Rubénerd!

I must admit a certain level of professional ignorance when it comes to cloud computing; much of my own commentary on the subject has been limited to security problems and my general anger with the way sites like Facebook have abused their users. It was refreshing to see some good stuff :).

I almost went to it!

Its one thing to feel frustration when you can't attend an event on the other side of the planet, it's quite another to know the CEO of SalesForce is hosting CloudForce Singapore less than two kilometers from your house and you didn't register in time to attend! As usual I found about the event on Twitter but it was too late.

Instead I opted to watch the webcast as I done so many times with events like this that previously I couldn't attend because of geographic isolation, and fortunately there were plenty of friendly people on Twitter discussing the events and ideas; I even met a few new people. That whole sentence could have been phrased better.

It's not what, it's why

It's almost become a journalistic cliche to compare every keynote speech with Stevenotes, but I'm neither a journalist nor am I worried about cliches ;)

Steve Jobs does such an amazing job building buzz and with the delivery of his Stevenotes, partly due to the cult of personality surrounding him and his mysterious company, but mostly for a reason I think most people miss: he takes the time to explain why his company is developing things and not just what.

SalesForce's CEO Mark Benioff was such a treat to watch for the same reason, instead of discussing a dry list of features he explained throughout the presentation why he was doing things while being refreshingly humble and candid. Enterprise software tools from Lotus, Microsoft, Siebel and Oracle are limiting and not enjoyable for people to use (both my father and I have personal experience!) Why can't enterprise software act more like Facebook or Twitter which people are flocking to in droves and are using to answer questions instead of asking support teams?

Impressions

Forgive the use of weasel words and general awe and glow with these nest few paragraphs, I only just finished watching the keynote and am still in awe!

Cloud 2 and Chatter looked phenomenal, particularly when they were demonstrated live through their Singapore data centres throughout the talk. Much of the interface was deliberately designed to resemble social networks that people are (according to them) now in more common use than email as of 2009! Not only was it internal to SalesForce, but it even made it possible for the likes of support technicians to reply via Twitter.

I could see people wanting to use these services instead of being forced to, which in itself could drastically change how people communicate in businesses. The difference between feeling compelled to use something and being forced to is something most business software vendors seem to have been either blissfully ignorant of, or haven't cared because they're too busy worrying about what they look like on paper or for the developers who'd be implementing it.

To me one of the more salient points made was that while Facebook in particular is a compelling platform, it lacked privacy, security and trust which limited its future growth and use in enterprise and SMBs environments. If I were using their services I'd be adopting a wait-and-see approach initially, but if SalesForce can deliver on these promises I could even see it putting pressure on sites like Facebook. Not necessarily in competing with users, but with attitudes.

I also liked their demonstration of being able to change the entire interface into foreign languages without any extra work, and using Simplified Chinese in their example (this being Singapore and all). Xie xie :)

Apples and Microsofts

I must admit I enjoyed the many playful jokes Marc made at the expense of Microsoft such as explaining the reason why he used an iPad was because a Microsoft tablet wouldn't work, or to Google's Singh that he felt no need or want to upgrade expensive Office suites every few years; even going as far as to call their cloud computing efforts merely a half arsed, last gasp attempt to remain relevant and as a stepping stone between their past and the future.

To highlight the cross platform nature of Cloud2 and Chatter in particular, he made use (to put it mildly!) of iPads, iPhones and a BlackBerry showing information and photos being transferred in real time regardless of where it was coming from. A few people on Twitter seemed angry that he'd lambast Microsoft and do advertising for Apple, Marc even saying that it goes against their message as being platform agnostic. Personally I saw it as using the best platforms available, which can be done because they're platform agnostic, and as he answered in the Q&A he did show his BlackBerry too.

My sincerest apologies

Forgive the terrible grammar and long, convoluted sentences, I wrote this just as the keynote ended and I wanted to get all my ideas down before I started forgetting stuff. If this were going into a magazine column or a blog network, no doubt I'd be fired. Heck, that's why I don't do either, right? ;).

I tell you what though, this whole talk was a fantastic advertisement for SalesForce, I've been rather apathetic with cloud computing but now I want to check it out and start developing on it! Well, once I've got all my Django and ncurses stuff done. Gosh darn it, why does there have to be so many interesting things to study now!?

I wonder what Mitch Kapor thinks of Chatter?

In response to the continual antics of Zuckerberg and Co, today was the International Kill Your Facebook Day (or variations upon that theme).

Unfortunately, I have such tenuous link with so many people I still need my account, though today I took the opportunity to scrub it of all my information other than my name and a fake religion called "fake-account-ism". I'm still one of Zuckerbergs pawns, but at least I'm no good to the third parties that cut his cheques. Well, less good, at least now they'd have to trawl their database looking for items people think they deleted but were just stored somewhere else or with a different database flag.

Its a reality check

Reading books such as Hoodwinked you could be forgiven for thinking the people of my generation are more ethical and have more of a desire to good socially and for the environment than previous generations. I suppose Zuckerberg is a splash of cold water and a solid reality check on this view. There are people of every generation who's motivation is profit above people.

Here's hoping Diaspora or another similar project can do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace.

The Whole Wheat Factor

Of course I'm also a hypocrite, as Jim Kloss pointed out this morning my time:

Thanks for adding the Whole Wheat Radio Player Ruben. We both made compromises. I wrote the unbelievably contorted code to add a simple link to Facebook profiles and you logged onto FB. ;-) ---Jim

He's right, of course! In my defence, I figure the information from this widget is in the WWR community silo and not Facebook, and unlike most widget developers I trust Jim :).

For those who don't know, Whole Wheat Radio is an internet radio station and community wiki showcasing entirely independent music.

Soylent Greenbes: You are not Facebook's customer. You are the product that they sell to their real customers -- advertisers. Forget this at your peril.

Alas, forgetting still doesn't give you the ability to permanently delete your account and have Facebook forget you. Which is a shame because in Soviet Russia, Facebook forgets you.

I know I've been saying this repeatedly for years now, but it seems just when Facebook does something interesting, they take two steps back in privacy in the same pen stroke. I'm saving my worrying out loud about Facebook's new Like button for another post, this one has to do with (yet another!) disturbing policy change.

From The Consumerist:

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced this morning that Facebook will toss a policy that made developers and partners with access your data to delete it after 24 hours. Now they can just keep it.

The reason [they gave] had to do with server load:

Zynga [makers of Mafia Wars and Farmville] has had to download user information 100 million times per day because of our policy. Developers were having to architect entire systems just to do this.

Rant rant rant!

Zynga? You mean that company that did all those advertising scams? They've had to go to great lengths to take data to use it like that? Well I'm sorry guys, but this is the price you have to pay to use people's data responsibly. People don't give their data to you, they give them to Facebook and they don't want you siloing it to data mine for your own nefarious purposes over long periods of time. They have their data abused by Facebook in that way enough as it is let alone allowing every third party developer with even less credibility and ethics than Facebook to do it.

What's next, they're going to complain they need entire servers set up to serve and receive HTTP requests or email? Okay I know I'm stretching the analogy a little, but I find it really hard to muster sympathy for such operations that are raking in money from suspect activities.

This change in policy for Facebook may have been borne of necessity (or so they claim, I'm really suspicious from a systems architect and ethical point of view) but it reeks of opportunism to me. What better way to push through something that would otherwise be unpopular?

A definition is a definition is a definition is a...

From a Wikipedia article that ironically has a verification and citation shortage:

Opportunism is the conscious policy and practice of taking selfish advantage of circumstances, with little regard for principles.

From Wiktionary:

The taking of opportunities; especially the practice of seeking immediate advantage from a situation without considering the long term

From the Encyclopedia of Jim Kloss (I assume):

Opportunism is when the RIAA takes a sledge hammer and tries to shove it somewhere where the sun don't shine, then calls it "helping artists"

In a worrying trend, it seems Apple will be furthering Facebook integration this time with iTunes. MacRumours is hardly an impartial source on such matters, but that ratio above doesn't look too favourable.

Look, Apple, I love you man, but instead of all these gimmicky features that introduce serious privacy and security concerns for a website people won't be using in a few years, why not focus on making the software run smoother? I've been using iTunes since version 1 on Mac OS 9 and it keeps getting worse; it's the only software other than the Firefox 3.5 series that can frequently crash my Mac.

I understand you have two concurrent code bases to maintain and in that context it makes sense to keep using C++ and Carbon for this reason, but when you start to hear people complaining about using an iPhone because the otherwise easy to use iTunes software is bloated and slow, you know you have a problem.

I really, really hope you either have plans for a native Cocoa version or have one running in house along with these silly new features.

Facebook's constant terms of service changes almost seem designed to test the limits of what they can get away with, much like Microsoft in the 1990s. This is the creepiest part of their proposed privacy policy:

Pre-Approved Third-Party Websites and Applications.

It's as if they took slides from a Security and Privacy 101 lecture and used the headings to construct a sentence.

In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook).

In other words, they know many people will be using Facebook with other browser tabs open, so they'll be exploiting them using a "legitimised" kind of XSS. Oh well, I suppose I could run Facebook in a sandbox or a separate browser that deletes cookies and history each session. Wait, no, that won't work because...

Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website).

I already knew my less security and privacy conscious friends were making a worryingly large slice of my information available when they installed any application, but this means it'll extend to sites as well? Really?!

Fortunately, we have nothing to fear because of all this stuff:

In these cases we require these websites and applications to go through an approval process, and to enter into separate agreements designed to protect your privacy. For example, these agreements include provisions relating to the access and deletion of your General Information, along with your ability to opt-out of the experience being offered. You can also remove any pre-approved website or application you have visited here [add link], or block all pre-approved websites and applications from getting your General Information when you visit them here [add link].

Malicious users who are able to exploit a bug in the implementation of this on a pre-approved third-party server don't sign agreements. They're also banking on the fact most users don't know or care about the technical workings of their Facebook accounts and won't do anything.

In addition, if you log out of Facebook before visiting a pre-approved application or website, it will not be able to access your information.

So you're admitting that as long as they're logged into Facebook in another tab in their browser you'll continue to perform your aforementioned suspect activities, while legitimising it by saying once they log out it'll all be peachy?

You can see a complete list of pre-approved websites on our About Platform page.

Whew, first good piece of news I read, I'll have some URIs to add to my DNS blacklist. Hope they're not sites I frequent otherwise I'm stuffed.

Other sections

Other parts of this new Privacy Policy are dodgy, but not any more than usual. This one about cookies didn't seem right, though perhaps that's just because I've never "interacted" with an advertisement before. TACO might have something to do with that though :P.

We also use [cookies] to confirm that you are logged into Facebook, and to know when you are interacting with [...] our advertisements.

The final word(s)

As with many users, I'm really torn when Facebook does crap like this. I already decided last year to stop updating my profile and delete all my applications, but if this goes through I'll delete all my data save for my email address and name (folks from high school still sometimes contact me through it). Surprising though it may seem, I haven't found any way to permanently (though even that's debatable) wipe a Facebook account short of deleting it and starting again.

Sometimes I go to bed feeling great about humanity, most nights I don't.

Not sure what's scarier, the fact these messages exist for me to get sent in the first place, or that people who know me (or have at least added me on Facebook) think I'd be receptive to them.

This message was written in a character set other than your own. If it is not displayed correctly, click here to open it in a new window.

Jaslyn became a fan of FARMVILLE - FREE ALL IN ONE tractor WITH UNLIMITED GAS! SPECIAL PROMOTIONAL on Facebook and suggested you become a fan too.

To see more details and confirm this invitation, follow the link below: [redacted]

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

I'm willing to accept the irony is so thick I'm just not getting it, like Fred Basset.

Hot on the heels of my comment on someone's tweet about Facebook (wow, wasn't that an internet sentence) one of my friend CalgaryGuru's tweets got me thinking about FriendFeed.

Just pulled Facebook out of my FriendFeed... Stuff I post on FB doesn't always make sense as a twitter tweet. Besides, FF is depricated.

(emphasis added)

It seems like only yesterday all the social network big wigs, head honchos and other cranially related titles (cranially related titles?) were using FriendFeed and hailing it as the aggregation answer to all their disparate service problems. Then overnight Facebook bought them out, and now they're about as relevant as Google Knol or the Rubénerd Blog.

I'd anticipated the sale to Facebook would scare some people off, but I had no idea it would be this quick and to the sheer extent it did. As far as I know Leo Laporte's TWiT network uses it for shows, but other than that when I go to FriendFeed it feels like a ghost town. I'm not the only one saying this.

My dad and I still have our FriendFeed accounts, but neither of us can remember when we used them. Do you still use yours?

The funny thing is, I still get emails every now and then telling me someone new is following my FriendFeed profile. Huh.

@jowyang commenting on #smba:

Many attendees say they don't trust Facebook. Concerned about how their data is used, permissions, and connecting personal with work

It seems this attitude is spreading. Having spent some time at my uni's computer barns recently, I've overheard conversations even by non-techie people about how Facebook is starting to worry them. Some naturally talk about how their significant others, bosses and the like accidentally saw something they weren't supposed to, but others talked about the issues Owyang is hearing too. This is a fundamental shift in attitudes.

The vast majority of Facebook users probably don't know or care, but all it takes is for enough people to become worried for a shift to start happening. The Facebook guys should be taking this gradual erosion of their reputation very seriously because unlike their constant remodelling that angers people but then gets ignored, this could be enough to scare people away from their service.

The problem is, with MySpace and Friendster back in the day there was a viable alternative in the form of Facebook to move over to when things starting getting icky. What is there for disaffected Facebook users? Twitter is a different type of service, and Orkut doesn't seem to be getting anywhere outside South America.

I suppose we've got a while yet before things really change.

It seems Mark Zuckerberg has started poking fun at the folks who adamantly hate the latest in a string of new Facebook changes.

I HATE CHANGE AND EVERYTHING ASSOCIATED WITH IT

I WANT EVERYTHING TO REMAIN STATIC THROUGHOUT MY ENTIRE LIFE

I DO NOT KNOW WHAT I WANT FROM THINGS I CANNOT CONTROL

BY LOGICAL DEDUCTION I AUTOMATICALLY OPPOSE THE NEW FACEBOOK STREAMING HOME PAGE

IF I HAVE TO EXPLAIN THIS GROUP IT IS NO LONGER FUNNY

First, good on Mark for ignoring the people who made him rich and telling them what they should want and expect, and secondly good on him for getting away with it while people still use it, those people afraid to leave because "other people use it". He's a marketing genius!

Personally, I can't wait for another five years to pass when Facebook becomes MySpace and Friendster and there's a new service people are using. Given the string of companies and services lying in the dust behind it, it'll probably be just as closed and suspect as Facebook, but one could always dream of an alternative open system that has data independence and a bit more accountability.

You've got to love the people setting up groups on Facebook demanding they change the site back. As long as they're still using it, Facebook management couldn't care less what they post about! The only way they'd start to care is if Facebook stopped growing and people started leaving it for another service which in the short term they know people won't do. Perhaps it's akin to people like me using hashtags to spread awareness of causes on Twitter that doesn't end up achieving anything but we all feel good doing it.

On a related note, other people have tagged me in photos but I haven't updated my Facebook profile since early October. In social networking terms, that's an eternity!