An interesting take on the so-called “pure” friendships that can be spawned by way of instant messaging. Online friendships aren’t just initiated by way of IM of course.
I’ve developed a number of friendships through disassociated, in some cases I’ve never actually met the people I’ve gone on to correspond with, though I can certainly empathise [...]

The Microsoft Messenger project has found there is an average of 6.6 degrees of separation among people, at least when it comes to users of their instant messenger (IM) service.
The Microsoft Messenger project, which was presented at a technical conference in Beijing in April, went further. “To our knowledge, this is the first time a [...]

Not that I have anything against the frivolous nature of Twitter, but there certainly are more practical ways of deploying the application, as Diana Mounter points out.
This might come as a surprise to some, but the office of the British Prime Minister at 10 Downing Street, is one entity leading the way, in its [...]

Don’t blame Ruby on Rails for Twitter’s less than brilliant performance of late, blame it on the framework, and over eager developers in a rush to finish their work.
Ruby on Rails is a Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework. To build an application in Rails, you start by defining a collection of objects that model the things your [...]

Twitter is a great messaging and networking tool, downtime notwithstanding, but why we have to refer to twittering as microblogging is a little beyond me… it’s online text messaging people.
Much of the Twittering crowd argues that Twitter will continue to grow in importance, perhaps rivaling other social media powers such as Facebook. “I have hundreds [...]

Twitter is Down; I Blame the Democrats
Wonderful. What else can we blame the Democrats for while we are at it?
The outage has lasted at least an hour at this point, and has eerily coincided with the announcement from CNN and other major news outlets that John Edwards has pledged support for Barack Obama in the [...]

Tweet topic research results
Good to see some solid facts, as a result of serious scientific research, on the matter.
I’d miss this, as those Twitter tweets just fly by on the screen, but 20 per cent of them are just to say good morning or good night.

Instant messaging “a linguistic renaissance” for teens
University of Toronto researchers Sali Tagliamonte and Derek Denis have found that instant messaging, or IM, “language” is not almost as harmful to teenagers’ ability to communicate as some parents and teachers had feared.
In fact IM “speak” permits teenagers the opportunity to express themselves with a mixture of colloquial [...]