Crystal gazing

I can’t sleep so I thought I’d kill two birds with one stone by dashing off a quick post.

I’m hoping the writing will tire me out enough for me to sleep, and also because I thought I’d share what’s on my mind – which is, coincidentally, the same thing that’s preventing me from sleeping.

Hand with Reflecting Sphere by M. C. Escher.

Since my last prophetic success (LOL), I’d like to make a few more social media predictions (which aren’t so far removed from my own technological wish-list, actually):

  1. Tit for Tat:
    A Facebook app that goes through your friend list, discovers what privacy settings people use on you and apply those same settings back on them.

    Sounds like childish pettiness, I know, but look at it his way: we’ve reached an age in which information can be valued – or priced.

    Hence, if Entity A has more information about Entity B than the converse, Entity A has greater leverage and Entity B stands to lose out.

    Now, answer me truthfully: would you rather be Entity A or Entity B?

    Precisely.

    And knowing how some of our information on Facebook has the potential to make or break us, it’s only fair for information to be shared in as fair a manner as possible.

    I’m as sure as hell not going to trawl through my Friend list to figure out privacy settings for each individual ‘Friend’, so an automated process to do this would be nice.

  2. Mute function and Timeline for Twitter web client:
    These are actually quite low-level ideas, but I think they’d really make Twitter better to use in the long run.

    • When I’m using my Mac at home, I have Tweetdeck which works great in terms of muting stupid people who tweet about inane things.

      However, I don’t always use a Twitter app that has this function which means there’s a lot of noise I have no way of filtering out.

      I’d unfollow these people, but I think it’s rude, so I’d rather just mute them – similar principle to that of Tit-for-Tat, I guess.

    • Twitter needs a timeline in the same way Facebook has one, just so we can re-discover all our ‘old-but-gold’ posts and marvel at how intelligent (or alternatively, how juvenile) we used to be.

      Until we started working and turned into our parents.

  3. Google Tunes:
    This is different from Google Music in that it works like a normal Google search.

    Instead of a textual input, however, you SING or hum a tune to your computer or Siri or what have you.

    The Google Tune search then scours its ginormous database to find the name of the song you’ve just hummed, thereby saving you many sleepless nights of having an earworm run through your head endlessly.

    This is especially helpful when you can’t Google the lyrics because you don’t, for the life of you, know what the lyrics are – but you know the tune to the chorus very, very, very well.

    Tragicomedy aside, it’s possibly the highest-level idea of the lot, because it’s very close to the concept of what Web 3.0 is envisioned to be like.

Let me know when these things come about, or better yet – if similar products already exist.

POSKOD.SG: Ten Steps to Effective Online Commentary.

POSKOD.SG Graphic

"People talking without speaking/People hearing without listening"

My latest article on POSKOD.SG.

Ten Steps to Effective Online Commentary.
A guide to online criticism and debate. (Mostly criticism.)

So, you’ve got an Internet connection, an opinion and some spare time on your hands.

Congratulations! Like everyone else and their blogs, you are now a media hub.

Before you commence e-hurling your iNtellectualism @ the rest of the world, here are ten steps to effective online commentary, the cyber-Singaporean way.

  1. Increase your Internet presence.Set up a website on socio-political issues in Singapore and give it a cerebral, subtle and unique moniker, something like Socially Political SG: Thinking About Socially Political in Singapore.What you have to say is, after all, very ‘niche’, and no one thinks about critical issues affecting our nation in as classy or as astute a manner as you do.
  2. Read widely.Turn to Google and Wikipedia for all your edificatory needs.Besides being the only scholarly sources that can be found on the face of the earth, they are also the most reliable, according to teenage students who take a great deal of pride in referencing “en.wikipedia.org” and “ehow.com” in their homework submissions.
  3. Participate in community discussions on a consistent basis.Trawl other websites and forums every hour and leave comments on other posts, regardless of whether or not your advice is sound and/or logical.Bear in mind that we are a democracy, and democracy, as translated from the Greek, means ‘many people shouting loudly at each other in a self-important fashion’.

    Moreover, your counsel serves to affirm and validate the existence of ‘netizens’.

    Never underestimate the value of this, even if netizens do not seem to mention their appreciation of your beneficence, or worse, if they seem to respond negatively to what you say.

(continued…)

Google+ and speaking in hushed tones.

g+

My Facebook-verse and Twitter-verse were abuzz with people asking for invites to Google+ today.

I didn’t ask for one because I know from my own usage patterns that I’m not an early adopter of technology; I wait and see what happens and whether a certain product is useful to me before I start using it.

So I did the next best thing – going to read up on what Google+ is all about and what people have been saying about it.

What I found out startled me somewhat: the concept of Circles is very akin to something I mentioned some time back in a post.

BTW please don’t get me wrong – I’m not saying that Circles is my brainchild or that the team plagiarised my idea, etc.

The only pleasure I’m getting out of this is knowing that I don’t need to do the work, but I can forecast trends as good as any Lee can.

I’m being tongue-in-cheek, in case you didn’t get it.

In other news, not everyone thinks Google+ is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S.