Too Many Facebook Friends: John Battelle, founder and CEO of Federated Media, is a pretty well-known guy in the digital media world, so naturally he gets tons of Facebook friend requests. Until now he just accepted them automatically, you know, so as not to be rude. Now he has 5,000 Facebook friends who aren’t his friends. What’s worse, he can’t use personalization services like Pandora because he has too many “friends.” He’s finding it quite difficult to mass unfriend this network, and again doesn’t want to be rude, so he’s trying to nicely ask people to unfriend him and “like” his fan page instead. It’s an awkward situation all around. So here’s a lesson everyone, don’t feel like you have to accept all Facebook friend requests. Just hit ignore, that’s what I do. Of course I’m not a well-known digital media figure, but it’s still a good rule of thumb.
Social Network Snobbery: Did you know that there are special social networks for the rich people of the world? Like Family Bhive, which bills itself as “Facebook for the fortunate.” The purpose of these rich people social networks is apparently to foster business relationships and give the “fortunate” a place to discreetly chitchat about rich people things like private jets and French Chateau property taxes. NYT
Internet Outage in Armenia: There was a recent Internet outage in Armenia, but it’s wasn’t for the reasons you would unfortunately expect today, like civil unrest and a crazy dictator’s suppressive measures. No, instead it was because of a little old lady who was trying to make a little money by selling copper scraps and in the process cut the one cable that provides the majority of Armenia’s Internet service. Woops. Gawker
Modern Ailments, Pt. 2: We told you about “Facebook depression,” well now there’s Internet withdrawal, a sympton associated with Internet addiction. Maybe the Cirque Lodge will start treating for that too. ars technica
Tweet of the Day: From @dlabar
More in Media
The accidental guardian: How Cloudflare’s Matthew Prince became publishing’s unexpected defender
Cloudflare’s day job is fending off botnets and nation-state cyberattacks, not debating how Google and other AI firms crawl publisher sites.
A timeline of the major deals between publishers and AI tech companies in 2025
Here’s a list of all the major deals signed between publishers and AI tech companies in 2025.
No playbook, just pressure: Publishers eye the rise of agentic browsers
For the bulk of publishers, Google is, as ever, the one to watch. It’s already got agentic features within its Chrome browser, but that’s the tip of the iceberg, some say.