A friend of mine recently decided to tidy up her Facebook profile information. She got to the relationships section and thought to herself, “you know what? this is nobody’s business. I don’t want to broadcast this to everyone.” She saw a message there that said “Leave status option blank to hide from profile.” Perfect, that’s [...]

A post on Knowing and Doing inspired me to check out Wordle. Wordle generates a good looking jumble of words for any text you paste in. The more often a word is used, the larger it appears. I did a ‘select all’ on my blog’s front page and threw it in there and this is [...]

It’s been 4 months since I last decided to write here at Udi’s Spot. Hard to believe. The main reason I’ve dropped off the blogging planet is that a few months ago I moved down to Buenos Aires. You could say that I outsourced myself. A curious thing happens when you remove yourself from The [...]

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 [...]