This is tough to say, but here goes…
I got scammed on Craigslist.
I know. I was blown away. Me? I was born well before yesterday and make (generally disregarded) claims to be the mayor of the interwebs. But, I’ve decided to take this lemon and make some digital-activation-case-study lemonade. Click below to have a taste (not as gross as it sounds).
Oh, digital evolution. You surprise me every day. Today, you brought to my attention this little gem of a website called OMEGLE.COM, an online chat service that lets you talk to strangers. Forget Facebook and Myspace, which only let you communicate with people you might actually know in real life. This is the new digital hotness right here: total anonymity and an open forum for saying whatever you want to a total stranger.
However, the benefit of this site goes far beyond its intended purpose of being “a brand-new service for meeting new friends.” With my first few forays into chatting on this site, I don’t think I would be friends with anyone I’ve met on here. Hell, I’m downright frightened by some of these folks. No, this web gem is living proof of one of my favorite modern theorems ever created, via the geniuses over at Penny Arcade, and is a prime example of everything that’s right and wrong with The Internet.
President Obama yesterday held a fairly remarkable town-hall style meeting yesterday called Open for Questions. Anyone could go to the site and either suggest a question and/or vote on which questions the president should answer. For the YouTube debates that took place during the election, it seemed fairly random which questions were selected for answering. But this time around, it appears the president really did tackle those with the most votes, submitting to the will of the people. That likely seemed like a problem-free strategy until the administration realized that the top question across a third of the categories was about legalizing marijuana.
Now that everyone and their mom is social networking in cyberspace, digital friendships are becoming a regular part of everyday life. Whether it’s broadcasting your whereabouts, stalking old friends, or managing a digital rolodex, the internet is a medium that can both enrich and tarnish friendships without any real interaction.
While much of the digital friendship discussion focuses on the extension of real-life relationships on Facebook or MySpace, there are numerous other platforms that facilitate different types of relationships. Not sexual ones. Well maybe, but I’m not talking about those.
Below are the 4 Types Of Digital Friendships that are a regular part of digital culture.
A couple weeks ago Saneel was browsing the internets and happened upon Silicon Alley Insider’s “Twitter Business Model Contest.” The contest asked for ideas on a viable revenue plan for Twitter – something it doesn’t quite yet have. He forwarded the link to the rest of the group and we decided that we wanted to tackle the problem.
Why, you ask? Well, frankly, we love Twitter. Nearly everyone in the office uses it on a daily basis. (Heck, Saneel even created some rules to tweet by.) We’d hate to see Twitter disappear.
We also thought we could come up with a more innovative (and less intrusive) idea than ads via Twitter. Being ad supported means being focused on CPM – and that just didn’t make much sense to us. So with that – we released the hamsters onto the wheels in our heads and got to thinking.
