These companies couldn’t be more different: Intel, the big chipmaker whose stock in trade is billions of silicon chips, and Facebook, the online social network whose business is–well, not very much yet, but ultimately getting its members to take on…
Facebook and Intel: A Tale of Two Frenzies
Facebook’s 60 Second roundup
Sixty seconds because it’s 1) very short, and 2) if you concatenate “60″ and “Minutes” on a blog the chances of getting sued for trademark infringement go up dramatically.
I didn’t see Leslie Stahl’s segment with Mark Zuckerberg, so I’m relying on others…
And then there’s the real gem from the online debate - a cut to reality from Michael Learmonth of the Alley Insider. After noting that the interview had the worst ratings of the year, Learmonth explained why:
…but it may also be due to the fact that (shhh!) outside of the certain corners of the Internet, no one cares that much about Facebook.
Mr. Learmonth gets the Pulitzer Prize for Truthiness, I bet.
Tagged: 60 Minutes, Facebook, Leslie Stahl, Mark Zuckerberg
Will Zuckerberg have a Roger Clemens-esqe 60 Minutes appearance?
Facebook Mark Zuckerberg will appear on “60 Minutes” and talk the Beacon advertising scheme and how it’s a great idea that just needs a little work.
Every once in a while a “60 Minutes” appearance goes well for the subject. Other times you get an appearance like Roger Clemens’ stint last week where he’s shifting […]
Facebook has announced that users will soon … [Facebook]
Facebook has announced that users will soon be able to shove profile-cluttering apps into a collapsible “extended” section. Until then, you can still pare down app-heavy profiles with the Facebook Profile Cleaner Greasemonkey script. [via]
Facebook Tries to Sell Out on “60 Minutes”
On Sunday night, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will appear on “60 Minutes” to tell the world that Facebook is in trouble. He doesn’t say that in so many words, of course, but his participation on the weekly news show, given the unlikelihood that many in Facebook’s existing demographic of 12-to-24-year-olds watch “60 Minutes” on a regular basis, signals that the social networking site is trying to connect with a larger audience.
Sure, Facebook has 60 million members and is valued at $15 billion, but it is still the No. 2 social network. To defend its lofty valuation, Facebook needs to grow its user base and figure out how to make money off of it, and those two things are looking like they may be mutually exclusive. Consider the reaction of the social networking site’s users to its Beacon advertising program. Om certainly didn’t think too highly of it.
But before the privacy agitators get excited all over again about the fact that Beacon collected and then posted purchases made on partner sites to all of your friends on an opt-out basis, it’s important to realize how fast users have let their privacy erode in the online world. Facebook may in fact be able to walk the line between building a community and selling that community to advertisers.
It has to. Zuckerberg gives several clues as to the catch-22 facing the social network in the interview, while also indicating that Facebook plans to continue pushing the envelope on advertising.
“It might take some work for us to get this exactly right. This is something we think is going to be a really good thing,” Zuckerberg tells correspondent Lesley Stahl about Beacon. “I mean, there have to be ads either way because we have to make money…We have 400 employees. We have to support all that and make a profit.”
Facebook’s shilling and advertising flubs show how hard it is to make money operating a social network, and how short-sighted people are when it comes to valuing these sites based on users. Advertisers want to see lots of engaged users on a site, but users don’t really want to see too much from advertisers. So Facebook has to walk a fine line to make both parties happy. If they can do it well, they’ll be a case study for building a social operating system. If they can’t, then they may become just another commodity.
And until Facebook figures all this out, the company apparently doesn’t plan on going public. Zuckerberg also told Stahl: “I think…what I can announce is that it is highly unlikely that we will go public in 2008 and when going public makes sense to do, we’ll do that.”
All roads lead to the social Web
During a panel discussion at CES, Owen Van Natta, chief revenue officer at Facebook, said, “We believe that social network is not building a new niche or vertical but it will permeate everything on Web and unlock things we don’t do today.” All roads lead to the social Web.
Over the last few years, the Web […]
Browse Facebook Photos iPhoto-Like with PhotoBook [Featured Mac Download]
Mac OS X only: Desktop Facebook application PhotoBook browses your own and your friends’ Facebook photo albums in an interface similar to iPhoto. Install PhotoBook and log into your Facebook account to easily navigate users and albums in a decidedly user-friendlier interface than Facebook on the web. PhotoBook comes with easy “add to iPhoto” feature (great for sucking friends’ and family members’ albums into your own collection), search as you type, full-screen slideshows, and keyboard shortcuts that make flipping through Facebook photos a lot faster and easier. PhotoBook 1.1 is a free download for Mac only.
Do You ‘Back Up’ Your Web Networking Life? [Ask The Readers]
Over at PC Magazine, columnist Sascha Segan argues that many of us are going to have a big ol’ pity party down the line, when we realize that social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook make it difficult to look through sentimental memories and messages like you can with paper or email. MySpace is bad enough, he writes, but:
Facebook is even worse, because so much Facebook information is metadata, a stream of “pokes” and “virtual gifts” and other non-e-mail-related information that adds up to a history of human interaction.
Segan raises an interesting point: How do we archive our relationships and significant moments when they happen on a social network? If Facebook, MySpace, and the like aren’t around in five or 10 years, will you miss the personal history you’ve stored up on them? If you did want to “back up” your social network information for later viewing, how would you go about it? Share your ideas in the comments.
Facebook, Google And Plaxo Join The DataPortability Workgroup
After publishing an invitation to Facebook to join the DataPortability Working Group January 4, we never thought that Facebook would accept it. Today changes everything you’ve ever thought about social-networking data and lock-in before, because today Facebook, Google and Plaxo have joined the DataPortability Workgroup.
Google and Plaxo joining are a positive, however given that both have previously joined together for platforms such as OpenSocial it’s not that significant, but Facebook is another matter. On January 4 Michael sort of defended Facebook’s stance against Plaxo pulling data from Facebook on the grounds that “Facebook also has a very good reason for protecting email addresses - user privacy.” Today, by joining the DataPortability Working Group Facebook is embracing open standards and open access, and that is a huge fundamental change from its previous stance on being locked in to closed standards.
I spoke with the head of the DataPortability Group Chris Saad prior to this post (Chris is also the CEO of Faraday Media.) After about 24 hours of correspondence, the following are to join the working group as official representatives of their respective companies: Joseph Smarr (Plaxo), Brad Fitzpatrick (Google) and Benjamin Ling (Facebook).
The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.
There has been no shortage of people who have knocked Facebook for their closed standards prior to today, perhaps many of whom had a legitimate point. Today Facebook has taken the first step towards open standards and data portability, and despite those previous gripes they should be congratulated for it.
Facebook 
Plaxo
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What is Facebook’s stance on data portability?
The latest wrinkle on the controversy over importing Facebook data into Plaxo is that Facebook has reinstated Robert Scoble’s 5,000 friend account per the following email and caveat (in bold):
Hi Robert,
Facebook’s Terms of Use broadly prohibits the running of automated scripts on the site because they can be used to commit malicious attacks, send […]
In defense of Facebook
It’s not as if Facebook needs my defense; it has Microsoft’s millions. And I can certainly be accused of Facebook fervency in my writings. But I think some are too quick to jump on Facebook’s back precisely because it is so big and successful.
But I see something bigger happening here: I think Facebook is redefining how to make a mistake.
When they announced the newsfeed, they took their users by surprise and pissed them off but after pulling back and explaining it went ahead and as it turns out, they were right: The newsfeed is the heart of Facebook and is, I’ve been arguing, a new interface for news elsewhere.
When they announced the ad program, they again took their users by surprise and didn’t include enough privacy controls for the users but after pulling back and adding those controls, I’ll say again that I think they’re onto something. See what Matt McAlister says responding to my musings about airlines capturing the wisdom of their crowds the last few days:
Carrying the theme to retail markets, you can imagine that you will walk into H&M and discover that one of your first-degree contacts recently bought the same shirt you were about to purchase. You buy a different one instead. Or people who usually buy the same hair conditioner as you at the Walgreen’s you’re in now are switching to a different hair conditioner this month. Though this wouldn’t help someone like me who has no hair to condition.
That’s what Facebook’s ad strategy will work to deliver: Social shopping. And I want that. Just as I’m interested in what apps friends install I’m interested in what products they buy, so long as they are willing to tell me, and also what they think of them.
Now comes the Scoble Plaxo kerfuffle but Facebook did right: It protected my email from going to the dreaded Plaxo. It cut off Scoble for violating the TOS. But it then reinstated Scoble before he could make a video whining about them. Plenty of folks say they did right.
But now to the bigger point: how Facebook makes mistakes. See Rick Segal defending Zuckerberg on this point:
The larger issue and concern for me is the piling on from Bloggers and questionable Political Action Groups when it comes to pounding on Mark Zukerberg. I turn fifty in 22 days so I can clearly say Mark is a kid. He is going to make lots of mistakes and he will continue to learn and grow. Focusing in on him and how he personally handed it, dissecting his blog posts, etc, is just silly. Many of the blog posts, especially from the “A” list types, have that twinge of arrogance and smugness which is normally seen when the business of business turns into the blood sport of watching somebody fail.
We need to use care in beating up Zuckerberg and Facebook in general because we want these folks to push the limits of finding new ideas and trying to make sense out of all the data flowing everywhere. Try it and get some reactions, adjust, find the happy center, rinse and repeat. That’s what Facebook should be doing and all the users and give feedback about the business. If they go off sides, it will get corrected, it always does. If they do really bad things, people vote with the mouse clicks. Just ask MySpace or AOL’s GeoCities. People vote and have no problem moving.
Right. We can’t expect to see new companies innovating and taking chances without the chance that they make mistakes. Of course, they’ll make mistakes. The question is what they do about them. Zuckerberg and Facebook have done a good job listening to their public and correcting their mistakes and keeping the nerve to innovate and experiment and they do it in the open.
Too often, companies and brands — especially media brands, I’ll add — try to act as if they’re perfect and they don’t make mistakes and they don’t want to risk their reputations by making any. This makes them timid and kills innovation.
I’d rather have a company that tries to innovates and makes mistakes so long as they listen and correct them. That, I believe, is the new way for companies to act. It works only if you are in a conversation with your customers and listen to them. And so far, Facebook has done that. So I agree with Segal. And I say don’t be so quick to jump on or write off Zuckerberg et al. They’ve done a lot right so far. Could they make the Big Mistake that messes it all up? Sure. That’s what Plaxo did with me, spamming me to the point that I will never trust that brand or company again.
But so far, Facebook has learned from its mistakes. That’s the most I can ask form.
What he says
Mike Arrington gets it right in the kerfuffle over Robert Scoble using a Plaxo scraper to take email addresses of his friends — mine included, I might add — and put them into their damned spam machine. Scoble’s doing to loud public crying act over this but I agree with Mike that Plaxo is wrong and Facebook is right. I want Facebook to protect my email address. I don’t want Scoble downloading it and giving it over to Plaxo, a brand and company I will never, never trust and would never choose to do business with or hand data to on my own. So much of the reaction to this little incident gets it backwards; there has been much talk about how we should be able to get our data out of Facebook and that’s fine but we also need to protect our data from others making use of it without our permission and that’s what this is about in the end.
: And what she says: Dawn, comment on Arrington’s post:
Facebook has created an environment where we only allow access to certain items that we want people to see. If I have let Scoble see my entire profile, meaning my education, my employment, my DOB, etc., and he takes any of that with him, to where ever he is taking it (and he could take it elsewhere), he is violating my right to privacy.
Not only does this affect the careful identity construction that I’ve done, but it also undermines my ability to only be a part of communities that I wish to take part in. He is porting my identity to sites unknown and using it in a way that I haven’t consented to.
If today it is Robert Scoble, who is to say that tomorrow it’s not someone stealing my identity and using it on sites that are unsavory?
Instead of jumping on a revolution bandwagon, we should be thinking about the overwhelming social issues here. I believe in portability for MY OWN identity. I don’t think that you should be allowed to take my information anywhere you want to go with it.
Right. Especially Plaxo.
: LATER: Good gawd, Nick Carr and I agree. Jack Schofield of the Guardian agrees, too.
: Scoble is back up on Facebook. But he now has fewer than 5,000 friends. Did some leave him?
Plaxo gives Facebook a litmus test
The new year in social networking is picking up where it left off with Plaxo letting loose a Facebook data importer (see Techmeme for the full debate). Robert Scoble was given an alpha version of Plaxo’s Facebook contact data importer, and the Facebook engine shut him down. So far Facebook officials haven’t said whether the […]
How to Safeguard Your Privacy Online
As privacy issues continue to monopolize our national conversation, sparked by everything from Google’s proposed takeover of DoubleClick to Facebook’s Beacon advertising platform to warrantless wiretapping by the NSA and various other activities that bring to mind tinfoil hats and black helicopters, I’ve started to wonder: How does one attain some semblance of privacy on the Internet? For while I can live with the fact that national security concerns may warrant some invasion of privacy at some point, I am not comfortable giving up personal information as to how I think for the sake of companies and their marketing departments serving me relevant advertising.
I know I am a part of a specific targeted demographic and I realize that marketers value, above all, the ability to understanding the basic incentives of targeted demographics. Further, I realize that it is exceptionally difficult to live in society today without being classified for marketing purposes – i.e. I am a male living in Silicon Valley and working in venture capital– and that this practice has been done for years via credit card purchases, mortgage information and other sources of data. What bothers me is that gathering my personal data gives marketers access to my personal habits, which they can then analyze in an attempt to understand why I do what I do and use their conclusions to serve me up [what they hope is] more relevant advertising. And what scares me is that some people call this a feature and are willing to grant access to their private digital footprint in return for this so-called relevant advertising.
To borrow an example from a friend of mine, I don’t care if my local grocery chain store knows that skirt steak and Corona beer are usually purchased together by males between 24 and 42 years of age. However, I do care if a search engine company knows that I purchased these items at the grocery chain store at four in the afternoon on Saturday, recently bought a round-trip ticket to Argentina and returned an item to the Macy’s in Union Square last weekend. Do they serve my needs any better by inserting advertising for Niman Ranch beef, hotel discounts in Buenos Aires and Macy’s latest sale on my Facebook page? I understand why, in terms of advertising rates, this is good for Facebook, but why am I giving up my privacy for this service?
So here are some ways to regain a reasonable facsimile of privacy on the Internet — or at least attempt to give marketers the most limited amount of personal information possible. Some of these are fairly practical and easily accomplished while others, admittedly, are way off the fairway and only for the serious privacy advocates and full-blown conspiracy theorists.
Feeling Practical But Not Paranoid?
Do not use desktop search tools like Google Desktop or Microsoft Desktop Search. A full index of every keyword on your hard drive in the hands of marketers is very useful for the purposes of targeted advertising.
Do not use webmail from a service provider like AT&T, Google or Microsoft. Same reason as above, except here it applies to every email you send or receive.
Do not use browser toolbars or desktop gadgets. Both of these types of add-ons from companies like Yahoo and Google are known to gather information on your online activity for marketing purposes.
Remove all social network accounts. There is loads of good information there that can be used for targeting and correlation. At the very least, remove all personal information and have a username that does not give any clues to your true identity.
Clear your browser cookies after every session. Alternatively, only search using Ask.com and enable AskEraser. To take erasing your footprint a step further, do not accept any browser cookies by default. This additional step will make web surfing slower and more intrusive as you will have to manually accept or deny cookies. That being said, if you surf for an hour without accepting cookies by default you will become much more aware of them, and that in and of itself could prove enlightening.
Change your local username daily. Browsers and other software have been known to pass local usernames to servers as part of their operation. If your username is something like “first.lastname” this is clearly useful information for data collection purposes.
Use Opera. With Opera, you can mimic another browser’s identification string, which helps mask your browser’s settings and reduces the information that you send to a web site when you visit.
Paranoid and Happy to Admit It:
Do not make international phone calls. Even if warrantless wiretapping by the NSA does not concern you, you need to be aware of Echelon.
Do not have a home broadband connection. If you have a home broadband connection, a network service provider can map your name to your IP address to your physical location. Again, your name, where you live and your Internet activity is all useful information for marketers.
Use free Wi-Fi. If you don’t have a home broadband connection but you will still want to be connected, find a free wireless access point at a local coffee shop. To further hide your existence, every time your computer associates with a wireless access point, manually change your MAC address.
Install a host-based Intrusion Detection System (IDS) like OSSEC. Assuming that you are already using a personal firewall, anti-spam and anti-spy software, a host-based IDS will ensure your computer isn’t being used without your knowledge. For an additional level of security, you could block all Internet traffic except for HTTP (port 80) and then log and trap anything else.
If you’re not satisfied being paranoid and want to venture into the land of Ted Kaczynski, you should give up on email, not have a home phone, use a pre-paid mobile phone that you change frequently, get all of your physical mail at a P.O. box and do every transaction (including buying a home or cabin in the woods) with cash.
But perhaps you want to live in our society, write on popular blogs — even have a public profile. I do, which means that I have a public presence for marketers to analyze. But I also follow most of the practical advice that I give above, because the only way to maintain a semblance of privacy on the Internet is to take responsibility for guarding your information – to whatever degree you see fit.
Marc, the Man Who Cried More Open Social
In a declaration marked by his characteristic passive-aggressiveness, Marc Canter is predicting big changes for social networking in 2008. Canter’s swaggering aside, the man knows a thing or two about social networks. It was almost 18 months ago when he started talking about how social networks will become a feature of many web apps; it took me a lot longer to figure that one out. He is being similarly astute in his 2008 outlook.
Canter, who runs an often overlooked social software company called Broadband Mechanics, believes social networks will become more open in 2008, and the world at large will come to realize the benefits of interoperability between various nets.
OpenID2, oAuth and APML - are the names of the standards which we’ll be using to build this inter-connected mesh. … So 2008 will see a growth in the ability of end-users to freely move between networks - taking their social graphs with them.
Canter is right on the money. Just as IM networks went from being silos to loose federations, so much social nets. Remember when mobile carriers got their SMS systems to interoperate? The usage exploded and everyone made money — never mind the millions of somewhat happy customers.
Canter also predicts that digital life aggregators will be big in 2008.
..this is a term I use to refer to Portals 2.0. This is what NetVibes is, iGoogle and what AOL and Microsoft are doing. Facebook is redefining DLAs and MySpace has their own notion as well. The best part of DLAs is that they’re not set in stone and that each vendor can add their own twist, feature set and attitude towards them, while still adhering to the principles of the idea.
In his end-of-the-year update, he lets us know that he has raised $400,000 in angel money, has at least eight live social networks using his software (which he also offers as a service) and is currently working with Bell Canada on an experimental social network.
White labeling gives us an opportunity to build a stable, profitable business not beholden upon VC funding which of course will make us a great investment for some large institution or private equity fund.
Did I mention he was passive-aggressive?
A Look Back At A Very Google 2007
Looking back at 2007, we will remember it as a year Google finally grew up and showed its true colors. Sure there was Facebook and all the hoopla around its platform and privacy, but the big story of year was still Google. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company that still gets a majority of its revenues from advertising made moves that would help expand its reach into new markets.
Wireless, Voice and Applications were three areas of major push - and if that meant taking on the telcos, the FCC, Microsoft, Wikipedia and even Facebook, so be it. And along the way it is estimated to add $1.7 billion to its $10 billion or so sales in 2006. No wonder it commands a market capitalization of $217 billion. Here are some of the major developments of a very Google-y 2007.
- January 2007: Crosses $10 billion in sales.
- February 2007: Google Office, ready for business. Microsoft beware.
- March 2007: Announces its 700 MHz spectrum plans, taken on Verizon, AT&T.
- March 2007: Viacom sues Google for $1 Billion.
- April 2007: Buys Doubleclick for $3.1 billion.
- May 2007: Launches Streetside View for Maps.
- June 2007: Buys Grandcentral.
- July 2007: Buys Postini.
- August 2007: CFO Greg Reyes retires.
- August 2007: YouTube launches embedded inline advertising.
- September 2007: GoogleNet is going global
- October 2007: Buys Jaiku
- October 2007: Launches OpenSocial, takes on Facebook
- November 2007: Launches Android, Mobile Platform, taken on Microsoft, Nokia, Others
- November 2007: Announces plans to produce GigaWatt of clean energy.
- December 2007: Launches Knol, takes on Wikipedia
Oh, go on, techies, read some bloody fiction during the holidays
Guest post: Chris Matyszczyk offers some reading suggestions for this holiday season, when techies should be taking a respite from their digital labors.
It is holiday time, and, in my tech naievte, I am assuming that the hard-working, soft-partying readers of this site take a few hours, perhaps even a few days, to remove their glassy […]
Podcast: A look back at 2007
This is our last Dan & David Show for 2007, and we look back at some of the major stories and trends of the year. We discuss the impact of the iPhone, cloud-based applications, social networking, software-as-a-service, green IT, industry consolidation and Web 2.0.
You can download the podcast directly to your desktop or MP3 player […]
Facebook finally breaks out Friend Lists
After months of prototyping and in the post-Beacon calm, Facebook launched Friend Lists, which allows members to organize “friends” into buckets, such as business, family, acquaintances, enemies…whatever phrase appropriately describes a list of people. However, the Friend Lists lack more granular controls, such as different privacy restrictions for each Friend List.
More on Techmeme
Will co-habitation be a new business for Facebook?
Guest post: Fresh from a sojourn to UK where he grew up, Chris Matyszczyk considers the latest trend in London home buying–speed-dating via Facebook to find co-buyers for real estate purchases.
When I think of England, I think of poverty.
Poverty of weather, poverty of emotional expression (save for humor and violence) and, now it seems, poverty […]
WorkLight secures Facebook for enterprises
Social networks are growing like weeds. This creates a difficult weeding problem for enterprises, who fear adverse impact from employees spending time and sharing company info in Facebook groups, which aren’t protected by corporate firewalls.
WorkLight is addressing both issues with WorkBook, a Facebook application that allows employees to use the social network to communicate securely.
“When […]
Founders Fund Has $220 MM To Invest
The Founders Fund has a raised a new $220 million fund, their second. They will invest in 15-to-20 early stage start-ups, they announced today. The four managing partners of FF include Peter Thiel, well known for his investment in Facebook and Sean Parker, who was involved with Facebook in the early phase of Palo Alto-based social network. Geni, Powerset, Quantcast, and Slide are some of their other investments.
Facebook responds to OpenSocial–opens its platform architecture
Facebook has a response to Google’s OpenSocial APIs, which will let developers build applications that tap into multiple social networks without modification, a kind of write-once, run-anywhere scenario when the APIs are supported. Today, Facebook announced that it will license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms.
Bebo which joined the crowd of social […]
Podcast: Opera vs. Microsoft; Bebo’s big move; AMD’s future
This week on the Dan and David Show, which is actually the David and Larry show since Dan is on vacation, we discuss Opera’s complaint in the EU against Microsoft over the IE-Windows bundle and Web standards. David thinks that Opera is in trouble and that’s why it’s reaching for the complaint. I argue that […]
Mark Zuckerberg Breaks Silence to Apologize
Faced with a firestorm of protest over a part of its month-old ad strategy that raised some members’ privacy hackles, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg finally broke his silence today to apologize: About a month ago, we released a new feature…
Friendship
Here’s my Guardian column this week, a much shorter and more cogent version of this post about changes in friendship brought on by the social web.
Newspapers v. Facebook
While in Sweden…. The new editor of Aftonbladet says they learned in a focus group with 20somethings that their major competition for time is Facebook.
I had a somewhat related conversation with my entrepreneurial students yesterday as we debated what properly can be defined as a journalistic enterprise, or part of one. This is a business variant on the who-is-a-journalist debate. But I argued that the real question is, what is the role of the journalistic institution in its community? Is it merely to inform or is it also to organize (which, not coincidentally, is the advice of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: bring your community elegant organization)?
Is a social service that helps local sports players organize properly part of a journalistic organization? For that matter, I’d argue, is a sports section? If we define journalism merely as reported content, then perhaps not. But if we define the larger role of the news organization to help its community organize itself, then social applications — even about sports — are properly part of the mission. I think we need to define the role of the news organization broadly, especially until we figure out what works.
So should Aftonbladet view Facebook as competition for attention — or its mission? I’m not suggesting that Aftonbladet should start its own social network; that would be the reflex of most media companies (we do it all ourselves). Instead, the question should be how to help the community where it is, doing what it does.
If I were making Facebook applications for news organizations now, I wouldn’t be making quizzes and such fripperies. I’d be figuring out how to get news that matters to you in your news feed. I’d be finding ways to tie you with other people who share your interest and know what you want to know. I’d find ways to enable you to recommend more news to your friends.
Seen this way, Facebook isn’t a competitor for a newspaper. It’s just another place to help your community.
(Aftonbladet news found via Media Culpa — which, by the way, is a great name for a blog.)
EU May Crack Down On Targeted Advertising
The European Union may crack down on targeted advertising following concern into the personal privacy aspects of such programs.
The Article 29 working party has an ongoing investigation into privacy online, and has previously forced Google to limit its data retention of web searches in Europe to 18 months.
According to a Reuters report, Gabriele Loewnau, a senior legal adviser for the German Federal Commissioner for Data Protection said that targeted advertising was a “hot topic” that will be part of the work program for the EU next year.
Targeted advertising is this regard is different to regular contextual advertising in that it is not simply advertising that displays in context to the web site, but advertising that is displayed based on user habits, including browser habits and online purchases. Facebook’s new advertising program delivers ads based on user interests and those of their friends, potentially meaning that they may also be a target of any future EU crack down.
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Alexa’s Make Believe Internet
Amazon’s Alexa traffic reporting service has little credibility left among people who follow traffic trends. Most analytics services, like Comscore, don’t measure small sites well, but they tend to get it right for the larger sites. Alexa seems to get everything wrong, no matter how large or small the site.
Example: In August Alexa said that YouTube passed Google itself in total page views. They were wrong, but their data continues to perpetuate this alternate reality.
Now, another embarrassing error. Alexa says that Facebook, on a steady growth curve for the last two years, now has a larger audience than MySpace. This isn’t as ridiculous as the YouTube/Google error, but it’s still way off. Comscore says that worldwide MySpace uniques are 109 million/month, whereas Facebook is at 86 million. Compete.com, which measures traffic using similar techniques as Alexa, stills says that MySpace is larger than Facebook.
Thanks for the tip Mark.
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Is Facebook Really Censoring Search When It Suits Them?
Earlier this month I wrote a blog post showing that a search for presidential candidate “Ron Paul” in Facebook Groups yields zero results. Facebook blamed the problem on a bug (unofficially, via comments by employees to that post), which was later corrected.
But a new issue may be harder to explain. On Tuesday, scores of mainstream press organizations (see WSJ, NYT, LATimes, CNET, AP, etc.). and bloggers reported on a privacy issue around part of Facebook’s new advertising platform.
MoveOn.org was leading the charge, and created a petition to demand Facebook not disclose personal information about a user without their explicit consent.
But now a side story is developing around the issue that relates to search censoring, again, at Facebook. Naturally all the press on the issue led people to go to Facebook to find the group MoveOn set up to organize their opposition to Facebook’s current privacy policy on this issue.
The group, which now has over 12,000 members, could not be located via search. Yesterday a search in Facebook Groups for “Privacy” began to return an error message saying “search is currently unavailable” (see image to right). But at the same time, searches for any other term yielded normal results.
Later search began working again, but the MoveOn Group was not included in the results even though it clearly had the term “privacy” in the title. A filtered search yielded seventeen results, but only sixteen could be viewed. The MoveOn group was likely the seventeenth, unseen result. See bottom image below.
MoveOn contacted Facebook to complain, and the search is now working. Facebook has not responded to a request for comment sent yesterday on why this may have happened, although we are in the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday.
MoveOn’s Adam Green, who alerted us of the issue, had this to say:
Facebook has the potential to revolutionize how we communicate with each other and organize around issues together in a 21st century democracy. But to succeed, they need the trust of their users. That trust will be undercut if they continue to put the wish lists of corporate advertisers ahead of the privacy interests of their users. It would also be undercut if it turned out our group was intentionally hidden from Facebook users — as opposed to it being an accident.
We’ll see if Facebook responds at all, and if they blame this on a bug as well.
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Getting Link Love From Facebook? Hold Yer Horses, Kids
You have may heard that Facebook has opened itself to advertising and marketing over the past month through several initiatives, one of them being the feature of creating pages for businesses (Microsoft) and/or personalities (Kevin Rose). If you’ve felt tempted to create a page for your own blog, that may have merits on its own as a means to create a community of fans *on* Facebook. But if you did it expressly for link credit, because Facebook pages are visible to Google, you may want to hold your horses, ‘pardner.
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The Facebook Backlash
Wow, for an announcement that was supposed to explain how Facebook is worth $15 billion, the company’s Social Ads debut the other day sure got a lot of negative reaction–not least because of the appearance of arrogance by Facebook execs…
The fine line between advertising and recommendations
Facebook Beacon has the ‘Net riled up over what many see as an invasion of their privacy. A Wall Street Journal article gives a good description of how the opt-out process works:
Users can’t opt out of the program, called “Facebook Beacon,” altogether. Instead, they have to opt out on a case-by-case basis when […]
Facebook Declares New Era for Advertising
As I write, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is announcing its long-awaited ad strategy. One piece is Beacon, a system that will let the social network’s members reveal their purchases, eBay product postings, and other things they’ve done on some 40…
Zuckerberg on OpenSocial, ads, and friend lists
I’m at Foursquare listening to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg in the one on-the-record session. Asked why Facebook chose not to be involved, Mark replies, “Who says we didn’t choose to be a part of it? We didn’t really find out about it until right at the end there.” When? “Maybe an hour after it launched.” Will Facebook be involved? Mark said they’ll see how it works and then evaluate. If it add values to users then they would be involved, he said.
He’s also talking about his new ad system, announced yesterday. I haven’t gotten my head around the full implication of the system but it seems like a customer advocacy platform without the conflict of paying those advocates (see: Pay Per Post). This is an extension of what I wrote about in my Business Week piece on Dell: customers as the best marketers. The recommendations of peers matter more than the spam of advertisers.
Jeff Pulver asks whether we’ll be able to segment business v. personal friends. Mark says they are trying to map out all the connections and that will get more and more granular; some will be manual and some will be agorithmic. He says that “realtive soon” they’re going to release things that help people organize. Soon, that will be lists of friends you can make so you decide what to share with what groups. He also said that they are considering raising the limit on friendships.
Facebook outage
I did a little Twittergram shortly before noon just as Facebook was coming back up off of a 1.5-hour outage. Twittergrams are 30-second audio messages that I can send to my followers on Twitter. I talked with one of the engineers inside Facebook (we were trying to get him to come down to lunch) and they said that they had a problem with a code update that they rolled up last night — the way they were talking I don’t think it was a hack, but rather an update that didn’t go well. Folks over on TechMeme are saying that Facebook might have been hacked, though. UPDATE: Facebook PR’s Brandee Barker has posted an official statement, which I’ve printed below.
By the way, the first place I go to get news is on Twitter now. The flow there is incredible and generally stories get discussed there long before they do on blogs.
Oh, and Facebook PR has a group that they’ve invited some of the press and bloggers into. Here’s an official statement that was just posted to that group:
This morning, we temporarily took down the Facebook site to fix a bug we identified earlier today. This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them. The site has now been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”
Facebook Outage: Wakeup Call
Facebook is nothing but a walled garden
Point (open up, or we’ll clone you). Counterpoint (the users don’t care…right this moment).
Tagged: Facebook, walled garden
Walled gardens: A necessary evil
There’s a good bit of hubbub about Google News offering comments from story subjects and then walling them off. But is this walled garden approach really all that shocking?
What’s shocking is that Google hasn’t tried to wall everything off yet. Michael Arrington calls Google News’ latest experiment hypocrisy. And he’s right. Techmeme has […]
Calacanis can’t keep up with Facebook
I’ve been on Facebook, what, about six weeks? I have more than 4,000 friends so if anyone should be complaining about “Facebook chores” like adding new friends or dealing with “application spam” it should be me. Jason Calacanis has been on for a while and only has 395 friends and now is giving up because he hasn’t figured out how to keep up with “Facebook chores.”
Rex Hammock chides him. I’m not going to link directly to Jason, cause I want you to read Rex’s post first cause Rex has a good point on this issue.
My response? I LOVE WHEN PEOPLE GIVE UP ON FACEBOOK!
Why? Because Facebook is now a media distribution network (among other things).
I’m in the media creation and distribution business.
When Calacanis gives up that means there’s fewer competitors.
Media creation also means I need to be a professional networker. That’s why I go to TechCrunch parties — to find great people to interview. Last night I collected a stack of business cards. Those people get invited to join Facebook. Why? Facebook is the new business card AND the new media distribution network. Watch what’s happening with video inside Facebook. Watch what’s happening with applications.
More of the best names in tech are on Facebook than any other social network I’m on (and I’m on a ton of them).
I’m glad Jason isn’t taking the time to do it.
Anyone else in this business want to avoid Facebook? Please do it! Means more opportunity for the rest of us.
Speaking of which, I’m gonna leave a little video message on this topic for Jason over on my Facebook profile.
UPDATE: as an example, over on Facebook I just shared a video done by Terry Storch and Brian Bailey on the Blogging Church (Brian blogs for one of the biggest churches in the USA). Facebook is the ultimate “pass along” video source. No one person gets huge distribution, but get passed along enough and a sizeable audience will show up. In fact, I can’t add more than 5,000 friends in Facebook so the audience size of any one person will always be small. But the passalong is huge. The app platform there works the same way — virally. Anyone miss that iLike got millions of visitors in the first two weeks? I didn’t.