My pal Ross, who is smart, asks a good question: why bother with Stamped. It’s a fair response anytime yet another social network crops us asking us to stop what we’re doing and “like” shit.

Still. I like Stamped.

It’s a clever idea that’s well executed, first and foremost. Unlike the other high-profile rate the real world thing that launched recently, Stamped is simple and constrained. You only sign off on the things that you absolutely approve of, there’s no mishmash of ratings and new verbs, and it’s wide open enough that you can rate anything1 but smart enough to know the difference between a movie and a restaurant. Best of all, there’s no game at work, no way to “win”.

What I like most, though, is the idea of Stamped, or something like it, achieving enough critical mass that I get a curated view of the real world, when I want it. Yelp is borderline useless, Foursquare checkins are noisy. I want to be able to pick up my phone and see a friend-fenced list of movies or books or shows I should check out or be in a new part of town and pull up a map with recommendations from people I trust.

I almost always like the recommendations I get from my friends better than the ones I get from algorithms. So go stamp some stuff.

Because you can rate anything, clever people are having plenty of fun with it, in ways surely unintended. Most of these I chuckle at, I don’t think it’s worth much handwringing since it’s easy enough to just unfollow anyone. If the jokes ruin Stamped, then it wasn’t good enough to begin with. ↩︎

Serious turkey face (photo by the wonderful Mr. Patrick Gibson)

I, for one, welcome our land-walking octopi overlords.

Survey Says

Louis vs. Rick is back and it’s as great as ever.

You should, by law, only use force to protect someone’s life or to protect them from being bodily injured OK? If you’re not protecting somebody’s life or protecting them from bodily injury, there’s no need to use force. And the number one thing that they always have in their favor that they seldom use is negotiation–continue to talk, and talk and talk to people. You have nothing to lose by that. This bullrush–what happened last night is totally uncalled for when they did not use negotiation long enough.

—Retired Philadelphia police captain Ray Lewis on NYPD’s raid on the Occupy Wall Street protestors.

Society needs to see science not as a luxury of funding but as a fundamental activity that drives enlightenment, economics, and security. Science agencies should never have to go hat in hand to congress.

One idea would be for the USA (or any other country for that matter) to earmark 10% of its budget to R&D. Like a good startup company might do. That way everyone knows what to expect annually. And long term research projects will have some hope of funding stability.

—My favorite of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s answers to an ask me anything thread on Reddit. [via tiffehr]

Responsive Advertising

Mark Boulton has some smart thoughts on the many challenges of incorporating advertising with a responsive design. That ads are sold on positioning is particularly problematic – by definition, there is no “above the fold” in a responsive design.

The pleasure of making something great is what drives us, not a specific technology.

—Geoff Stearns, author of SWFObject, in declaring Flash is dead, long live the internet.

Another ugly aspect of the Zynga story is the use of “Google chef situation” as a metaphor for an employee getting too much stock. That refers specifically to Charlie Ayers, Google’s chef 1999–2006, who reportedly made a giant pile of money from his stock options. To anyone who suggests he doesn’t deserve that compensation: fuck off. Charlie worked incredibly hard at Google and did a great job growing a kitchen from one meal a day for 40 people to three squares for 10,000 people. That kitchen had a huge impact on the success of the company; Google got an extra 200 hours’ work a year out of employees because we wanted to eat at work rather than go out. Charlie personally was responsible for the kitchen’s success. I assume “chef situation” is some sort of class distinction, that chefs don’t deserve as much compensation as the hallowed engineers. That’s disgusting.

—

Nelson Minar on one of the many scummy aspects of Zynga’s attempt to force some workers to sell their stock back.

If it were possible for a company to be a douchebag, Zynga is almost certainly it.

The Social Graph is Neither

Perfect.