Facebook: Now with Real-Time Stalking!

By Ginger Lennon

By Ginger

As if AOL Instant Messenger and Facebook don’t already consume enough of our attention, The Facebook Blog revealed that they will soon be rolling out Facebook Chat. Similar to GMail’s gTalk Sidebar, when we sign on to Facebook, we will now see a chat bar pop up at the bottom of our browsers. Facebook Chat will allow us to connect with other Facebook users in real-time, as opposed to posting on walls and message boards.

Granted, this application will keep us in “real-time touch” with more people in our social networks than ever before… This however, is not necessarily a good thing. I don’t know about you, but there are about 10 people I chat with on a fairly regular basis on AIM… yet I’m closing in on a solid 700 people within my Facebook network.

Just because we have profiles and have a lot of “friends” on Facebook, doesn’t mean we want everyone to have instant access to our lives. We all saw the backlash Facebook had when the News Feed was launched… Can’t we all just “stalk” each other from the secluded privacy of our living rooms without being hounded on IM?

I am going to have to agree with Mashable on this one, and say that between AIM, Yahoo, GTalk, MSN, Jabber, Skype and MySpace, enough is enough. The more does not always mean the merrier.

Add comment April 7th, 2008

Why It’s Important to Read ‘Moore’ Then Just the Headline

By Ben Haber

By Ben

The Associated Press had a great article this morning about a man, Michael A. Moore, who lost fifty pounds so he could donate a kidney to his best friend. Until he lost this weight, doctors would not allow him to be part of the procedure because he was pre-diabetic. Moore ended up chronicling his weight-loss on YouTube, so that he could keep his friend updated on his progress and give him hope.

When Boston.com picked up this story, someone wasn’t paying very close attention. Instead of reading the article, someone noticed the name “Michael A. Moore” in the lead paragraph, and automatically assumed that this story was about the well-known documentary filmmaker, Michael F. Moore.

On the business/technology page of Boston.com (an image of the page is below), there was a picture of Michael Moore the filmmaker, and a summary of the article which says:

Michael Moore documents kidney donation on YouTube
The documentary filmmaker donated his kidney to his best friend. To prepare, he lost 50 pounds and chronicled his experience on YouTube.

Although this seemingly does make sense – a story about the filmmaker Moore loosing fifty pounds for a medical procedure sounds like something very conceivable – this is a good lesson for all: Read the whole article before commenting.

1 comment April 7th, 2008