DJOliva's Blog

dbreunig:

Nate St. Pierre writes:

Lincoln was requesting a patent for “The Gazette,” a system to “keep People aware of Others in the Town.” He laid out a plan where every town would have its own Gazette, named after the town itself. He listed the Springfield Gazette as his Visual Appendix, an example of the system he was talking about. Lincoln was proposing that each town build a centrally located collection of documents where “every Man may have his own page, where he might discuss his Family, his Work, and his Various Endeavors.”

He went on to propose that “each Man may decide if he shall make his page Available to the entire Town, or only to those with whom he has established Family or Friendship.” Evidently there was to be someone overseeing this collection of documents, and he would somehow know which pages anyone could look at, and which ones only certain people could see (it wasn’t quite clear in the application). Lincoln stated that these documents could be updated “at any time deemed Fit or Necessary,” so that anyone in town could know what was going on in their friends’ lives “without being Present in Body.”

A patent request for Facebook, filed by Abraham Lincoln in 1845.

I’ve long argued Facebook is working towards natural or timeless (for lack of better words) human interaction. That their central idea is relevant in any age should not be surprising.

(Though it is astounding Lincoln was imagining a nearly identical privacy system.)

(Via The Next Web)

Update: And it looks like a hoax! And we all fell for it… Patents, Facebook, and the Lincoln-twist. Gets ‘em every time.

I didn’t take many science courses in college, but the curvature of this ball is just astounding to witness. Off some guy’s right arm and into another’s junk before it careens off a woman’s unsuspecting face.

Texas barbecued Baltimore last night 14-3, but it was Japanese pitching phenom Yu Darvish who appears to have smoked out the dugout with some nasty flatulence. To be fair, we don’t actually know who dealt it, only that those who smelt it immediately started screaming “YU!” so loudly it could be…

This is fun to hear!