The IBM Super Bowl ad was very, very cool. For those of you who missed it, it was basically Muhammad Ali in his famous “I am the greatest!” speech/rant, but focusing on the next phrase: “I shook the world!” The Linux boy/child/weirdo/eminem clone is staring at Ali on the TV, who repeats this over and over. Then Ali appears next to the world, and implores the kid to “shake the world.” Good stuff, probably the best of the whole series. I know IBM is doing this purely because it wants to shake Microsoft and the money tree, and not because it wants to shake DRM, patents, or any of the other things I want to shake, but it’s still cool. And I don’t mind shaking either MS or the money tree. Go IBM. :)
February, 2004
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Feb 04
Sun, 01 Feb 2004
It took me a whole, like, 48 hours too long to be one of the cool kids invited to join orkut. I’m hurt and all that. But then again, I’ve now had three invitations since late last night. Clearly all the cool kids are there.
[later] Orkut is sort of nifty, but has a fairly deep flaw- ‘friend’ or ‘not friend’ doesn’t really allow for the many shades of relationships in real life. I’m tempted to say that I wouldn’t call anyone a friend I haven’t had a beer with- yet within hours of joining Orkut, someone who I think is very cool but have not heard hide nor hair of for four years nominated me as a friend. It would be nice to at least differentiate between ‘friend’ and ‘acquaintance’.
[much later] cooper passed on a critique of orkut with links to others. Some points there I mostly dismiss by saying ‘it is just beta, for chrissakes’ but others seem fairly valid. ‘Friendship’ and relationships suffer greatly when you make them elitist and/or ‘rate’ them on narrow, arbitrary criteria- advo suffered greatly from this once upon a time when people cared about ‘master’ and all of that trite, uni-dimensional crap.