facebook

I only met Callum briefly in Melbourne in 2007, right after I stopped volunteering for couchsurfing, right before he started volunteering for couchsurfing. A brief encounter with Callum was enough to know you're dealing with someone very smart and special. Later we started opencouchsurfing.org and regularly communicated online. I was happy to meet him again last summer in 2012. He wanted to start a new project and we brainstormed a bit about this. We were both avid users of ping.fm. I think Callum actually got me onto ping.fm at some point in 2007 or so.

Sometimes I get in touch with friends I haven't seen in a long time, but most of the time Facebook is just terribly annoying. There are the vampires and growing gifts, and many more time wasting "applications". I also noticed that more than 50% of the requests come from less than 10% of my "friends". Today I went through the usual "confirm requests" and decided to check out at least the Super Wall (after tons of requests). I clicked through the sign-up process without looking, without selecting anything and no friends at all.

Looking for some candidate blogs to add to Planet Hospitality I stumbled upon Spurring civic engagement on Facebook, Myspace and SixDegrees.org.

For the moment, while Facebook’s Causes and Myspace’s Impact seem a welcome change in allowing some use of these networks for more civic purposes, it seems as though they’ve hobbled their tools enough and created a weak-enough attachment that we’re skeptical that a