Google finally answered my prayers for a good and usable social network. Google Plus (Google+ or G+ for short) is not a whole week old but it makes a lot of buzz (no pun intended). If you are one of those that managed to get in, make some contacts and play around you know why. While it might be seen as just another social network, and while it does sound and look quite familiar, there are some new features. The most praised one being circles. Which is unprecedented power of managing, sorting and organizing your contacts. Maybe it sounds trivial, but it actually changes the way we'll use social networks from now on. 

Problem is, now when all those people are not just "friends" (most of which being anything but friends) but can (and should) be organized in circles, how to do that in the most useful and efficient way. Here's my (rather early) attempt to make the most of it. Read more…

I've just seen a TV show about houses of the near future. One of those shows that are all about bright tomorrow and how technology will make our lives marvelous.

Some of those things are really great and interesting. Recycled materials, energy saving and other ecology stuff. Daring designs. Technology aided conformity. And tons of nonsense. Read more…

The comment on tutorial about making nice and useful links led me to a strange idea about how the links should be (not) done. Nicholas Carr explores the idea of delinkification, i.e. not placing links inside of the text, but putting them on the end of it, like the footnotes in the printed text.

Links are wonderful conveniences, as we all know (from clicking on them compulsively day in and day out). But they're also distractions. Sometimes, they're big distractions – we click on a link, then another, then another, and pretty soon we've forgotten what we'd started out to do or to read.

I beg to disagree. Read more…

There is a subtle yet important art in making links on the web. I'd like to share a word of two about it. Some people (like web designers. bloggers and other weird creatures) make links daily while the others do it every now and then. But we all do it sometimes. I hear you asking why should that be important at all and why would you care, especially if you are in the latter group. Here's why and here's how. Read more…

It's fascinating that Google is not capable of making an usable social network. They made the best search engine, a decent email service, calendar, on-line documents and even video editor and much more all the way to Google Wave. But each time they step in the arena of social networks they only make one fail after the other. 

Which doesn't make much sense. So, what are they missing? Read more…

This post is an easy tutorial for patching the Sociable plugin for WordPress. Sociable makes the icons for sharing that you can see under the post. It offers 99 different social networks but Buzz and Plurk are still missing. 

This is not the type of post you expect on this blog, nor the type of post I expected to write. But I really like Plurk and my sister wanted Buzz. And I felt a bit of hacker's urge tonight. So, for bloggers among you, here they are.

Read more…

Mobile phones and other technology is damaging our minds. And making us stupid. It's not because of the radiation close to our brains (though that probably counts too, in a different way), but because it makes our brains lazy. On one hand, we advance tremendously. On the other, we're dumber and less capable than we were millenia ago. Read more…