On the other hand, I’m a little disappointed with myself. Too much time has gone by, and I don’t feel like I have accomplished enough at work or in my personal life. I wanted to make new Austinite friends, get to know my coworkers, catch up with all college friends, read more books, learn to cook… and all too many times, I end up sitting in front of the TV watching Glee. I need more motivation. Enough said.

On a side note, I’m taking my first REAL vacation. By REAL, I mean no parents or family to show you around or pay for anything. This is all planned and paid for by me or my amazing friend Carmen. We’re going to Las Vegas for a week!

So my friend Josh found an article about how science is connecting brain activity to Twitter. Essentially, they hook up a device to measure your brain waves and when you focus on a particular letter on the computer screen, the computer will figure out what letter you are focusing on based on your brain activity when the computer blinks certain rows of letters. The article explains it,

“The interface consists, essentially, of a keyboard displayed on a computer screen. “The way this works is that all the letters come up, and each one of them flashes individually,” says Williams. “And what your brain does is, if you’re looking at the ‘R’ on the screen and all the other letters are flashing, nothing happens. But when the ‘R’ flashes, your brain says, ‘Hey, wait a minute. Something’s different about what I was just paying attention to.’ And you see a momentary change in brain activity.”

You can tweet this message and people with locked-in syndrome, in which they can’t communicate, but their brain is working completely are able to communicate with the rest of the world. I found this so interesting because on my favorite TV show House, one the patients had locked-in syndrome or something similar to it, and was hooked up to a computer and a cursor to where up was yes and down was no. However he couldn’t communicate anything past this. With this new brain-twitter interface, these people are able to communicate normally.

As a thought for the venture capital side of things, I also found it interesting that Blair didn’t care about monetizing Twitter or any of the other “web 2.0″ websites. I find this to be very true among venture capitalists nowadays because I’ve been researching Twitter for class and some of the possibilities to monetize their service and while many experts and bloggers have their ideas, the venture capitalists supporting Twitter are perfectly fine that there is no money coming in the door. The question for me and the rest of our class today was why. Shouldn’t they trying to find a business model and make money? I feel like the value of a large network of users and their information is being bidded on my venture capitalists more than the actual returns they could make in the next year or two. As Kevin said in class, they are hoping to make it big. In a sense, venture capitalists are accustomed to taking more risk, and the cloudy companies with huge network potential are where the money might come from. Overall, I feel like the talk was very enlightening and made me think much more about the VC market and how companies are getting started (and exiting) now.

http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/04/facebook-starts-recommending-branded-public-profiles/

I totally see it from a business standpoint of why facebook would want to become Twitter and not lose their fanbase. I’ve noticed that despite all the fb complaints, people are fb tweeting much more often. Facebook wants to stop anyone from going over to Twitter in the future mobile generation. I am still annoyed though. Like someone said in class, I don’t want to “follow” all of my facebook friends. I might want to check their pictures and profiles every once in a while or wish them a happy birthday, but I don’t want to know their every move or thought on their mind. I still would use Twitter to get only the few people that I actually care about what they are doing. That’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Facebook is making an admirable attempt at trying to compete with Twitter, but in the process they are just copying Twitter and not differentiating facebook from Twitter. Facebook needs to go back and focus on what made them popular in the first place. Even though Twitter may be a big deal for me in the future, I still would stalk people’s pictures and friends on Facebook. Fb needs to realize their niche and expand upon that instead of copying Twitter. OR…just make a facebook-led spinoff that could compete with Twitter on a bigger and better basis. Take advantage of the user base of facebook and make it easier for people to signup for the fb Twitter. Facebook can easily integrate this FB Twitter into the original facebook if users agree to this. However forcing all of us to follow everyone’s status updates is just adding clutter to the home page. I don’t even bother reading it, and it’s only been implemented a few weeks at most. I honestly believe that the old newsfeed with photos, events, and relationship updates on the homepage engaged my attention on facebook longer. Perhaps, I won’t have a reason to check my facebook as often if what I really need is to follow a few friends by mobile. Of course, this depends on Twitter building a big enough user base, to where you have to get Twitter in order to connect to all of your friends.

My personal experience with Twitter has demonstated that Twitter really is growing. I got Twitter a few weeks ago (for a group project technology topic) and tweeted maybe 2 or 3 times. Every week I had 2 or so of my friends add me randomly. I never told them I was on twitter, and I didn’t make any friends they would already know and see me following. It was quite impressive. The same thing happened to one of my group members who has 30 or so friends on twitter, when he first said that he didn’t know anyone on Twitter.

So does this all mean that we should all be tweeting on our mobiles instead of facebook stalking on our laptops? ::shrug:: Only time will tell. But I really hate to say I told you so.

Anyways, the birthday paradox states that in a group of 36 people, there is an 80 percent chance that 2 people have the same birthday. It seems our class proves that point quite well. Out of the 18 students and 4 instructors (only 22 people), Ken and Joel have the same birthday. today. Happy Birthday guys! =)

For the MySpace case study, I decided to revisit my MySpace account after 2 years of inactivity. To much of my surprise, the website was cleaned up a lot! I logged in to find tagged photos of me, application requests, and the typical facebook activities that consume my time. My account even had friend suggestions, one of them who is my current roomie! =) I quickly added her, updated my profile, and then discovered MySpace Music!

In the past, MySpace was for keeping up with a few old middle school friends and to check the latest tour dates of my favorite bands. Now, the website has really added to the music side, and I loved the playlist option on my profile page. I added my favorite songs and now have them streaming whenever I visit my profile. I love it! I don’t see myself using MySpace much more than for music purposes and keeping up with the tour dates, but even then the site has me logging in.

My other discovery. LinkedIn. I first got a LinkedIn when I started working at Bazaarvoice this past summer and added a few of my coworkers. Now, I’ve realized that people come and go quickly in your life, and keeping up with those connections is important. It’s easiest to add those friends as they come, and not try to find them later on. In other words, if I wanted to keep in contact with Judd Bagley I should have done so when he was in our class and added him that day. Right now, I’m in the process of finding fellow peers who I will want to stay in touch with beyond our time here at UT.

Twitter. O dear. It seems like my whole life will be broadcasted to the world if you just google my name. I couldn’t resist the temptation to see what Twitter is all about, and just signed up for an account this past week. My excuse is that it is for my MIS375 group project, and that I need to experience the technology before I can really understand and write about it. I can see how “tweeting” can get addictive. Thank goodness I don’t have unlimited text messaging! =)

So that’s it. I’m choosing to put my information and whereabout on the World Wide Web. I’m also choosing to invest so much time in my social networks. Sad, perhaps. Reality, yea.

To get a complete sense of my Internet activity (for all of you marketing folks), the tabs that are normally open on my browser are: Facebook, Yahoo email, Mccombs business email, Blackboard, Youtube (to listen to my fav music video) or Pandora, and perhaps one of my 2 blogs for class purposes, LinkedIn, or MySpace. That’s me in a nutshell. Don’t judge.

Read the article at: http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?presenter=53

and the Yammer website: https://www.yammer.com/

What I found extremely interesting from all of it, was the question of whether we really know that wikipedia isn’t being biased and banning certain people, or that an elite few are controlling the content. It is not limited to wikipedia either; but blogs, reviews, social networking profiles, all user-generated content should be taken into account. We can’t all be cyberstalkers and track down each person and his/her IP address to see if their Internet activity is legit. How can we trust UGC? and How can we prevent fraudulent users from using the Internet as their mask? How will we address security issues in the near future? Should cyberstalking be a respectable job? hehe I would find it quite entertaining. It’s like Nancy Drew via Internet.

Even though our generation experienced the move from 1.0 to 2.0, I barely remember Web 1.0. I remember logging into AOL, chatting on IM, and even entering chat rooms. I was a huge fan of Nsync (yes I admit it), and made my own fan page on Geocities. Other fans would come leave messages of my guestbook occassionally, but that was as much sharing as there was. [Interestingly enough, Geocities is the reason why I still have my main Yahoo email address.] Then it gradually moved to  getting a livejournal, blogspot, and then xanga…and coincidentally I had all 3 to keep up with the links with my friends. We shared about our lives and that was it. I wasn’t completely Web 2.0 savvy, until I went to the UT orientation week when I finally received my .edu email address and signed up for Facebook in July 2005. Profiles, pictures, friends, notes, and anything else I wanted to share was out in the open. In college, I’ve learned to Youtube everything (including the box step from my ballroom class), ask Wikipedia when Youtube fails, and Facebook stalk any classmates that are assigned to your group projects. I believe the change has been gradual and continues to be so, as more and more is being collaboratively shared.