I am however, taking a little break from Twitter and RSS this weekend. I already cheated a little by sending a few DMs to take care of some things, but other than that, it’s social media radio silence over at the 512 Pixels HQ.

I don’t know if I’ll be back on Monday or not. I like the quiet.

The IPA is a new way to do patent assignment that keeps control in the hands of engineers and designers. It is a commitment from Twitter to our employees that patents can only be used for defensive purposes. We will not use the patents from employees’ inventions in offensive litigation without their permission. What’s more, this control flows with the patents, so if we sold them to others, they could only use them as the inventor intended.

This is a significant departure from the current state of affairs in the industry. Typically, engineers and designers sign an agreement with their company that irrevocably gives that company any patents filed related to the employee’s work. The company then has control over the patents and can use them however they want, which may include selling them to others who can also use them however they want. With the IPA, employees can be assured that their patents will be used only as a shield rather than as a weapon.

We will implement the IPA later this year, and it will apply to all patents issued to our engineers, both past and present. We are still in early stages, and have just started to reach out to other companies to discuss the IPA and whether it might make sense for them too.

Good for them.

Get ready for advertising in your Facebook news feed. The company has launched Facebook Offers, which aims to bring Groupon-like deals to users of the social networking site. Facebook will roll out the functionality to page owners gradually over the next few months.

I hope no one is surprised by this. Facebook is free to use because advertisers pay for views.

Update: According to The Next Web, this has actually been around for several months.

Social media—from Facebook to Twitter—have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society.

Facebook was scared shitless and knew that for first time in its life it arguably had a competitor that could not only eat its lunch, but also destroy its future prospects. Why? Because Facebook is essentially about photos, and Instagram had found and attacked Facebook’s achilles heel — mobile photo sharing.

This makes a lot of sense.

Now, where’s that Mac app?

The spam reporting button I put into Dr. Twoot last month¹ was a demonstration that the process could be made much simpler and could be done directly from the timeline—no need to jump to the spammer’s profile. In fact, I now take great pleasure in reporting spammers. A quick click on the ∅ button reports the spammer, blocks him from appearing in my timeline again, and strikes through his tweet.

Ryan Irelan has even done research on what clients making marking tweets as spam easy.

All this has led me to think about why we take time and go out of our way to report Twitter spammers.

Do we do it as a favor to Twitter itself? The company clearly is playing cat-and-mouse with these accounts, as the ebb and flow of tweet spam changes over time.

Or do we just want to keep our neighborhoods nice? I know I hate seeing spam when I’m flicking through my replies, and will report it just to get it out of my face.

Maybe we just like being in charge of something.

Whatever the reason we report spam, I think everyone sees it as a problem.

Of course, not everyone reports spam. Here’s Marco Arment:

Twitter needs a far more aggressive, automated, proactive, heuristic-based anti-spam system. And if someone has trouble legitimately tweeting a link with no text to 100 people in a row who don’t follow them at precise 1-minute intervals, that’s just the price we’ll have to pay.

In the meantime, I’m never using the “Report Spam” feature again, because it just seems like I’m wasting my time.

Will Twitter apps start building in spam filtering, like Mail.app does? That’d sure be something.

People are becoming more world-social and making friends across the globe, some they may never meet in person. Relationships (friendship and love) are being forged online more and more often these days and the Internet is becoming a tool to help people interact on an emotional level. Twitter may be text at 140 characters at a time, but it is an enabler of conversation that can spill out in to many different forms.

My friendship with Myke is a great example of this. He reached out to me on Twitter to be on his podcast, The Bro Show.

Fast forward a year, and I have two shows on his ever-growing podcast network, and we text or talk daily.

Even more so, he’s flying across the ocean to come visit me and my family at the end of April.

Now, my parents would probably freak out that “a guy I met on the Internet” is coming to visit me and will be spending time with my wife and kids, but I don’t have a moment’s hesitation about it. The technology between us has become so transparent, I don’t find it odd or weird at all.

It was just the same at Macworld. I hit it off with guys like Brett Kelly, Ben Brooks and Shawn Blanc without any awkwardness. Heck, I shared a hotel room with Thomas Brand and Pat Dryburgh and nothing sketchy happened.

Why?

Because things like Twitter, iMessage and more tie people together. Spending “actual” time together is just a bonus, really.