I am ecstatic that we can return to truly fun stories and have one week without more bad news from the tech and media sectors. This week’s Tuesday Sexy Tech Trifecta line up starts off with what could be the poster child story for this column.
1. Women would choose Internet access over sex. A recent New York times article surfaced a new study from Intel and Harris Interactive. The most interesting finding is that “46 percent of women and 30 percent of men would opt to forgo sex for two weeks rather than give up access to their precious Internet for the same period.” It’s not a surprise that increasingly, people are unable and unwilling to live without constant Internet access. It’s just a reminder of exactly how far that relationship with the online world has come. Another finding worth noting was that 61 percent of women would prefer to live without television for two weeks than lose Internet access for a week.
2. You’ve been served. An Australian court approved Facebook as legal means to serve papers this week to a couple who had defaulted on a loan. A lawyer in that country petitioned to “use Facebook to serve legally binding documents after several failed attempts to contact the couple at the house and by e-mail,” according to AP. The judge who ruled on the case did specify the documents could not be tacked on the user’s Facebook wall, but had to be sent in a private email message via the social network.
The case opens up new questions about what are officially binding and legal ways of communicating. I would love to see how this progresses in the United States–could we ultimately be Twittered with papers, file our mortgage documents over Facebook, etc.? And, what privacy rights, if any do we have as users of social networks? Fascinating stuff.
3. Shoe-throwing video gets 8 million+ views in first four days. The video of an Iraqi journalist throwing his shoes at President Bush on Saturday is the perfect storm for a viral video: Spontaneous, quasi-humiliating, and brazen. Visible Measures has interesting graphs that show how the video spiked as it traveled the net, and how it compares to the online video audience of President Elect Barack Obama’s victory speech. As Tech Crunch points out, the episode is “sure to live on in infamy for many reasons.” Check out this slow motion version of the video followed by Bush’s comments. If you are looking for another shoe throwing video clip, check out this one on the viral video chart.
