Social Networks
Google Buzz: FriendFeed in Gmail
Google Buzz strikes me as a lightweight clone of FriendFeed integrated into Gmail. That’s not surprising when you consider FriendFeed’s origins: the founders are all former Google employees. While FriendFeed remains a marvelous service — it was recently acquired by Facebook — it never saw much adoption beyond the geek set. Mainstream Internet users have yet to wrap their brains around the concept introduced by FriendFeed in 2007: social media aggregation.
Google Buzz could finally bridge that conceptual chasm, racing out the gate with a combination of four very powerful advantages: Click here to continue reading "Google Buzz: FriendFeed in Gmail"...
Friendster Throwing Bizarre Errors
Friendster, the once-hot social networking pioneer that’s long been overshadowed by Facebook and MySpace, has fallen upon hard times in recent years. Not only have they gained a reputation for unreliability, even their unreliability has fallen beneath the mainstream media’s radar. It’s gotten so bad that they’ve been unsuccessfully trying to shop themselves around in Asia.
Now Friendster’s homepage is throwing back all sorts of weird errors. Sometimes you’ll get gibberish, sometimes you’ll get a blank page, sometimes you’ll get foreign-language versions, and sometimes you’ll get pictures from random users’ profiles. I’ve been reloading the site over and over again just to see who I’d get.
Privacy concerns aside, this little social network meltdown roulette is both sad and amusing at once.
