Whether the digital era improves society is up to its users – that's us

This essay by Danah Boyd is in a similar vein to the one I wrote for yesterday: Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain: Why We Should Examine Our Approach to Networked Living.

Boyd explores a question which she’s been grappling with:

What role does social media play in generating or spreading societal fear?

It’s an interesting read. I’m curious to hear what people think…

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Facebook and Education - Do Opposites finally Attract? | Disrupt Education | Big Think

Since Facebook’s launch there have been a couple of attempts to build education related applications or communities on the platform but none of them actually succeeded in attracting a critical mass of users. The idea though seems to be pretty obvious. Facebook itself started as a closed network for Harvard University.

Only then it has become the world’s largest social network with users visiting the site on a almost daily basis. All the data you need as a developer can be found in the social graph plus you get access to all the friends a user has when signing up for the application you built.

But people did not care, at least not enough to make the applications viable enough. Apparently, learning is something we don’t want to share with our social graph on Facebook, e.g. family and friends. And on the other hand it is pretty clear that managers or other business people won’t share their latest score in English tests or assignments with their network on LinkedIn. That’s one of the reasons why services like the language learning communities I talked about last week in my first post here on Big Think launched outside of Facebook and managed to attract a fair amount of subscribers over the years.

Then things changed again. Zynga came and all of a sudden it became somewhat normal to receive friends’ messages or notifications in the Facebook news stream who found golden eggs or other mystical animals on their farms, a trend the language learning community Busuu realized early on. On their service people earn berries when completing exercises or correcting other member’s texts. Busuu then connected this feature to Facebook and enabled their members to share their berries / success with their friends on Facebook. It was basically the same as simply writing “I completed an exercise successfully” but using the Busuu berry system it became part of the new social gaming world that has effortlessly been accepted by Facebook users.

The next big thing for start-ups in the education space will be Facebook credits, of course. The potential is huge as it will also open possibilities to get revenue from a younger audience as they can already buy credits directly at the counter in super markets from their pocket money in the US, no credit card needed and I’m convinced that this concept is also going to be successful in the rest of the world.

…more at link…

Memolane Transforms Social Data Into Visual Timelines - NYTimes.com

Over the last few days, I’ve checked-in at several favorite haunts on Foursquare, favorited a few Lady Gaga and cat videos on YouTube, uploaded half a dozen photos of a cookie party to Instagram, and posted several status updates on Twitter and Facebook.

As individual pieces of data, each of these points contains a tiny bit of information about me and my life. But when combined, they start to shape into a larger narrative, a story of sorts about how I spent the last few days.

Memolane, a new start-up based in Denmark and San Francisco, is hoping to corral all of those data points into a single, visual timeline, to help users create an interactive scrapbook of sorts on the Web.

…more at link…