Category: Social Media

I watched with some interest the fooflah about Facebook’s Beacon.

On the one hand, I think the application serves a useful purpose–it provides a dose of reality for those who have been extolling the virtues of the ‘social graph’ in all dewey eyed innocence. It’s hard to ignore that purchase of Depends showing up for all your friends to see. Hard for your friends to miss, too. Yes, it’s nice to actually see the snooping that’s happening without having to indulge in guesswork: am I, or am I not, a commodity. Now we know for sure: just stick us on the shelf between the sardines and the peanut butter.

On the other hand, how rude.

Now Facebook has come out with a new plan: the stores will still track you, still send your purchase information to Facebook, but you have to actively OK the first story for the site. This still means that the information is sent to Facebook. As proud as you are buying that new Nikon D300, how do you feel about information being sent to Facebook about the good deal on that…oh oh.

Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.

(emph. mine)

Uh huh.

Of course, I expect those people who signed the petition and protested such an invasion of their privacy and trust to quit the service. Why else would people get so uptight but still continue? Unless, like the young lady quoted in the New York Times, they also feel they don’t have a right to privacy.

Indeed.

Am I quitting Facebook? Well, one doesn’t quit Facebook. One deactivates, leaves, never to return, and hopefully hunts down and eradicates every Facebook cookie stored on any and all machines, promising to never, ever, buy into the hype on Techmeme, ever again. It’s not quitting, per se, as much as throwing up barricades. After all, when I go shopping for … it’s none of your damn business.

updated

Oh, look, the Manz R sayin de same thing. Well, that’s a relief. I wouldn’t want people to have to rely on the opinion of a girl.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

I must seem like I’m filled with disdain for Twitter, Facebook, or any of these other jewels of social graphing, or whatever it’s called this week. However, I really don’t have anything against the tools, as much as I can’t stand the hyperbole.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using, and enjoying, Twitter, Facebook, GMail, or any other new darlings. But there’s a lemming like quality to the discussions surrounding these tools that brings out the Critic, the Cynic, and the Curmudgeon in me, almost as a counter balance to weigh down the mountains of fluff.

One would think that being a tech, I would be all over these new ‘forms’ of technology. However, as a tech, I recognize that there really isn’t anything particularly innovative about the technologies behind Twitter, Facebook, and the like. They’re more good examples of dealing with performance issues, and excellent marketing, more than something truly new in the field of technology. They enable social networking? We’ve had social networking through the internet for a half century forty years.

In the meantime, when something new, really new, does come along within the technology field, it’s lost in all of the fooflah about Facebook, Twitter, and so on. I worry, sometimes, that we’re at the end of innovation; that we’re caught up in a cycle of Silicon Valley marketspeak that will never allow anything exciting through.

Jeneane Sessum was interviewed for ComputerWorld for the problems with missing GMail email. I find it fascinating when Google is asked about any problem with its services, it always states it can’t respond fully because of ‘privacy’ concerns.

I don’t use GMail or Yahoo mail or any centralized email service for my email, primarily because, as happened with Facebook, you never know when your interactions with your friends suddenly become marketing fodder. It’s one thing to subject yourself to stealth ads, quite another to do so to your mates.

Centralized data aside, I think the issues with Jeneane’s email, and especially Google’s non-response, demonstrates an increasing problem with Google: it’s spread too thin. If Google doesn’t have its hands in television, it has its hands now in cellphones, closed social networks–increasingly throwing out tendrils into virtually every known, and possibly unknown, form of internet-based interaction. All, of course, with the undercurrent that some day the ‘somethings’ Google puts out will eventually become ‘somethings-with-ads’.

Yahoo’s desperate explorations into the hip (last year, internet operating systems, this year social graph) in order to maintain it’s implicit coolness have been overshadowed by the Peanut Butter Manifesto, a company communication by a senior Yahoo executive worried that the company was spreading itself too thin.

If, however, Yahoo’s rather timid explorations are seen as spreading the company thin, like peanut butter, than Google’s own explorations must be seen as the Vegemite of the internets, as it seeks to scrape smears of itself on everything we touch.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The New York Times has an article about an incident that happened some time back: A young man Twitters he’s going to commit suicide. The article features our old friend, ambient intimacy. It also features quotes by yours truly, and about half a dozen other folks you probably know.

I was a little surprised to read some of the quotes from folks. People breaking up with their mates via Twitter? Posting everything online before talking to each other directly? It’s almost as if the only intimacy these people share, is the ‘ambient.’ There’s nothing real.

I’d rather be alone. I really would, rather be alone.

Recovered from the Wayback Machine.

The world is happily building away their new vision of a utopia based on social networking and an open OpenSocial API, which is going to link just everything together.

Perhaps the world will read the terms of use of the API, and realize this is not an open API; this is a free API, owned and controlled by one company only: Google. Hopefully, the world will remember another time when Google offered a free API and then pulled it. Maybe the world will also take a deeper look and realize that the functionality is dependent on Google hosted technology, which has its own terms of service (including adding ads at the discretion of Google), and that building an OpenSocial application ties Google into your application, and Google into every social networking site that buys into the Dream. Hopefully the world will remember. Unlikely, though, as such memories are typically filtered in the Great Noise.

Via a Wired article comes Anil Dash:

Regardless, Google’s move is a big bet on interoperability — and against the “winner take all” philosophy of social networking, according to Six Apart’s Dash.

“The market has already decided that there’s going to be a long tail of social networks, and that people are going to belong to more than one. As soon as you belong to more than one, this kind of interoperability is critical,” Dash says. “Open standards win every time.”

A lot of people have a different idea of what ‘open’ means than I do. Is this a Silicon Valley interpretation? Do we need Silicon Valley dictionaries that have entries such as:

o·pen (ō’pən)
adj.

Defined and controlled by Google.

From Russell Beattie, who took the red pill. Or is it the blue pill?

Would people be jumping on this bandwagon so readily if it was Microsoft unilaterally coming up with an API, holding secret meetings geared towards undercutting the market leader, and then making sure that only those anointed partners get a head start on launch day by making sure a key part of the API isn’t released – even in alpha. (It obviously exists already, all the partners have that spec and even sample code, I’m sure. The rest of us don’t get access yet, until the GOOG says otherwise).

Silly boy. Looks like he doesn’t use the Silicon Valley dictionary, either. If he did he would know that Microsoft is synonymous for doing evil while Google is synonymous for…well, you know.

But yes, I also looked for the RESTful part of the equation. It wasn’t there. One would think that OpenSocial was rushed out the door quickly, for some reason.

Open standards are not built in secret, with copyright and control owned by one, and only one, company. Open standards belong to the people, and though the standard development process may seem overly political at times–full of anger, rhetoric, accusations small and large, pissing contests, not to mention mind numbing discussions over the smallest points of disagreement–in the end you have a truly open standard that everyone owns a tiny piece of.

But hey! Why am I always so gloomy and paranoid! This is the future of the web, boys and girls. Jump in!

PS This is not a specification whose focus is to import or export your contacts and other relevant information between tools. This is meant for application developers; to create applications like Scrabulous (which is quite fun, btw) that work in social networks other than just Facebook. Until we see more of the RESTful portion of the API, we won’t know if an export/import is feasible.