Is Facebook heading for a Black Tuesday-like crash?

When Joseph Kennedy, John F. Kennedy’s father, overheard shoeshine boys discussing their stock porfolios, he sold many of his holdings, figuring the market was overextended. Shortly thereafter, the market crashed on 1929′s Black Tuesday. (Disclaimer: this story might be an urban legend.)

Might Facebook be heading for a similar catastrophe? My father just signed up for an account.

While my father is no shoeshine boy (he’s a physicist), Facebook’s appeal has been to the younger folk. Might the influx of, um, people of an advanced age cause the site to lose its cool? (I’ve noticed that some of my friends’ parents also have been popping up on Facebook.)

Of course, there is an opposite interpretation: Facebook’s reach has become so vast that no other social networking site stands a chance of usurping its dominance.

I’m not sure which theory I subscribe to. But in the meantime, I need to scrub my Facebook profile and make it Dad-safe.

Connect with me on these social networking sites

You can connect with me at these social networking sites:

• Facebook
• LinkedIn
• MySpace
  
• Twitter

Ping.fm solves the (admittedly self-inflicted) problem of updating your status on multiple social networking sites

With so many social networking and microblogging sites, updating your status on all of them can be a pain. In many people’s cases—including mine—it leads to either neglect or cutting and pasting.

Ping.fm solves the problem though. From Wikipedia:

Ping.fm is a free social networking and micro-blogging web service that enables users to post to multiple social networks simultaneously.

Making an update on Ping.fm pushes the update to a number of different social websites at once. This allows individuals using multiple social networks to update their status only once, without having to update it in all their social mediums individually. Ping.fm groups services into three categories – status updates, blogs, and micro-blogs – and updates can be sent to each group separately.

From Ping.fm I simultaneously post to Twitter and update my status on Facebook, LinkedIn, and MySpace. Ping.fm supports more than 30 social networking sites, including the behemoths that I just mentioned, new sites, and even dying networks (remember Friendster?).

I bookmarked Ping.fm and added it to the home screen of my iPhone for easy access when I’m away from my computer.

The Obama campaign and new media and social networking

While I’m politically active, this blog isn’t—if you want to read about politics you probably can find a few other websites that delve into the subject.

But anyone interested in online communications and social networking has to be paying attention to Barack Obama’s campaign: Nov. 4 will be the biggest test of the real-life power of that emerging technology.

The Obama campaign isn’t just using, but is distributing quality content via

• A Facebook application
• Podcasts
• Twitter
• A social network on BarackObama.com
• YouTube
• A blog
• MySpace

And the campaign got 2.9 million people to opt-in to receive text messages from it in exchange for being the almost-first person to know whom Obama selected to be his running mate. Think it might use that data as part of its get-out-the-vote efforts?

Will it pay off on November 4? I suspect the Obama campaign has studied Howard Dean’s candidacy in 2004 and realized what it needs to do to translate virtual support into real votes.

If you are a writer or editor, is Scrabble ever just a game?

I have a friends who are doctors, but I don’t think it’d be held against them if they lost a game of Operation. But playing Scrabble with my wife and in-laws last weekend, I felt self-inflicted pressure to win as a result of my given profession.

Despite not being allowed to use the word “texiled” (I defined it as “the act of being exiled to Texas”), I managed to win.

And in case I thought I was putting too much pressure on myself, that night I logged onto Facebook. My college roommate is a reporter, his fiancée’s status bragged that she’d beaten him “at scrabble 2 times in 2 days…and words are his job!”

So much for the pressure coming just from within.