*****WARNING! Spoilers about the existence of Santa Claus ahead****

When I was a kid, and believed in Santa Claus, I always got predictably excited about Christmas. Yes, people told me that if I was naughty all year (and I was always naughty) I wouldn’t get that Big Wheel I wanted, but would instead receive nothing but a lump of coal and maybe some tube socks… But I didn’t actually believe it. I blithely assumed that, based on past years’ experience, I would actually get an awesome present or two, no matter how many bad grades, muddy clothes and stray animals I naughtily brought home in the months preceding Christmas.

But many of the kids of today may not share that same peace of mind as they bed down on Christmas Eve. They might actually be afraid of that whole Santa’s blacklist thing.

Or at least they will if their parents sign up for the “Parents Calling Santa” iPhone app. With this application, a parent can sign up to have Mr. Claus himself call up their kids. And, if that parent chooses, Santa can scare the living bejebus out of the kid by telling him or her that he was way too naughty this year, and won’t be getting any presents. Now, maybe I was a bit more naive than the kids of today, but if my eight year-old self had received a threatening phone-call from Angry ol’ St. Nick on the night before Christmas, I would have cried, crapped my pants or hid in my closet for a few days…or possibly all three simultaneously.

If that’s not scary enough, parents can also use send their kids a custom video of Santa talking to their kid. Like the iPhone app, this website also offers special customization options for kids who have been naughty. Parents can have Santa mention the present they would have gotten, if they hadn’t been so bad. A multiple choice drop-down provides a list of possible naughty transgressions that have offended Santa, including everything from spending too much time on Facebook, to talking with his/her mouth full.

There’s not much time left before Christmas morning, so if there are any parents out there with kids to scare, you better hurry. Though if your family is anything like mine, you don’t need clever websites or iPhone apps to scare the wee ones – Uncle Lou, a santa suit and 15 rum n’ nogs should more than do the trick.

It seems there is always unforeseen consequences when new technology is introduced. An unpredictability that is no fault of the designers or engineers of things like smartphones, often creates a discourse between user, technology, service provider and the market that can be turbulent; It’s the human factor. No matter how predictable analysts or engineers think we may be, as the recent bandwidth problems in the US and Canada attest to, often times it is difficult to plan for the effects of technology and especially social technologies. Earlier this year the Rogers Canada iPhone Data Plan petition made its way around the internet in an attempt to do what the first 60,000 name petition failed to do. Convince Rogers to open the bandwidth floodgates and stop nickle and diming iPhone users with ridiculous overages and hidden costs that were completely arbitrary in the eyes of the consumer. The petition so far stands with over 12,000 signatures and it remains to be seen if Rogers will offer data plans that are competitive with other providers in the US and even in Canada. Canada is one of the few countries that has multiple data plan providers for the iPhone and Bell and Telus have teamed up to offer a more competitive service than Rogers, so why won’t it change?

Meanwhile in the U.S. users have revolted against AT&T in an online demonstration called Operation Chokehold aimed at showing the severe need for more bandwidth and upgrades to the communications infrastructure which is woefully inadequate in the eyes of the consumer.  Both the FCC and AT&T condemned the upstart users and in accordance with the Patriot 1 and 2 Acts have lobbied to have them all rounded up and jailed without legal representation in a secret detention facility as they are a danger to our way of life. (that way of life being one in which we simply accept horrible service while getting bilked by corporate monopolies or government bureaucracies) Just kidding, that last part isn’t verifiable, but I have a friend of a friend who’s a Washington insider (Washington State insider to be precise) and he says they could do it if they really wanted to.

Some analysts have shown concern that bandwidth and internet access are becoming more restrictive in the pursuit of the bottom line. So have the glory days come and gone? Are we going to sign petitions and bang our drums, throw monkey wrenches at the system and demand better service and more bandwidth like the peasants of old?

In a competitive and open market customers shouldn’t have to beg for a fair price and good service, they should be able to maximize the economy of their choices freely by having options i.e. multiple providers competing for their patronage. The monopolies that companies like Rogers and AT&T have enjoyed are not indicative of an open and competitive market though, they have enjoyed dangerously inefficient market power and in both cases they have abused it. There was another country in which many people complained about monopolies and the horrible services and products they provided, Communist Russia.

It has been a banner year for social media. We can all pat ourselves on the back knowing that we generated an obscene amount of tweets, status updates, comments on status updates, event pages, we got totally linked in and really explored the boundaries of what we could do with this thing. And we’ve made all sorts of social media predictions for 2010 based on the upwards trend and all of which (every single last one) will come true because we know exactly what is going on without a doubt; we have absolute surety…except for one thing maybe.

Social media may be getting in the way of your search results. Bots (and most humans) tend to think that what’s newest is best. In reality exactly what you’re looking for is what’s best, while many times being duped by the top ranked results on a page has been coined “Google gullibility“. I search the internet for a living (I use RSS feeds and I have subscriptions but I still go out digging in the dirt for exactly what I’m looking for) and I can say honestly that a lot of my searches place me square in the middle of some pedantic conversations that have nothing to do with what I’m looking for except that a keyword appears in the text.

Twitter feeds appearing in Google and  and Bing represent to me a cluttering of search engine space. It’s about quality, when people have mistakenly accepted that it’s about quantity. Because of this I search mostly news sites now, which unfortunately bypasses a lot of otherwise awesome things that might appear in a regular search.  But this may only be a temporary traffic problem, the highway might clear up again in the very near future. Right now it’s about real time search, in the very near future it will be about semantic search engines.

For more information on those go here. For more information about what the people in the photo above are laughing at go here.

The internet was shaken to its core this week by the news that popular singer and girlfriend-puncher Chris Brown will no longer be using Twitter. Despite the terrible blow dealt by his absence on the popular social media site, Twitter shows no signs of shutting down their operation. In fact, they just released a list of their top-trending topics in 2009, revealing that, yes, people use the site for things other than reading tweets from Chris Brown.

The list of top Twitter trends is broken up into six categories: News Events, People, Movies, TV Shows, Sports, Technology and Hash Tags. Interestingly, they didn’t reveal actual numbers of tweets sent about each topic, but merely where it ranked on a top 10 list for each category. That’s probably good though, as we’d most likely all be embarrassed if we learned that, say, Adam Lambert prompted 50 or 100 times more tweets than something more traditionally discussion-worthy, like swine flu.

Speaking of H1N1, it showed up twice on the top 10 list for News Events, though it was surpassed by news about the Iranian elections. We can attribute a lot of that Twitter traffic to the fact that election protestors in that country were using the site as their main source of organization and communication. Incidentally, that fact may be the reason that Twitter, along with an Iranian pro-reformer site, were hacked yesterday by a group calling themselves “Iranian Cyber Army“.

In the People category of top-trending topics, the list was topped by Michael Jackson, with Susan Boyle and Adam Lambert rounding out the top three. And there, comfortably in the #5 spot? Chris Brown. Though given his behavior in the past year, it’s unlikely he’s in the top 10 because of his own fascinating tweets. So we can all hope that, somehow, Twitter can soldier on without him.

Well, another year over and only 2 more to go until we all die in the 2012 earth ending apocalyptic collisions between one fictitious rogue planet that someone haphazardly associated with a Sumarian creation myth and an ancient Mayan calendar, which like all calendars happens to have a beginning and end.  So let’s just worry about that later and focus on social media in the coming year shall we. Here are some predictions for how social media will grow and develop through 2010, a collection of my own ideas and some that I’ve remorselessly ripped off from others.

In 2010:

Social media will grow fastest in India and other economically booming parts of south east Asia, much faster than Europe or North America. Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) has openly expressed that he feels my opinion on this matter is astute and correct by agreeing with me. Though he didn’t state it was with me exactly per se, we share the similar view that with one of the fastest growing economies on earth and with an robust entertainment and media culture India looks ripe for social media explosion. So really he agrees with me by virtue of the fact that we hold the same opinion.

Race, culture, and lifestyle-specific social media platforms will begin to fragment the overall user base into unique services. The idea of Racial social media presents a bit of a moral conundrum but yet we’ve seen income stratification over platforms and that hasn’t caused any eyebrows to be raised in righteous indignation. The fact that social media will be growing most in India and China is what drives this prediction.

Social media will level off among higher income Westerners while it will increase among lower incomes. This is a natural law of economics, there are diminishing returns for any good once it has reached a certain threshold. The main “consumers” of social media platforms thus far have been the middle to upper class and the ratardedly wealthy of the world. If tech gurus like Alec Ross and others are able to come through with their hopes of narrowing the digital divide between rich and poor, the lower incomes will be the next large growth sector of social media.

Elitism will rule social media. Because poor uneducated ignorant buck toothed hillbillies will be flooding social media platforms like a deluge of garbage consuming zombies the ivy league veterans of social media will retreat into elitist cyber-enclaves where their status and anything they post will only be viewable to their rich and cultured friends.

The social media using public will undergo a self reflexive behavioral adjustment in 2010. After a barrage of embarrassing and job losing tweets and facebook statuses widely reported over the past two or three years, we will begin to live our social media lives like our mom is reading every tweet and facebook update. Self reflexivity is a sociological term in which either we begin to self-censor our behavior and speech because of and innate sense that our actions are being observed or we are aware of the process of socialization and the costs of our being out of step with norms.  Crap, do I have to explain norms now? That one seems pretty obvious.  You know, like in Cheers “Norms!”

The world used to be simpler. There was the brick n’ mortar world, and there was the internet-y world. But with the passage of time, everything’s getting all mixed up. Here are three products and services that in some way blend the two worlds in ways that both useful, and confusing for someone of advancing years, such as myself or your Dad. And yes, they’re all available for purchase in time for the upcoming holiday season.

TweetBookz – Tweets, by design, are meant to be ephemeral and short-lived. You see a funny picture, think up a witty pun, or have an interesting bowel movement, and you tap out a quick 140 character post about it. It gets sent out to your friends and associates and is quickly read and forgotten. Or so we all thought. But TweetBookz take this uniquely online world and give it a permanent, paper-y presence on your coffee table. Or, more likely, in a dusty box in your attic. The idea is simple: you pick 200 of your very best tweets and this company turns them into a book, with one tweet per page. For the sake of veracity, you’re not allowed to go in and edit your tweets after the fact to make them more awesome. And you’re also not allowed to borrow any from some funnier, smarter or sexier Twitter user. It’s gotta be all you. So if I were to create a TweetBook myself, it would consist of 200 identical pages, each saying: “Got up, did some writing, watched reruns of The Office. Tty tomorrow!”  They cost around $25.50 for the hard-cover edition. And you have to go hard-cover, because this will be something you’ll want to read and re-read for decades to come.

Amazon’s Instant Video Streaming with DVD Purchase – What’s the crappiest part of buying  a DVD from an online retailer, instead of down at Best Buy? That’s right, it’s the infernal waiting for it to arrive in the mail. Well, the wait is over. Now when you purchase certain hard-copy DVDs from Amazon, you get instant access to a streaming version of the movie. It’s only available to US purchasers at the moment, and only for about 300 TV shows and movies. And, for now, it’s only for a limited time. But if it’s popular, you’d have to think they’ll roll this feature out on a much bigger level. The best thing about this is that you can buy DVDs as gifts for people, and still get to watch it yourself via the streaming version.

VeriFone’s iPhone Credit Card Payment System – So you’re selling some vintage Scobby Doo collectibles to a guy who saw your Craigslist ad. You meet him (somewhere public and well-lit, I hope) and he doesn’t have any cash. No problem. Just swipe his credit card through this little iPhone gizmo, and his money will instantly be yours to enjoy. It brings the joy and convience of ecommerce to the brick and mortar world of, well, wherever you happen to be. To operate this, you have to pay a monthly subscription fee, so it’s really only meant for relatively high-volume sellers, like delivery pizza parlors, door-to-door salespersons and prostitutes. But if there’s anyone like that on your holiday shopping list, you know what to buy them.

Let’s play a little guessing game. We’ll start with an easy one – The founder of which groundbreaking social networking site turned down a $30 million acquisition offer by Google in 2006, an amount that, if paid in shares, would be worth approximately $1 billion today? Okay, now another one – Which social networking site has become a punchline due to the face it more or less invented the genre, then got its butt kicked by a bunch of imitators? And, lastly, a trickier one – which social networking site has over 115 million registered users and is still one of the top 100 global websites based on traffic?

Of course the answer to all those questions is Friendster. Everyone’s first social networking site, Friendster’s meteoric rise and even faster fall is the stuff of legend, and jokes. But much to the surprise of many, I’m sure, the site still gets over 61 million unique visitors a month and is among the most visited sites on the planet. And that’s probably why Friendster just sold for $100 million dollars, to Malaysia’s MOL Global.

Those numbers, and that payday, raise an interesting question. Who the hell uses that site? If nobody you know still rocks a Friendster account, it’s just because you live on the wrong continent. The top 4 countries accessing Friendster are: the Phillipines, Indonesia, Malaysia and South Korea. Yep, apparently Friendster has enjoyed a massive resurgence in Asia, mainly among teenagers.

Oh, and one last question for the guessing game – What’s the 5th country on that list? The United States. Which means that somewhere in the vicinity of a million Americans are still hooked on Friendster. But can you imagine what’ll happen when those folks discover MySpace? It’s going to blow their minds.

Illustration of planned Digital Cloud (photo courtesy of RaiseTheCloud.org)

As part of the 2012 Olympic festivities in London, England, a team of engineers, artists and architects have partnered with Google to plan a “Digital Cloud” structure that will hover over the city, transmitting video, audio and data streams.

The structure itself is a collection of inflatable spheres set atop thin, soaring towers, each of which will contain a spiral ramp and elevator. The spheres are meant to be a physical manifestation of a digital cloud, and each is an inflatable, transparent, three-dimensional screen, lined with LEDs. The entire structure will be self-powered by photovoltaic panels.

Transmitted onto the screens of the spheres will be everything from real-time data related to Olympic events, world news, weather information and tourist tips for getting around London. Audio feeds related to the data will play at ground-level, so visitors to the site will be able to watch events and feeds above, while hearing the related audio from their position on the ground.

The project has some heavy hitters involved, including the aforementioned Google and a group from MIT’s Senseable City Laboratory Team, but it’s still missing one thing – money. Raising enough money to build the structure is part of the experiment, and the planners will be reaching out to the public, via sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube. You can find out more details about the project and see lots more images at raisethecloud.org.

If any of your FBBFs (Facebook Best Friends) from the New York area recently disappeared from the social networking site, you can stop wondering why. They were a sex offender. Well, it’s also possible they just decided they have better things to do than spend all their time on Facebook. Either way, you’re better off without them.

Thousands of registered sex offenders from New York state were just given the boot from Facebook and MySpace. It’s the result of a new law that recently came into being. The Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (aka e-STOP), requires the state’s 30,000 or so registered sex offenders to inform the state of their home, email and social networking addresses.

Those who set up new social network accounts, or continue to use existing ones, without disclosing their info to the government face new felony charges if caught. Despite that threat, only 27% of those 30,000 provided authorities with an email address. And only 10% revealed a Facebook or MySpace account. According to a government spokesman, those 22,000ish sex offenders who didn’t divulge that information are either in jail, homeless, don’t have internet access or “chose not to respond”. It’s that last possibility that raises a few alarm bells.

But the e-STOP law did succeed in rounding up the accounts of 3,533 registered sex offenders, and having Facebook and MySpace terminate them. Oh, and just in case you were wondering, sex offenders prefer Facebook over MySpace by almost a two to one margin. There was no immediate indication how many were using Friendster.

One can’t argue with Oxford, and the proclamation from those hallowed halls is that the word of the year for 2009 is… unfriend.  Yes ladies and gentlemen, Facebook has contributed the word of the year.  Unfriend is defined by Oxford as a verb meaning to “to remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.” Well, no kidding.  As usual, the establishment is a bit behind the times, but it’s certainly very interesting to look back on past words of the year to gain insight into the social climate of that time. Shall we?

2009’s word of the year hints heavily at the influence and infiltration of social networking into modern day life.  Myself, I have been part of some sort of social network for most of my teenage and adult life (anyone remember Friendster? Asia Avenue?) and it’s hard to think of what life was like before there was such a thing.  In social networking etiquette, to unfriend someone is tantamount to betrayal.  It requires so little effort to add someone, but actual effort to seek out and unfriend them, implying that the deleter must really hate the deleted’s guts.  Who hasn’t felt the well-placed sting of trying to access a friend’s/frenemy’s/enemy’s profile only to discover you have been locked out? Nowadays, people even race to block or delete formal significant other’s and BFFs to claim the “I got over you first” prize, so no wonder the word unfriend has become so entrenched into our vernacular.

The more diplomatic way to go about removing someone without removing them is to keep them on your list and to subtly screen them out of your network sphere.  Facebook allows this with its list functionality, whereby users can create lists with custom privacy settings for various levels of friends.  Now Jane can instantly discover that she’s not such a BFF with Jill by looking at her profile via Chuck’s account and seeing how much more Chuck can see versus her!  Talk about scandalous!  Isn’t that so much more of a slap in the face than being upfront and just deleting that person?  I think so.

My proclamation for the end of 2009 is to take this unfriend business one step further: I say everyone should go through their friend list and just remove those they don’t like, remember, and/or are unlikely to run into for at least the next 12 months.  What’s the point of all this social clutter?  The majority you delete won’t care, and for those people who do get offended, well, they probably should get a life and you don’t want losers on your list anyways, right?  There are various very legitimate reasons to unfriend someone, which you can read here if you need help filtering; so this season, don’t be a wimp – just unfriend.  Ironically, it just may make you feel more connected.