Your Social Graph Is Autistic

Much has been made of social graphs as filters for discovering new content, to the extent that many are now challenging the view that a social filter is even remotely indicative of interest – "…who you know doesn't always translate into what you like" I'm not convinced that there's such a thing as an "interest […]

FriendFade

A pair of recent articles – Scott Brown's Facebook Friendonomics and Mashable's 12 Great Tales of De-Friending – have raised some interesting questions on the longevity and sustainability of relationships established within social networks. Brown speculates around the problematic notion of never losing touch with anyone in environments such as Facebook. Most notably losing the […]

Making Web Services Personal

Ben Trott, co-founder of Six Apart and its current CTO, led an all-too-brief session (20 minutes!!) on where blogging platforms are driving innovation in services and formats and the direction this may take in the future. Blogs are beginning to evolve from simple journals to automated aggregators or personal content – effectively inverting the role […]

Rendezvous

ETech is a perrennial nexus of Powerbooks and iBooks – firing up iTunes and seeing how many users have enabled the Share My Music option much music is being shared over the local wifi network is always a novelty. In this screenshot you can see the music collections of the EFF’s Cory Doctorow and the […]

Trust Me: Adventures in Social Engineering

Jon Oliver, MailFrontier‘s Director Of Research, describes social engineering as the means by which identity thieves extract passwords and account data from unwitting users. Oliver’s session outlines how criminals are using progressively more sophisticated techniques as users awareness increases. 51m adults were ‘phished in 2004’; a 1126% increase from 2003. In a survey, around 30% […]