Sonos Era 100 Review How to Download iOS 16.4 Save 55% on iPhone Cases How to Sign Up for Google's Bard Apple's AR/VR Headset VR for Therapy Clean These 9 Household Items Now Cultivate Your Happiness
Want CNET to notify you of price drops and the latest stories?
No, thank you
Accept
Culture

Facebook's 'lie' button and other fun from Shorty Awards

The Shorty Awards honor excellence in social media. So just how do the rest of us get better at this "social thing"?

Sree Sreenivasan headshot
Sree Sreenivasan
2 min read
The "Lie" button, the subject of one of the funny videos at this year's Shorty Awards.

Like the medium they honor -- social media -- the Shorty Awards are whimsical, fun, and irreverent, with a pinch of seriousness, activism, and social good thrown into the mix.

I've been a judge for the Shorty Awards for several years (with such folks as David Pogue (@Pogue), Esther Dyson (@edyson), Craig Newmark (@CraigNewmark), and Steve Wozniak (@stevewoz).

Along with the judging, I've also played the Shorty version of Joan Rivers. Earlier this month, at the ceremony in New York's Times Center, instead of asking about their clothes or nuggets of gossip, I used interviews to probe this question: "How do we get better at this social thing?"

Below you'll find a mix of prerecorded pieces as well and some of my 40+ interviews with winners and others.

Let's start with a video about the Facebook "lie" button. It's a project of the imagination of Matt Semel (@MattSemel), who also did last year's fake tech product, Ignorify.

Here's Felicia Day (@FeliciaDay), the night's emcee and star of Web and TV shows, discovering the benefits of having 2 million followers on Twitter:

Here's actor Seth Green (@SethGreen) and the Mars Curiosity Rover (@MarsCuriosity) chatting about movies, Twitter and more:

Here's George Takei (@GeorgeTakei), who has found a new life as social media star who and won for achievement in Internet culture:

And here's a playlist of my interviews:

This is the full list of my interviews. Among those whose work you might know:

Texts From Hillary, winner of Tumblr of the Year:

If you are a fan of the BBC show "Sherlock" or British band One Direction, you might know these winners of fan site of the year:

The creators of the Shortys are Greg Galant and Lee Semel -- I wrote about them and their other project, MuckRack, last year in "The most Twittery journalists of them all."