The folks at MySpace, always keen to jump at new emerging technologies, have finally opened up their platform to talk to Twitter.   Facebook did this about a year ago, about the same time I decided that MySpace was no longer useful.

So about a year ago I changed my status on MySpace to say “Find me on Facebook”.   I turned off all email notifications and said goodbye to that platform.

But now they’ve made it simple to link your Tweets to MySpace…perhaps injecting a digital amphetamine into MySpace’s arm.   I’ve hooked my Tweets up to WordPress (I use a plugin called Twitter Tools).   So, when I publish this message, a notification goes out to Twitter…and, theoretically, it should go to MySpace.

For Facebook, I use the RSS import function and import each blog entry as a Note.   I’ve found that linking Facebook status updates to my Tweets is a bit annoying because while my followers on Twitter are not always the same as my Friends on Facebook, enough of them overlap that I think they’d get tired of the redundant updates.

But MySpace….sure…bring it on!

Some choice quotes from the comments to Palin’s Facebook announcement of Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death…

“thank you for maintaining my belief in you as a real american, however this country is now much better off, one less socialist, anti freedom senator.”

“Now if we could just talk God into taking Arlin Spector, Harry Reid,and Nancy Pelosi America would be Eutopia!”

“Ted Kennedy dying has made my day….”

“If he makes it into Heaven (& I doubt he will with his stance on abortion) I hope that God makes him babysit all the aborted children for eternity. God have mercy on his soul.”

“good riddens”

Sarah Palin’s Facebook ‘Friends’ Celebrate Ted Kennedy’s Death: “One Less Socialist,” “Good Riddens” | PEEK | AlterNet.

Someone went to great lengths to target the Internet identity of one man: a 34-year-old blogger and economics professor in the Republic of Georgia named Cyxymu.

Attackers first unleashed a wave of spam email and then a distributed denial of service attack aimed at sending huge amounts of traffic to the professor’s Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites, causing many to buckle and some to break under the strain of the traffic.

The motive is still a bit unclear,  seemingly something to do with a Georgia / Russia territorial dispute?   Anyway, I’ve been on the receiving end of a DDOS once and they’re not very easy to defend against.

Professor Main Target of Assault on Twitter – NYTimes.com.

Cybraphon is an emotional musical instrument robot comprised of 60 robotic components playing: a Farfisa wind organ, a Shruti box, a snare, a tom, a cymbal,  12 chimes, a dub plate and 10 other percussion items amplified through vintage gramophone horns.

Apparently Cybraphon has some sort of a rudimentary AI that processes emotions based on feedback from its online presence on social networking sites such as Twitter, Facebook and MySpace.

Cybraphon wants to be popular. Just by going to its website you will affect its mood and the kind of music it plays. Cybraphon regularly checks its MySpace page, worries about how many fans it has on Facebook, looks up its website stats and obsessively Googles itself to see what people are saying about it.

It’s so very cool but unfortunately I may have to travel back in time to destroy it before it destroys us all.

Cybraphon | Autonomous Emotional Robot Band.

Robot Band Plays Music, Obsesses About its Online Followers – Wired Magazine

Referring to MySpace as the “ghetto of the digital landscape,” Harvard Fellow and Microsoft Researcher, Danah Boyd, indicated that MySpace users are more likely to be “brown or black” and espouse a different set of ideals in conflict with those espoused by the teens she surveyed over four years.

She said that patterns in migration across social networking sites echoed those of a white exodus from cities in the past. Boyd also said that teens who use Facebook are more likely to condescend their MySpace-favoring peers.

MySpace now a “digital ghetto” | TransCosmic – the ongoing journey;.

This has been rumored for a while, but it looks like Facebook has started testing their new Paypal-like e-commerce system with some 3rd-party apps.

The payments platform could position Facebook to become a significant e-commerce player, not just challenging Ebay (and PayPal), but also Amazon and iTunes.

While technically still operating in the red, CEO Mark Zukerberg said they expect to be profitable this year. Presumably part of this proected revenue increase will be coming from the new payments system.

One can only assume this eventually work with Facebook Connect, as well as the iPhone app.

Of course, MySpace has their own in the works as well.

FT.com / Companies / Media – Facebook brings in payment system.

I’ve been asked this 3 times in the past month….How do I insert music notes or hearts into my Facebook or Twitter  status?

Even my mom knows how emoticons work, but these aren’t your average smiley face characters; you’re entering the strange world of ASCII SPECIAL CHARACTERS!

There are two ways…

1) Copy ASCII symbols from here (copy paste them directly)

♥ – heart
♫ – Two musical notes
♪ – One musical note
☺ – white smiley face
☻ – black smiley face
☼ – sunshine

2) Make them yourself!

This works for some people and not for others, but each of these characters can be typed on your keyboard using the ‘alt’ button.  If you’re on a laptop make sure you ‘Num Lock’ is on!

Next, hold down ‘alt’ (the one in the bottom left of your keyboard) and press type the following:

Hold ‘alt’ then type 1 -☺ (white smiley face symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 2 -☻(black smiley face symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 3 – ♥ (heart symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 4 – ♦ (diamond symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 5 – ♣ (clubs symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 6 – � (black diamond with question mark)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 7 – • (round bullet)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 8 – ◘ (block with white circle)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 9 – ○ (unfilled white circle)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 10 – ◙  (block with filled white circle)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 11 – ♂ (man symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 12 – ♀ (woman symbol)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 13 – ♪  (One music note)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 14 – ♫ (Two music notes)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 15 – ☼ (sunburst)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 16 – ► (black triangle pointing right)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 17 – ◄ (black triangle pointing left)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 18 – ↕ (up and down arrows)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 19 – ‼ (bang bang, or two exclamation points…it’s one character)
Hold ‘alt’ then type 20 – ¶ (paragraph symbol)

When Facebook first added its chat feature, many people turned it off by default.  It has never worked well.  It’s buggy, you can’t save your chats, you can’t chat with more than one person…the list goes on.

One thing it seems to excel at, however, is ensuring that the one “friend” on your friend list that you’d rather not chat with will be guaranteed to strike up a conversation at the least opportune moment.

Well, they’ve made some minor improvements to the chat recently, the most useful of which is that you can now “go online” for a particular group of friends.   Let’s say you create two “Friend Lists”…one for co-workers and one for peeps (and yes, you can put people in multiple groups).  When you get home from work, you might not want to be bugged by your co-workers, so you can “go offline” for that Friend List, but “go online” for your peeps.

Block Facebook Friends From Seeing I’m Online in Chat | LA Snark.

A few months back, Jeff Pulver, a friend and new media guru (amongst many many other things) was lamenting about Facebook’s 5000 friend limit.  Having nowhere near 5000 friends myself, I had no idea that Facebook limits you to 5000 friends.

To work around this limitation, Jeff created a “Fan” page for himself and the spillover Friend requests got funneled into the Fan page.   This got me to thinking about the concept of Friend and Fans.

I’ve noticed a new trend on Facebook…that third column you your main newsfeed page.  The one that usually starts with “Suggestions” and offers you to become fans or friends of new people or things.   You’ve seen them….”Become a fan of Laughing” was one I saw the other day.

Underneath the Suggestions you’ve got your Sponsored Ads.  You may have noticed that sometimes your Ads have fans too (perhaps friends of yours?).  These are simply implied endorsements.   This is where it gets tricky…and might be getting Facebook into some legal trouble.

Is there a distinction between being a Friend and a Fan?   Is Facebook using your “Friendship” or “Fandom” to help market products?  It’s all very gray, but Gawker thinks there may be more to it…

Gawker – Did Julia Allison Break the Law in Search of Facebook Fame? – julia allison.

added 10/27/2009:  A lot has changed in Facebook since I wrote this.  You might want to also check out this post:   How to change your Facebook Newsfeed Options

Don’t you hate logging into Facebook only to see your entire news feed flooded with notifications from your friend’s recent activities?    Well, you can solve the problem a few ways…

1)  Remove the friend.
Are they really your friend?  If they’re annoying you, why keep them as friends?  I know it seems cold and heartless…but if they complain, then you can explain the reasons later (or just play dumb…it’s up to you).  Most likely they won’t even notice.

2) Hide the friend from your news feed.
You can do this simply by clicking on the HIDE box in the upper-right-hand-corner of the offensive news item.  It will drop down a menu where you can chose to hide all their stories from your newsfeed.  Don’t worry…they won’t know (unless you tell them).

3) Hide the app from your news feed.
Similar to hiding a friend, you can hide an App from your news feed.   So when you see your friend has completed the “What 80’s Cereal TV Theme Song Character are you?”  quiz, you can just hide that app and you’ll still see other items from that friend, but never this particular app.

Regardless of the above…Turn off notifications in your own Apps!

This is easy to do and your friends will thank you!  (Feel free to forward this to ALL your friends who might need a HINT!

TO TURN OFF AUTOMATIC NOTIFICATIONS:

1)  While logged into Facebook, click on “Settings” (next to your name in the top blue bar).

2)  Click “Application Settings”

3) you should see a page that says “Application Settings – Recently Used”.  Below will be a list of your installed Facebook applicatons.   There is a dropdown menu to the right that says “Show:”  Choose “Allowed to Post”.

4)  For each app, click on “Edit Settings” and change the selection from

Believe me, your friends will love you extra, and you’ll keep them from removing you from their news feed (or worse)!