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.

–

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.

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.

I found this especially funny, because it riffs on the chorus of one of my favourite songs – “500 Miles (I’m Gonna Be)” by The Proclaimers.

More Song Lyrics as Google Maps here.

(via)

A Pre that will take you far away.

You know where you hope this Pre will take you, but you can’t be sure.

Yet it doesn’t matter – because we’ll be together.

Er, actually, no – it does matter. Where is the Palm Pre Plus?? I’ve been waiting for it to appear on Expansys for ages.

(via Ansen’s Formspring.me page)

For those without image suppork:

Question: how to do lit ):
Answer: dunno i havent do:p

Question: What kind of lit rep are you?!
Answer: errrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr r u mr laremy pretending to be my classmate?

Eh… Not me lei *makes whale sounds*

In any case, I have decided to get my own Formspring.me page too!

Something I’ve been thinking about recently – it’d be nice if developers at Facebook, Twitter, etc. came up with options to allow users to streamline their messages so that users can decide which messages they want to broadcast (general audience) or conversely, narrow-cast (specified audience).

I know someone is going to attempt to rebutt this idea by saying something along the lines of “But Twitter allows you to protect your feed” or “But Facebook allows you to create privacy settings”.

Well, that’s not what I’m talking about.

The features I mentioned above are very ‘all or nothing’ in that we only have the options of saying something to everyone or saying nothing at all, when in essence, we might be in situations where we want to say a particular something to a certain group of people at a certain point in time.

Let me illustrate with the example of my Facebook profile. My profile is protected in the following ways:

• Only ‘friends’ can see my entire profile, so you’ve got to add me as a friend before you can view my profile, and
• Only people who aren’t on my Limited Profile can see my status updates.

Now, let’s say I want to post something about work on my status. The colleagues whom I’ve added as friends can normally see my status updates. However, this time round I might  feel that this particular status update isn’t something I want my colleagues to see, perhaps because I’m afraid they might ‘view’ me in a certain way after they’ve read what I’ve said.

At this point, I’d like to be able to have an option whereby I can decide: alright, let’s publish this status message, but let’s exclude this person and that person from knowing about it, for the reason I’ve mentioned above.

Think about my idea this way – it’s the digital equivalent of speaking in hushed tones in the office, so that you get to control who gets to listen in to what you want to say, and who doesn’t.

At this point, someone else is probably gonna ask: “What about using private messages then?”

Well, private messages are precisely that – private. They have a different social connotation from status messages i.e. we’d only use private messages if the information was strictly meant for private consumption. In a face-to-face context, it’s the equivalent of whispering – and whispering to a few hundred individuals at one go doesn’t really make sense, does it?

So I think it’d be nice if social networking tools could start to reflect some of the nuances in face-to-face communication/social interaction that haven’t been duplicated in the digital arena yet. It’s probably one of the issues that will mark the next step forward in the evolution of the Web 2.0 landscape.

1. There is imperfect knowledge in the world,
2. The Internet is a gigantic brain, and
3. The Internet helps to smooth out the imperfections in knowledge,

I decided to pose the above-mentioned question to the almighty Facebook-verse and Twitter-verse. These are the findings on Facebook:

And on Twitter:

People generally seem to think that Jaben Network is the best. Funan Centre comes in second and Epicentre and City Music are tied for third. Brands recommended are V-mode, Sennheiser and Bose.

The conclusion? Well, if you really want to know… ask your own Internet brain!

1. Allow students to ‘book’ a meeting slot with me based on mine and their available meeting times without much hassle.
2. Automatically ‘pull’ info from my Google Calendar to determine when I’m free/when I’m not free + ‘push’ info to my Google Calendar to automatically update my schedule for me.

I don’t think anyone has come up with something like this yet so if any computing whiz wants to work on this, I’d say go for it (and let me know when you do come up with this so that I can use it! It’s my brainchild after all!). You can most likely sell it to companies/organisations that need this service when you’re done creating the program for it.

I’ve saved everyone (i.e. scholars who might want to study my works next time, LOL) the trouble of mapping the route by using Google Maps to show you how the tank travels. I’ve included placemarks in the map, so please click on them. There’s some very valuable information in there, including pictures, which might help you visualise the geography a bit better.

For those inclined toward academia, you may want to think about how geography is mediated in literature. Or perhaps how Web 2.0 tools might be used to bring literature/drama a bit closer to everyone?

View Full Tank! in a larger map

I briefly toyed with the idea of temporarily deactivating my Facebook account because it’s taking up too much of my attention from other things. However, I changed my mind when I saw the warning that I’d lose my administrator status in my groups/events/pages.

I think that’s going to cause major chaos later on when I log back on to Facebook again; besides, I just need some respite from the information overload, I don’t need major upheavals and subsequent administrative difficulties at this point in time. Once I realised that, it made everything a lot clearer – I just needed to make logging in that bit more difficult so as create a psychological barrier/aversion to logging in.

Let me just say that I never knew deleting a saved userid/password could bring so much relief.