Oh my god, you guys, I actually just sent an email that said:

“so i didn’t really get a chance to think about our little make-out rendezvous from a couple of weeks ago until tonight, when i went on your facebook page and saw that you deleted my “facebook wall” comment about us making out. that particular comment was meant to be a joke, it was supposed to be funny, and facebook is retarded and it was probably super retarded that i made a comment on your “facebook wall” or anyone’s “facebook wall” and facebook is for kids in high school that are grounded, anyway. but it’s even more retarded that you care so much about your “image” that you deleted my comment about us making out, and i can only ascertain that you did it in case the floozies were to check up on you to see it.

but the MAIN RETARDED PROBLEM in all of this is your stupid cheap motives of the following factors:

1) why you came over to my old apartment in the first place, and
2) why you kissed me, and, ultimately,
3) what all of your fuckin reindeer games are all about.

yes, i’m drinking wine right now and yes, i’m over-tired from school, but seriously, YOU ARE LAME.

so good luck with your superficial antics and your facebook censorship. i get semi-indecipherable comments on my “facebook wall” from girls that i used to work with at kmart in international falls all of the time and i still leave them up there, because facebook is DUMB and MEANINGLESS and it would probably hurt their feelings if i were to erase their messages simply because it doesn’t fit with the persona that i’m trying to create in the DUMB FACEBOOK WORLD.

thanks for the mammories, tell your friends i say hi because i still really like them. you, on the other hand, are one of those ridiculous internet shitbags and i am SERIOUSLY OVER IT AND YOU.

BYE”

{ Dancing at gunpoint | Continue reading }

This is a little bit genius. One of the new features of FriendFeed (a Twitter-like thingie) is “fake following”. That means you can friend someone but you don’t see their updates. That way, it appears that you’re paying attention to them when you’re really not. Just like everyone does all the time in real life to maintain their sanity. Rex calls it “most important feature in the history of social networks” and I’m inclined to agree.

{ Kottke.org | Continue reading }

Using economic models US researchers predict new tactics to exploit the personal information that online social-networking sites provide.

One effective strategy could see free or cut-price products offered to the most influential online individuals to kickstart new fads, says Jason Hartline, at Northwestern University, Illinois, US.

Some very targeted advertising schemes using social networks exist, for example Facebook’s Beacon system, which can tell your friends when you buy products on other websites. But Hartline says they will get smarter.

{ New Scientist | Continue reading }

photo { Aaron Ruell }

Interesting article in today’s Washington Post about how many social networks, particularly Facebook, are mining shitload’s of very personal information about users who are dumb fucking stupid enough to give away all kinds of valuable stuff to these criminals, just so they can send a fellow cretin a “Virtual Martini.”

{ George Parker | Continue reading }

Facebook fanatics who have covered their profiles on the popular social networking site with silly games and quirky trivia quizzes may be unknowingly giving a host of strangers an intimate peek at their lives.

Those mini-programs, called widgets or applications, allow users to personalize their pages and connect with friends and acquaintances. But they could pose privacy risks. Some security researchers warn that developers of the software have assembled too much information — home town, schools attended, employment history — and can use the data in ways that could harm or annoy users. (…)

“Everything requires you to give access to personal information or it forces you to ask your friends to do the same — it becomes a real nuisance,” said David Dixon, 40, an information technology consultant in Columbia. (…) “Why does a Sudoku puzzle have to know I have two kids? Why does a postcard need to know where I went to college?” (…)

“You want to be social with your friends, but now you’re giving 20 guys you’ve never met vast amounts of information from your profile,” he said. “That should be troubling to people.”

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

A mobile phone service that sends users an electronic map of their friends’ whereabouts is to be launched in the UK.

The Social Network Integrated Friend Finder (Sniff) uses mobile phone signals to locate friends and partners, regardless of where they are in the UK.

The application will be accessible through the Facebook social networking website and across all the major mobile phone networks.

Useful Networks, the US company behind the technology, said the application would only be available to over-18s and those who gave their permission to be tracked.

Friends had control over who could find them and when, and could instantly switch between being “visible” and “invisible”.

Mobile customers will pay 50p for each “sniff” and will receive the answer by text.

It will be the first Facebook application to apply premium charges to customers’ mobile bills.

{ Lancashire Ecening Post | Continue reading }

photo { Barry Lategan }

The whereabouts of more than 100,000 mobile phone users have been tracked in an attempt to build a comprehensive picture of human movements.

The study concludes that humans are creatures of habit, mostly visiting the same few spots time and time again.

Most people also move less than 10km on a regular basis, according to the study published in the journal Nature.

The results could be used to help prevent outbreaks of disease or forecast traffic, the scientists said. (…)

Each time a participant made or received a call or text message, the location of the mobile base station relaying the data was recorded. (…)

The results showed that most people’s movements follow a precise mathematical relationship - known as a power law. (…) The second surprise was that the patterns of people’s movements, over short and long distances, were very similar: people tend to return to the same few places over and over again.

“Why is this good news?” he asked. “If I were to build a model of how everyone moves in society and they were not similar then it would require six billion different models - each person would require a different description.”

{ BBC | Continue reading }

Last week, three prominent neurosurgeons told the CNN interviewer Larry King that they did not hold cellphones next to their ears. “I think the safe practice,” said Dr. Keith Black, a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, “is to use an earpiece so you keep the microwave antenna away from your brain.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

“How many legs does a dog have, if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it a leg.” — Abraham Lincoln *

* * *

[*Note: Lincoln never said this. He liked a similar, more long-winded anecdote about a cow, but the dog version? Nope. Still, the quote is credited to Abe on some 11,000 different Web pages, including quote resources Brainy Quote and World of Quotes.

(…)

“When someone alters a Wikipedia article to win a specific argument, anyone who reads the false article before the ‘error’ is corrected suffers from collateral misinformation.”

And a scholar at the Hoover Institution performed an experiment with totally unsurprising results: When 100 terms from U.S. history books were entered into Google, the topics’ Wikipedia articles were the first hits 87 times.

All of these examples are signs of the times.

And all of them get at a big question: For the Google generation, what happens to the concepts of truth and knowledge in a user-generated world of information saturation?

{ Washington Post | Continue reading }

photo { lastnightsparty }

xfredx
Hey, did anybody see Garden State?

msprout
I don’t watch anything that doesn’t have Mr. T in it, sorry.

xfredx
Same for me. Except instead of Mr. T I watch Rachel Ray. And instead of watching I masturbate.

{ reddit comments }

new york craigslist > manhattan > missed connections
re: DIESEL STORE IN UNION SQUARE, STORE MANAGER,… - m4m - 23 (Union Square)
Date: 2008-04-03, 5:22AM EDT

you wrote:

Lol! I have never done this but let’s give it a try.
I was the guy who needed help with the PGA number and was looking for J….e and since he went for lunch you helped me out. Just wanted to say you are very cute , and I would love to invite you for dinner after my trip. You helped me today around 200pm to 230pm. If you are the one ( I would be very lucky ) tell me what I was wearing or what I look like or anything we talked about and I will send a picture to make sure we are talking about the same person lol.

I think it will be fun.

M

——–

you know where the guy works (ie: where to find him) and his name. you’ve even interacted with him. this is not a missed connection. this is just cowardice.

why are you wasting your time here??? go after the guy.

this goes to all you guys who post on here, “you work at ____.” if you know where to find him, why are you waiting for him to find you(r post)? go get what might be yours, fools. carpe diem!

50 Cent has more than 1 million friends on MySpace, but if the rapper ever decides to leave the social network, he’ll be leaving behind those friends, too. So like a growing number of artists, he’s started his own social networking site.

On Thisis50.com, fans can create profiles and friend lists just like on MySpace, but 50 Cent has direct access to the site’s users and their e-mail addresses.

More and more acts, from Kylie Minogue to Ludacris to the Pussycat Dolls, are launching their own social networks, which are becoming a sort of next-generation version of artist Web sites.

{ Reuters | Continue reading }

related { 50 Cent no longer supports Clinton }

The billboards arrived without fanfare or explanation in more than a dozen major cities last May [2007]. Bearing two simple catch phrases, “Harvey Dent for district attorney” and “I believe in Harvey Dent,” they featured a photo of a stately Dent (imagine Eliot Spitzer with a shock of blond hair) against an American flag.

But within 72 hours, each billboard had been defaced by identical graffiti: The candidate’s eyes were scrawled over with black rings, his lips crudely rouged with a smeary, clown-like grin. As well, each of the placards’ messages had been altered to read: “I believe in Harvey Dent TOO.”

Although not outwardly advertising anything other than Dent’s political aspirations, the billboards were in fact the opening salvo of one of the most interactive movie-marketing campaigns ever hatched by Hollywood: a multi-platform, hidden-in-plain-sight promotional blitz for the new Batman movie “The Dark Knight,” which stars Christian Bale and Heath Ledger and reaches theaters on July 18 [, 2008].

By employing a variety of untraditional awareness-building maneuvers and starting the film’s promo push strategically, more than a year before the film’s release, marketers at the firm 42 Entertainment (subcontracted by the film’s distributor, Warner Bros.) seem to have struck a chord with “The Dark Knight’s” core constituency: fanboys and comic-book geeks. The promotional efforts — part viral marketing initiative, part “advertainment” — fit into an absorbing, nascent genre-bending pastime called alternate reality gaming that have been the toast of movie and comic blogs for months. (…)

“The Dark Knight’s” alternate reality game (ARG for short) is mashing up advertising, scavenger-hunting and role-playing in a manner that variously recalls “The X-Files” and the play “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding,” “The Matrix” and the board game Clue — all in the name of galvanizing a community of fans to bond (with the new Batman and each other) over the course of a wild goose chase.

Or to be more precise, a wild Joker chase — one that so far has involved clues spelled out in skywriting, secret meeting points, cellphones embedded inside cakes, Internet red herrings, DIY fan contests and even fake political rallies. Moreover, last week several players were nearly arrested in Chicago while engaging in civil disobedience to promote the movie; others have even been “kidnapped” and “murdered” over the course of the game. (…)

In December, conscientious followers noted a mysterious countdown on WhySoSerious.com that instructed viewers to travel to 22 real-world addresses in cities from coast to coast to pick up a “very special treat” under the name “Robin Banks”. Turns out the addresses were bakeries in possession of a number of cakes bearing phone numbers spelled out in icing.

{ LA Times | Continue reading }

related { walking up the side of a building }