Teleute

Mamihlapinatapai (sometimes spelled mamihlapinatapei) is a word from the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego, listed in The Guinness Book of World Records as the “most succinct word”, and is considered one of the hardest words to translate.[1] It describes “a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that they both desire but which neither one wants to start.” It is described in Rock, Paper, Scissors: Game Theory in Everyday Life, by Len Fisher (p76), when describing the Volunteer’s dilemma.

Poyozo is an automatic, personal diary system to help reclaim and consolidate your ever-expanding digital life with simple visualizations that you can use every day

With tweetbook you can generate a pdf e-book of your latest tweets and favorites. Also share the tweetbook with your friends!

Love that they direct you to the person who told them what domain name to choose! Ah, see the importance of an ampersand now! :)

via @keithcollantine

Since August is nearly over, it is time for an update and answers to some questions. We have been coding. We have Diaspora working, we like it, and it will be open-sourced on September 15th.

muuter will allow you to mute your friends on Twitter when they become too noisy for your taste. If you do it manually and unfollow the -temporarily- loud twitterers, you risk forgetting to follow them back again. Here’s where muuter comes valiantly in your rescue: you define the twitter name and the time you want to mute ‘em (or muute ‘em?), we do the remembering part. Please notice that the “mute” action is performed by temporarily unfollowing your contact.

This pattern library is dedicated to Dark Patterns: user interfaces that have been designed to trick users into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise have done. Normally when you think of “bad design”, you think of laziness or mistakes. These are known as design anti-patterns. Dark Patterns are different – they are not mistakes, they are carefully crafted with a solid understanding of human psychology, and they do not have the user’s interests in mind. The purpose of this site is to catalogue various common types of Dark Pattern, and to name and shame organizations that use them.

Thanks to the endearingly confused efforts of a young cartoon fan in 1964 we have the following charming sequence of letters to enjoy. The fan in question - Wendy - fancied acquiring some pictures of Woody Woodpecker and the character’s creator, and so attempted to ask him directly. Indeed the request reached Walter Lantz, but not without a brief detour due to a case of mistaken identity.

According to Adams, the biggest problem for users on social networks like Facebook is that all your “friends” are in one big bucket. Unlike real life, there’s no way to differentiate how you act and interact with different groups of people in your life. When you go to Mom’s house on Thanksgiving you behave differently than when you’re at Hooters with your college friends, but online all those people appear on a single friends list. Adams also differentiates between strong ties (the 2-4 people you call on the phone at least once a week), weak ties (friends of friends, the co-worker who’s two cubicles down) and temporary ties (the person you’re buying a cup of coffee from). Collapsing all these different groups and relationships into a single context—like Facebook—and combining them with the permanence of the internet can lead to a lot of awkward situations. Like Debbie, the girls swim coach who realized, to her horror, that her 10-year-old swimmers could see her commenting on wild photos from the gay bar where her adult friends work.

Not just me who went “Eh?” then! :D

Nice one.

via @blogbloketips