The Evolution of Social Networking
by AJ Focht
Ten years ago the internet was just starting to get its game on attracting people and businesses alike. The one thing I recall the most, from that time period, was the mass emphasis on internet anonymity. Parents, teachers, and sponsored commercials all warned of the dangers of using your real name or information online. For years it was common practice to sign up on every new website with a fake name, fake address, and if possible an email account that was only used to sign up for things.
Flash forward ten years and almost everyone has left a traceable mark on the internet. Social networking sites are being shared by every one of all ages and backgrounds. The handling of personal information is more serious than ever but that doesn’t seem to stop anyone from putting it online.
What went wrong? How did everything get turned upside down in just one decade?
I believe the start was a combination of online shopping and chat room. When buying or paying for anything online the purchaser needed to be forward and truthful with all of their information. They were forced to put in real names, addresses, and even credit card numbers. After a few years of trusting these sights they started easing up on other sights. Working at it from the other side were the chat rooms and early blogs. People were making friends in chat rooms and using early blog services like Live Journal and Dead Journal. Personal information started coming out slowly as the users comfort levels with the internet increased. While this might have started to drive away some of the internet information phobia, it was not enough to stop it.
In 2003 Myspace.com enters the scene and started social networking on a global level. Myspace did something that no other social network had yet to do; it attracted the Millenials (or Generation Y 1980-2000). This generation saw the potential of the personal profiles and interlinked friends system. Myspace was like taking all of the other small social networks and interaction we would get from chat rooms and put it into one nice package. Every profile was like a personal website that allowed the user to customize it and make it truly their space.
Facebook came into the scene a year later in 2004. Facebook attracted college students as it was, at first, exclusive to them. With the growing popularity of the social networking, and a new found public distaste for Myspace, Facebook seemed the perfect option for all when it opened up to all users in 2006. That same year Twitter came into existence but I will get to that in a moment.
I was honestly surprised when Facebook took the lead in the social network race. A culture that was so opposed to putting its personal information on the web was starting use a site that had a consistent news feed of your personal activities. Then we saw Myspace add its news feed feature in an attempt to keep up with Facebook. Then Facebook took away their profile interests section and replaced them with categorized “Like” sections.
Now we are at today and at the point of this blog, sorry for the extended history lesson. Today Facebook and Twitter are the major players in the social networking field and Myspace is getting smaller daily. Our society, in just over ten years, has changed from a society afraid to put real information online to a society that runs on an updated friends news feed. Forums, groups, profiles, and photos no longer make the social network. Now we want to know what are friends are doing when they do it. The news feed is like a constant chat room between you and your friends and is unique to each individual person (unless for some reason 2 people have the exact same friends).
Social networking now consists of three stages: blogging, vlogging, and news feeds (chatting). A world that just a decade ago was afraid to put any personal information online is now streaming it for all to see. Social networks of all kinds are being updated with more and more personal information on a daily basis. The evolutionary track seems to move away from the individuals profile, something now being kept by blogs, and into a social collective. Wide scale conversation between complete strangers is completely possible now on sites like Twitter. It seems as if social networking evolved the personal aspect only to draw users in and now is devolving.
It is devolving back to its original roots. It is now more common to use multiple social networks at the same time then just a single one. Chat rooms have been replaced by Twitter (and any other consistent new stream). Blogs and vlogs are replacing the profiles sections of social networks. At the same time all of these are being linked by apps to interact with each other. Social networking is becoming simpler and more spread out but at the same time it is becoming larger. With each application that links separate social network sites, we are creating a larger super network.
I will stop there and let you think about that for a moment before I go to Matrix on you.
Techgasm of the Week: Stealth Reborn
It tears through the skies at staggering speeds, completing a flight around the earth in less than two days at a grueling 600 miles per hour. Sporting a sexy skin-tight coating of rubber that would make Batman jealous, this metal falcon is virtually undetectable by enemy radar. Loaded with all of this sleek technology, was difficult to imagine anything more powerful than the B-2 Spirit stealth bomber.
Until now.
Meet the Next Generation Bomber. Boeing has teamed up with Lockheed for the ultimate tech showdown against their competitors, Northrop Grumman. With a shape much like the X-47B Navy attack drone, Northrop's prototype will pack much more of a punch than its stealthy predecessor. The company plans on stocking their next-gen models with a whopping 28,000 pounds of weaponry.
Boeing has been presenting ideas for their competing hypersonic speed demon with pilot-less potential. An unmanned aircraft of this caliber would be above and beyond the capabilities of current technology. Based on Boeing developmental concept designs submitted thus far, these Next Generation Bombers will have a radar signature of less than 1/5h of a fruit fly.
The financial results Northrop released last April show that there was a $2 Billion budget increase for “restricted programs” in their aircraft division, but the money was nowhere to be found on the recent Airforce budget reports. Rumors abound that the undisclosed billions will fund a black ops program to carry nuclear weapons on board the new Next Generation Bomber, projected to be in production in 2018.
Will these Next Generation Bombers be simply the most advanced in aviation technology, or a top secret project to carry 14 tons of nuclear power in the fastest, most stealthy machine ever created? Either way, we will have to wait 8 years to find out.
Photos courtesy of the Air Force and Northrop Grumman
Sci-Fi Techs Versus The Iraq War
Whether you are an advocate of the Iraq War or not, you have to admit that it is extremely costly to be involved in. The cost at the present moment is just under $493 trillion dollars. That's right trillion dollars.
Wired.com recently wrote an article about 10 Sci-Fi Techs We could have if they weren't so expensive. I've put a little spin on it, so the reader can actually get an idea of how much money is being spent on the Iraq War.
These are a few Geek things we could have built for less than what we have spent to date.
A Gundam Meca:
A what? If you're an Anime fan, you know exactly what this is. A Gundam Meca, in non-Anime lingo is basically a giant killer robot.
Someone went ahead and did it: calculate the cost of constructing a military-grade giant robot. The result, when you throw in flexible aluminum alloys, seven engines, thirty helicopter motors and a computer fast-thinking enough to keep it upright.
If you are having trouble imagining it, this should help:
The pictures still doesn't do it justice. The robot is described to be 60 feet (18 meters) in height, and it weighs and estimated 43.4 metric tons.
Cost: $750 Million (non-armed)
We could build an army of them for what we have spent to date on the Iraq War. Granted, they wouldn't be built out of Gundanium, but it would still be pretty cool.
An Orbital Hotel:
A hotel that orbits the earth and can sustain human life.
Leave it to the Brits. After decades of disengagement from human space exploration, it recently reversed its positionto propose a lounge for the station.
Now that would be a cool vacation. Of course a week long vacation orbiting the planet Earth would cost the traveler a cool $10 Million dollars, but having the option would be nice!
Cost: $1.2 Billion
We could have a chain of hotels in space for what we have spent on the Iraq War.
Supersonic Travel and a Maglev NY/LA Express
The Concorde fleet has been decommissioned by British Airways because of the high cost of jet fuel and maintaining the fleet.
With the retirement of Concorde, the only supersonic commuter airliner, 2-hour trips over the Atlantic are a thing of the past. It's perhaps the first tech to go from sci-fi to reality and right back again, all in the space of a generation: no zombie apocalypse required.
The Maglev is basically, a train. A ridiculously fast train:
Maglev carriages, forced along by magnetic fields instead of traditional propulsion systems.....In everyday use, modern Maglev systems manage about 260MPH....
Travel would become quick, no more 9 hour flights, or 24 hour train rides, we could travel the U.S. and abroad in a minimal amount of time. As long as security doesn't hold us up, telling us water is bad.
Cost: $7.6 Billion, if you were to revive and repair 20 Concorde Supersonic Jets and build a Meglev rail from New York to Los Angeles.
We could revive and maintain a fleet of supersonic jets, fuel them and build a super speed train for a fraction of the cost of what we have spent on the Iraq War.
Last, but one I personally would like to see built the most.
A TransAtlantic Tunnel:
What better way to travel from the United States to Europe than a tunnel? No flight delays, no airport, and I would only have to take my shoes off if I wanted to. That and I could finally drive to that SGLondon Event to meet all the girls overseas! (or underseas?)
a sleeper express between London and New York, right? An immersed tube under the Altantic could cost half a billion dollars a mile, about three times the cost of a modern bridge.
We're already looking at about $1.6 trillion dollars, at that burn rateand this doesn't account for the precipitous drops at the continental shelves, or, indeed, the engineering problem of deep-ocean tunnel immersion.
Isn't it scary that we could build a tunnel at a half a billion dollars a mile, and still not put a dent in what we have spent on the Iraq War?
Even if they were to build it under the sea floor, the traditional way a tunnel is built:
If you're thinking of cutting a tunnel the traditional way, under the sea bed, it gets even crazier. Extrapolating the cost of the Channel Tunnel, built in this fashion, and the price lands somewhere in the $10tn region.
It's $10 Trillion. For what we have spent on the Iraq War, we could build 49 tunnels from New York to London, and still have some change left over.
Cost: $11.6 Trillion if both were constructed (I like options, so we have the above sea floor scenic route, and the underground tunnel route)
Chances are, due to cost, I will probably never see these things implemented in my life time. The goal of this article was to get people to realize how much money we are spending on war, when we could be spending money on things that really matter.
Granted most of the things I have mentioned in this article don't
really matter. Money used on the Iraq War could be put towards better and more helpful things for the human race.
I am by no means an advocate of the Iraq War. I do realize that some of that money spent on a daily basis goes towards our soldiers that were wounded, or unfortunately killed while serving. No amount of money can replace a leg, an arm or psychological damage done.
Money can't replace a lost loved one, and I am sorry that money is all we can offer the family, or the soldier that has served our country. I firmly support every soldier that serves our country, and want to say Thank You.
If you are reading this, and you are not registered to vote, quit wasting time and go register. Please remember, when you are at the polls this year, that things need to change in order for us to stop wasting money and lives. Your vote does count, your vote does matter, you can make a difference.
DevilsReject is looking forward to a new U.S. Administration. He won't tell you who to vote for, but he will say: Yes We Can!
One Step Closer to the Holodeck?
Every Star Trek: The Next Generation fan dreams of the day when we will have our own holodeck to ourselves. It seems as though researchers at the University of Tucson, Arizona have brought us one step closer!
BBC News is reporting the story about how Savas Tay and his colleagues are working to make 3-D holographs more usable in today's technology.
As of right now, holographs take an abundance of time to produce, and are not very useful due to the amount of time and lengthy procedure it takes to create one.
Holographs are created by mixing reflected laser light with a second laser beam to lay down a static image - typically a lengthy, complicated and delicate process.
Laaaysers.
In the amount of time it takes to create the holograph, processes like x-rays, MRI, or CAT scans can be performed to get the necessary information to treat a patient.
Mr. Tay and Co. have removed the lengthy amount of time it takes to create the holograph. Reducing the amount of time to create the holograph greatly increases the potential to be used in the medical field, and in other fields as well.
In a paper in Nature Mr. Tay and colleagues describe their thin-film polymer that can have images "written" to it in minutes and can be wiped as quickly to take and display another image.
The material has been shown to stay stable throughout hundreds of write and erase cycles.
Does this mean you should call your contractor to start on the design and location of your holodeck? No. They aren't that close. Yet.
What it means is that the most current technology, being x-ray, MRI and CAT scan technology, may be used to create a holograph of your organs.
The procedure will give doctors and surgeons the ability to see the dysfunctional or unhealthy organ on a three-dimensional platform. This would aid greatly in trying to find tumors, cysts or other masses or problems with the organ, leading to a quicker diagnosis and, in the end, quicker recoveries.
It will also guide surgeons through more delicate operations:
The ability to quickly refresh images in holographs could mean that surgeons use them as a guide during operations.
Anything that helps guide a person through my innards without causing permanent damage, is a-okay in my book.
This research has a trickle-down effect on other technologies. Eventually it will lead to holographic televisions and other displays using holographic technology.
Though we're a ways off from having that 3-D television in your living room, so don't throw that 52" HD-TV out just yet. It does, however, have the potential to help humans, animals and society in general throughout the world.
This is DevilsReject's first attempt at an article, and he is totally looking forward to the Star Trek prequel.
A Quick Look at CES 2008
The International Consumer Electronics Show (CES) is the annual event for electronics enthusiasts. Prior shows have brought us the Xbox (2001), HDTV (1998), the NES (1985), the Commodore 64 (1982), the Compact Disc player (1981), and the VCR (1970) each of them icons in their own right.
This years show is no exception, with Panasonics 150-inch Lifescreen Plasma (its bigger than a queen size mattress), Pioneers 9mm-thick plasma TV and real black contrast concept taking the cake. Honorable mentions should include Alienwares curved rear-projecting gaming monitor, 2880x900 pixels of pure wrap-around gaming goodness, and SanDisks 16GB microSDHC card at least in this geeks humble opinion.
Technology isnt the only thing making news this year. During his traditional keynote address, Bill Gates announced his official retirement from Microsoft, highlighted by an entertaining video of his life after Microsoft where attempts to work on his physique and mental well-being with Matthew McConaughey, asks George Clooney to play him in a biopic, and tries to get back on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Slash even joined him on-stage for a little bit of Guitar Hero.
But this year, the rest pale in comparison to the ultimate in self defense: Tasers C2 line of leopard-print (also comes in pink!) bad guy shockers along with a revolutionary MP3-playing holster. You might want to read that again and give it time to sink in. Fashion with a Bite meets music-on-the-go for the modern day man or woman who wants to not only sport the latest trends, but listen to cool beats while they pump neer-do-wells with 50,000 volts of pure personal protection.
If youre interested in more coverage of CES 2008, head on over to The Giz or Engadget both of them have agents live on the field.
Tuesday Tasting: Laptops, Showers, and Submarines
Each week, Ariel Waldman serves a tasting of the latest in sex and tech.
One Porn Per Child
Easily accessible, the One Laptop Per Child initiative brings more than just technology to children's fingertips. A recent report pointed to porn surfacing across numerous pupils' screens within a primary school in Nigeria. "Efforts to promote learning with laptops in a primary school in Abuja have gone awry as the pupils freely browse adult sites with explicit sexual materials," stated the News Agency of Nigeria. What better lesson in learning than an accurate introduction to the internet?
Outdoor Shower Lets You Lather, Rinse, Repeat Your Lovemaking
Adventurous towards the outdoors? A new way to wash off the dirt may save you a skinny dip after a messy sex session in the mud. The Outdoor Shower, created by Danny Venlet for Viteo, consists of a pressure-activated platform that sprays upwards once stepped on. Aside from lathering off your lust, we're sure the shower provides a pleasing bidet-like sensation to your recently pleasured parts.
Watching The Submarine Races
Deep-sea sex is nothing new for the rich and flirtatious. Submerged in a submarine, Mile Deep Club veterans prefer the privacy of the Pacific. Unfortunately, the well-off are learning quickly that the ocean is not entirely their oyster. Reports of "excited" dolphins interrupting intercourse have emerged from various luxury vessels. "Dolphins are easily excited when they sense people making love. They get jealous and bang their noses against the window," said US submarines president Bruce Jones. While the idea of making dirty-minded dolphins jealous may be a turn on, it's probably best to watch the submarine races in safety.
A Keyboard for Squids and Cyborgs!
I can't help but look at this and ask myself, is this a joke? Do cephalopod actually use computers? Or is there a strain of super humans with spectacular finger mobility out there in need of a keyboard just for them? Thinkgeek.com is out to make life easier through a complicated looking new keyboard.
If you hold your hand up, and look at your fingers, they do not create a straight line. Each of your fingers has a different length. With a conventional keyboard, you have to contort your fingers to flatten out to allow you to type. This contortion of your fingers is one of the main reasons people end up with repetitive stress injuries (RSI). With a conventional keyboard you have to conform to the keyboard, instead of the keyboard conforming to your fingers. With the Maltron keyboard, the keyboard conforms to your fingers for increased comfort and even improved typing speed.
The keyboard conforms to my fingers? Is it made of delicious pudding or memory foam? Can I take it apart and use it to fill up the holes in my mattress that my cat ate?
With a conventional keyboard, only 8 of the 10 fingers get used. With the Maltron Keyboard your thumbs get more use then a conventional keyboard. Additionally, with a the keys being placed in a position more suitable to fit your fingers, you will be able to type faster. Many users report that the Maltron keyboard increased their speed by 20%, though each individual person will experience different results.
I will say I'm curious. Partially. If I could type 20% faster? Oh man, think of what I could do. 20% more ... efficient emails? IMs? Hot cyber chatting?! Can't say when it comes to my coding, I really look to type faster.
Maltron is offering this geeky new keyboard for a mere $489.99 . Now you can wow or horrify your friends with this curious gizmo!