Good point:  Is the pace of innovation so rapid that if I invest a lot of time setting it up, making my profile, learning the ropes and trying to maximizing the benefits, only to find out a month later that a better application has just launched.  How frustrating!

Obsolence, whether it’s a DVD player or HDTV or 8 track player, has always been an issue.  The problem here, of course, is the pace.  If it’s parabolic, you might get “innovation paralysis.”

Next: Are you my friend?

Interesting – how do you communicate with your closest friends?  By looking at the emails that you send (yes, for me), *by your cell phone logs?*  Yes, for a lot of people. By their Twitter or IM messages?

How do you tell someone you don’t want to be their friend?  One professor said that if she said “no” to any student, then the entire college can get a reputation for being “cold” and unfriendly.  You might just appear rude to the person(s) doing the asking. 

And, perhaps worst of all from a Machiavellian point of view, you might someday wish that you had friended that person!

And what about “friend overload?”  The 25 invites in your Inbox every morning.  To our readers – please comment – what do you do when someone that you don’t know asks to be your friend?

Here follows a discussion of tagging which goes over my head – Sean just said he’s been studying it for 12 years, so I should really look for one of his R/WW posts. (Note to self)

Very good point: “We have serious problems, and we need serious people to solve them.” (The American President)  Studying Social Networks tends to quickly give you a very narcissistic form of tunnel vision, i. e. “It’s all about me.” 

How do I manage my friends?  I really hate creating all those user names and profiles.  How can information find me better?   Will Personalization make Search work better for me?  Perhaps this should be called “the Twitterization” of our culture – It’s  all  about ME.

So, this participant suggested the radical idea that there may actually be more serious problems in the world then how accurate my Netflix recommendations are.  Things like war, poverty, famine, genocide, and of course – global warming.  There is another group talking about what Defrag should cover next year, so this may impact the agenda.

New topic: Information overload.  *What if you turned off your RSS feeder for a week?*  Or FaceBook, or whatever it is that is overwhelming you.  Would your life be better or worse?  Could you even go a week (are you Master of your .com Domain?)  If you turn the tap back on, do you want a program to filter out what gets through to you, or do you want help managing that which gets through to you (or both?) Sean notes that companies like FeedHub are working on this very problem.

To start your own conversation, just pose this question to another person or persons: “What the world really needs is_______________” and see where it goes – or tell us in a comment what you would fill in that blank with.

<lunch!>

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 6th, 2007 at 1:56 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.