I have a very public web presence from this blog and my web site. I enjoy sharing information and communicating with people via email and occasionally (with a heads-up email first) talking on the telephone. I also spend an hour a week giving free advice to students on their projects, employment hints, and to a more limited degree give feedback on technical ideas. I can enjoy doing this because email is asynchronous: I can handle these interactions when they don't interfere with my work or research. In the past I have accepted connections on LinkedIn and Facebook from people who I don't know, just t be friendly. However, there is a cost to this. LinkedIn frequently sends out email statuses of what colleagues (current and present) are doing. I like this for people I know well either personally or through years of email interactions. However, status updates from people I am not closely associated with take time even to ignore. The situation is worse on Facebook. I used to a...

Nice: I just tried this: go to your Facebook Account menu on the upper right corner of the home web page and select Account Settings . Near the bottom of the page, click the learn more link for Download Your Information . Follow the instructions and you will get a ZIP file with your home page, friends list, all messages, wall, and photographs.

I spent some time experimenting with the Buzz APIs this morning - well documented and simple to use. The firehose data will be useful for tracking public social media posts. I set up Google's example app on my AppEngine account and had fun playing with it. Unfortunately, because of the amount of incoming data, it would only run each day for about 4 or 5 hours before hitting the free resource quota limits. Since this was just for fun, I didn't feel like paying for additional resources.