I am the ghost of groovymother.com. Woooooo!

The Facebook Fallacy - Technology Review

Fascinatingly pessimistic view from the super-smart Michael Wolff (who, I didn’t know, edited AdWeek until last year, which lends extra weight to his concerns).

“Absent an earth-shaking idea, Facebook will look forward to slowing or declining growth in a tapped-out market, and ever-falling ad rates, both on the Web and (especially) in mobile. Facebook isn’t Google; it’s Yahoo or AOL.”

Renouncing citizenship: Did Eduardo Saverin do anything wrong?

Level-headed rational piece from The Economist blogs regarding Eduardo Saverin’s US citizenship renouncement.

This Creepy App Isn't Just Stalking Women Without Their Knowledge, It's A Wake-Up Call About Facebook Privacy

Good article about a skeevy app, but which is causing some people to draw the wrong conclusions.

This app isn’t just using “public” data (where users have specifically told Foursquare/FB “Make this information public”). It requires every user to approve API connetions to 4sq/FB which allows them to gather information that your friends have said “Only share this with my friends”.

Those checkboxes should really read “Only share this with my friends, plus the faceless developers whose apps they approve to access their account”. There’s a lot of information flowing around out there that people think they’ve applied restricted privacy to.

Biologic: A Playful Social Network Browser for iPad

Cellular loveliness from Bloom. Makes for a delightful second-screen.

Inside the DNA of the Facebook Mafia

Pretty solid Sarah Lacy post, which includes this perceptive gem:

“Quora seeks to organize information to benefit the person answering the question, not the person asking it. As such, some people posing the questions get annoyed that they don’t get the right to retain more control of the dialogue.”

Facebook hype will fade - CNN.com

“It’s not that MySpace lost and Facebook won. It’s that MySpace won first, and Facebook won next. They’ll go down in the same order.” — Douglas Rushkoff

venomous porridge - Yesterday, Facebook announced some new measures...

Facebook’s “security” feature circumvented by Facebook’s blatant sharing of default-by-public data. What’s the opposite of “security by obscurity”? (Insecurity by publicity?)

Dropbox - Virals

Splendidly implemented viral flow from Dropbox. Hand holds you through spamming your Twitter & Facebook feeds with the carrot of extra free storage.

Cow Clicker

Posted without comment.

“You get a cow. You can click on it. In six hours, you can click it again. Clicking earns you clicks. You can buy custom “premium” cows through micropayments (the Cow Clicker currency is called “mooney”), and you can buy your way out of the time delay by spending it. You can publish feed stories about clicking your cow, and you can click friends’ cow clicks in their feed stories. Cow Clicker is Facebook games distilled to their essence.”

Facebook and "radical transparency" (a rant)

“The battle that is underway is not a battle over the future of privacy and publicity. It’s a battle over choice and informed consent. It’s unfolding because people are being duped, tricked, coerced, and confused into doing things where they don’t understand the consequences. Facebook keeps saying that it gives users choices, but that is completely unfair. It gives users the illusion of choice and hides the details away from them “for their own good.””

Facebook Is My New Boatcar

Nice summary by Blaine of what people should be building, instead of wanking away with “open Facebook competitors”. Build outstanding focused tools that can use Facebook for free social graph importing, inviting, and promoting. Think of them as a slightly tweaked “Address Book Importer”. Do shit that they can never do, and do it awesomely.

eg. Compare Plancast with “Facebook Events”.

QRANK

Free iPhone trivia game — new questions daily, and compete against your Facebook friends for bragging rights. Initial poking points to: Rather Splendid.

Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login

Epic comment thread. Context: “We’ve determined by looking at our traffic stats that people are doing Google searches for “facebook login” and coming upon RWW. They see the FB Connect button and assume that RWW is the “new Facebook.”“

The Hierarchy Of Digital Distractions

Yep, sums up my life.

TechCrunch: Yeah Ok, So Facebook Punk'd Us

Very satisfying. Facebook add a ridiculous feature, only visible to people who work at TechCrunch. A writer spots it, give FB a whole 24 minutes to respond to his questions, and in the TC way, rushes out a story so he can “scoop” competitors. Pwned!

Exclusive: The Future of Facebook Usernames - Anil Dash

Anil Dash predicts the future of Facebook vanity URLs. Who’s going to be the first to register “mikearrington”, I wonder.

The size of social networks | Primates on Facebook | The Economist

Good Economist article about how “the Dunbar number” relates to online social networks, with some interesting stats about friend groups on Facebook.

Burger King Says Sacrifice 10 Facebook Friends For a Whopper

Brilliant piece of viral marketing by BK. People will happily sell out their friends (and plaster BK’s name across their friend feeds) for a $3 hamburger.

AddressBookSync | Facebook Picture Synchronization with OS X Address Book

Update your OS X Address Book with photos and birthdays from your friends’ Facebook pages (sadly, Facebook bars it from doing anything useful, like updating email addresses and phone numbers)

Social Networking Wars // Current

I hadn’t seen the “Super News” animations before starting working here, but they can be pretty good — and this one is excellently geeky.

Booksthatmakeyoudumb

Comparing SAT scores with colleges’ most popular books according to Facebook. Guess where the Bible ends up on that scale…

Techdirt: Hasbro Sues Scrabulous For Being Too Scrabble-ish

This could be interesting to watch — In my social network, Scrabulous is *the* killer Facebook app. If it were to disappear, would it hurt Facebook?

Facebook's Misrepresentation of Beacon's Threat to Privacy: Tracking users who opt out or are not logged in. - CA Security Advisor Research Blog - CA

Even if you’re using Facebook’s privacy settings to opt-out of their new “Beacon” “service”, the info is still getting sent to Facebook who may or may not be gathering it. Thank gawd for Adblock.

Facebook News Network - CollegeHumor video

“All the News Feed that’s fit to print.’ (And features my chum Jill Bernard’s status in the crawl — clearly I’m a friend-in-law to the video’s makers.)

Coova.org : Facebook; Social WiFi Utility

Interesting use of Facebook’s APIs: Allow internet access via your wireless router to anyone who is your friend on Facebook.

Facebook Follies (or the Dangers of Investing in Someone Else's Platform)

Baratunde Thurston on being shut out from messaging the group he founded on Facebook for the specific purpose of messaging. “I invested a lot into Facebook, but I’ve discovered, painfully, that Facebook doesn’t value me nearly as much as I’d hoped.”

Facebook | Scrabulous

Play Scrabble against your Facebook chums. Nice!

Friend Photos - Facebook Screensaver

OS X screensaver which grabs your friends’ photos from Facebook. Playing with this, I was reminded that a) I have some incredibly hot friends and b) I have some incredibly strange friends.

Facebook | Abe Vigoda Status

The most important Facebook application EVAR!

Facebook Developers

The new Facebook API. They’ve done a really good job of letting you integrate — essentially they’re being a platform and then getting out of the way of whatever you want to build.

phpsh -- an interactive shell for php

This could come in handy for sanity checking syntax when writing PHP. Bizarrely, it’s mostly written in Python!