While it feels like everyone in the world is talking about the whole Facebook privacy thing, my quick and informal survey of some non-internety folks came back with a bunch of blank stares.
Anyway, Openbook does a better job explaining what's up than just about anything I've seen. Do a quick search for anything you imagine people wouldn't want made public about themselves and it comes back. It sort of reminds when AOL released a whole bunch of supposedly anonymized search data only to find out that it's really easy to track back to individuals. Only this time there's not even an attempt to make it anonymous. Now I get that people should have a better understanding of what they make public and all that jazz, but it's pretty easy to find some stuff that any person with half a conscience would hide away for the person who made it public.
[Via The Awl]
Tags: aol, facebook, privacy
The most interesting thing to me about this Inside Facebook story on Facebook surpassing Myspace in US Google searches was the accompanying graph. While it's big news in an of itself, a closer look at the search versus news coverage tells an interesting story. Starting in the middle of 2007 Facebook began to overtake Myspace in media mentions. At the same time Myspace was roughly four times more popular as a US search term. While that gap slowly closed over the last two years, the media coverage for Facebook was consistently at or above Myspace.
Now I mention this because if you were to follow just media mentions (which many do), you would be falsely led to believe that Facebook was far more popular than Myspace. This isn't a particularly revolutionary idea, but comparing searches (intentions) versus news mentions on Google trends gives a nice way to compare these things in a simple way.
Got any more of these trends that show the media over-representing? (For the record, I'm not sure the media is doing anything wrong here. Facebook was the property who's interest was growing. With that said, it's impossible to say what that growth would have looked like without the aggressive coverage.)
Tags: facebook, media
Wherever you stand in the Twitter debate (love or hate), I have contested for some time that you at least have to find it interesting that so many people are into communicating in this new way. Anyway, I quite enjoyed this story of how Twitter came to be from @Dom. (The original nugget was super simple: "a service that uses SMS to tell small groups what you are doing".)
As a side note, my (kinda) bold prediction for 2009 is that Facebook will buy Twitter and Microsoft will buy Facebook (or at least put the wheels in motion). While I think both can be profitable services, I don't think either will ever be massively so (especially if they rely on business models that are about interpersonal interactions). At the end of the day, I'm not sure how either will live up to the large investments they already have (and rumor has it both are looking to add to, Twitter with $20 million). Sure, I understand Fred's point about looking at costs when thinking about revenues, but surely all the investors in these two companies are going to want to see returns that match the scale of their investments, right? (Just my two cents.)
Tags: business, facebook, history, twitter
<rant>
Today I got some Facebook spam. It's the first time it's happened, it came from a friend and it ended up on my wall. After Twittering about it, Ray pointed me towards these posts on the Facebook blog. So it looks like the problem lies in people giving their username/passwords out to random sites with promises of apps (or something). These sites then take control of a user's account and send out a barrage of spam.
Okay, now for the rant. The reason this is happening in part is Facebook's own fault (as well as a lot of other parties). Part of the way these sites have expanded at the speed they have is by asking people to enter their email username/password and then crawling their contact list and showing users/sending out invites appropriately. By encouraging this kind of behavior, Facebook makes it seem okay to give a site (even one you trust) your username and password, which it shouldn't be. Ever. Period.
OAuth attempts to solve this problem by bouncing you over to the other site for approval, rather than asking for the login info. Google has implemented a version of this, but it's still not being used by many sites (the only integration I've seen is Dopplr).
Now Facebook isn't alone in this one. Every social site has a feature like this where they ask for email usernames and passwords. This is bad for business.
</rant>
Tags: facebook, security, socialnetworking
A company called Weblo is helping Facebook members sell ads on their profile pages. This apparently is against the rules because Facebook doesn't want profile pages to become "a free-for-all.� As the article rightly points out, "Weblo gets to the heart of a question of ownership that will generate more debate as more people spend more of their time looking at content created by other ordinary people. When users post reviews of restaurants on a media site, for example, should they get to share in the ad revenues generated?"
It will be interesting to see how this plays out. I've thought for a while ad revenue sharing is a huge opportunity in the social networking space.
Tags: advertising, facebook, socialnetworking
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