April 2, 2007

I guess most people on LiveJournal saw their proposal to turn LJ into MySpace (lj_dirtycache is particularly good fun for anyone who’s ever looked at bands’ sites on MySpace). What’s funny about LJ’s effort is that LJ clearly understand what is going to provoke their users to apoplectic rage until they realise they’ve been had. By comparison, Facebook was a bit lame, merely offering to send someone round to physically poke the people you “poked” on Facebook. They should have announced some variant on the Facebook feed to get all the “OMG UR HELPING STALKERS” people up in arms again.

Google announced TISP, their IP-round-the-U-bend service, as well as Gmail Paper, for those who prefer their email on paper. Slashdot had a collection of unconvincing stories. Poor show.

Disappointingly, the IETF don’t seem to have done anything very exciting lately, at least nothing to match the seminal Standard for the transmission of IP datagrams on Avian Carriers.

Finally, robhu announced he’d reconverted to Christianity. It initially seemed he’d converted to a fluffy sort of Christianity in which God is a metaphor for the good which, in a very real sense, is in us all. However, in the discussion thread which followed, it soon became clear he’d reverted to his old evangelical habits, informing me that I was blinded by the devil and was “just as much of a fundamentalist as Richard Hawkings“. His later post contains the de-brief, in which it is revealed that I was in on it from shortly after he’d posted the entry. robhu used some excellent observational humour to convincingly impersonate evangelical responses to my ultra-atheist straight man.

In summary, burr86 and robhu jointly win the Internet. Tonight, we dine in Hell.