Sanborn Media Factory

Mashable has procured documents about the release of an official Tweet Button— the first of its kind produced in house, by Twitter. The customary retweet button that has found its way onto most publications on the web was developed by Tweetmeme, a company which aggregates all the popular links on Twitter, determining the most popular, sorting it by category and relevance. We hope that Twitter isn’t torpedoing this service, but instead the two are combining their powers for good to better sort Twitter’s ever expanding content.

Another oddity of this story is the fact that all of the images Mashable uses have a note on the bottom saying that they’re confidential and subject to a non-disclosure agreement. I’m curious what the agreement may have been, allowing the release of this information, yet not removing the NDA caption on the screenshots. 

AdAge Post by Rupal Parekh and Michael Bush.

At some point, people only care about what you are DOING. Social media is just another way to let people know what you are doing. It isn’t an answer intrinsically.

JetBlue doesn’t have “social capital” to cash in, they have a reputation as a company that treats their customer well and they let people know in a tasteful way that adds to that reputation. When you do consistent good work for your customer, they will give you the benefit of the doubt when something bad or out of the ordinary happens. 

Tom Coates in this interesting article on Google’s future. Interesting read, but if you are short on time, just skip to the summary in the last two paragraphs. 

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/07/29/google-the-search-party-is-over/#com-head

R.I.P. Chatroulette, 2009-2010 - Internet Culture - Salon.com (via heyitsnoah)

I think the Chatroulette phenomenon is a perfect example of the state of the internet today. The problems the tech scene is trying to fix today aren’t real problems. In fact, they’re solutions to problems that the internet has created. Humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years with relatively little social and communication needs. We need our friends, we need our family, and we need to put our skills to work and make money. Some of us also need ideas. But all of us need (and only need as a basic fundamental human necessity) friends and family that we emotionally connect with in person on a daily basis. The pub solved that problem hundreds of years ago. The telephone solved that even better as our families moved apart. And now we have email in addition to the telephone and personal blogs for those of us who want to be public.

We’ve solved our basic fundamental need of intimate communication with friends, family, and colleagues. Anything more than this is going to be gimmicks and micro-solutions to the last 5% of a problem. And I’m even lumping Facebook into the gimmick section due to the fact that only a small fraction of us want to be public within the confines of one company in everything we do.

We, as social animals, are actually relatively simple creatures with relatively simple needs. Technology is moving much, much faster than our brains and social needs can evolve.

(via jayparkinsonmd)