I am, therefore I exist

"Facebook wants to populate the wilderness, tame the howling mob and turn the lonely, antisocial world of random chance into a friendly world,a serendipitous world. You'll be working and living inside a network of people, and you'll never have to be alone again."

Goodbye Second Life. We learned how to be ourselves in the cyberspace. We're not scared anymore to show our life on The Internet as it is in real life. What made Facebook outstanding was the fact that it offered a platform that served as a ground for this social experiment and transition, incorporating a golden rule to play the game: you have to be yourself to let others recognize you and interact with you.
Despite all the social goodness that pushes transparency to rule the Internet, I wonder how much of this transforming movement we also owe to the commercial web. e-commerce has been growing stronger and transforming economies over the past years, and as it turns out, you also need your real identity to pay by credit card. It's just that now we're looking at both sides of the coin.

High-Tech fruits and vegetables

Funny how the biggest and most popular technology businesses have a fruit or something related to everyday life for a name. Apple, Blackberry, Orange, Sun, you name it. It’s part of the effort of these kind of companies to enter the customers’ conscious space. Despite their complex products and services, they want to claim that they are as simple to deal with as a fruit. For a funny example of how weird this seems if you take it out of context, watch this video.

The future of the book

The Future of the Book. from IDEO on Vimeo.

Beauty explained beautifully

Philosophers have always tried to explain beauty. This is another attempt. It is worth the listen and the view, as the presentation is quite original - made by visual information studio Cognitive Media.

THIS is good stuff

The digital revolution may mean no shopping

Every age has its revolution. The Digital Age has just had its own: the Wikileaks affair.
How is this revolution shaping up? In the form of two contrary forces: one is expansive,
and it has to do with making everything public (as it happened with the US embassy cables). The antagonist force aims to cut the public from the information source, which in the case of the digital revolution means disrupting the sites of the incumbent parts. This was evident when Wikileaks activists attacked the global sites of MasterCard and Visa in revenge for the companies' decision to freeze all payments to the Wikileaks site.
This shows that in a globalized world the only way to make a revolution of global reach is to make it via the Internet. But nations are too small a battleground for a digital war. The perfect new target may be freezing global e-commerce instead, by preventing consumers from reaching the sites of multinational companies.