Call me crazy, but perhaps Google’s not-so-unofficial corporate motto, “don’t be evil“, isn’t such a great thing to aspire to. I sincerely believe in their good intentions, but maybe this was the wrong way to state them. I’m reminded of this classic Chris Rock bit: You know the worst thing about n***as? N***as always want […]

Danah Boyd has written an awesome post about how inefficiency and unreliability can actually be beneficial in certain social situations. Think about all of the interesting interactions that happen while people are waiting for drinks at a crowded bar. She also asked if anyone could think of any examples of deliberate inefficiencies built into social […]

Recently my father shared an interesting story from Slashdot with me about a man that pays other people to argue with him on Amazon‘s Mechanical Turk. The Mechanical Turk is a place where you can offer up money in exchange for the performance of a task. Typically it’s used to accomplish things that a computer […]

Joshua Porter asks the question, “Did the Long Tail beget social design?” I think the answer is absolutely yes. Here’s what Joshua had to say Netflix rents most of its movies from the catalog of past movies, not from the current list of blockbusters. Same with Amazon and books, iTunes and music. Christopher Anderson goes […]

It seems like the Facebook engineers add another javascript and css file to their pages with every new feature. As of today, viewing the Facebook homepage loads 36 javascript files from Facebook and 4 more from advertisers. In addition to these 40 files, there are 12 css files. That’s a lot of files! If you’ve […]