Closing Open Tabs

Two accidental clicks last month cost me a bunch of open tabs, filled with Twine and Twitter goodness I had yet to process. Snackr has only made the information overload worse. Assuming a third accident is on the horizon, here is a peek at what piqued my interest recently.

These are the things that popped up recently, begging for more attention that I cannot give. To allow me to close my browser and move on, I post all the open tabs here:

Twitter
A bunch of interesting things happened in the Twitosphere:

• Hackers exploit autofollow feature—this also references a nice new Twitter security blog, TwitPwn, by Aviv Raff, a forensics researcher at RSA
• Monitter widget—A kickin’ search interface for Twitter. Enter keywords and watch topic-centric streams emerge.
• UTweet—a student effort to incorporate Twitter into Texas life
• Big change in protected user model—I’m a bit concerned about the impact of de-coupling private Twitter accounts, although the scenarios given clearly demanded a change
• Chris Brogan’s take on Twitter—argument on why Twitter still beats Jaiku
• Twitter Sphere – Two Uses—Brit Watwood talks about two core uses, social connection and information broadcast
• Twitter Squeeze—generates both fear and loathing
• Twitter use among uber users—how the summer of downtime can be seen in uber user activity on Tweet Stats
• Tweet Party—organization tool to separate your followers and communicate with them in groups
• Twitter as a news wire—talking about how twitter is able to beat mainstream press to reporting news
• Twitter vs. Plurk—comparing the UI experience for two microblogging services
• Are Music Tweets Mostly For Twits?—Scott Thill rants about some musicians’ lack of imagination with their Twitter accounts
• Following and update limits for Twitter—much discussion on the new limits of use of Twitter, targeting spammers of the system
• A Brief History of Internet Outages—a quick look at some of the most notorious downtime of the modern Web, including AOL, eBay, MobileMe, MSN Messenger, Netcom, Netflix, Skype and – of course – Twitter.
• The Gray Lady Is All A-Twitter —the New York Times is making use of Twitter
• Who’s investing in microblogging and lifestreaming?—Benedikt Koehler mapped some data from Crunchbase, a free directory of tech companies
• How Janet fooled the Twittersphere—the story and fallout from a fake corporate account for Exxon Mobil
• What The Web Needs Now: A Profile of Profiles—a nice write up on profiles, stemming from the Exxon Mobile fan acting as the company’s representative. It’s a pitch for WebProNews’ Twello, but it is also of broader discussion about multi-system integration and validation worthy of a later blog post.
• Twitter growth over time—some very cool use of Google Insights to show the spread of Twitter interest across the U.S. by state

Social Networks
Some interesting essays

• There’s life after death if you’re online—great Guardian article on the design and administrative issues of dealing with death in online social networks
• I can, automatically, become just like you—people copy behaviors in order to form affiliation strategies
• visualization of offline social networks formed at a conference—one of my advisors at IU SOI is part of this sociometric network research, which I hope to co-opt this fall for a local study
• TODAY – visualizing personal mobile communication—a very cool affective computing visualization of mobile phone activity
• The conversation prism—social networks and tools as a color wheel
• Passionates—a great essay from Joshua Porter on the importance of activity, responding to a Robert Scoble post differentiating passionates from non-passionates
• It’s Who You Know (Or Don’t): Online social networks are powerful and ineffectual all at once.
• Clive Thompson on Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook ‘Friends’—Wired looks at work from MIT to track social interaction patterns, even to the point of predicting group meetings as the “pulsating star” reconvenes
• Free Government—a non-profit built on open source software design to empower citizens
• Lifecycle of Emergence—a nice essay on social emergence strategies by the Berkana Institute, an organization cultivating leaders to strengthen local communities around the globe

Other Academics

• The anatomy of prototypes—announcement of a new article by Erik Stolterman, “The Anatomy of Prototypes: Prototypes as Filters, Prototypes as Manifestations of Design Ideas” in the ACM Transactions (with link to PDF)
• Info design patterns—a master’s thesis from Christian Behrens of the Interface Design program at Potsdam University of Applied Sciences, all about design pattern taxonomy for the field of data visualization and information design
• cultural analytics—interview with Lev Manovich, Professor of Visual Arts at UCSD, about how we can create quantitative measures of cultural innovation
• How to do Interaction Criticism—almost all of Jeff Bardzell’s HCI class in a series of posts. Nice post on Epistemology of Criticism, too, prior to the series.
• 24 tips to get tenure—nice advice for new academics trying to get permanent work, from IU’s Curt Bonk
• Human Computer Interaction: towards a critical research position—a nice Design Philosophy Paper by Anna Croon Fors and Erik Stolterman (who recently wrote a much less appealing post about pruning social networks)
• The Role of Theory in HCI—along with nice lists of HCI and psychology theories, this essay is helping me brainstorm some academic paper ideas.

News & Information

• DNS flaw worse than expected—sometimes, I think security conferences are around to scare the bejeezers our of normal folk
• Proposal 2.0—interesting way to use Web 2.0 to get married
• Ancient archaeology holds clue to new computer systems—sort of historical informatics, something some students discussed last spring at our SOI unconference
• Evolution as Described by the Second Law of Thermodynamics—”Natural selection for least action” by Ville Kaila and Arto Annila explains evolution as motion in physics terms
• Scour—social search engine. I have had some benefit from SocialBrowse already, so this, too, may make an interesting follow-up article.
• Scientists closer to developing invisibility cloak—are you kidding me? That James Bond car could be for real?
• Warp Drive engine would go faster than light—and so is the Enterprise??

Media & Entertainment

• 25 opening title sequences—I’m a sucker for these. This compilation has Catch Me if You Can in the first half, legitimizing the project for me. There’s also a part 2.
• The future of TV is Dr. Horrible—how a little thing like self-distribution on the web might become the norm
• Win at rock, paper, scissors—quick statistical strategy for winning
• Old 78s Converted to MP3s—more than 2500 records in this collection, from which about 3800 titles have been converted to MP3 format.
• Card-counting whiz eyes Facebook football fantasy—Jeff Ma of “21” fame is now helping run a platform for fantasy football leagues

Tools

• Kluster—a group decision making tool
• Redesignme—communal product design
• TileStack—Hypercard for the modern world
• Kuku Klock—web alarm clock

There. I feel better.