Rubénerd!

Om Malik on the new Facebook Home thing:

And most importantly it is Facebook, a company that is known to have played loose-and-easy with consumer privacy and data since its very inception, asking for forgiveness whenever we caught them with its hand in the cookie jar. I don’t think we can be that forgiving or reactive with Facebook on mobile.

Robert Scoble in response:

The "privacy angst" folks like Om Malik are wrong

I just read Om Malik's post about why Facebook Home bugs him. Sorry, it's time that we stop listening to those who have "privacy angst."

"Privacy angst?" Class.

Personally, I am supremely thankful we have honest people like Om Malik thinking about these issues, and voicing them in a public space. The true enemy to privacy is complacency.

Don't trust those who tell you to stop thinking or listening.

Emil Protalinski writing for ZDNet:

Summary: Not only did Facebook beat Google to the purchase of Instagram, but it also beat out Twitter, according to a recent rumor.

If that's true, Facebook did Twitter a favour!

By the way, whatever happened to Twitter's acquisition of Posterous? I never really used it, but was thinking of setting one up as a replacement for TwitPic.

Wow, someone who time travelled from even a few years ago wouldn't have any idea what any of these services are.

Facebook is about to go public. Typically what happens with such deals is the prospective public company enlists the assitance of an underwriter, who sells the shares on their behalf. Only a select few are given a crack at the first rounds before the stock is sold to the general public. Understandably, those who get in first make instant millions. Nice work if you can get it.

Sincerely, I've got to hand it to Mark Zuckerberg. Since starting Facebook to get the phone numbers of girls he was too embarrased to ask (darn, why didn't I think of that?), he's arguably demonstrated nothing but contempt for his users, yet here's his project on the cusp of earning billions. Meanwhile, to quote but one example, Julian Assange remains under house arrest. Think about that.

Regardless of where you stand on the Google+ integration into Google search results, this site is an eye opener for what it returns, and who's behind it.

Complete with an Orwellian name!

From the page:

How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves. We created a tool that uses Google’s own relevance measure—the ranking of their organic search results—to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.

Now in Google's defence, they claimed on Google+ that they couldn't perform the same (or similar) thing themselves because Twitter (and presumably Facebook, etc) had closed access to their silos. Right?

All of the information in this demo comes from Google itself, and all of the ranking decisions are made by Google's own algorithms. No other services or APIs are accessed.

Ouch

Now I don't see Google+ as being a credible threat. I also still don't trust Facebook, and feel like they're playing politics here by capitalising on the stumbling of an opponent. As a service Google singled out to make an example of, you can bet the folks at Twitter also relished the opportunity to design the service.

Despite all these caveats, the results speak for themselves. Google could implement this, no question.

What's most breathtaking about this is Google did something that Facebook, Twitter and the like couldn't do: unite them. Seemingly Google didn't get the divide and conquer memo.

Not to pound a dead horse here, but I keep coming back to my theory that marketers and managers now run Google, not its otherwise talented engineers. This is clearly not a technical issue, it's a matter of PR and priorities.

Reminds me of that rehashed Assange quote from last year:

What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? I give private information on corporations to you for free, and I’m a villain. Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.

Some over reported news:

Alec Baldwin likes [Zynga's] Words With Friends, the Scrabble game available on multiple platforms including the iPhone, so much that he missed a flight because of it. [..] On Tuesday, Baldwin was kicked off an American Airlines plane at the Los Angeles International Airport and had to switch to a different flight.

A more recent update on older news:

Online games powerhouse Zynga is shooting for $1 billion in its IPO, according to an amended prospectus filed on Friday morning.

Well, what do you know.

There hasn't been any annoumcenet of it yet on Gowalla's blog, but it's being reported across the tubes the checkin service has been bought by Facebook. Seems I jumped ship just in time.

I wish the team the best of luck in Palo Alto, and hope they do the right thing and allow us to easily export our checkins. Our Atom feeds have been dead for months and their promise to "definitely" develop export tools have gone unfulilled. During early 2010 I used Gowalla to track our last journey through Europe, and would desperately like to not have that stuff lost.

UPDATE: Was about to take a crack at their API, but then rediscovered the gloriously named export.synack.me. Got my checkin history emailed to me in a JSON file. Brilliant! The Hairy Lemon!

With Facebook and Google, we're the product. Is this a new phenomena, or something that has existed with all advertising sponsored media? No prizes for guessing my POV ;).

POV: @perryodd's vehicle

I had a fascinating conversation with @quietdiscourse this afternoon on Facebook and traditional media. His point, and it was a valid one, was that it was unfair to single out Facebook as a company that sells us (well not me anymore, I don't use Facebook) to advertisers, because everything from newspapers to commercial TV uses this model. He asserted the difference between Facebook and traditional media was one of scale, and that we're more offended by Facebook because of the different kind of information they know about us.

While I agree with all he said, I think there's also more to it.

Oh, do tell

He's right that Facebook knows different information about us, but the big ethical question we face (sorry, bad pun) with Facebook is their pervasiveness, and how they perform their business.

The internet has afforded companies an entirely new generation of behavioural tracking that traditional media outlets like commercial television could only dream of. Companies like Google have mostly been on the ethical side of this, though their refusal to bundle DNT by default in Chrome and DoubleClick relying on us maintaining cookies instead of simply respecting our stated intentions also demonstrates their priorities.

Facebook is another kettle of sheep. Wait, got my metaphors mixed there, that's baaaaaaad.

One need only research the Beacon controversy from a few years ago, to the use of their databases by American border controls and the FBI, to the logged out information tracking scandal playing out now to see the issue is far more problematic than the advertising based business models of their predecessors.

Mmm, disclaimers

As I conceded on The Twitters, I'm a developer who happens to write, I'm not a media expert. Still, while I agree we need context when discussing the issues surrounding Facebook, we also need to keep in mind they're an entirely new class of advertising-sponsored service which requires further scrutiny, and I fear we risk trivialising the new issues Facebook introduces by saying all advertising media has similar issues. It's not just what they know, and the scale of their operations, but how they're getting our data and how they're being disseminated and used.

I've argued against the Federal Government's media enquiry on the basis that all media is biased, and time and resources would be better spent on educating people how to objectively analyse what they read. Perhaps education and transparency are the key here too?

This morning Rubénerd.com blew its web hosting bandwidth limit. Frantic, I emailed Net Logistics and despite it being a Sunday morning in Sydney, within 20 minutes they allocated extra bandwidth, and upgraded me to one of their newer plans. That's customers service!

Checking through my server logs, over 32GiB of transfer was blown in five days due to one image request from apps.facebook.com. Needless to say, I'll be finally adding hotlinking protection to .htaccess.

I'll be posting details tomorrow once I’ve done more research. In the meantime, thank you to Alex Paulson and all of you on Google+ and Twitter for letting me know :).

In the words of one of my friends on the service, I finally "caved" and registered for Google+. If you're on it, feel free to add me, do a search for Ruben Schade, esq ^_^.

The [potentially] good stuff!

Having used it for a day now, its pretty clear Google has made no secret of its intentions for Google+. I've read people making broad, sweeping claims that the service serves a niche between Twitter and Facebook, but it's clearly targeted at the latter. And that's a Good Thing™.

The layout is the same as Facebook, the threaded conversations Facebook presumably brought in from their acquisition of FriendFeed are the same, the tabs and even the optional photos along the top are the same. Instead of Facebook's trademark light blue and grey, Google+ is grey and... grey. It's streamlined and minimalistic, in much the same way Facebook was when people were leaving the awful mess of MySpace. Remember MySpace?! CANNOT UNSEE.

Along with the familiar interface to entice Facebookers away, the Google team have also gone out of their way to counter Facebooks insidious, intentionally obfuscated privacy settings that have continued to make headlines. People who think these Circles will always ensure their information is safe from leaking to the wrong people are deluded of course, but the interface for adding people to various circles and the explanations of everything in Plain English are a refreshing change.

More importantly, even if Google+ fails (all but the most dyed in the wool fans readily admit history isn't on Google's side), I hope this demonstration of how privacy settings should be presented provide the impetus for others to implement similar systems, to take privacy more seriously, and that users themselves will stop being so apathetic and start demanding it. A long shot I realise, but who knows?

As I said, I've been using it for a day now and love what they've done with the UI. As a Google Reader user, my Buzz stream is presented as a separate tab, though I wonder how long that'll be the case before its folded into our Google+ profile directly. It certainly seems redundant having two "life streams", but then again Google seems unusually tolerant of such service duplication. Will Google Reader continue to exist in its current form, or will Sharing on the service be replaced with +1?

I'm really exited to see how this all pans out!

The [potentially] bad stuff

If you’ve done nothing wrong, You’ve got nothing to fear;
If you’ve something to hide, You shouldn’t even be here;
You’ve had your chance, Now we’ve got the mandate;
If you’ve changed your mind, I’m afraid it’s too late;
We’re concerned, You’re a threat;
You’re not integral, To the project.
~ Eric Schmidt
~ Pet Shop Boys, Integral

The bad news is, Google+ is run by Google, a company who's overwhelmingly primary source of revenue is selling our habits to behavioural advertisers, not paying tax on it, and that is regularly compelled to disclose information to American intelligence agencies.

While I acknowledge they're vastly more ethical and transparent than Facebook, we still must maintain vigilance and follow common sense rules about cloud computing. Don't use the service for anything private. Withhold certain personal details, and mix in a little BS! Use a profile picture of yourself from your snowy trip to the Czech Republic where your face is obscured enough to render facial recognition algorithms useless!

As I say now, don't be used as a cloud tool, use it as a tool!

ECMA-GoogleScript

The reason why I abstained from Google+ initially is that Google's launching and failing of social network after social network has become a running joke, and that I was less than enthusiastic about starting over for a fifth time. Many of the arguments being used to justify its existence and why it's "different from all their previous services" are what people said... about their previous services. Make no mistake, so far the script has been exactly the same.

Facebook needs some serious comeuppance, and Google is one of the few companies with enough clout, name recognition and cool to take them on. Provided they commit to transparency, Google does have the potential to take the high road against Facebook and be a force for good again.