John Palfrey has dredged up a Village Voice 2003 article on Friendster. The article characterizes the site as a place to find dates and to check out people you might want to date. The idea that a social networking site could be a place for actual social interaction had not yet surfaced. Of course, the fact that Friendster’s founder would throw condoms out into the crowd as the official Friendster tchochke contributed to the perception of what the site was about.

Interesting to read the article now.

[Tags: friendster social_networking facebook ]

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Bestiario is a Spanish group that does some insanely watchable visualizations of networks of information. For example, poke around at their way of mapping del.icio.us links.

I’m not very good at interpreting visual data so I can’t tell if it’s helpful, but it sure is cool.

[Tags: visualization social_networks ]

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I haven’t tried the software yet, but I like how they’re developing it:

The concept of Jing is the always-ready program that instantly captures and shares images and video…from your computer to anywhere.

It’s something we want to give you, along with some online media hosting, to see how you use it. The project will eventually turn into something else. Tell us what you think so we can figure out what that is.

Try it, you’ll like it. Find out more in the FAQ, or on the weblog .

Not so incidentally, I found out about this via a post by JP Rangaswami following up on a really terrific post about the incredible capacity of our new circulatory system (capillaries, not a fire hose, says JP). The follow-up post gives an example of capillary action at work. The first post frames the Net as how conversation — taken not just as chin-wagging but as how much of the the work and play of sociality are accomplished — scales. [Tags: jing screen_grab screen_capture jp_rangaswami conversation web_2.0 messiness ]

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