Posted on: June 4th, 2010 The Secret of Life

Recently I was robbed and thieves stole everything I had with me, including my notebook, iPod Touch, digital camera, even most of my clothes and eyeglasses. I was returning from a travel I did to spend some time with my friends in a nearby town on New Year’s Eve.
I live in São Paulo, alone, without any help of my family and I need to sustain myself with clothes, food and everything else. Since I’ve been left without almost everything I had, I thought: “Why not ask for $10?” If all my friends donated, I would be able to buy a new computer. Ten dollars aren’t so much, it’s the price of 2 premium coffees, a lunch out or a print.
Of course if you can donate just one dollar, I’ll be happy anyway.
Blogging: Long-form tweet.

via @tilue and inforthekill and icanread and whoever owns the credits.
Each day, Haley logged on to his account, and his friends’ updates would appear as a long page of one- or two-line notes. He would check and recheck the account several times a day, or even several times an hour. The updates were indeed pretty banal. One friend would post about starting to feel sick; one posted random thoughts like “I really hate it when people clip their nails on the bus”; another Twittered whenever she made a sandwich — and she made a sandwich every day. Each so-called tweet was so brief as to be virtually meaningless.
But as the days went by, something changed. Haley discovered that he was beginning to sense the rhythms of his friends’ lives in a way he never had before. When one friend got sick with a virulent fever, he could tell by her Twitter updates when she was getting worse and the instant she finally turned the corner. He could see when friends were heading into hellish days at work or when they’d scored a big success. Even the daily catalog of sandwiches became oddly mesmerizing, a sort of metronomic click that he grew accustomed to seeing pop up in the middle of each day.
This is the paradox of ambient awareness. Each little update — each individual bit of social information — is insignificant on its own, even supremely mundane. But taken together, over time, the little snippets coalesce into a surprisingly sophisticated portrait of your friends’ and family members’ lives, like thousands of dots making a pointillist painting. This was never before possible, because in the real world, no friend would bother to call you up and detail the sandwiches she was eating. The ambient information becomes like “a type of E.S.P.,” as Haley described it to me, an invisible dimension floating over everyday life.
FROM: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2
I wanted it so badly « Stand By You