Can Ben Silbermann Turn Pinterest Into The World's Greatest Shopfront? For a guy running such a beautiful website, Ben Silbermann looks like hell: He has prominent bags under tired, watery eyes; his shoulders hang heavy; his shirt is wrinkled; and his dark hair is uncombed. When he speaks--with the open-vowel inflections of his Iowa upbringing--his voice is so slight that it often gets lost beneath the din of other conversations. When he moves, it is with the economy of a marathon runner trying to conserve every last bit of energy on the eve of a big race. "I’m tired," says the 30-year-old CEO of Pinterest, the social scrapbook that’s the hottest website on the planet, as he prepares to shovel down a bowl of noodles a few feet away from his desk. Such is life at what earlier this year was declared the fastest-growing web service in history. This schedule is the price of running a site as beloved as Pinterest, which has won its fans thanks to its breakthrough design. Pinterest gets none of that. This too is by design.
An Autopsy of a Dead Social Network Friendster is a social network that was founded in 2002, a year before Myspace and two years before Facebook. Consequently, it is often thought of as the grand-daddy of social networks. At its peak, the network had well over 100 million users, many in south east Asia. In July 2009, following some technical problems and a redesign, the site experienced a catastrophic decline in traffic as users fled to other networks such as Facebook. This is the company that famously turned down a $30m buyout offer from Google in 2003. (Friendster has since been rebranded as a social gaming platform and still enjoys some success in south east Asia.) The question, of course, is what went wrong. They say that when the costs–the time and effort–associated with being a member of a social network outweigh the benefits, then the conditions are ripe for a general exodus. But Garcia and co point out that the topology of the network provides some resilience against this.
Google Wave: why we didn’t use it With Google pulling the plug on the development of Wave, its meant-to-be-revolutionary communications protocol, Ars staffers pondered Wave's collapse. The ideas in Wave were undeniably cool, the vision was ambitious, and Google backed it. So why did no one use it? We looked to our own experiences of using Wave for clues as to what went wrong, and we found plenty. Jon Stokes, Deputy Editor When Google Wave was first announced, I was instantly struck by a use for it: role-playing games. I wrote an article on the results of my Wave RPG quest, then I quit using Wave while I waited for Google to improve it. Wave's primary interface sin was that it crammed a multiple-window-based desktop metaphor into a single browser window. Still, Wave held promise, and I kept coming back. My last and most successful attempt at this was a Wave that I started called "The BH6 Club," the idea being that old-school hardware site editors would hang out and talk hardware. Chris Foresman, Contributing Writer
AOL AOL Inc. (previously known as America Online, written as AOL and styled as "Aol." but commonly pronounced as an initialism) is an American multinational mass media corporation based in New York City that develops, grows, and invests in brands and web sites.[4] The company's business spans digital distribution of content, products, and services, which it offers to consumers, publishers, and advertisers. Founded in 1985 as Quantum Computer Services, an online services company by Jim Kimsey from the remnants of Control Video Corporation, AOL has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or to set up international versions of its services.[5] AOL is headquartered at 770 Broadway in New York[6][7] but has many offices in cities throughout North America. Its global offices include Bangalore, India; Dreieich, Germany; Dublin, Ireland; London, United Kingdom; and Tel Aviv, Israel. History[edit] 1980s: foundations[edit] 1990s: a new internet age[edit]
Prodigy (online service) Prodigy Communications Corporation (Prodigy Services Corp., Prodigy Services Co., Trintex) was an online service that offered its subscribers access to a broad range of networked services, including news, weather, shopping, bulletin boards, games, polls, expert columns, banking, stocks, travel, and a variety of other features. Initially, subscribers using personal computers accessed the Prodigy service by means of POTS or X.25 dialup. For its initial roll-out, Prodigy supported 1200 bit/s modems. To provide faster service and to stabilize the diverse modem market, Prodigy offered low-cost 2400 bit/s internal modems to subscribers at a discount. The company claimed it was the first consumer online service, citing its graphical user interface and basic architecture as differentiation from CompuServe, which started in 1979 and used a command line interface. The service was presented using a graphical user interface. To control costs and raise revenue, Prodigy took two separate actions.
CompuServe CompuServe (CompuServe Information Service, also known by its acronym CIS) was the first major commercial online service in the United States. It dominated the field during the 1980s and remained a major player through the mid-1990s, when it was sidelined by the rise of services such as AOL with monthly subscriptions rather than hourly rates. Since the purchase of CompuServe's Information Services Division by AOL, it has operated as an online service provider and an Internet service provider. The original CompuServe Information Service, later rebranded as CompuServe Classic, was shut down July 1, 2009. The newer version of the service, CompuServe 2000, continues to operate. History[edit] Founding[edit] CompuServe was founded in 1969 as Compu-Serv Network, Inc. Concurrently, the company recruited executives who shifted the focus from offering time-sharing services, in which customers wrote their own applications, to one that was focused on packaged applications. Technology[edit] CIS[edit]
Online Citizenship Most people are good citizens in the offline world. They are kind to others, they obey laws and want their community to be a better place. But these days many of us are also citizens of the online world. We participate in discussions, share photos, and get help using websites. Stewart is a good guy. But when Stewart goes online, he seems to become a different person. He often writes provocative comments on blogs and video websites without contributing anything valuable. Recently a friend recognized his online name on a few comments and gave him a call. Stewart was speechless - he never meant to hurt anybody. But that all changed. Now he sees that citizenship means giving people the same respect he does in the real world, even when he disagrees with them.
Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? - Stephen Marche Yvette Vickers, a former Playboy playmate and B-movie star, best known for her role in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, would have been 83 last August, but nobody knows exactly how old she was when she died. According to the Los Angeles coroner’s report, she lay dead for the better part of a year before a neighbor and fellow actress, a woman named Susan Savage, noticed cobwebs and yellowing letters in her mailbox, reached through a broken window to unlock the door, and pushed her way through the piles of junk mail and mounds of clothing that barricaded the house. Upstairs, she found Vickers’s body, mummified, near a heater that was still running. The Los Angeles Times posted a story headlined “Mummified Body of Former Playboy Playmate Yvette Vickers Found in Her Benedict Canyon Home,” which quickly went viral. Also see: Live Chat With Stephen Marche The author will be online at 3 p.m. Vickers’s web of connections had grown broader but shallower, as has happened for many of us.
Kari Henley: Are Facebook Friends "Real" Friends? Well, I have to say one thing - HuffPost readers rock! This is one spirited group and thanks to everyone who joined in on the lively debate about "Facebook and Kids" last week. Clearly there is a lot of energy, pent up emotion, generational gaps and strong opinions regarding the "tipping point" of Facebook and other social networking sites. I stumbled into a much bigger lion's den than I imagined! Today I'd like to explore why social networking in general has touched a collective nerve. Do sites like Facebook stand as viable communities, and are the people on your home page "real friends?" Yet, this prism has many sides. "But do you really consider these relative strangers to be your 'friends?"' So, what gives? Let's look at Wikipedia's definition of Friendship: Friendship is a term used to denote co-operative and supportive behavior between two or more people. How about the definition of community? The experience of loneliness is a widespread societal wound.
How We Know by Freeman Dyson The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick Pantheon, 526 pp., $29.95 James Gleick’s first chapter has the title “Drums That Talk.” Sadly, the drum language was only understood and recorded by a single European before it started to disappear. Carrington understood how the structure of the Kele language made drum language possible. In 1954 a visitor from the United States came to Carrington’s mission school. The story of the drum language illustrates the central dogma of information theory. Another example illustrating the central dogma is the French optical telegraph. The distance between neighbors was about seven miles. Unlike the drum language, which was based on spoken language, the optical telegraph was based on written French. After these two historical examples of rapid communication in Africa and France, the rest of Gleick’s book is about the modern development of information technology. Morse was ideologically at the opposite pole from Chappe.