Titles in bold-italics are the ones I recommend.
My library:
- Good Reads – uses shelf “currently-reading” for current books.
- Read 25 books by the end of 2008 at 43things.com
- Thought Provoking Books In Athens (private) book club at Booksprouts
- (Out of date) Library Thing
Previous:
2010 Resolution Reading List
- Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space – Carl Sagan – 368 pp (368 total)
- Deal with Your Debt: The Right Way to Manage Your Bills and Pay Off What You Owe -Liz Pulliam Weston – 210 est pp (568 total)
- Some Answered Questions - Abdu’l-Bahá – 314 pp (892 total)
- The Promised Day Is Come - Shoghí Effendí Rabbání – 208 pp (1,100 total)
- The Last Days of Socrates - Plato, Hugh Tredennick (Translator), Harold Tarrant (Contributor) - 289 pp (1,389 total)
- The Trial of Socrates - Isidor F. Stone – 273 pp (1,662 total)
- The Histories – Herodotus – 720 pp (2,382 total)
- Libraries in the Ancient World - Lionel Casson – 173 pp (2,555 total)
- Mapping Human History: Genes, Race, and Our Common Origins- Steve Olson – 278 pp (2,833 total)
- Why Smart People Do Dumb Things - Mortimer Feinberg, John Tarrant – 265 pp (3,098 total)
- The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood - Howard Pyle, Scott McKowen (Illustrator) - 328 pp (3,426 total)
- The Seven Mysteries of Life - Guy Murchie – est 661 pp (4,087 total)
- Why We Make Mistakes: How We Look Without Seeing, Forget Things in Seconds, and Are All Pretty Sure We Are Way Above Average – Joseph Hallinan – 304 pp (4,391 total)
- Next – Crichton, Michael – 431 pp (4,822 total)
- The Ball is Round: A Global History of Soccer – Goldblatt, David – 992 pp (5,814 total)
- A Wrinkle in Time (Time Series, #1) – L’Engle, Madeleine – 224 pp (6,038 total)
- Ender’s Game – Card, Orson Scott – 324 pp (6,362 total)
- IN PROGRESS – Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World – Ahamed, Liaquat – 576 pp (est 6,938 total)
- IN PROGRESS – Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives – Specter, Michael – 304 pp (est 7,242 total)
- IN PROGRESS – Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us – Godin, Seth – 160 pp (est 7,402 total)
- IN PROGRESS – Foundation (Foundation, #1) – Asimov, Isaac – 256 pp (est 7,658 total)
- IN PROGRESS – Title – Author – __ pp (est __ total)


The Twitter Timesink
May 6, 2009 in Social / IM / Chat by Ezra S F | No comments
Glenn asked: “What is it about Twitter that makes it more of a time sink than Facebook?”
I consider a time sink something where I invest a high value of time for boring and poor value.
My contacts mostly duplicate in Twitter what they provide in Facebook. The time I spend reading Twitter posts I’ve already read in Facebook is a waste of my time. My Twitter contacts respond about a 1/5th as much as Facebook users (it used to be higher in Twitter). So I get more out of Facebook.
Twitter Replies suck. The Replies system makes it look like my contacts reply much more to me than others which I find highly unlikely. More likely the Replies implementation stifles conversation by requiring either everyone to be public or to allow all the participants to follow each other for there to be one conversation. Instead its many different (sometimes hidden) duplicate conversations. Facebook comments are attached to the status update so following a conversation is significantly easier.
Twitter Apps suck. Last Friday, I looked at Facebook Connect for AIR. My complaint about it was my interactions with Facebook would be as limited as Twitter. The promise of Twitter apps is to do more than the Twitter.com web UI provides. Many just provide easier ways to do the same thing: see your Twitter timeline. Others let you see quantification of your usage. Facebook apps by contrast provide access to content not within Facebook, so more of the web because part of my Facebook access so I can actually do more.
Except Socialthing and Tweetdeck. They are exemplary implementations of Twitter Apps. They extend the functionality of just Twitter by itself and are primary reasons I kept at it for so long. Socialthing unofficially died a while ago and official stoppage of support was announced last week while I wasn’t using it. Tweetdeck probably will stick around for a while.
Twitter lacks granular privacy. In Twitter, either you are private or public or ban specific users. I’m torn between public and not. So I opted for private with sneezypb where I mostly subscribe to friends. My other account, ezrasf, was where I subscribed to Blackboard community members, educational technologists, etc. Facebook could improve some in privacy as well. Compared to Twitter, Facebook makes a great attempt at granular privacy. Plurk, another microblogging / status update site, represents the privacy Holy Grail for me. It allows for making specific posts public, private, available to groups, or individuals.
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