Rob Johnson

Money quote from danah boyd’s piece about facebook as a utility

I just wish that Facebook would’ve taken a more responsible path so that we wouldn’t have to deal with what’s coming. And I wish that they’d realize that the people they’re screwing are those who are most vulnerable already, those whose voices they’ll never hear if they don’t make an effort.

Read the entirety of danah boyd’s argument that facebook is a utility and should be regulated.

When I hang out with my nontech friends now, they want me to talk about why facebook is scary.  They don’t understand what changed, but they know something did.

My answer is now the same.  I don’t trust facebook anymore.  I used to love what they were trying to accomplish - making the web more open and encouraging people to share information more often - but now I question their motives too often.

This is important.  When you sign on people for a mission that sounds like “make the world a better place” you’re asking at some level for a selfless decision.  Obama asked for our support for hope & remaking the face of america.  It’s a big ask, one requiring a huge chunk of trust.

Facebook got similar trust from us in the beginning.  I wanted to participate in their movement.  I wanted the web & facebook to lead a revolution where individuals had more of their ideas heard.  More of the voices listened to.  And yes, that has happened.  But now i just think they want to conquer, one optimized user sign up form at a time.

Shutting down EventVue.

I use this blog for 2 reasons - to share stuff with personal friends (you’d have to be a friend to care about what i say here) and to mark events and thoughts that I consider to be important in my life.

This week Josh and I decided to shut down EventVue.  We’ve been working on it for 3 years now and I’ve given a lot of myself to its success.  (If you know me really well, you know that i’ve given too much to it).

We learned a ton over the past 3 years and I made an effort to at least document what happened on our blog.

Thanks to all of you who have been supporters of us over the past 3 years.  I’m already starting to look forward to what is next.

Relaunch of EventVue.

We relaunched EventVue today and i’m very excited about it.  The immediacy of the realtime web has created the possibility for a whole new experience around events.  Because short messages can be shared so easily and distributed so quickly on the realtime web, we think that the time has come where people can truly connect at events in a way not seen before.

Now, when you are interested in the State of the Union address and are watching it on TV, you can actually connect with other people watching it all across the world in real time.  Or when you’re interested in a conference in your industry, but can’t attend, you can share you ideas or suggestions and watch them actually make it back into the conversation in the conference hall.

The realtime web is a revolutionary force for events and we’re relaunching EventVue in hopes of pushing it forward.  You can read more about our relaunch on our blog, and you can go check out the response to the relaunch at #eventvuerelaunch.