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Facebook today announced that application developers will be allowed to store user data for more than 24 hours, removing a major restriction that the company had imposed on its ecosystem for years. Competitors like Twitter and MySpace had no such restrictions and now Facebook is in the same boat. Founder Mark Zukerberg used to say that the rule against storing data was essential to protect users and their privacy. Where are those now? Privacy, Zuckerberg told me in a March 2008 interview, "is the vector around which Facebook operates." Two years later, not so much. In a December 2009 interview , Zuckerberg said that Facebook's new public-by-default privacy settings reflected how he would build the site if he were to do it again from scratch today. Compare below what Zuckerberg said in 2008 and what today's new Developer Terms of Service say about holding on to user data now. Sponsor I believe that the Facebook policy change on storing user data is a net win for the web: it will enable all kinds of new innovation. It was that kind of innovation that I was asking about two years ago when I got the following answer about privacy that just doesn't sound right anymore today. Zuckerberg on Data Portability, March 10th 2008 interview with ReadWriteWeb : "If you export your friends list, does their contact information come with that? What if they change their privacy settings later? Right now if you take an action that gets published to your friends' news feeds, but then if you change your privacy settings later to be more restrictive - then those events disappear from the news feeds. If that data is published off-site, then there's no longer any control over the data for users. " (emphasis added) And today, on the new Developers' Terms of Service : You must give users control over their data by posting a privacy policy that explains what data you collect, and how you will use, store, and/or transfer their data....You may cache data you receive from the Facebook API in order to improve your application's user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date ...You will delete all data you receive from us concerning a user if the user asks you to do so, and will provide a mechanism for users to make such a request. (emphasis added) One thing that remains the same? "You cannot use a user's friend list outside of your application, even if a user consents to such use." Facebook doesn't want you taking your data out of the Facebook ecosystem, to other competing services, but it doesn't insist that 3rd parties under its shadow check in with you daily anymore, either. It's hard not to feel a little cynical about that. Discuss
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Facebook Data & Privacy: So Much Has Changed in Two Years
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Thanks to voice-controlled systems like Ford's Sync , drivers don't have to take their eyes off the road if they want to place a call or switch to the next track on their playlists. Today, Ford announced the next step in the company's roadmap to connect mobile phones and cars. With Sync AppLink, Ford is introducing a new platform that allows developers to offer voice controls for their mobile apps on Sync-enabled cars. At first, AppLink will only work with Android and BlackBerry devices, but the company plans to offer support for Apple's iPhone OS and other smartphone platforms next year. Sponsor The first Sync-enabled applications, which will be available later this year, are Pandora , Stitcher , and Orangatame's OpenBreak Twitter app. Even though Sync is based on the Microsoft Auto platform, Ford did not announce that it plans to support the upcoming Windows Phone operating system. Drivers will be able to control AppLink-enabled mobile apps through voice commands that will be routed through the Sync system, as well as from buttons on the steering wheel. The first car to feature this new service will be the 2011 Ford Fiesta . Ford plans to offer AppLink on all Sync-equipped cars next year. Existing Sync users will be able to update their car's software at a later point as well. Same Apps - Just Controlled by SYNC From the user's perspective, installing a Sync-enabled app is no different from installing a regular app on their mobile phones. The only difference is that the car will notice when you start a Sync-enabled app and allow you to control the app's function with your voice. This allows Ford to plug right into the existing developer ecosystems and distribution channels for all of these platforms and developers only have to make relatively minor updates to make their apps compatible with Sync. It's important to stress that these applications are running on the user's phone and not on the car's built-in Sync hardware. Sync only passes the voice commands on to the application but doesn't interact with the app beyond this. In Ford's parlance, these are "brought-in" apps, as opposed to "built-in" apps (like Ford's Vehicle Health Report and 911 Assist) or "beamed-in" cloud-based apps that send traffic information and turn-by-turn directions to the car. Sync AppLink for Developers Ford is currently working with a small group of trusted partners and plans to open up the Sync API and software development kit to a broader selection of developers later this year. Ford also announced the launch of a Sync developer community that will give developers a pathway to partner with Ford on Sync-enabled applications. Image credit: Flickr user Jim Trottier Discuss
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Ford Sync Will Soon Let You Control Your Mobile Apps by Voice
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How do you connect to Twitter and understand its value and performance? That's part of the challenge for any enterprise considering how to adopt social technologies to connect with customers. This week at Sugarcon we heard a lot about how to manage a social CRM envrionment. Increasingly, companies are turning to API's for integrating third-party applications like Twitter to better connect and interact with customers. Sponsor Sonoa Systems calls it an API economy with Twitter serving as the most applied API on the planet. To manage API's, Sonoa offers Apigee , a free self-service for developers working with API's. This week at the Chirp conference, Sonoa broadened Apigee by providing analytics, monitoring, debugging and testing tools. For example, with API Analytics a customer may monitor usage levels, review usage patterns, see the geo-location and look at performance metrics like response time. The service now also allows users to share messages with other developers to help with troubleshooting and community learning. API management will become a major requirement for the enterprise, especially as more applications integrate into CRM environments. As Paul Greenberg stated in his keynote at Sugarcon, the focus is no longer about controlling the customer contact but interacting with the customer in the fashion they wish to communicate. [Disclosure: SugarCRM paid for a plane ticket for Alex Williams to attend SugarCon in San Francisco.] Discuss
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Sonoa Broadens Twitter API Management Service
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URL shortener bit.ly has announced some simple user interface changes for its standard users and a whole series of new features for paid users, including custom domain names and statistics. While the standard user interface changes are neat, it's the "end-to-end branding" that we're actually looking forward to, as it should take a bit of that mystery meat feel out of our day to day online lives. Sponsor The biggest changes standard bit.ly users will see is the searchable history, which allows users to search through URLS they have added. Bit.ly has also tried to make it easier to manage the links you've added by adding a specific "Manage" section, which will show all the links with basic statistics on each, such as Twitter conversations and clicks. And all of a user's shared links will be available in RSS format. As for the bit.ly's pro users, the service will begin offering a traffic dashboard, short domain redirection, unlimited API calls and, most importantly, a full "end-to-end branding". End-to-end branding means that if someone goes to shorten a New York Times URL, for example, they will end up with a link containing the nyti.ms short link instead of a standard bit.ly link. This will happen for all users, whether they shorten the link through the bit.ly website or through third-party Twitter clients such as TweetDeck, Twitterfeed and ÜberTwitter. While this type of service is not only great for the website, its useful for the users too, because you don't have to blindly click on a shortened link. It keeps everything short and sweet for our Twitter character limit while giving us, the user, some clue of where we're going. Discuss
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Bit.ly Pro Takes the Mystery Out of Shortened URLs
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Given the recent developments in the Twitter developer ecosystem, I think it's a good time to revisit the idea of an open Web alternative to Twitter. The fact is, the differences between microblogging and normal blogging are insignificant. I'm going to detail five of the differences. My point in doing so is to illustrate that the best way to bootstrap an open alternative to Twitter is not by inventing a bunch of new technologies or products. Instead, I want to show that most of the pieces already exist in the current blogging ecosystem. With a few modifications, a distributed microblogging ecosystem can easily emerge. Sponsor Guest author Chris Saad is VP of strategy at Echo , the world's leading provider of comment/conversation technology to Tier 1 publishers. His role is to track trends in the marketplace, listen to and participate in the community and translate those needs into actionable product direction. His background includes co-authoring of the Attention Profiling Markup Language (APML) specification, and co-founding the DataPortability Project . Used by Digg, BBC, NewsGator, France Telecom and others, APML is industry standard for Attention Profiles. The DataPortability project's mission is to advocate interoperable data portability for users, developers and vendors. Length Microblogs are, well, micro. They are shorter. This is not some marvelous invention - it is a simple, imposed limitation on the input field. Any publishing software today, from WordPress to Drupal, can be modified to force users to stick to 140 characters - call it "microblogging mode". I don't think this particular difference (or how to bridge it) warrants much more explanation. Real Time While blogs used to update rather slowly in a publish and subscribe model, microblogging has had a reputation for being faster or real time. The old school refresh rate of 15 minutes or more (the time between RSS refreshes) seems like an eternity these days. Of course the reality is that the Twitter API is still incapable of sending updates to individual clients in real time, and the whole thing is far from real time. Updates in seconds, however, is a key trait of microbogging. The fact is, however, that blogs now have a method of pushing updates that's faster and more effective than even the Twitter API. It's an open standard called PubSubHub and it's supported by both Blogger, WordPress, Buzz and countless other smaller services. Blogs are already real time. Identified Subscriptions One of the nice things that Twitter does that traditional Blogging software does not do is called Identified Subscriptions. That is, when you subscribe to (a.k.a follow) a user, their name and face appear in your sidebar, and you get a nice little ego boost in the form of a notification email and increase in your follower count. Why couldn't we add a simple mechanism to PubSubHub so that when a client subscribes to push updates, it leaves behind some optional identifying information about the user like their name and avatar? Or maybe instead of leaving the actual username and avatar, it might provide a URL to the subscribing user's own microblogging site that has that metadata stored in the header. Addressability This is perhaps the most complicated difference and gap to close. With Twitter, you can easily say, "Hey @chrissaad you are are a crazy hippy" and I will get it in my message stream. Blogs can't do that right? Well, actually, blogs have been doing addressability since day zero. The same way the rest of the Web does addressability - using links. Bloggers frequently link to each other and then check their trackbacks and pingbacks for incoming references. The only problem with this model is that it's not user friendly enough. Mainstream users don't understand URLs and checking pingback and referrer logs is just plain silly. So rather than reinvent the wheel, why not just add rubber? To make it easier for users, imagine if blogging software kept track of the users you were following (see Identified Subscriptions above) and when you type the equivalent of "@", they provided a list of suggested aliases to choose from. When you select the person you are addressing, the software could insert the alias and hyperlink the name to the associated URL of that user's microblogging site. Clients, then, could subscribe to Google Blog Search (remember blog search is essentially the blogging world's open firehose) and search for any reference to your personal URL. The rest is just presentation tricks to show those replies mixed in with the rest of your microblogging items. Clients Why can't existing Twitter clients allow users to subscribe to PubSubHub enabled RSS and Atom feeds. They would also subscribe to the Google Blog Search for references to your own URL (for @ replies). No need to rip and replace Twitter, just offer an open alternative: subscribe to any site - anywhere. The Future As you can see here, microblogging is and could be fundamentally the same as blogging in terms of the mechanics and technologies involved. The techniques used to build and improve the open blogosphere could be used to bootstrap a microblogging sphere as well. There have been many big strides in this area, such as Status.net. The opportunity now is for the (ex?) Twitter clients and blog publishing platforms and the standards groups to make small tweaks to extend the technology in the right way. Discuss
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Microblogging vs. Blogging: 5 Ways to Create an Open Twitter Alternative
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