Real-World Social Networks vs. Facebook ‘Friends’

Once again Clive Thompson writes another insightful article for Wired.com The latests deals with the social networks and clueless managers. Tell me, does this sound like your workplace?

Almost every time he analyzes a group, Waber discovers that the super-connector — the crucial person who routes news among team members — isn’t the manager. “The manager is almost always peripheral,” Waber says. “It’s some random guy.” And that person is usually overworked and overstressed. He isn’t given enough support to fulfill his role, because nobody in the firm knows he’s doing it in the first place. If you study the org chart, the higher-ups are in control. But if you study reality, those same managers barely know what’s going on.

Yeah, sounds like plenty of place I’ve toiled in too. The paragraph above rings so true for me and it always makes me wonder how my manager attained their position. Makes my skin crawl just remembering some of the incompetent drones that seemed to have only two purposes in life: more meetings and self-promotion at their underlings expense.

Of course the article isn’t really about this specifically its just that’s what it means to me.

Rolling with the new facebook redesign

facebook has started to make their redesigned UI available on a limited basis and I guess I’m one of the lucky ones who gets it earlier than most.

First impressions.

• I like the new tabbed interface which so far seems to be doing a good job of organizing all of the different sections so its no longer a mishmash of new feeds, posts, notes etc.
• Although I’m no expert about fonts and type faces it seems that there have been some tweaks to these which either gives it a newer or cleaner look. I can’t quite decide which.
• It appears they haven’t made any great improvements to their photo application. The most common complaint I hear from friends and family is that uploading photos is pain in the rear.

I’ll probably post some more observations once I’ve had a few days to get used to the design. In the meantime I think I’ll head over to techmeme to see what the peanut gallery has to say.

Scrabulous shuffles title, becomes Wordscraper

Scrabulous is back!!

According to the AP, the makers of Scrabulous have done a reboot of the popular but legally challenged Scrabble competitor.

The game itself has also changed. Instead of Scrabble-like square tiles, for instance, wordscraper has circles. The tiles earning double and triple points have been rearranged, and tiles for quadruple points have been added.

Hasbro missed the boat on this issue. Instead of allying with the developers of Scrabulous in order to tap into their enormous player list they’ve alienated the community and engendered plenty of ill-will along the way.