Social Networks

Entries related to social networks, group psychology, anthropology, and really any of the social sciences.

#ff #EAv API @benrobbins @Mamacita @MrktgMommy_JWil @rough_edges @ejc @Merlandre

I’ve taken a little time to relax amidst the post hurricane Irene cleanup, do to a little recreational programming. It the sort of thing that I do when I’m stressed. My latest project has been to play with the Empire Avenue API. Using this, I’ve come up with a few people to suggest for Follow Friday.

@benrobbins owns 50 shares of (e)AHYNES1. His Empire Ave shares are trading at about 44 and he has strong earnings. He also has a strong KLOUT score. He describes himself as an “Entrepreneur, inbound marketer, [and] general web geek”.

I’m not sure who I originally came across @Mamacita. I want to say that it was through something like MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog several years ago. I bought a few of her Empire Ave shares when I first started. She also currently has strong earnings and a strong KLOUT score. She describes herself as a “Social Media Specialist, Writer, Speaker, Internet Watchdog, Absentminded Professor, Education Advocate/Critic, [and] Mommy”.

Next on my list is @MrktgMommy_JWil I think I probably found her on Empire Ave. She owns 10 shares of (e0AHYNES1. She has strong earnings, but her KLOUT score is only in the twenties. She describes herself as a “Blogger at MarketingMommy.com. Mother, Christian, book-lover, and hockey fan.”

@rough_edges is next on my list. He doesn’t have a lot of Twitter activity, but still has pretty good earnings. Not surprisingly, his KLOUT score is in the twenties. This is another person I probably found via Empire Ave. He owns 50 shares in (e)AHYNES1. He lacks a description on Twitter.

@ejc describes himself as a “Lead designer at Scopely. Full time Designer, Developer, Illustrator, Mac Nerd. Part time Writer, Actor, [and] Improviser.” He has strong earnings and a good KLOUT score. I only own a few shares in (e)EJC and he doesn’t own any in me. I’m not sure how I stumbled across him.

Ending off this week’s list is @Merlandre. He describes himself as a “retired HR director”. He owns 10 shares of (e)AHYNES1 has had good earnings, but his KLOUT score is only 30.

I’ve bought a few more shares in each of them, and will probably do some similar buying over the coming days. Later, I hope to write in more details about how I came up with the list, some of the caveats, issues with the #EAv API, and other ideas I have about programming with the #EAv API. Let me know your thoughts, especially if you have looked at the API.

Wordless Wednesday



Our front yard after #irene, originally uploaded by Aldon.

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Wordless Wednesday



IMAG0298, originally uploaded by Aldon.

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Digital Nostalgia

This evening, I participated in a Tweetchat about online social networking. One of the first questions was about when people started networking online. I mentioned Usenet back in 1982 when I was working at Bell Labs. Yes, if you know where to look, you can find stuff I wrote back in 1982 still online. I believe I first used Minitel at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1983 when I was hitchhiking around Europe.

I had also visited bulletin board systems in the 1970s, but they weren’t particularly connected. Later, when Fidonet came along I was on that for a bit. I can’t recall if I ever accessed Minitel or Arpanet via Fidonet. Latter, I had accounts on ATTMail, SprintNet, and Compuserve. I also believe I did a little bit on GEnie in the late seventies, but I pretty much used it to access some programs that I translated to run on calculators, and never really used it for networking. Also in the seventies, I had been on Battelle’s computer network, and used to play Star Trek there. For other games, in the evenings at Bell Labs, I used to play Rogue on their computers. At times I’ve had versions of these programs that ran on my PCs.

One of the challenges back in the day was to send emails across multiple networks. My connection to Usenet back in 1982 was via UUCP, and addresses were of the form machine1!machine2!...!user Of course, these days, everyone knows the SMTP email addresses, user@machine However, the user part could be an address on a different email address if the host machine was a gateway, so I regularly sent email through a machine called ucbvax. It took several UUCP connections for me to get to ucbvax, so my email address was something like machine1!machine2!machine3!machine4!machine5!myid@ucbvax I don’t remember if the .berkely.edu was in use at the time. For me to send an email, it would go to machine4!machine3!machine2!machine1!ucbvax!user@othermachine.

There were also ways of connecting to Decnet, which used two colons to separate a userid from a machine name, bitnet, and of course X.400. X.400 addresses were long an complicated /C=US/ADMD=Att/PRMD=attmail/ou1=somethine/ou2=somethingelse I think Sprint used semicolons instead of slashes. Many of the networks had gateways, and if you knew the gateways you could email many different places.

One place I used to email to was FTPMAIL. You could send FTP commands via email to a machine that would grab a file and send it to you in small pieces that you put together and decoded to get your file. Another person on the mailing list mentioned XNS, but I never used that. Someone else mentioned PROFS. PROFS ran over RSCS which is what Bitnet used, so I never was on PROFS, but I had access to it via Bitnet and various RSCS programs I wrote.

Then, there were the speed issues. The first device I used had a 110 bps connection. Bps is bits per second. Now, people talk about megabits, or in somecases gigabits per second. I later used a 300 bps modem, a 1200 bps modem, a 2400 bps modem, a 9600 bps modem, a 14,400 bps modem and then moved over to ISDN which would allow 56K.

Enough for the early digital nostalgia. Maybe this will stir memories for other digital aborigines out there.

Wordless Wednesday



Patient Kiosk at NB CHC, originally uploaded by Aldon.

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