The aggregate flatness of Facebook
Most readers know that I’ve been tracking Google Trends data on Facebook for years. Now on January 1 2012 It seems pretty obviously that in the international aggregate this was the year that Facebook finally hit saturation in terms of “mindshare.” But there are interesting international differences. United States: United Kingdom: France: Germany: Italy: Russia: […]
The decline of Digg, the rise of reddit
This is probably old news to you, and I’ve read about Digg’s problems in the tech media, but I just realized how much reddit has eclipsed Digg in referral traffic. I’ve always gotten way more attention from reddit (some science bloggers have told me that reddit readers are a “smarter set”), but when I did […]
The sons of Adam: spirit, not blood
Hominin increase in cranial capacity, courtesy of Luke Jostins A few years ago a statistical geneticist at Cambridge’s Sanger Institute, Luke Jostins, posted the chart above using data from fossils on cranial capacity of hominins (the human lineage). As you can see there was a gradual increase in cranial capacity until ~250,000 years before the present, […]
The rise of Chrome, the decline of Firefox?
There’s been extensive reporting in the media on the rise of Chrome, and the decline of Firefox, based on StatCounter data. I’ve got access to four weblog analytics, one of them going back to 2006. I see the same trend. It’s real. What I don’t understand is the lack of acknowledgment of the continued stagnation […]
Has twitter peaked?
I hadn’t given the issue much thought, but that’ what Randall Parker asserted in the comments below. First, let’s look at Google Trends search traffic with Facebook as well: Facebook dwarfs twitter, so you can’t tell. So with only twitter: Interesting. Now let’s look with Alexa: It’s a little more ambiguous using Google Trends estimate […]
Google+, Facebook, twitter
It’s been a while…what’s going on with Google+? I think we can conclude it isn’t a Facebook killer in anything like the medium term. After moving away from Facebook I started posting again because almost all of my friends in “flesh space” simply don’t use Google+. Rather, Google+ has become a more elaborate extension of […]
Diaspora, depression, and suicide
What We Don’t Know About Suicide: CNNMoney reports that Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of four co-founders of the social networking site Diaspora, died over the weekend, and that suicide was the likely cause of death. He was 22. I gave some money to Diaspora. It seems like it didn’t pan out. So? But that’s easy for […]
Second Life after the hype
Slate has an interesting retrospective on why Second Life never fulfilled the hype. My own caution was rooted in an argument from a tech journalist who pointed out that the exact same things stated about Second Life were once stated about MUDs. He actually simply repeated quotes from stories in the early to mid-1990s and […]
Limits to technology
A few stray thoughts, which might be worth having a discussion about. Unless one wants to go Soylent Green or Logan’s Run both the proponents of stable/declining world population and continued growth have to look to technology. More people means more economic productivity to keep everyone afloat ahead of the Malthusian trap. But even if […]
John McCarthy, 1927-2011
John McCarthy has died. Sadly I was expecting this, I was told that McCarthy was still teaching courses in 2008 by someone in Stanford’s computer science department, but he was in obvious bad health. One of the major downsides of the incredible information flow in the internet age is that you often hear through the […]
Browser share via Google Trends
I use Google Trends a lot, but I don’t necessarily know if it’s telling me anything useful. So I decided to see if it might correlate well with browser share data. I know that W3Schools has been tracking their own stats for years, so I took their data from September of 2008 to September of […]
Google+, very different from Facebook
TechCrunch has a post up on the declining public usage of Google+. It’s been several months since I’ve been “using” Google+. I put usage in quotes because I am not a big active poster on twitter, Facebook, or Google+. But I do participate passively a fair amount. At this point for me I can say […]
Why Menupages exists
You’ve wondered I’m sure. I have. Why are restaurant websites so horrifically bad?:
…The rest of the Web long ago did away with auto-playing music, Flash buttons and menus, and elaborate intro pages, but restaurant sites seem stuck in…
Real life interaction is a feature, not a bug
The prince of neurobloggers Jonah Lehrer has a good if curious column up at the Wall Street Journal, Social Networks Can’t Replace Socializing. He concludes:
This doesn’t mean that we should stop socializing on the web. But it does suggest …
Scientist afraid of what information technology might do to our brains
Carl pointed me to this really strange interview in New Scientist, Susan Greenfield: Living online is changing our brains. If you removed it from the New Scientist website and put it on the The Onion it wouldn’t really need much editing. Some of …
~1 month into the new social network order
I am only being added to Google+ “circles” at a clip of half a dozen per day. This is off the peak of nearly 20 or so per day a little over a week ago. I’m now at nearly 500 people in my Google circles, though only 5 were individuals …
Google+ is not Buzz or Wave reprised
Over the past few weeks I’ve seen several media stories profiling the rise of Google+ by noting that hoopla also greeted Google Wave and Google Buzz before their expiration as “It” technologies. This caveat was probably more true for …
Google+ observations
– I have invited 5 people to the service (as per their requests). And yet I have 163 people in my circles. Right now the rate of people adding me to their circles is increasing.
– At least half the people I don’t even recognize at all. Most of t…
Google+ vs. Facebook: browser wars part 2?
There’s an amusing story up at The New York Times on the activity surrounding Mark Zuckerberg’s Google+ account. Zuckerberg is of course just scoping out the competition. Here’s the heartening part:
So far, Google’s new social serv…