False Witness

I dropped my car off at the shop for some routine maintenance today. While I was settling my bill, the cashier asked if I or my wife had Facebook accounts. I didn't feel like explaining why I didn't want to "friend" or "become a fan" the service station, so I just lied and said no. I used to use this same tactic when a cashier asked if I had an e-mail address, but I've stopped since no one under the age of 75 can believably claim to not have an e-mail address anymore. I don't even know why I feel the need to lie in order to avoid having to politely refuse an offer to receive targeted marketing. I absolutely love declining to share my phone number when asked by a cashier - it makes me feel like I've just vetoed a bill in the UN Security Council.

Twit

I recently decided to give Twitter a shot. In light of my recent sort-of rants against location-based meeting services and text messaging, my interest in Twitter may strike you as odd and/or hypocritical. When I first heard about Twitter, I was highly skeptical, but I've warmed up to it. Perhaps it was Shaq's Twitter account that did it for me. I don't expect to be tweeting all that often, but I thought it would be nice to have the option. Follow me if you're so inclined.

A True Underdog Story

I learned of Dodgeball's demise today through the esteemed Will Leitch. In case you never heard of Dodgeball, it's a mobile social networking application that allows you to tell all of your friends (and their friends) where you are at any given time. If you remember this iPhone commercial demonstrating the Loopt application, it's kind of more primitive version of the same idea. I find both applications somewhat horrifying, and I don't necessarily think it's totally a generational thing. I can't imagine that the next generation's batch of introverted nerds is all that geeked about these apps, but I guess I could be wrong. I'm sure that eventually, applications like these are going to be commonplace and I'll eventually be forced to use one of them and may even enjoy it, but I'm remaining skeptical for now.

In Your Face

Here's an article about the latest trends in charitable giving. Instead of trying to coax people to pull money out of their pockets, charitable organizations are setting up websites that allow you to do things that you normally do online and capturing a portion of the advertising revenue. For example, instead of performing a web search through a regular search engine, you perform it through some charity's website. The charity sends your search off to a normal search engine and collects a small amount of money from advertisers for each search request that is brokered through their site.

One of the people profiled in the article is Dave King, a friend of mine who has created Lil' Green Patch, a Facebook application that works in a similar fashion. Instead of performing searches, you send virtual plants to your friends. For every 10 plants that you send, 1 sq foot of rainforest land in Costa Rica is saved. I've been using Facebook for a couple of months now and tending my own Lil' Green Patch, though I have to confess that I haven't been much of a virtual gardener. For whatever reason, I can't really get too enthused about sending virtual plants to people. In general, I've found that my personality is not all that compatible with Facebook. I have a pathological aversion to talking about myself and bothering other people, and really, what else can you do on Facebook other than talk about yourself and bother others? I realize that my fear is largely irrational, so maybe Facebook will help me get over my fear of annoying people. If anyone out there wants some virtual plants, let me know.

Hitchhiker's Guide to Social Networking

I've had hitchhiking on my mind recently. The protagonist in Into the Wild, the book I just finished reading, hitched his way across the country. I talked to some guys at the last Providence Geeks meeting who built software for managing point-to-point transportation networks. Their software wasn't designed for hitchhiking, of course, but it dawned on me that ride sharing is a possible application for online social networks. I'm not all that familiar with online social networking, so it's possible that people are already using it to share rides. I don't think the technology is quite ready, since if you really wanted to approximate hitchhiking on an online social network, you'd need a critical mass of users who are accessing the network from portable, GPS-enabled devices, and I don't think that such devices are common enough these days. Even if that was a reality, I'm not sure how willing people would be to offer rides to or accept rides from virtual friends, never mind virtual friends of virtual friends.

One of the things that fascinates me about hitchhiking is how it seems to have gone from an fairly common activity to something that few people would ever consider doing almost overnight. At least, that's my impression of it. My impression is probably not entirely correct, hitchhiking probably wasn't all that popular prior to it becoming unthinkable (my best guess is that this inflection occurred between 30 and 40 years ago) and it's probably more common today than I think it is. Still, I wouldn't be surprised if a confluence of factors including, but not limited to, pervasive online social networking, rising energy prices, concerns about pollution, and traffic congestion leads to a greater number of people sharing rides in the not-too-distant future.