Smalltalk with James Robertson

I might get worked up over something like this - but it's pretty much how I assumed things worked anyway:

Bear in mind that we’re not talking 5 years ago. We’re talking last week, and even still today. Right now, as you click on advertising within a number of social network sites, the code behind them is sending your personal information (including your name and/or user ID) to the advertiser.

Cue the all too typical outrage. I just have a hard time caring anymore. Seriously - what's an advertiser going to do? My inbox is already overflowing.

Update: Ok, it's even dumber than that. The "personal data" being sent is... wait for it... the referring url. Oh, the horror.....

Technorati Tags: advertising

This doesn't surprise me a bit - Facebook is still growing, and the "backlash" over privacy is limited to a handful of overly self important A-Listers:

Facebook has had a net gain of 10 million active users since it announced a series of new features at f8, the company's April 21st developer conference. A few high profile tech bloggers may have quit the site, but not many other people have. The number of deactivations, according to a Facebook spokesperson, is about the same as it's been all along.

Outside of the upper reaches of the blogosphere, I haven't heard anyone talking about Facebook having a problem. Here's the bottom line: no else one cares. People seem to have a pretty good grasp of what Facebook is useful for, and they use it for those things. Here's a question: if you aren't a celebrity, how the heck else are you going to regain contact with people you went to school with for a reunion? Back when people tended to live where they grew up, this was a non-issue. Now?

Technorati Tags: privacy, facebook

I linked to this story about an attempt to create a "distributed Facebook" earlier, but I was making a different point about privacy. When I really got into the article, I noticed this:

As they describe it, the Diaspora* software will let users set up their own personal servers, called seeds, create their own hubs and fully control the information they share. Mr. Sofaer says that centralized networks like Facebook are not necessary.

Umm, sure. First, your ISP probably forbids you from running a server of that nature (nevermind whether it should be that way; it is). Second, setting up your own VPS, while easier than it once was, is not for the faint of heart. I documented my efforts here; unless they plan to ship a preconfigured VM for deployment (complete with Apache configuration), then this will catch fire with a handful of tinkerers, and no one else.

What makes Facebook work is that it's simple. This effort might be some things, but simple won't be one of them.

Technorati Tags: simplicity, privacy

Is Facebook overplaying its hand with respect to privacy? There are certainly a lot of people who think so; Jason Calacanis has a long missive up on it, and the Times has a story about a startup dedicated to creating a social media site that "cares about privacy".

I guess my take on all this is a big bag of "so what?" Social media sites exist to share data; if you put something up that you don't want shared, then you're mostly just fooling yourself. Posit some site that has some perfect set of privacy rules. You put up a set of photos that you only share with a core group of friends. Well. If even one of those people copies one of those photos and emails it, then the privacy controls stop mattering, don't they?

All of this is much ado about less than nothing, IMHO. If you put it on a website of any kind, you should expect that it could get shared, period. All the controls in the world won't stop "copy" followed by "email". Once you realize that, you realize just how little this entire conversation matters.

This is the kind of non-reflective stuff I love from social scientists - in the context of worrying about the rise of texting/IM/etc as a communications default amongst kids:

What she and many others who work with children see are exchanges that are more superficial and more public than in the past. “When we were younger we would be on the phone for hours at a time with one person,” said Ms. Evans. Today instant messages are often group chats. And, she said, “Facebook is not a conversation.”

If you jumped into the wayback machine to the 70's, there were plenty of people worried about the impersonal nature of phone conversations, and how it "just couldn't replace" face to face conversations. I suspect that this current worry is part of the ever present worry on the part of adults that the next generation is somehow being ruined by technology.

The semantic web is apparently a sponsored thing:

Facebook has just given us an idea of how quickly these widgets are being adopted: a week after f8, 50,000 websites now feature the Like button and the other new plugins.

There were plenty of people who thought that it would happen some other way - but what was really needed was a critical mass of social users (all the Facebook users) who could be encouraged to start using simple "semantic web" stuff such as the "like" button. I'm part of that 50k - look at the bottom of this post :)

Technorati Tags: facebook, semantic web

Good luck with this - from a New Jersey Middle School Principal:

"It is time for every single member of the BF Community to take a stand! There is absolutely no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! "Let me repeat that - there is absolutely, positively no reason for any middle school student to be a part of a social networking site! None."

Right.... just like there was no reason for his generation to use a phone. When this guy joins the 21st century and reality, he should let the rest of us know.

Technorati Tags: education, stupidity

Looks like my theory on transcoder use in order to support the iPad wasn't off - that's exactly what Facebook has started to do:

As ReadWriteWeb notes, this implementation is not HTML5, which is what YouTube, Vimeo, Brightcove and a host of other video services are starting to support. Instead, Facebook is doing device-based transcoding (something that SaaS companies like Encoding.com provide) and converting the video so that it plays back in a QuickTime-compatible format within the iPad’s native video player.

As time goes by, I expect more sites to move to HTML5 or use Transcoding - and I also expect Flash usage to start dropping. Flash was the video standard for the web, but I think these sorts of moves prove that it's being dethroned....

Technorati Tags: facebook, flash, adobe, iPad

Dare Obasanjo notes that the semantic web is back, via Facebook and the meta-data that they are getting ready to consume via their new open graph API:

One of the things I find most exciting about this development is that sites now have significant motivation to be marked up with extremely structured data which can then be consumed by other applications.

Technorati Tags: facebook

With the Facebook announcements yesterday, it appears that I have some new work on the Smalltalk to Facebook interface. The authentication scheme seems to be simpler (which is good - I never really got the first version as finished as I'd like).

It looks like it's simpler than the old API - that was a mishmash of old and new ideas, whereas this version seems to be unified around a simple data model, and all the accesses to it are via JSON (much, much nicer than XML, IMHO). I'll take a more comprehensive look at it later today.

Technorati Tags: smalltalk, facebook