Category: Opinions

Twitter Outage – Possible Reasons

Twitter went out today, and it was “a big thing” – many users used facebook and tumblr to complain about the outage. This is the biggest twitter outage since October last year, and it deserves a bit of attention. Why do these outages happen? Twitter reported that it’s a cascaded bug, which probably means very …

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Strange Experiments By Facebook

Recently some friends and I noticed weird behavior by Facebook: seeing stories by pages you haven’t “liked” just because a friend likes them (but the friend hasn’t liked the particular story). E.g. “Check pictures from our promotion” by a brand you don’t like, but your friends do. setting pictures and statuses by friends of your …

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“Favorite” Is The New “Like”

The “Favorite” button on twitter was once used for storing a list of favorites and mostly a “Read it later” list. But after twitter introduced some changes it evolved into something else. The apparently innate need for “liking” things on the web is slowly taking over, and more people are using the “favorite” button exactly …

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The Social Web Is Not So Social

Everyone is talking about the “social web”, due to the rise of social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Google Plus. But is it actually the “social” factor that drives this enormous success? Mark Zukerberg claims that people like to do things with their friends online, and he has stood on that claim for a …

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Facebook Adds A Stalking Feature

Facebook recently became a stalkers’ paradise. The so-called “close friends” group appeared. In fact, it might have appeared earlier, it’s just that now facebook started giving you suggestions to add friends to your “close friends” list. What it does is simple – you get a notification (the red number at the top) every time a …

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The Language Problem Of Social Networks

The world is diverse. There are thousands of ethnicities and languages, and hundreds of countries. And we claim that the Internet helps us live in an open world without borders. True, but language is an important aspect of that. If you don’t have a common language, you can’t communicate with anyone. Social networks are a …

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Is It Just Me, Or Technorati’s Claim Token Is Stupid?

I just submitted two blogs to Technorati. It appears that they want you to make a new post containing the claim token. I have been validating many sites for many purposes (e.g. analytics), but most of them required a special tag somewhere in the code or a DNS record. Never it required visible content. So, …

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Doing The Same Thing, Only Better

There is a discussion whether innovation is really happening, or we have been stuck in the past 15 years. This fear stems from the unrealistic expectation that innovation should be sporadic, exploding and obvious. Truth is, it has always been happening slowly, one step at a time. Something gets created. Then it gets improved, over …

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How URL Shorteners Should Change

URL shorteners’ main strength was the fact that twitter didn’t shorten URLs. But now it does, so it is almost entirely useless to shorten your URLs. Almost. There are two cases that are still valid, and even though I dislike url shorteners, these use-cases will keep them alive for a while: analytics – in case …

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7 Little Known Ways To Become Immortal Superhero

They say you should write catchy titles to your blog posts in order to get clicks. And so people develop all kinds of recipes to do that. One of the most common approaches is “X [something great]”. “3 secrets to becoming famous on twitter”, “5 important advice for your social media campaign”, “7 ways to …

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