IBM SNAzzy Knows Your Circle of Friends Better Than You Do

via Gizmodo by Jack Loftus on 8/2/09

That heavy breathing you hear on the phone sometimes? It's IBM.

Specifically, it's the IBM Social Network Analysis for Telecom Business Intelligence data mining tool, or SNAzzy for short, and it knows all about who called who and for how long on the network of "one of the largest mobile operators in the world."

The purpose of this snazzy snooping, as explained by Big Blue researchers, is to spot "churners" on a cell network who might influence their circle of friends with "profit-threatening behavior." The reasoning goes that when one person ditches a cell network for greener pastures, they can inspire their friends to do the same. Enter SNAzzy, which can apparently recognize this behavior, alert the carrier, and allow them to swoop in with retention materials and keep their remaining customers happy. It does this by mapping out call behavior, time, and a bunch of other heavy metrics that seem to be copy/pasted right out of the NSA.

Better still (I say sarcastically), IBM is already eying larger deployments beyond telecoms into areas like social networks. Personally, I can't wait to see what my Facebook picture stalking looks like when presented to me in graph form.

Google Wave coming, could change communications as we know it

via DVICE by CharlieWhite on 7/24/09

In case you haven't heard, those Google geniuses are at it again. In September, you'll be able to browse to Google Wave, called a "personal communications and collaboration tool." This open-source, web-based wonder will let you combine your e-mail, instant messaging and social networking onto one personalized page on the web. Soon, you'll be communicating in "waves."

After the jump, take a look at the ten-minute presentation (it's well worth your time), and you'll see what makes Wave so revolutionary. It simply changes the way email, instant messages and social networking work, and gives you new ways to communicate with each other. It even lets you share files by dragging and dropping, and give any of your contacts access to them. It also works on mobile devices. This is going to be big:

Google Wave is a Mix of Chat, IM, Twitter and Google Docs in Real-Time

via Gizmodo by matt buchanan on 5/28/09

I have the feeling Google Wave is something you're gonna have to use to really understand: In the simplest terms, it's a live chatroom with a spread of documents, photos and/or videos, where you can reply to any part of any message or anything that's shared, and it's all real-time.

The idea is to drag email and IM into real-time—so it's free-wheeling mesh of Twitter, IM, Friendfeed really, any other kind of service presenting semi-real-time stuff in a stream. But in Google Wave, you can share and collaborate on projects, and all of this is mashed together at once, so it might be the ultimate service for people with ADD, or enterprise looking to simulate the feeling of 10 people standing around a desk scattered with a bunch of projects, but you're all able to work on any of them simultaneously while you're also whispering to the cute girl across the table about the new sushi place around the corner. You start a wave with any message or photo or whatever, and you bring people into the discussion, and then they can bring other people in as well (unless you block it or start kicking people out) so it's as public or private as you want it to be.

It's easy to see why Google would jump in here—real-time is the next iteration of the internets, and everybody's been obsessed with it since Twitter (look no further than Facebook). Not only does Wave elevate the collaborative and conversational aspect of real-time, Google's smartly pimping it from the app side too, pushing for apps that use and run within a wave, since a service is now really only as good as it is as a platform. At least, I think that's what this is all about. Maybe it's just a surfing chatroom. [Google Wave, Cnet]

Părăsit înainte de nuntă, din cauza pozelor de pe Facebook

via Realitatea .NET - Divertisment by Realitatea.NET on 4/28/09

O italiancă şi-a părăsit prietenul după ce l-a văzut în poze incriminante pe Facebook cu câteva zile înainte de nuntă.

Furioasă, Valeria A., de 28 de ani, a lipit afişe peste tot în Roma cu chipul logodnicului ei, Antonio M., după ce a găsit pe Facebook fotografii în care acesta apare între sânii goi ai unei femei. Valeria, împreună cu o prietenă, a lipit sute de afişe cu fotografia incriminatoare în capitala italiană, în zona în care Antonio merge la serviciu.

"Mulţumesc lui Dumnezeu că există Facebook! Cel puţin am descoperit că eşti un porc trădător înainte de nuntă! Semnează : Fosta ta logodnică şi mireasă şi cei 548 de invitaţi la nunta noastră", a scris Valeria pe afiş.

The Pirate Bay Lets You Share Torrents on Facebook

via Gizmodo by matt buchanan on 3/30/09

Terrible idea or fantastic one? The Pirate Bay's latest feature lets you share your favorite torrents on Facebook, dumping it directly in your newsfeed, like when you buy Bon Jovi tickets from Ticketmaster.

It works perfectly: Now you can share the fruits of your labor with your friends after using our guide to BitTorrenting like a pro, so they can leech off you, like you're leeching off everybody working to seed aXXo's latest rip. Or you know, porn. You can also send torrents directly to individuals using Facebook's messaging feature, in case it really is the latter and you don't want it littering your public wall. Unless you don't care if your mother, boss or that girl you got to drunkenly Facebook you the other night knows your sexual proclivities right off the bat. [Neowin]