Facebook Sleeve

Put Down The Phone

There are people trying to conversatiate with you!

Improv Everywhere - Surprise Musical

Friendster Announces End

Friendster goes dark on May 31st. In other news, people still have Friendster accounts.

EGYPT: Google Launches Speak-To-Tweet

Google has created a work-around for Egyptians cut off from the internet. Via the company's official blog:

Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service—the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection. We worked with a small team of engineers from Twitter, Google and SayNow, a company we acquired last week, to make this idea a reality. It’s already live and anyone can tweet by simply leaving a voicemail on one of these international phone numbers (+16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855) and the service will instantly tweet the message using the hashtag #egypt. No Internet connection is required. People can listen to the messages by dialing the same phone numbers or going to twitter.com/speak2tweet. We hope that this will go some way to helping people in Egypt stay connected at this very difficult time. Our thoughts are with everyone there.

Nice work, Google.

Twitter On Egypt: The Tweets Must Flow

Twitter has issued a statement which partially references events in Egypt.

Our goal is to instantly connect people everywhere to what is most meaningful to them. For this to happen, freedom of expression is essential. Some Tweets may facilitate positive change in a repressed country, some make us laugh, some make us think, some downright anger a vast majority of users. We don't always agree with the things people choose to tweet, but we keep the information flowing irrespective of any view we may have about the content.

The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact. This is both a practical and ethical belief. On a practical level, we simply cannot review all one hundred million-plus Tweets created and subsequently delivered every day. From an ethical perspective, almost every country in the world agrees that freedom of expression is a human right. Many countries also agree that freedom of expression carries with it responsibilities and has limits.

Their "the tweets must flow" headline reminded me of this, of course.

Tweet Of The Day - Robert Gibbs

As we saw last year in Iran, the roles of Twitter, Facebook and YouTube cannot be underestimated in these things.

MySpace Likely To Shutter

News Corp is reportedly putting MySpace up for sale after cutting staff by 50% this week. If there are no immediately takers, the site is expected to shut down by June. This will come as a shock to millions who thought MySpace was already gone. The site lost $100M in the fiscal year that ended last June.

FEDS: Even If You Friend Your Boss, He Can't Fire You For Facebook Dissings

A federal labor agency has ruled that social media postings are protected speech that employers cannot use against staffers.

In what labor officials and lawyers view as a ground-breaking case involving workers and social media, the National Labor Relations Board has accused a company of illegally firing an employee after she criticized her supervisor on her Facebook page. This is the first case in which the labor board has stepped in to argue that workers’ criticisms of their bosses or companies on a social networking site are generally a protected activity and that employers would be violating the law by punishing workers for such statements. [snip]

But employees might cross the line into unprotected territory if they disparage supervisors over something unrelated to work — for instance, a supervisor’s sexual performance — or if their statements are disloyal. Courts often view workers’ statements as disloyal when they are defamatory and are not supported by facts. Mr. Babson cited a case upholding the firing of airline workers who held signs saying their airline was unsafe. But, he said, if employees held signs accurately saying their airline or restaurant had been cited for dozens of safety violations, that would most likely be protected.

The agency also noted that monitoring employee Facebook postings could be considered an act of union-busting.

Twitter To Launch New Interface

But first, a long boring set-up.

Google Wave Goes Bye-Bye

Google has announced that they are giving up on Google Wave, one of the few products from the internet giant ever to fail.

Wave, a real time messaging platform, was unveiled in May 2009 to an enthusiastic crowd of developers at the Google I/O event in San Francisco. It would “set a new benchmark for interactivity,” said Sergey Brin. The product is part email, part Twitter and part instant messaging. Users can drag files from the desktop to a discussion. Wave even showed character-by-character live typing. It fully launched this last May. And while the service has many, or at least some, passionate users (including TechCrunchers), it “has not seen the user adoption we would have liked,” says Google.

Google Buzz will probably be next, I'm guessing.