Category Archives: Social Networking

You can have any gadget you like so long as it’s an iPod

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This morning’s Observer column, which has items about Apple, YouTube and Facebook. Sample:

The release of the new iPod range provided an insight into the company’s technical strategy. At the top of the line is the iPod Touch, which looks, feels and operates like the new phone – except that it doesn’t make or receive calls. It is, as one wag put it, ‘a de-phoned iPhone’. A better way to put it is that the iPhone is an iPod that makes calls. The music player is at the heart of Apple’s technological strategy, which leads to the thought that the company’s next laptop will be an iPod masquerading as a tablet…

Facebook privacy issues, contd.

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From Scobleizer…

One of my friends caught his teenage son having a party because his son posted some pictures of that party to his Facebook page. Let’s just say that “dad” isn’t allowed into his Facebook profile anymore. This is yet another example of the problems that Facebook users are facing. Forget the fact that many of you believe that parents should have transparency into their kids lives. This was a case where a kid put some content up that he didn’t want someone else to find yet they did. Same thing as an employer finding a photo of you doing something that they would find to be a fireable offense.

There is going to be a lot of tension about Facebook until it adds much better privacy controls. Some things deserve to be open to the public (and to Google). Glad to see Facebook is recognizing that. But other things should only be kept for close personal friends. I wish I could set Facebook stuff to be shared with the audience I want to share that media with (whether or not I usually want to make my stuff totally public).

This one will run and run. The issue is surfacing all over the place. At the panel discussion after my Keynote Address at Leeds Metropolitan University last Monday, for example, there was an interesting discussion about whether lecturers should be in Facebook (i.e. whether their presence was an intrusion on what should be regarded as a ‘student’ space).

Facebook’s little privacy problem

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This morning’s Observer column…

Aw, isn’t that sweet? The nice folks at Facebook are anxious to ‘help more people connect and find value’ from their social networking site.

Let’s see how that will work in practice. Someone types ‘John Smith’ into Google – and up comes his Facebook public search listing. To find out more about this fascinating chap, however, the searcher has to either log into Facebook (if s/he is already a member), or subscribe to the service if s/he is not. Either way, the searcher is lured into Facebook’s walled garden.

Does this help John Smith ‘find value’ from Facebook? Well, maybe – if he’s desperate for his personal details to be accessible to anyone on the web. But the main beneficiary of this erosion in users’ privacy will be the company that operates Facebook, and it is disingenuous to pretend otherwise.

Of course, Facebook’s owners protest that members can avoid this by adjusting their privacy settings. But you only have to look at a few Facebook profiles to see that most subscribers either don’t know how to limit the amount of personal information that is displayed on their profiles, or simply cannot be bothered. So, coming soon to an office near you: some really embarrassing job interviews…

It’s aSmallworld

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Well, well. An exclusive social networking site. It’s aSmallWorld.net.

We have imposed certain criteria in order to keep the network exclusive. To join, you need to be invited by a trusted member.

If you have not received an invitation, you can ask your friends to invite you. If you have no friends who are members yet, please be patient.

I don’t know about you, but it evokes the Groucho Marx response in me.

I only found out about it because there was a piece in the New York Times.

Blog-hating as a syndrome

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Lovely Guardian piece by Scott Rosenberg on the strange hostility evoked by blogging in conventional minds…

From the dawn of blogging it’s been tempting for established professionals to reject blogging as trivial and unreliable. Epitomising this stance most recently is Tom Wolfe – who, in a brief essay accompanying the Wall Street Journal’s blog birthday celebration, dismissed the blogosphere as “a universe of rumours”. To support this charge, he cited an inaccuracy in Wikipedia’s entry about himself. Of course the online encyclopedia is not a blog at all. But critics like Wolfe can’t be bothered making distinctions. He admitted that Wikipedia isn’t “strictly a blog” but claimed it “shares the genre’s characteristics”, and dismissed a universe of blogs on the basis of a single Wikipedia inaccuracy – which was, naturally, immediately corrected. If it’s online, apparently, it’s all the same, and all worthless.

It’s hard to take Wolfe’s assessment of blogging seriously since he admits that, “weary of narcissistic shrieks and baseless ‘information’,” he doesn’t read them himself. In any case, those who obsessively review their own Wikipedia entries for errors might pause before accusing others of narcissism…

Hulu, hulu

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Well, well. News Corp. is getting ready to roll out its putative YouTube killer. Here’s the breathless update from the site:

The first bit of news we’d like to share is that we have a name: Hulu.

Why Hulu? Objectively, Hulu is short, easy to spell, easy to pronounce, and rhymes with itself. Subjectively, Hulu strikes us as an inherently fun name, one that captures the spirit of the service we’re building. Our hope is that Hulu will embody our (admittedly ambitious) never-ending mission, which is to help you find and enjoy the world’s premier content when, where and how you want it.

Actually, it’s basically another way of spelling ‘turkey’.

Note also the cheerful, friendly Terms and Conditions which state, in part,

You are also strictly prohibited from creating works or materials that derive from or are based on the materials contained in this Site including, without limitation, fonts, icons, link buttons, wallpaper, desktop themes, on-line postcards and greeting cards, unlicensed merchandise and mash-ups, unless you have obtained the prior written consent of Hulu or unless it is expressly permitted by this Site in each instance. This prohibition applies regardless of whether the derivative materials are sold, bartered or given away.

Facebook, yawn…

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I’m finding Facebook a bore. I resent the ‘walled garden’ approach which lures ‘friends’ to send me messages inside FB — which then prompts an email from FB telling me that so-and-so has sent me a message which can only be seen by logging into FB — when all along s/he could have sent me a perfectly good direct email. The only feature I really like is the status updates of my friends — but I could just as easily get that from something like Twitter. (Later: hang on — I can get the status updates via an RSS feed. Why didn’t I think of that earlier?)

The other irritating limitation of FB is the fact that one exists only in a single context. In real life, I have friends and acquaintances in a range of different — and only barely overlapping — worlds. If FB could accommodate this complexity, then perhaps it would be more useful. But it can’t.

I’m not alone in thinking like this — see this blog post pointed to by Bill Thompson…

I lost control over my MySpace ages ago. I have long since given up responding to private messages on most SNSes. I had to quit LinkedIn after I got lambasted for refusing to forward requests from people that I didn’t know to people who are so stretched thin that I am more interested in hugging them than requesting something of them. I don’t know how to be “me” on Twitter because I can’t figure out how to manage so many different contexts. I find it funny when journalists ask me what SNS I use. I’m on most of the English ones, but they always grow to push me away. Each had an initial context for me, but each one grew and lost that context…

Who owns the Facebook idea?

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Interesting piece in the New York Times. Facebook is being sued by the founders of ConnectU, who claim that Mark Zuckerberg nicked the idea from them.

The Winklevoss brothers and Divya Narenda, another ConnectU founder, contend that Facebook’s founder stole the idea from them. In a suit filed in 2004, the ConnectU founders accused Mr. Zuckerberg of lifting their site’s source code and business plan when he worked for ConnectU as an unpaid programmer. They are asking that Facebook’s assets be transferred to them.

Here are the facts that are not disputed: In 2002, when the Winklevoss brothers were juniors at Harvard, they conceived what was initially called the HarvardConnection, which was to be a social network for the college. In November 2003, they asked Mr. Zuckerberg, who was studying computer science at Harvard, to develop the site’s software and database, promising to compensate him later if the venture prospered.

Mr. Zuckerberg abandoned the project in February 2004, a month after registering the domain name thefacebook.com. By the end of that February, his new site, also a social network for Harvard, had registered half the college’s undergraduates. By April 2004, it had spread to other Ivy League schools.

Very quickly, Facebook expanded to serve other universities, then high schools, then organizations as varied as McDonald’s and the Marine Corps, and finally the general public. By contrast, ConnectU never really got started: it didn’t open until May 2004, and, overshadowed by what became, simply, Facebook, today it has no more than 70,000 registered users…

Sadly (for the brothers), there was no written contract. And, as lawyers say, documents win cases.

Facebook funnies

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I keep getting emails from Facebook saying “So-and-so has added you as a friend. We need to check that you are in fact friends with so-and-so. To confirm this friend request, follow the link below…”. But for a while now, the link hasn’t worked. Is it possible that their system is wilting under the exponential strain? I hate being unintentionally rude.