Erase Your Virtual Life

Are you tired of condensing all your wit and wisdom into 140-character tweets?

Are you frustrated with friending family you haven’t seen in years?

Are you worn out on waving? Miserable with being mashed up, linked in, street viewed and RSS fed?

Here might be your answer. Techcrunch reports that Moddr, a Netherlands-based new media lab, will help you delete enough of your social network accounts to render you a virtual non-person.

The site runs a python script which launches a browser session and automates the process of disconnecting you from social networks On Facebook, for instance, it removes all your friends and groups. On Twitter, it deletes all of your tweets, and removes all the people you follow and your followers. It does not actually delete these accounts, it just puts them to rest. (Here is a video showing how this works with Twitter).

Note Techcrunch’s warning: “This will really delete your online presence and is irrevocable."

Tweet us... er, phone us... if you give this a try at 248.524.3542.

Technology in '10

What do the experts say we can we expect for technology in 2010?

According to Nuri Djavit and Paul Newnes, writing on the blog Digital Media Buzz, the coming year will be one where Facebook replaces email, mobile commerce becomes a reality, we will register only once for many different sites, and crowd sourcing becomes a common idea.

Meanwhile, the technology staff at the Guardian (of London) predicts a year of more Google, green technology, apps and Apple.

What do you think?

Do You Poken?

With all the social networking sites available these days (Facebook, Myspace, Linkedin - oh my!) it can be hard to keep track of all your user information -- and tricky to exchange information with new contacts.

What happens when you attend a conference and meet new people face-to-face? Gone are the days of giving out phone numbers or email addresses via tiny business cards that can only hold so much information. Time to start poken!

Poken ($19.95 from pokenzoo.com) is a small USB device that stores your personal profile containing links to your listings on all your social networking sites. When two pokens touch palm-to-palm the data is exchanged so that you can instantly share contact information with another poken user. Then, when you plug the poken USB into your computer, the data you have collected is downloaded to your machine. One poken can store up to 64 different contacts, so if you're a real social butterfly you might want to invest in a few.

If you're not quite ready to take the poken plunge, Moo Cards are a slightly less expensive option. Design your own business cards and Moo Cards will print them and send them to you.

Some companies, such as VistaPrint, offer free business cards (you pay for shipping) but they will include their logo on the back of the card. Remember, when designing your business cards, the info side of your business card does not have to be the "standard" name, position, company, etc. You can share any information you want, including your social networking sites and usernames.

Twitter Guide Book

Mashable.com, a blog dedicated to covering Web 2.0 and social media, has created a page aggregating their articles about Twitter. Called The Twitter Guide Book, this page provides links to a wealth of information about Twitter, from basics (retweets, hashtags, changing backgrounds), to more advanced topics (Twitter for business, sharing items on Twitter). This is an excellent resource to help you get the most out of Twitter.

[via iLibrarian]

Seeking Michigan Digitizes Michigan History

Interested in Michigan history? Take a look at Seeking Michigan, a new website of digitized documents, maps, films, images, oral histories and artifacts, which tell the stories of the State's families, homes, businesses, communities and landscapes.

Seeking Michigan includes one million death records covering the years 1897 through 1920. These records -- never before available electronically -- are indexed for searching by name, death date, location and age, and hold tremendous research opportunities for genealogists, historians and students.

In addition, the site currently has:

• more than 100,000 pages of Civil War documents;
• approximately 10,000 photographs;
• a variety of Michigan sheet music;
• a rich section about Michigan's 44 past governors;
• Works Progress Administration data (circa 1936-1942) about land and buildings throughout rural Michigan; and
• oral histories with notable Michigan residents.

According to Sandra Clark, director of the Michigan Historical Center, Seeking Michigan moves the archives and library experience outside of the bricks and mortar of the building in which the collections are housed. By employing the latest Web technologies and social media, the site aims for an enhanced user experience.

Seeking Michigan is a project of the Archives of Michigan and the Library of Michigan. Funding is from the Talbert and Leota Abrams Foundation, a Lansing-based nonprofit that has provided more than $2.5 million toward the development of the Library of Michigan's and Archives of Michigan' genealogy collection. The National Historic Publications and Records Commission provided additional funding.

Twitter Explained

Julia Angwin has written an excellent primer on Twitter for the Wall Street Journal.

"When I first joined Twitter, I felt like I was in a noisy bar where everyone was shouting and nobody was listening.

Soon, I began to decode its many mysteries: how to find a flock of followers, how to talk to them in a medium that blasts to lots of people at once and how to be witty in very tiny doses...

Twitter is useful precisely because so many people are talking about different things at once. When he was president of Sling Media, for instance, Jason Hirschhorn constantly monitored the keyword "sling" on Twitter. "It's an up-to-the minute temperature of what people are saying about your brand," he said. He left the consumer electronics company last month."

[via iLibrarian]

Good Morning America Catches Twitter Fever

Twitter is all the rage. It seems that everyone from Ashton Kutcher to MC Hammer is tweeting. Good Morning America recently featured a segment on Twitter and briefly talked to Biz Stone, founder of Twitter. Take a listen to what GMA had to say about Twitter.

Museum of Modern Art Recreates Itself Online; Add Large Social Network Component

The New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has redesigned its website after seven years.

The site, moma.org, which debuted today, is, according to Randy Kennedy writing in The New York Times, "an almost complete reconstruction of how the museum presents itself online. It features livelier images from its collection and exhibitions, increased use of video and the new interactive calendars and maps... the museum wants the site to transform how the public interacts with an institution that can sometimes seem forbidding and monolithic."

The site will now include a high degree of social networking: There is a “social bar” at the bottom of the page, which when clicked will expand to show images and other information that users can “collect” and share after registering for a free account at the Web site.

Again according to the Times:

“A user could build a portfolio of Walker Evans photographs or Elizabeth Murray paintings and send them to friends... The site will also eventually make it easy for users both casual and scholarly to trace lines of interest, digging up more information about works from publications and curators…

The new site includes an area called MoMA Voices that [museum officials]… see as a place where blogs will begin to form and where new ideas about how to have conversations will grow organically...

Museum visitors with cellphones will be able to text the number associated with an artwork to an area on the museum’s Web site. In this way they can later review and organize what they have seen.”

Facebook Reality

The Economist has an interesting article about Facebook and "friends." Money graph:

Put differently, people who are members of online social networks are not so much “networking” as they are “broadcasting their lives to an outer tier of acquaintances who aren’t necessarily inside the Dunbar circle,” says Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, a polling organisation. Humans may be advertising themselves more efficiently. But they still have the same small circles of intimacy as ever."

So if you have a half-dozen friends in real life, you're likely to have no more in Facebook. Hmm.

The Positives of Social Networking

Social networking has been a hot topic recently here at The Tech Desk. We have published about the positives of Twitter, possible negatives of Twitter, and the rise of microblogging in America.

So, where does this all lead? Are people truly connected through these online social networks? In September 2008, The New York Times posted an excellent story by Clive Thompson discussing how social networking is impacting our relationships. One of the most interesting things he brings up:

This is the ultimate effect of the new awareness: It brings back the dynamics of small-town life, where everybody knows your business. Young people at college are the ones to experience this most viscerally, because, with more than 90 percent of their peers using Facebook, it is especially difficult for them to opt out. Zeynep Tufekci, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, who has closely studied how college-age users are reacting to the world of awareness, told me that athletes used to sneak off to parties illicitly, breaking the no-drinking rule for team members. But then camera phones and Facebook came along, with students posting photos of the drunken carousing during the party; savvy coaches could see which athletes were breaking the rules. First the athletes tried to fight back by waking up early the morning after the party in a hungover daze to detag photos of themselves so they wouldn’t be searchable. But that didn’t work, because the coaches sometimes viewed the pictures live, as they went online at 2 a.m. So parties simply began banning all camera phones in a last-ditch attempt to preserve privacy.

“It’s just like living in a village, where it’s actually hard to lie because everybody knows the truth already,” Tufekci said. “The current generation is never unconnected. They’re never losing touch with their friends. So we’re going back to a more normal place, historically. If you look at human history, the idea that you would drift through life, going from new relation to new relation, that’s very new. It’s just the 20th century.”

You can read the rest of the article here.

Another Look at Twitter: It's Where Things Happen

Last week, Tech Desk staffer Barry Hyland blogged about some [negative] social implications of Twitter, the microblog site which is all the latest Internet rage.

He cited Yves Smith, who wrote that "Twitter feeds that... false sense of urgency. Most things can wait. Indeed, a lot of things are better off waiting. But we are encouraged to be plugged in, overstimulated all the time, at the expense of higher quality human relations."

Now, another -- more positive -- point of view from TechCrunch, in Why We Often Write About Twitter And Will Continue To Do So:

"Twitter has grown into far more than just a messaging or status updating service, and anyone who really uses it or develops for it knows that. It’s where news gets broken and what more and more celebrities openly turn to to start getting social with the community... It’s a place where companies can do business while people can choose to engage only with their peers instead. It triggers and support the organization of worldwide charity events...

Basically, it’s as social as social networking services can get."

Twitter Me a River

Interesting thoughts from Yves Smith over at Naked Capitalism regarding Twitter and the compression of communication and thought, and some social implications that should give all pause. Yves seems sadly resigned to it. (Hat tip: andrewsullivan.com)

The Growth of Social Networking

eMarketer estimates that in 2008 nearly 80 million people, 41% of the US Internet user population, visited social network sites at least once a month, an 11% increase from 2007. By 2013, an estimated 52% of Internet users will be regular social network visitors.

[via Stephen's Lighthouse]