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…

WIlliam Gibson on eBay

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I’ve become a really keen observer of the rationalization of the world’s attic. Every class of human artifact is being sorted and rationalized by this economically driven machine that constantly turns it over and brings it to a higher level of searchability. . . . The tentacles of that operation extend into every flea market and thrift shop and basement and attic in the world.

“Every hair is being numbered — eBay has every grain of sand. EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It’s like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement.

“Every toy I had as a child that haunted me, I’ve been able to see on eBay. The soft squeezy rubber frog with red shorts that made ‘eek eek’ noise until that part fell out. I found Froggy after some effort on eBay, and I found out that Froggy was made in 1948 and where he was made and what he was made of. I saw his box, which I’d long forgotten. I didn’t have to buy Froggy, but I saved the jpegs. So I’ve got Froggy in my computer.

“This is new. People in really small towns can become world-class connoisseurs of something via eBay and Google. This didn’t used to be possible. If you are sufficiently obsessive and diligent, you can be a little kid in some town in the backwoods of Tennessee and the world’s premier info-monster about some tiny obscure area of stuff. That used to require a city. It no longer does.”

From an interview with the Washington Post.

“Tough cheese, suckers — er, customers”

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Translation of Steve Jobs’s message to customers who bought an Apple iPhone for $599 last Wednesday morning and discovered that by the time they got it home Apple had slashed the price by $200.

That’s technology. If they bought it this morning, they should go back to where they bought it and talk to them. If they bought it a month ago, well, that’s what happens in technology.

Later: There’s been such a hoo-hah that Jobs has posted an Open Letter to iPhone users on the Apple site saying that

we have decided to offer every iPhone customer who purchased an iPhone from either Apple or AT&T, and who is not receiving a rebate or any other consideration, a $100 store credit towards the purchase of any product at an Apple Retail Store or the Apple Online Store. Details are still being worked out and will be posted on Apple’s website next week. Stay tuned.

Later still: Bob Cringely has an interesting take on it all:

This week’s iPhone pricing story, in which Apple punished its most loyal users by dropping the price of an 8-gig iPhone from $599 to $399 less than three months after the product’s introduction, is classic Steve Jobs. It wasn’t an accident. It wasn’t a thoughtless mistake. It was a calculated and tightly scripted exercise in marketing and ego gratification. In the mind of Steve Jobs the entire incident had no downside, none at all, which is yet another reason why he is not like you or me.

Let’s deconstruct the incident. Apple announced a variety of new and kinda-new iPods dominated by the iPod Touch (iPhone minus the phone) and an iPod Nano with video (great for watching miniseries). At the very end of the presentation, Jobs announced the iPhone price cut. Why did he wait until the very end? Because he knew the news would be disruptive and might have obscured his presentation of the new products. He KNEW there was going to be controversy. So much for the “Steve is simply out of touch with the world” theory.

So why did he do it? Why did he cut the price? I have no inside information here, but it seems pretty obvious to me: Apple introduced the iPhone at $599 to milk the early adopters and somewhat limit demand then dropped the price to $399 (the REAL price) to stimulate demand now that the product is a critical success and relatively bug-free. At least 500,000 iPhones went out at the old price, which means Apple made $100 million in extra profit.

Had nobody complained, Apple would have left it at that. But Jobs expected complaints and had an answer waiting — the $100 Apple store credit. This was no knee-jerk reaction, either. It was already there just waiting if needed. Apple keeps an undeserved $50 million and customers get $50 million back. Or do they? Some customers will never use their store credit. Those who do use it will nearly all buy something that costs more than $100. And, most importantly, those who bought their iPhones at an AT&T store will have to make what might be their first of many visits to an Apple Store. That is alone worth the $50 per customer this escapade will eventually cost Apple, taking into account unused credits and Apple Store wholesale costs.

So Apple still comes out $75 million ahead, which is important to Steve Jobs.

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.

End of the ‘two-shot’?

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Hooray! Peter Preston spotted it.

You do a little news interview and, when it’s over, you then do a ‘two-shot’. The interviewee mouths a few silent nothings. The interviewer nods in mock interest (and total boredom). The camera rolls for a couple of minutes in case slivers of this weary mime are visually needed to leaven the chat.

Fakery? Channel Five News has announced it is ditching the device, with Sky only a second behind. It’s either a stirring victory for truth and honesty – or (nod-nod-wink-wink) a splendidly cynical chance to get rid of a television reporter’s most demeaning, least favourite chores.

Wonder if the BBC will follow suit?

The Porsche and the lawnmower

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This morning’s Observer column…

It’s an odd way to start a revolution, to put it mildly. The iPhone is a lovely piece of kit – in effect, a sleek, powerful personal computer running an industrial-grade operating system. It has the capability to be a really disruptive device in an industry that badly needs disruption. But it comes shackled to an unpopular, low-tech mobile network. So acquiring one is like buying a Porsche engine and fitting it to your lawnmower. People figured out quickly that you could cancel AT&T’s internet service to get its browser to work only via wi-fi; but you couldn’t use it on any other mobile phone/data network. (And still had to pay the 18-month AT&T subscription.) This was not a fundamental technical limitation of the device, but a technological shackle designed by Apple to drive business to AT&T…