A weekend of the long social media knives apparently just took place at rich people social network A Small World. The email excerpted above was sent to members this morning. The private social network, sold to Harvey Weinstein and then dumped by him, stopped taking new members back in February. Now they've purged their rolls of what were apparently troublemakers and/or poor people.

Meanwhile, over on A Small World founder Erik Wachmeister's new site, "Best of All Worlds," the interface is busy asking me what I am an expert in. Choices so far include "Art," "Philanthropy," "Farming" and "Hunting."

Do you know more about the A Small World shenanigans? [...]

No seriously, which demons did you confront via social media this weekend? Meghan McCain, for one, was busy. My only beef here, I guess, is that when you want to get into it with someone, you actually have to call them. The whole "call me" thing just doesn't work. (via)

"Have you actually tried to set up a Facebook page for a company lately? It’s gotten so comically, hella complex."

At The Guardian, journalists who identify themselves as Guardian employees in their Twitter bios are advised to include a disclaimer such as, “These are my personal views and not those of my employer.”

Yeah, that's because the legal department would rather not carry all employees at all times on their libel insurance. So if you work in the media, at some places you're encouraged (sometimes even commanded) to use things like Twitter—but also apparently sometimes you're encouraged to actually make a disclaimer that your social media output isn't "work product." Shady! So then when you get sued, well, off you go, enjoy hiring your own defense. It's [...]

Apparently, if Facebook wanted to repair its reputation, all it had to do was seem like it was helping to topple an authoritarian regime. Now that the U.S. media is loudly pushing the idea that social media can change Egypt—and next, the world!—it makes Mark Zuckerberg's tendency to monetize every aspect of our online lives seem less important.

But the same apparatus that causes commentators to overstate Facebook’s importance to the Egyptian protests makes the service a growing threat to our ability to control our own identities. Facebook makes other people’s previously-invisible mass of interpersonal interactions into something visible—something that can be quantized, aggregated, sold, tracked and controlled. [...]

The concept of people typing Dadaist humor on Twitter has existed since Twitter got its first big batch of smart-ass users in 2007, at that year's SxSW. Twitter was suddenly the place to get breaking news on inconsequential online-media events. Also, it was full of banter and inside jokes and drunken jabbering. It became fun, because a lot of bored funny people now had a way to narrowcast every oddball thought to people who might appreciate that kind of nonsense.

Only last year did anyone refer to this as a certain thing, Weird Twitter. My own Twitter feed has always been weird, because I follow a lot of [...]

"It's hard to pinpoint the exact moment it happened — but at some point, Twitter became a dark place." lol LOL

— Shani O. Hilton (@shani_o) January 30, 2013

One Matt K. Lewis is very angry with Twitter.

But first, I'm in love with his opening sentence. "Soren Dayton and Rob Bluey — two conservative tech geniuses — talked me into joining Twitter during a lunch Ed Morrissey organized at an Iraqi restaurant in Minneapolis during the 2008 Republican convention." I've heard of maybe two of these things, if you include "2008." WHY. WHAT? But in any event, here's the story of what happened to Matt K. [...]

Maybe what I am about to say will come as a surprise to some. But it's something I've known about myself for years.

I have a hard time networking with white guys. And I think they have a hard time networking with me, too.

I’m not saying I don’t have any white male friends—I do. But within my social network, the ratio of white men to any other group is disproportionately small.

I’m so bad at networking with white guys that even the most serendipitous circumstances are foiled. I once had an interview with a Boston-based founder of a certain “game layer on top of the world.” I [...]

Happy Internet Week! In case you don't know, Internet Week is "a festival celebrating NYC's thriving Internet industry & community," according to the website of Internet Week Dot Com.

If you wanted to, there's a talk tonight at the Internet Week, except it's not on the Internet, it's in real life, called "Will Tweet for Food: Writing Your Own Ticket in the Digital Age." There's tickets, and you can write them.

But even more notable are two new developments in this wonderful age. There's Sonar, which shows you people not in your networks who are around you and using Foursquare or Twitter. They call this "extreme networking." (They [...]

Hey, "the revolution of media becoming social" (and freeing itself from the tyranny of copyediting, apparently) gets its 45,385th chance to shine today! Say goodbye to reading magazines just to read them or maybe reflect on their content and start metamicroblogging and adding the "Tw" prefix to already made-up words and campaigning to become the mayor of your local Starbucks. Or, you know, you could just book a train ticket.