Satirizing social media has quickly become a shopworn cliche, but Dallas-Fort Worth’s Fox 4 has posted a brilliant example that sums up the subject perfectly. Anchor Clarice Tinsley begins her “report” on a shooting at City Hall by tossing to reporter Matt Grubs, who’s “live on the scene, tweeting details to his 87 followers.”

The piece goes on to lampoon Facebook, FourSquare, Skype, and something called MySpace (???), while also satirizing the dinosaur media’s often-clunky attempts to integrate the buzzy platforms. (H/T The Political Carnival)

If you had told me ten years ago, when I was in the midst of my pimply, awkward, boy-terrified teens that there would soon be a world where I could do nearly all communication online or via text, rather than shaky-handily calling my crush, only to hang up three times in a row when he answered, I would’ve begged for you to send me to the future right then and there. Things are different now. Social media lets you avoid and ignore to your heart’s content, leaving you blissfully alone with your laptop so you can update your Facebook status.

So here’s one my wife will surely hate: a TV show that’s based on Foursquare, the service where you “check in” at various locations, let your friends know where you are, and if you do it enough, you can even become the “mayor” of a location like the Starbucks across the street from your office. According to Andrew Wallenstein at Paid Content, Hollywood has come calling “in the hopes of developing a TV show.”

Traveling today? Prefer not to risk being zapped by x-rays? Make the unfortunate decision to Travel While Underwired? Or just heard so much about the new TSA pat downs that you just have to know what it’s like? Whatever the reason for having your junk firmly felt in the name of national security, Foursquare will [...]

Over the past few years, everyone has been captivated by the ideas of what social media can do for political change, how the amazing democratization of free, instantaneous communication could be employed to change the world. In Moldova, protests using the internet for organization were called the Twitter revolution. In Iran, people wondered if social media would destroy a disputed election. And, in America, on the eve of Midterm decisions that could change the very direction of our nation, baseball fans checked into Foursquare to let people know where the best riots in San Francisco are.

In the last decade there have been major advances in storing, analyzing, and acting upon extremely large data sets. Data sets that were previously left dormant are now being put to (mostly) constructive use. But the vast majority of information in the world isn’t available for analysis because it isn’t being electronically collected.

This is changing rapidly as new data collection mechanisms are implemented – what engineers refer to as instrumentation. Smart phones are one obvious new source of potential instrumentation. A person’s location, activities, audio and visual environment – and probably many more things that haven’t been thought of yet – can now be monitored.

Emily Gannett is tireless. I know this because I have traded emails with her at 2 a.m. only to later wake blearily to a chipper morning missive sent south of 6 a.m. before her morning run. She’d be that woman of whom people say “I don’t know how she does it” even if she didn’t [...]

Disruptive technologies are dismissed as toys because when they are first launched they “undershoot” user needs. This does not mean every product that looks like a toy will turn out to be the next big thing. To distinguish toys that are disruptive from toys that will remain just toys, you need to look at products as processes.

Late yesterday, Facebook launched a new “geolocation” application called Facebook Places. The app, which resembles existing, smaller start up companies likes Foursquare and Gowalla, allows users to “check-in” at different locations and thereby announce their whereabouts to friends as well as connect with other Facebook users in the same location.

Perhaps the biggest, most pervasive, most important shift in media during the last year has been the rise of location-based services, particularly those used when mobile. New companies with names like FourSquare, Gowalla, and Loopt are letting everyone know where you are, where you aren’t, where you’ve been, and maybe even where you’re going.

Foursquare reached a milestone this weekend – twice. On Friday, the location-based social network hit one million “checkins” from users in a single day — then followed-up on Saturday with its second million-checkin day.

I jumped on the Foursquare bandwagon relatively early. I was at a bar in the Lower East Side sharing in some revelry (and one too many Arrogant Bastards) when my friend Nando said, “Hey, Bebe,” (his nickname for me), “Are you on Foursquare yet?” Ever one to be a part of the latest social media [...]

As Joe Coscarelli pointed out yesterday at the Village Voice, “It’s a boy’s world, still: of the 53 entrepreneurs photographed, only 6 are women.” Sigh. Those odds not only suck, they don’t reflect what’s really going on in the New York tech industry. Where there are, in fact, women — and you don’t even have to look that hard for them!

I love technology and man is it helpful. But it also means you’re always on. Always findable. Always available to “just take five minutes” to answer an email, tweet a link for someone, check in quickly on FourSquare. And our reflexes have developed accordingly. (This I know well after a week of SXSW!) So that’s why I’m strangely pumped to embark on the National Day of Unplugging, to take some time away from tech to celebrate life IRL. (That’s “in real life” for those of you who don’t speak nerd, yo.).

As we approach the start of a new decade, it seems new methods will be perceived as romantic. Forget the skywriter at the beach or the JumboTron at the big game — we’re entering an era of marriage proposals via social networks, and the city-centric meet-up software FourSquare just scored its first when Alex Marsh checked in at dinner with his girlfriend, adding “popping the question!” to his message, knowing full well that she would receive the update. She said yes — and checked in on Foursquare, as reported by Mashable.

The Financial Times recently wrote about News Corp and MySpace, and describe a strange tactical decision regarding a social media program, saying “that News Corp. dragged its feet over implementing Ajax, a program that allows users to send a message, an e-mail or to post a comment on their friends’ pages without having to open a new browser window.” Yeah, no it isn’t.

Shalom! The Newest FourSquare City is Tel Aviv! And Mumbai, and Munich, and Rio, and Sydney, and Reykjavik, and Bangkok… The popular location-based mobile service — darling of the 2009 SXSW scene — went live today in 50 new cities across the globe, bringing their total to 100 cities worldwide.

So this is the email that just landed in my inbox. Mike B. it turns out is Mike Bloomberg. As in Mayor Mike Bloomberg. I think.

We live in interesting times. Today, you can take the entire world with you in your pocket, but few can be bothered to get off the couch. Increasingly, applications on the web are making it more difficult to ignore the call of the wild. Some of the coolest apps on your phone right now encourage you to get off the web and get a life.

If you haven’t had your media overdose on augmented reality yet, or, even better, tried it, you soon will – and with good reason. Augmented reality, AR to its close friends and acquaintances, is here.  On my phone.  In my hand.  Now. Long a staple of sci-fi and speculation, real, effective and useful AR for [...]