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Soldiers, in the U.S. as well as in Iraq and other overseas locations, will no longer be allowed to use a variety of social networking sites such as YouTube, MySpace, and several others. The reason? Security concerns as well as bandwidth problems.

As a sysadmin, I understand how administrators feel about the use of such sites. I also understand the security risk potential these sites pose to national security and military operations. What saddens me is the fact that these soldiers use these sites to keep some normalcy in their lives while away from home and to keep in touch with friends and family while on tours that last twice as long as they should. The benefits to military personal are not fabulous and the pay isn’t so great; now they are losing a few more of the simple pleasures they had while away serving their country…

Read the full article here….

Yes, this is Windows. Yes, this box is sitting on my desk. Unfortunately, I have to have Windows on at least one computer at work. Sorry folks, hope this doesn’t lower my cred. ;) Anyway, you can get the Twitter app here: http://theflexblog.com/?p=20 and if you don’t have it, you will need the Apollo Runtime.

“When I talk about Twitter people think I’m crazy. Who would want to be bugged by hundreds of messages a day from your friends telling you what they’re up to. Well, as it turns out, lots of us would. Twitter is positively addictive and everyone, including Mike Arrington at Techcrunch, seems to think it’s going to be the next big thing. I’m really happy for Ev and the gang at Obvious. Ev jumpstarted the blogging revolution and tried to do the same with podcasting until Apple jumped into the ring and squashed all the competition. Twitter is his well deserved second home run.

But I’m leaving it.”

Leo Laporte has left Twitter because of TWiT. Mr. Laporte feels that due of his personal use of Twitter people have assumed that there is a relationship with the service and his trademarked TWiT (“I’m sure half the people there think we have some sort of relationship” see The Life of Leo at Vox for his full posting). The problem I see here is that when people jump to conclusions and react without evidence, it can backfire. This statement was presumptuous and not at all what I have come to expect from Mr. Laporte. It was almost as if he was following the instructions of a lawyer. =P

I responded with my personal reaction to his full posting at his Vox blog (see above link) and am including it here. I also recommend you read his full posting and the excellent responses readers have posted thus far.

I felt a loss when I received the tweet from you stating you were leaving Twitter to join Jaiku because of confusion over your trademark. While I have been watching/listening to you since the days of ZDTV and have been an avid fan, I can’t help but feel that this was a tacky move and a slam in the face to Twitter by telling all your fans to follow you to Jaiku in a mass exodus.

I tried to overlook those emotions, signed up for an account at Jaiku, and decided I just didn’t like it. Besides all the friends I have at Twitter, it took me over an hour to go through the signup pages due to server overload then another two hours to receive the activation message on my phone. I think there should be competition; I just think this is a shameless way to promote it.

Of course, I could be over reacting to the “promote the competition business” and the whole underlying issue is ONLY the trademark thing. If so, tell your lawyers to get over themselves before you get the same reputation some big businesses that I won’t name. Just because a name “sounds like” yours doesn’t mean it is the same thing or will be confused with yours. At this point, I am afraid I have some serious re-evaluating to do regarding TWiT.

Perhaps we are all over reacting but my gut instinct is this: How ridiculous. What a twit.

What do you think?

ORLY?

Apparently SonyBMG in the UK wants artists to blog their demos rather than send them in by creating an account at SixApart’s Vox.com. I am an avid Voxer and my knee jerk reaction is that this will dirty up the lovely neighborhoods at Vox. I like Vox and really would hate to leave it because it becomes yet another MySpace. I hope my gut feelings are wrong.

Read more about this story here. 

Yesterday I wrote an article about a report that was just published about social lending. Since the article became very popular over the past day, I thought it might be interesting to take a deeper look at Zopa and Prosper to see what they offer to both the borrower and the lender.

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This is kind of macabre, so I am posting a link to it.

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