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Dalton Caldwell:

We’re building a real-time social service where users and developers come first, not advertisers.

Our team has spent the last 9 years building social services, developer platforms, mobile applications and more.

We believe that advertising-supported social services are so consistently and inextricably at odds with the interests of users and developers that something must be done.

Help us create the service we all wish existed.

Putting my money where my mouth’s been for the last few years, and backing this audacious project. I hope it succeeds.

Derek Powazek:

Every community-based site in the history of the web has essentially been a stab at creating a social network. Most of them fail as businesses, with the rare exception of small, lucky communities that become self-sufficient but not exactly prosperous. What if that’s just the way it is?

Oliver Reichenstein:

Social media buttons are not a social media strategy, even though they’re often sold that way. Excellent content, serious networking and constant human engagement is the way to build your profile. Adding those sleazy buttons won’t achieve anything.

I approve of this message, which might seem ironic coming from a peddler of social media icons. Perhaps I should include this health warning in the accompanying ‘Read Me’ file.

Jonathan Harris:

These vignettes draw comparisons between software and medicine – in their dual capacities to heal and to hurt. They explore the nature of addictive technologies in relation to business, the power that software designers are presently wielding over the masses, and a new way of imagining companies: as medicine men for the species.

This is essential reading for anyone designing software. Essential.

Pinboard’s Maciej Ceglowski:

Social networks exist to sell you crap. The icky feeling you get when your friend starts to talk to you about Amway, or when you spot someone passing out business cards at a birthday party, is the entire driving force behind a site like Facebook.

Because their collection methods are kind of primitive, these sites have to coax you into doing as much of your social interaction as possible while logged in, so they can see it. It’s as if an ad agency built a nationwide chain of pubs and night clubs in the hopes that people would spend all their time there, rigging the place with microphones and cameras to keep abreast of the latest trends.

Required reading.

I quickly tired of posting my presentations to SlideShare as the service became increasingly laden with features and countless advertising.

Thankfully there’s now an alternative in the form of Speaker Deck, which publicly launched this week. Designed by Ordered List, this new service gives presentations the distraction free environment they deserve, and is an exemplar of detail-driven design. Don’t let the simplicity of the product fool you. Attention has been fostered on even the tiniest details; skim over thumbnail images to see what I mean.

If you have presentations you wish to showcase, I encourage you to try Speaker Deck. You won’t be disappointed.

Adrian Short:

You can turn your back on the social networks that matter in your field and be free and independent running your own site on your own domain. But increasingly that freedom is just the freedom to be ignored, the freedom to starve. We need to use social networks to get heard and this forces us into digital serfdom. We give more power to Big Web companies with every tweet and page we post to their networks while hoping to get a bit of traffic and attention back for ourselves. The open web of free and independent websites has never looked so weak.

A timely post. When read in tandem with Nik Cubrilovic’s post Logging out of Facebook is not enough, the features announced at Facebook’s most recent f8 event aren’t just creepy, but downright sinister.

Zerply is a professional network that helps you find like minded people by tags, skills, location and more. Essentially it’s a simpler, classier replacement for LinkedIn. It gained a degree of traction this week after being featured by Tina Roth Eisenberg, who perfectly summed up my problems with LinkedIn:

I had fallen out of love with LinkedIn a long time ago, but last week’s sneaky move (read about it here) pushed me over the edge. What a lost opportunity. LinkedIn was built on such a fantastic core idea. And then they tried to be twitter-and-facebook-and-everything-else at once. Bummer.

I’ve deleted my LinkedIn account. You can now find my professional profile on Zerply.

Joseph Perla explains how Facebook’s business model is built on sand:

Eventually, though, and this might take a long time, but it is finite, everyone will have tried Facebook ads and know that they are useless. Eventually, after 10 million businesses have invested $1000 each, and Facebook has earned $10 billion in revenue in total, then they will have run out of new customers and their revenue will dry up. A useless product is never sustainable.

Garrett Murray:

It’s not that Facebook’s Places feature is bad, it’s just that it’s boring. It’s nothing special. They didn’t do it better than anyone else.

That’s the problem with Facebook. They are slowly destroying independent web applications with boring versions that immediately win due to Facebook’s population. There’s no demand for excellence.