Category Archives: Facebook

Facebook: still growing

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From today’s New York Times:

The social network on Wednesday reached the latest milestones in its quest to dominate the world, topping 1.79 billion monthly visitors as of the end of September, up 16 percent from a year ago. Facebook also added a record number of new daily users and said for the first time that more than one billion people regularly used its network exclusively on their mobile device every month.

And those numbers do not even include Facebook’s other properties, such as the photo-sharing service Instagram and the messaging service WhatsApp.

Facebook’s user growth defies the usual trajectories for social media companies, which often start strong out of the gate and then sharply slow down. Twitter, which added four million new visitors last quarter, now serves a user base roughly one-sixth the size of Facebook’s. Snapchat, while popular among young users, has about 150 million daily users, about half as many as Twitter…

Facebook can’t be just a ‘platform’ if it’s distributing news

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This morning’s Observer column:

Many years ago, the political theorist Steven Lukes published a seminal book – Power: A Radical View. In it, he argued that power essentially comes in three varieties: the ability to compel people to do what they don’t want to do; the capability to stop them doing what they want to do; and the power to shape the way they think. This last is the kind of power exercised by our mass media. They can shape the public (and therefore the political) agenda by choosing the news that people read, hear or watch; and they can shape the ways in which that news is presented. Lukes’s “third dimension” of power is what’s wielded in this country by outlets like Radio 4’s Today programme, the Sun and the Daily Mail. And this power is real: it’s why all British governments in recent years have been so frightened of the Mail.

But as our media ecosystem has changed under the impact of the internet, new power brokers have appeared….

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Big data: the new gasoline

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This morning’s Observer column:

“Data is the new oil,” declared Clive Humby, a mathematician who was the genius behind the Tesco Clubcard. This insight was later elaborated by Michael Palmer of the Association of National Advertisers. “Data is just like crude [oil],” said Palmer. “It’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas, plastic, chemicals, etc to create a valuable entity that drives profitable activity; so must data be broken down, analysed for it to have value.”

There was just one thing wrong with the metaphor. Oil is a natural resource; it has to be found, drilled for and pumped from the bowels of the Earth. Data, in contrast, is a highly unnatural resource. It has to be created before it can be extracted and refined. Which raises the question of who, exactly, creates this magical resource? Answer: you and me…

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Zuckerbergus Imperator

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This morning’s Observer column:

Power and money are the two great aphrodisiacs, and few people or institutions are immune to their attractions. Not even the Economist, a posh magazine which resolutely sees itself as floating above the vulgar ruckus of journalistic hackery. Last week, like an elderly dowager seduced by Justin Bieber, the venerable publication checked its collective brains at the door and swooned over Mark Zuckerberg, the infant prodigy who now presides over Facebook, and so possesses both power and money.

For the cover illustration, the magazine photoshopped a picture of a celebrated statue of Emperor Constantine the Great (272-337). Young Zuckerberg’s head, adorned with a wreath of gold laurel leaves, replaced Constantine’s. The sword in his left hand was replaced by a Facebook logo, and the emperor’s languidly drooping right hand was rotated 180 degrees so that it now gave the thumbs-up that is Facebook’s “like” symbol. (The gesture had a rather different interpretation in Roman times.) On the plinth of the statue were the words: “MARCVS ZVCKERBERGVS” and CONIVNGE ET IMPERA”, which is the nearest the photoshopper could get to “connect and rule”.

On inside pages one finds an editorial and a long article explaining why Marcvs Z is the greatest thing since Constantine.

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The European Court of Justice’s bombshell

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This morning’s Observer column:

On Tuesday, the European court of justice, Europe’s supreme court, lobbed a grenade into the cosy, quasi-monopolistic world of the giant American internet companies.

It did so by declaring invalid a decision made by the European commission in 2000 that US companies complying with its “safe harbour privacy principles” would be allowed to transfer personal data from the EU to the US.

This judgment may not strike you as a big deal. You may also think that it has nothing to do with you.

Wrong on both counts, but to see why, some background might be useful….

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LATER This is a truly extraordinary moment. Lots of interesting and informative stuff about it on the Web, including this piece by Julia Powles and this NYT piece by Robert Levine.

And this from Edward Snowden:

Snowden_tweet

So what happens next? My colleague Nóra ní Loideain has passed me this reassuring note:

Christopher Graham, UK Information Commissioner, said on 8 October at a meeting at Dentons [a law firm]: “Don’t panic. Safe Harbor is not the only route for international transfers. We are coordinating our thinking with other DPAs across the European Union.” The 28 DPAs which form the EU Art. 29 Data Protection Working Party met in their International Transfers sub-group on 8 October, and this group’s plenary will discuss the issue on Thursday this week, on 15 October.

Which means … what, exactly??

Quote of the Day

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” Facebook is interested in “digital inclusion” in much the same manner as loan sharks are interested in “financial inclusion”: it is in it for the money.”

Evgeny Morozov, writing in the Observer, April 26, 2015.

Why the world’s poor shouldn’t be conned into thinking that Facebook is the Net

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This morning’s Observer column:

Some years ago, I had a conversation with a senior minister in which he revealed that he thought the web was the internet. While I was still reeling from the shock of finding a powerful figure labouring under such a staggering misconception, I ran into Sir Tim Berners-Lee at a Royal Society symposium. Over coffee, I told him about my conversation with the minister. “It’s actually much worse than that,” he said, ruefully. “Hundreds of millions of people now think that Facebook is the internet.”

He’s right – except that now the tally of the clueless is now probably closer to a billion. (Facebook has more than 1.3 billion users, some of whom presumably know the difference between an app and the network.)

Does this matter? Answer: yes, profoundly, and here’s why…

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Even if you’re not on Facebook, you are still the product

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This morning’s Observer column:

The old adage “if the service is free, then you are its product” needs updating. What it signified was that web services (like Facebook, Google, Yahoo et al) that do not charge users make their money by harvesting personal and behavioural data relating to those users and selling that data to advertisers. That’s still true, of course. But a more accurate version of the adage would now read something like this: if you use the web for anything (including paying for stuff) then you are also the product, because your data is being sold on to third parties without your knowledge.

In a way, you probably already knew this. A while back you searched for, say, a digital camera on the John Lewis site. And then you noticed that wherever you went on the web after that John Lewis ads for cameras kept appearing on the site you were visiting. What you were witnessing was the output of a multibillion-dollar industry that operates below the surface of the web. Think of it as the hidden wiring of our networked world. And what it does is track you wherever you go online…

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