I don't have a great memory. I often meet people who remember me, but I don't remember them. I've had whole conversations with people who clearly know me, but on whom I've drawn a blank. My phone's address book has a "notes" field, and mine is peppered with little aide memoirs about the people I've…
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I get a lot of random Twitter DMs from attractive women who are desperate to make friends with me. I usually report the obvious spammers. But a few weeks ago, one nearly slipped through the net. The woman was wearing a military uniform - a proper one, not a sexy Hallowe'en costume - and was…
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Way back when Blackberry was the smartphone, my team at Vodafone obsessed over the idea of the "Unified Inbox". "What if," the marketing chaps said, "you could see all your notifications in one place!" Imagine a single inbox where your MySpace friend requests mingled with your Email. And your Facebook and Google Buzz notifications were…
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Play with the demo I was lucky enough to go to Number 10 Downing Street for a meeting a few weeks ago. A perfect opportunity for a photo of me by that famous door. Being the vain man that I am, I wanted to set it as my avatar photo. But Twitter and other social…
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The British are culturally predisposed to root for the underdog. I'd never been a massive fan of MySpace - but after the trials and tribulations it has gone through, I have a soft spot in my heart for it. So, when this email arrived, I couldn't wait to give it a go. Ok, so the…
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Getting access to my Twitter archive opened my mind to the nature on transience of the media we create. Take, for example, this tweet and image: http://twitpic.com/2dhr3 - Loving #mint09 🙂 — Terence Eden (@edent) March 23, 2009 Well... ok... fun at the moment it was taken, but does it have any use beyond that?…
Continue reading →We're in a fairly mature phase of social networks now. Broadly speaking, most social networks separate out into a few main groups. Eyes - e.g. services like Flickr for pictures and YouTube for moving pictures. Ears - e.g. AudioBoo for voices and SoundCloud for songs. Feet - e.g. FourSquare for where I am now and…
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Only fools make predictions. So here are my predictions on the future of social media. In the original days of computing, every user had their own computer. Well, Turing had his own computer... Then, everyone had to timeshare on a massive mainframe. Later, every user had their own computer. Now, we're back to mainframes. Sure,…
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Google Plus has a serious flaw. It's summed up in this question: Why are you following me? I know who I want to share my "I hate my job" posts, and "Oh, my cat is so cute" pictures - but I talk about a wide range of things, not all of which you'll be interested…
Continue reading →One of the great things about the Internet and Peer-to-Peer technologies is that they are decentralised. If one part of the net goes down - the rest pulls together and manages. If a box somewhere dies, other boxes should take over until it can be fixed. Grimly, we can apply this as an analogy to…
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