Archive for the ‘tech & web’ Category

Posted on March 19, 2009 - by sarahsamudre

Stick To What You Do Best: Facebook and the Writing on the Wall

Facebook deciding to copy Twitter is a sign the social media giant is in trouble of tripping over itself.

When it comes to life-casting, sharing information and networking, my first experience of social media was with Live Journal. I was on there regularly from 2001 until 2005, when I discovered Myspace (before all the tweens did). I kept using LJ, but noticed as Myspace began being adopted by everyone, LJ was changing it’s features to look more like Myspace. Myspace inevitably did the same thing the following year as a bunch of the literate types exodused for the less-cluttered, more aesthetic Facebook. Myspace tried to clean up its profiles and added a bunch of features to copycat Facebook, but it was too late. The writing on the wall for any social media site is when it looks behind at the competitor and gives up its edge to conform to competition.

With that said, it should be no surprise that as Twitter’s star rises, Facebook would get worried. Facebook already tried to buy out Twitter: Facebook’s Thiel Explains Failed Twitter Takeover – BusinessWeek. When that didn’t work, Facebook decided it would copy Twitter, saying that real-time streams were the future of social media. Unfortunately for Zuckerberg, it’s only ONE road to take in that bright new shiny future and 95% of us doubt that it’s the right road for Facebook to take.

The ensuing smack down…

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Posted on March 12, 2009 - by sarahsamudre

Twitter Start Up!

Alright, so I keep pimping Twitter to my friends as the end all and be all of social media (right now, of course). I tell them it’s like a cocktail party, full of the most interesting people in the world, and you get to listen to snatches of conversation, pick a huddle, join in on conversation (sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t). The point of the party/Twitter is to make contacts. Hopefully you’ll be funny, intrigue people, and find people who are like you to connect with- thus a network of useful contacts starts emerging!

Why Twitter?

Honestly, Twitter gives you news before the news media has it. Twitter connects you with hilarious celebrities, introspective authors, and politicians. Twitter provides you a way to promote a business, a book, a movie, an album, a website and most importantly, yourself, all the while providing you with the ability to listen in on conversations with people who know how to market, use social media and the techy tools you’ve never heard of. Most importantly, if done right, you can get job opportunities, make contacts and friends, help people out and get helped in return. Twitter “CAN” be all that and more. No one really knows the true breadth of Twitter yet- new ways to use it are being found everyday.

How?

But how DO you start Twittering? Honestly? I signed up for Twitter last year and only started using it 3 months ago. It’s not something that is easily used. To the beginner, it can just seem like a weird, poorly designed rip-off of Facebook’s status updates. But it’s SO MUCH MORE!

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Twitter Picture: (This whale always seems so blissfully happy!)

Because I keep telling people to get on here, and passing along the articles I’ve found helpful, I just figured it would be easier to write an article of all my favorite web resources for Twitter. So here we are:

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Posted on February 1, 2009 - by sarahsamudre

True Love and Twittering During Superbowl

So I was sick all last week, so my efforts to try and blog more often totally crapped out. I had a three day migraine that lasted until midday Saturday. I’m still under the weather, but well enough to get out and about.

While I was sick, I missed a dinner reservation, a haircut, a gym trainer appointment, a paper deadline, and lost 10 followers on Twitter. But I also lost 3 pounds, sooooo…. win?

Sadly no. The loss of 3 pounds does not cancel out tons of mass guilt I feel for letting dozens of balls drop because of a stupid cold/flu. At least the migraines stopped and I can be sick without being unable to Twitter or read or write. Being sick is one thing, but migraines are the worst. (I’m not liking, by the way, that Twitter topped the list before read and write. What’s happening to me?)

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Anyway, I found this INCREDIBLE news story on a local news site this morning:

Couple die together after 62 years of marriage | KOMO News – Seattle, Washington | News

The story tells about a couple who recently died, after being married for 62 years, within six hours of each other. The wife had been diagnosed as terminally ill, and the husband basically ‘gave up the ghost’ when she passed away. Their relatives are quoted as saying that “their lives ebbed and flowed” together, and so, as sad as they are to lose both of them at the same time, they’re overjoyed that they died as they lived- completely in love and dependent on one another.

My husband Vasant and I were lying in bed the other night, and I couldn’t sleep- so I was distracting myself by trying to match my breaths to the duration and depth of his (he ALWAYS falls asleep right away). It took a while to slow my breath down to match his, but I kind of felt a “chi”-like energy in my gut breathing with him like that. I felt warm and drowsy and after ten or fifteen minutes fell asleep on his chest.

THAT is how I dream our last moments will be. In our nineties, on a house by the ocean, coming in from the garden and lunch, we’ll lay down together to nap, match breaths and just let go of this world. We’ve talked about that scenario so many times, and this story just kind of makes me feel reassured that it does happen. Vasant’s grandfather gave up the ghost six months after his wife went. Nothing was wrong with him- he just didn’t want to go on without her. The article details how it’s actually quite a regular phenomena, for couples who have been together for an incredibly long time to just “quit” life after one partner dies. Vasant and I read the article today and felt like that ideal afternoon 70 years from now… may be more than just our own sentimental wishes.

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In NON-SENTIMENTAL news, I twittered during the Super Bowl. It was fun. A small party actually happened at our place, last minute, which was wonderful, and while we’re all hanging out, I’m also twittering (I’m not anti-social, I’m WONDERFUL at multitasking twitter and live interaction). But man, watching the game was fun, but it was made even more enjoyable by watching it with all the people I follow on Twitter- especially when everyone in the room was yelling the same thing as all the people on Twitter. It was like being at TWO superbowl parties. I’m sure someone somewhere will right an article about that: Multi-tasking social events: Real Life and Twitter Superbowl parties and how they intertwine.

By the way, best movie trailer? Transformers 2. Best non-movie commerical? It was a tie between MacGruber and Alec Baldwin’s Hulu/Alien commercial. Great stuff.

Posted on January 14, 2009 - by sarahsamudre

A Surplus Population

“Well, if they’d rather die, they had better do it and decrease the Surplus Population.” – Ebenezer Scrooge

Chewing The Fat: Requiem. by Dave Hingsburger. 

A friend of mine posted this article. I read in horror a tale about paramedics who were called to the aid of a 59 year old man. H had called for their aid because of a heartattack. Operators who had remained on the line, however, listened as they agreed to let the man die because he was fat. 

I was horrified at the thought of this being true. How could people choose to let a man die? I’ve read those articles that rail against the obese as harbingers of doom, carrying disease and pestilence, weighing down our health care system and pushing their health cares on us. I especially love the *health experts* who decry obesity as a strictly modern phenomena. That is not historically accurate at all, and I’ve got the pictures of King Henry 8th to prove it….

But to decide to let a man die? 

I had to fact check it: Paramedics arrested after allegedly ‘neglecting’ dying man | The Guardian

There it is. It actually happened. 

Two paramedics actually let someone die because they judged his lifestyle, rather than save him because that’s what they’re paid to do. 

I hate fat phobia. But what I hate more is the skinny idiots in this world who have only ever had five pounds to shed who say that fat phobia is a made-up fear that fat people use to feel victimized in a victim-centric culture. 

A couple days ago, Jack Cafferty  at CNN blogged about his outrage over our nation’s rise in obesity (Cafferty File: Obese America), not checking to see what the study was based on, and disregarding the many comments protesting the findings of the study. Most doctors disregard Body Mass Index (BMI) as a viable way of measuring whether a person is healthy or not. But man, obesity sure makes Jack Cafferty (who I usually like) pissed off. This is not his first fat-centric rant.

But fat phobia is rampant in our culture. If you aren’t aware of it, you probably aren’t also, now or in the past, a member of the people discriminated against.

But this is unheard of. This is scary. The writer of the article above put it best, and made me cry when I read it:

“A note of fear creeps into my life. What would ambulance attendants see if they came for me. A fat, disabled guy, in an apartment full of wheelchairs, long reachers, and grab bars. What value would my life seem if it was just my body they saw – not my connections, not my routines, not my hopes and dreams…”

-Dave Hingsburger (Chewing The Fat: Requiem.)

What does any of us see when we look at a fat person? Shoot, I know FAT PEOPLE who are FAT PHOBIC. People who make stupid judgments about how a person lives and who they are the second they size up their body size miss the point of what health is all about. I know skinny people who eat nothing but junk and never work out, and I know big people who work out four times a week, weight train and eat healthy, moderate organic diets.

Bemoaning “Life’s not fair!” doesn’t make life anymore fair, but maybe telling Barry Baker’s story might encourage those of us who hear it to be more fair in our assessment of each other. These cruel, quick judgments are hurting our society more than sugary sweets do.

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We all need to be better than we are presently.