Super Volatile

Erika Gable, 29, who lives in Brooklyn and does public relations for restaurants, never understood the appeal of Facebook in the first place. She says the daily chatter that flows through the site — updates about bad hair days and pictures from dinner — is virtual clutter she doesn’t need in her life.

An investigative article on obscure subculture of seemingly normal people who hide the dark secret: they're not on Facebook. So far the journalists discovered that such strange lifeforms exist, though further research is required to establish how is that possible.

We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage - we call that person a sociopath. And both Google and Facebook have gone deep into stalker territory with their attempts to track our every action. Even if you have faith in their good intentions, you feel misgivings about stepping into the elaborate shrine they've built to document your entire online life.

Open data advocates tell us the answer is to reclaim this obsessive dossier for ourselves, so we can decide where to store it. But this misses the point of how stifling it is to have such a permanent record in the first place. Who does that kind of thing and calls it social?

Fantastic analysis of what is fundamentally wrong with social networks. Great read.

At a very basic level, Google+ and Facebook are in the identity delivery business, and Twitter is in the information delivery business. That's a powerful distinction. It reflects a fundamentally different conception of what's more valuable: information or identity. It also gets at who is more valuable, advertisers or users.

Slightly sugar-coated article on the difference between Twitter vs. Facebook and Google's social network (how is it called, again?).

News organizations have a responsibility that the things they report are indeed true, and if they start bending that rule, why would we give them the benefit of credibility to them in other cases? A recommendation for people working with news is to employ more critical thinking, just as they were taught to be in the first place, and investigate before they blindly republish.

What the fake story about IQ of IE users tells us about ourselves. Good read.

I have the sensation, as do my friends, that to function as a proficient human, you must both “keep up” with the internet and pursue more serious, analog interests. I blog about real life; I talk about the internet. It’s so exhausting to exist on both registers, especially while holding down a job. It feels like tedious work to be merely conversationally competent. I make myself schedules, breaking down my commute to its most elemental parts and assigning each leg of my journey something different to absorb: podcast, Instapaper article, real novel of real worth, real magazine of dubious worth. I’m pretty tired by the time I get to work at 9 AM.

That's the best piece I've read in a while. An essay on the anxiety of living in our times.

Teens' lives are entirely built around their actual friends. Quite simply, why would teenagers bother using Twitter when Facebook exists, and offers so much more? Teens want a platform that allows easy, fully-functional communication to an exclusive social circle. That is, solely to their friends and peers. Twitter is a platform built for inclusive broadcast (to everyone), and to teenagers it offers no obvious value.

16 year old writes why teenagers don't tweet. He does it himself, though his demonstrated attitude towards work and self-promotion is clearly not teenage.

The proper label for a 'friend' or 'like' button in Facebook should be 'Subscribe', because that it what it does, simply put. It adds another feed to your timeline. But 'subscribe' is an unidirectional concept, 'I will import your status updates into my timeline', and is closer to 'follow' in Twitter.

On some fundamental flaws of social networks.

Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system.

Malcolm Gladwell questions “social revolution” of social media. Not a particularly hard task.

I'm Daniel Sieberg. I'm a recovering social network addict. And my life is not a status update.

Quitting Facebook is still rare enough to be fashionable. Just remember to announce it as loudly as possible. Writing a 10k characters blog post describing the process is a good first step.

The site has been embattled as old press and state attorneys general use any excuse to blame sex crimes on the site. From South Carolina Attorney General Henry McMaster’s failed crusade against them to a variety of press stories about sex and other crimes. If it’s just a sex crime it isn’t a story. But if a listing on Craigslist was involved, it’s a big story.

Techcrunch in defense of Craigslist adult section.