An MIT processor has said that social networking services such as Twitter and Facebook “diminish” their users.

Professor Sherry Turkle equated manic participation in social networking sites as a form of ‘modern madness’. Having recently published a book ‘Alone Together’ in the US, due for a February release in Europe, Turkle alleges that technology is making society less human.

“We have invented inspiring and enhancing technologies, yet we have allowed them to diminish us,” wrote Turkle in Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.

Turkle describes the instant that society is willing to accept electronic interactions as equal to that of personal interactions, as the ‘robotic moment’. The great attraction is, Turkle says, that people are drawn to low risk easily available connections.

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I have used google images probably an average of 50 times per day since it was launched way back when. I have always found the results returned by the other major search engines far inferior. I would say that the results on Google images are still better than those delivered by their competitors, however the new interface totally sucks.

Hey google GUI team your image search still needs work! When I search on Bing I get a nice clean fast loading page where I can clearly see the size, perpective and orientation of the images. On Google image search my screen is now awash with what appears to be complete random clutteredness. Images are bleeding onto one another and I have no idea if I am looking at 1 image or 36 images. Just what have you done? Please fix it quickly else I will be forced to go with the swell.

If google continues to make mistakes like this and others associated with the May Day update I am certain we will see a surge of daily users migrating to Bing and Yahoo. It’s very difficult to be such a dominating, market leading company and still make considered and effective responses to attacks on your market share. I just get the feeling that with search the consequences of such mistakes will BIG and will happen FAST.

Come on Gooogle …..

Anyone who works closely with search engines or website marketing will know very well that April and May 2010 of this year have been very confusing times. The long pending rool out of Google Caffeine may or may not of started, be underway or completed, in addition to the changing of other factors determined by their page ranking algorithm.

It must be very hard for the wolds leading search company to risk it all and change their ways. It would seem that Google plan is to bring more currency, relevance and personalisation to search results. This means that those companies who have in the past relied upon stable static serach results to bring them regular customers may no longer be able to rely on organic google traffic.
The cinics and economists will say that Google has done this in order to add instability to traffic and reveneues, therefore increasing demand for their own Pay Per Click advertising program called Adsense.

Whatever the reason beit commercial or about changing the user experience, Google is in danger of breaking the very farbic of the internet. Rememeber how amazed we were when the internet grew and was considered to be the largest, and most accessible information resource on the planet. Well that information, and accessibility is what makes the internet great. No more do we need to refer to printed encyclopedias when we have the entire knowledge of the world on tap.

But there’s a problem brewing, brought to light yesterday by a colleague. She was doing some research and desperately needed some information she had previously found on the internet. After some frantic and frustrated hours she gave up looking on Google. Google it seems now considers that vital piece of research to be NO LONGER RELEVANT.

So what Google seemed to help make, they are now certainly to break. We rely on the power of search engines like Google to deliver us the information we need. If that search engine is perceived or known not to deliver this service, what value does it have?

Now where did I put my wallet and keys? Just don’t ask Google!

Pathological Oversharing Panel – Resonance FM media playground from alfie dennen on Vimeo.
Not having studied sociopychology in my years, i was facinated to consider the concept of ‘pathological over sharing’ and the role social websites like twitter may have in enabling individuals to follow such a disfuntional path. Sure Twitter will be a lfash in the pan, in the same way that bloggin has been for most. The sweet taste on 3 click journalism soon sours on the back end of a 10 pint night. I can only hope that the common masses leave journalism to those who can write… unles sfo course they have soemthing to say that might actually be worth reading. This author is content to be considered in either category.
Pathological Over Sharing – thanks to Resonance 104.4FM London (cool community radio) for the ‘heads up’ on this topic.

For a company whose very currency is relevance, I am somewhat shocked to see that Twitter is still operating in there services in 2009. That’s just plain lazy. If I could be bothered to login to my twitter account I would tweet about it. Perhaps they are superstitious and don’t think that 2010 will be their best year. tweet tweet

I am fortunate enough to work in a place where I get my hands of plenty of new technology. Just now we have been checking out some cool GPS photo logging kit. These hand held devices can be used alongside your camera phone or digital camera to log and track where and when pictures are taken. These devices could be a catalyst for a host of new internet applications, or we might find GPS built into consumer electronics as standard.

But how about this…

Imagine this amazing new technology, where you can take a photo of your mates on a night out and have the time, place and position automatically logged and posted to applications like google earth for you to share with your friends and family. My colleague who tested this cool new global postioning applicaion tells me, ” it even works on trains “, nice one James! You clever guy.