Well, since Youki and Usree lured me into this quiz on Facebook, i thought I’d post it here because, well, I don’t know if you want to let yet another Facebook app access all of your personal information. If you’re on Facebook, that is. And we should be able to talk about these [...]

An interesting aspect of social network sites like Facebook and MySpace is their appropriation of the word “friend.”  I sometimes get email messages from people I hardly know (and sometimes people I don’t know at all) inviting me to friend them (now it seems there is no more need to use the verb “befriend“).

How [...]

I remember what a good friend told me several years after he had finished his PhD in New York and moved to Osaka, Japan. We were going over some old emails–you know, the quality kind, the long kind of emails that were composed and not just dashed off in a series of bullet points and [...]

It’s been quite a while since I’ve ventured to write about learning French, or even taken a few baby-steps in the direction of actually writing in French – this mostly because I haven’t been studying and practicing as I should for my research project between learners of French in Berkeley and [...]

From the Journal of Murketing (not a typo), “Gallery of default anonymity: A work in progress.” The gallery presents the default user thumbnail image from a variety of sites, such as eBay, Facebook, Youtube, Twitter and others.

A newly added friend of mine remarked, “You know, your [default Facebook] thumb confused me because [...]

As visualized through a Facebook news feed! Enjoy.

A very interesting article on Facebook, and the controversial issue of ownership of user-generated data appears in New York magazine.

Money quote:

If there were one word to describe what Facebook has added to my life, I would use it. It’s a multidimensional pleasure: It’s given me a tool for exceptionally mindless, voyeuristic, puerile [...]

A British teenager who took a drugs overdose has been saved after the American girl he was chatting to online raised the alarm.

The 16-year-old boy from Oxfordshire had sent her a message suggesting he intended to commit suicide.

Although she did not know where he lived, calls via the White House and the British Embassy enabled [...]

This has got to be the funniest Facebook-related image EVER:

It’s the story of Aeneas’ journey toward founding Rome, told via Facebook status updates.

Bitter culture wars played out over Valentine’s Day in India, as the New York Times reported.

Sri Ram Sena, the über-religious right-wing Indian political outfit, had announced their intentions to “disrupt Valentine’s Day celebration as it is against Indian culture.” The disruption, they said, would be targeted against schools and colleges, [...]

Over the last months, I have been following a friend’s trials and tribulations in love, a narrative mediated through the terse dozen or so words of Facebook status updates (a popular micro-blogging feature on the site). I reproduce below the exact updates, with the date stamps.

Enyd: finally found someone who makes [...]

Yes, I finally caved.

Facebook has been exploding with the “25 random things” phenomenon…

It’s akin to a chain letter, carrying this instructional heading at the top of each note:

“Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose [...]