Social Roulette–the brainchild of Jonas Lund, Jonas Jongelan and Kyle McDonald–was a great idea:

Social Roulette is a game that gives you a one in six chance of deleting your Facebook account. If you lose, the game will delete all of your posts, friends, photos and other elements of your profile before completely deactivating it. If you’re lucky enough to survive, the message “I just played Social Roulette and survived” will be published to your wall.

But, it is not to be, Facebook pulled the plug. Too bad.

via Beta Beat

Anil Dash from The Web We Lost:

The tech industry and its press have treated the rise of billion-scale social networks and ubiquitous smartphone apps as an unadulterated win for regular people, a triumph of usability and empowerment. They seldom talk about what we’ve lost along the way in this transition, and I find that younger folks may not even know how the web used to be.

I look forward to a time when more people can move away from proprietary and restrictive networks like Facebook and make the web more open again.

via Slashdot

There was a point in the late ’90s where all the graduating M.B.A.’s wanted to start companies in Silicon Valley, and for the most part they were not actually qualified to do it. They brought the whole sideshow of the hype and parties and all that crap. M.B.A. graduating classes are actually a reliable contrary indicator: if they all want to go into investment banking, there’s going to be a financial crisis. If they want to go into tech, that means a bubble is forming.
– Marc Andreessen (Bubble? What Bubble?)

Read the article and you’ll find out that Andreessen still believes that tech companies are undervalued and there isn’t a tech bubble right now. Everyone should be watching where most of the newly minted MBAs land next though.

via Betabeat

The NYCMate application (available for iPhone and Android) has a NextTrain feature, which uses phone data to predict subway arrival times. It does so by analyzing when its users lose signal when going underground. According to this article, the system will need about 10,000 of NYCMate’s 600,000 users to turn on the NextTrain feature to get an accurate view of what is happening with the trains in Manhattan.