Rational Idealist

Many online services are a great place for communication with people you don’t have time to meet in person often enough anymore. By simply broadcasting to Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and others, many people can be kept up to date with my life and thoughts, enabling us to meet at perfect timings without much logistical and emotional overhead. They are a serendipity support platforms.

Since serendipity used to be in gods domain, this can get tricky. “Here be dragons” I say.

All these services are based on broadcasting to your followers (friends). It turns out, there is a huge, but not perfect overlap of the crowds across platforms. And it turns out, we shape the messages to fit the crowds more than to adapt to platforms. This is all managable.

Where it gets tricky though is, when I link my Facebook status with my Twitter account. Suddenly all my FB friends, that originate from very different backgrounds and environments, see not only when I get up, but also when I’m having a cocktail. Sometimes I might not want that.

Friendfeed is even more fun, bringing all channels, intended for different audiences into single feed, making any control of the message impossible. These second level services are kind of sincerity support platforms.

I guess it’s all about the freedom; but not my personal freedom, the fate of the planetary cybernetic system depends on the freedom of information now. It makes the social world more transparent and managable, for the government, corporations, advertisers, and me as well… *sigh*

Related articles by Zemanta

• Twitter Rambling summary
• 2009: Moving Beyond Social Media Whispers
• Got a real-time ego problem? Get a room!

Image via Wikipedia I got notified about long expected feature of Apps within LinkedIn being released. Exciting!

But, as usual with those guys, it doesn’t work the first time; and looking at some other features they’ve released this year, it’s not going to for some more time.

The first three apps I’ve tried responded:

• problem communicating with server
• undefined
• temporary overloaded

The last one  is actually from my friends over at Huddle.net, huge congrats to them, not only for being featured app, but also the only one with articulated damage control.

When clicking on  ‘browse more apps’ nothing happens. Doh.When going to my profile I see loads of advertisements for all the apps I haven’t installed and no activity from those that I have. The exception is SixApart, that actually seems to be doing something useful. Thumbs up!

All in all, please LinkedIn, can you take some more time on finishing the job on launch next time?

Related articles by Zemanta

• LinkedIn’s well-groomed app platform goes live
• Does your employer own your LinkedIn contacts?