Typically I ignore game/toy Facebook apps that burdon my friends with inane wall posts. Typically their business models hook into some sort of affiliate marketing scheme, and for the most part, these apps are just pollution.

Friend FAQ is exactly like this, though for some reason I still decided to click through and check it out. Finding out who “said” what about you, however, does require you to spend ‘points’. This is something that I do not plan on doing.

Some of what my friends “said” did however make me smile, and many of the answers were very nice, so I thought I’d share.

• Is Nater Kane fun to be around? Yes
• Would you travel the world with Nater Kane? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane lets the “yellow mellow”? Yes
• Is Nater Kane fun to be around? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane will do anything to get what they want? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane can do 20 pushups? Yes
• Would Nater Kane ever dress up in a mascot outfit and run around? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane knows what a fist pound is? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane grinds their teeth while sleeping? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever used steroids? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever given money to a homeless person? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane is a freak? No
• Do you think Nater Kane parties too much? No
• Do you think your first impression of Nater Kane was right? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane is mean? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane can eat more than 3 Big Macs at a time? No
• Would you travel the world with Nater Kane? Yes
• Do you think Nater Kane has ever pulled an all-nighter? Yes
• Find out who answered for 50 coins!Do you think that Nater Kane is a slacker? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane looks good in a bathing suit? No
• Do you think Nater Kane is a spaz? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has showered today? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane ‘plays with themselves’? No
• Does Nater Kane have a nice butt? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane watches the TV show “24″? Yes
• Have you ever had a crush on Nater Kane? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever fooled around at work? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has game? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane is cuter than Brad Pitt? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane puts ‘hoes’ before ‘bros’? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane has ever played strip poker? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane knows what a fist pound is? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane is selfish? No
• Do you think that Nater Kane likes blue eyes? Yes
• Is Nater Kane fun to be around? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane voted for Obama? Yes
• Do you think that Nater Kane has a funny looking nose? No

First let me thank Josh Klein for mentioning this on his blog before I got around to it…

So…

I have recently been working on starting a website called Democratus that will be a sort of “customer service platform for government” and provide a place for ideas for change to come directly from the people and be delivered directly to our representatives and press. We hope to be able to get this website off the ground by early next year, but in order to do that we’re looking for some funding. Recently we applied for a grant from the Knight Foundation, who sponsor a contest for ideas like this, and we’re very hopeful that this will provide the funding we need to launch the site, but we need your help to get the grant.

All you need to do is visit the website of the Knight Foundation and our page there, and register and vote on our idea. It should only take a minute or two and it would really help. If you want to read our application it is there on the website, and if you want to leave a comment on the proposal after reading it (something about how innovative and important this would be in your life, for instance) that would be even better.

Feel free to forward this post to other people that you think are interested in encouraging political participation and efforts to make our democracy more direct.

1) Register with the Knight Foundation: http://is.gd/6cTK

2) Vist our site: http://is.gd/6cU3

3) Vote and comment on our proposal (clicking on 5 stars won’t hurt)

4) And then if you’d like, tell us what you think by sending us an email to Nate.Heasley@gmail.com or nater@naterkane.com

Some folks are just never satisfied. Maybe it’s because they’re professional critics who don’t do much else other than voice their opinion for a living, or maybe they’re just cranky people in general, but I’m just sick and tired of people bitching and writing useless articles about Twitter. All this bitching is just noise, data and information pollution, and most importantly… not productive.

I think people are putting a silly amount of weight on this company and it’s service. If anyone builds a component of their business that relies on ANY webservice they don’t control to the point that that service is mission-critical, then they’re optimistic (which is admirable) and an idiot (which is not admirable).

They’re having scaling issues, the end.

Almost every service that I’ve come across in 12 years that didn’t start with some supermegacorp style backing has had scaling issues. People used to just deal with it. Circa 96′-97′ (pre Microsoft) Hotmail used to be (and still is IMO) a super slow piece of garbage, yet people still use it.

If the folks that I see that claim to be so dependent on Twitter that they feel the need to fill Technorati with tons of useless complaint posts, they should either stop bitching and maybe invest in the company, donate money to them, send them pizza, go to work for them to fix things and make things how they want them to be, OR just build another service themselves. They even use someone else’s service for their status blog now themselves.

I’m sorry, but I’m really tired of all of the useless noise about this service being unavailable. If only people were this vocal about stuff that matters more to more people we’d be in a different world. Like a extremely large percentage of personal computers and laptops shipping with a broken & POS operating system. Or Hillary Clinton just generally being an idiot and getting in the way of a candidate who can kick McCain’s ass… anyway, you get the point.

The real point is this…

Twitter doesn’t have a revenue model that user have to “deal” with.
Twitter doesn’t have a sketchy policy regarding the content that is posted through it’s service
Twitter was initially engineered for SMS
Twitter has a decent API that many people have built neat tools and services with, some of which are even useful!
Twitter has changed the way many people communicate with one another… “@” now has two purposes on the web, cool.
Twitter doesn’t edit or censor content that passes through their system. (unless it’s actually damaging or abusive to a specific person… read here and here)
Twitter is I18n friendly.
Twitter is free.

Ning is a pretty neat idea… on paper.

It’s a site where you can “roll your own” social networking site targeted at any weird or random idea you can come up. There’s enough random stuff out there, and this is the only proof I need.

In the age of there being so many of those already, it seems like putting the creation of a network site into anyone’s hands seems like it’s ripe for over-saturation and misuse unuse.

As I’ve been tooling around with Kenny Miller’s Interlinky network on Ning, I’ve started to think to myself… “what’s the point of having 83475345 redundant web relationships?”

Living in New York, it’s easy to find social industry events most nights of the week, there are tons of social groups that exist offline, besides all of the ones you can find on meetup.com. But what do we actually do with all of this networking? When we get together face to face to do stuff drink, we sometimes end up making friends who we talk about work with. Sometimes we make friends who we don’t have to talk about work with (but can). And even sometimes a business contact is made and/or a business relationship is formed. Most of the time, it’s just social silliness, high-school style, minus the big grass field and the paranoia about the cops coming at any moment.

Some social services do make sense cents

LinkedIn is an example of one of those few sites out there that does actually serve a purpose. I have use it to reconnect with ex-coworkers from 10 years ago, and other people have used it to get in touch with me about hiring me or NaterKane (the business) for interactive work. Since LinkedIn is all about business, work, your professional reputation and trust… folks don’t tend to add others as contacts who they don’t know, or haven’t already worked with.

Many of the other big sites however, have little if no quality control.

I actually wish that facebook kept their business model around targeting college kids. I know the world would be different, however I wouldn’t have to deal with people throwing virtual sheep at me for no reason (thanks to the assholes who write useless and what I consider abusive software over at Slide.com) or the unsolicited Vampire/Zombie/Seamonsterboogieman invites reminiscent of those Underworld movies.