Facebook doesn't know how happy they just made me - and reflections on graduate school

One of the main problems lately with facebook has been the mass amounts of application invitations and other such visual spam. Once again, facebook has come to the rescue a few months later with a way to block all the notifications and messages from an application.
Now I can resume my hectic grad school life with an occasional hiatus to Scrabulous without Zombies attacks distracting me. Hooray!

In other news, as evidenced by my lack of posting for several months, graduate school has certainly taken over my life. I am involved in many projects and I am learning a lot and enjoying my time spent here. Campus is beautiful and the weather has stayed warm later in the year than I expected. One of the opportunities I have enjoyed since I have moved here was attending ArbCamp which was a community event with keynote speaker Joseph Jaffe of the internet marketing oriented blog Jaffe Juice. I met many interesting members of the community and talked about social computing, privacy, and web design. I am excited to have a signed copy now of Jaffe's new book, Join the Conversation. In the conversations about social networking, I was very surprised by the number of people subscribing to microblogging services like Twitter and Pownce. Perhaps people strongly connected by their college associations prefer Facebook, whereas those finding facebook too cluttered enjoy the brevity of micro-posts. The issue of critical mass in adoption may be the main deciding factor in who uses one social tool over another. In any case, I think it would be really interesting to see a study on demographics of these various tools over time, to see if it is just the rise and fall of trends with certain populations always being the first adopters or if the population using the tool has more to do with the nature of the tool.

I will post more about my first semester, but it may not be until Winter break. Until then, my first priority is surviving and thriving in my newfound environment.