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Facebook announced yesterday that it is taking a number of dramatic steps that would all add up to serving 1 billion "like" clicks from visitors to sites around the web, within 24 hours. Many people are concerned about Facebook's growing dominance around the web . One group of high-profile New Yorkers has launched OpenLike , a "very alpha alternative to Facebook Like." Working on the project so far is much-watched blogging investor and startup guy Chris Dixon , Huffington Post co-founder and MIT Media Lab guy Jonah Peretti , Jonathan Glick of Dixon, Conway , Ehrenberg and other VC-blessed TLists , Tom Pinckney who with Dixon both sold SiteAdvisor and founded Hunch.com and MIT grad and Hunch engineer Peter Coles . Dixon said this afternoon that the project is "looking for an authoritative open source person to govern it." Sponsor So the establishment is in Palo Alto and the rock-star insurgents are from the East Coast? Let no one say the Internet is boring. The lightweight technology at OpenLike is right now just a way for site owners to provide buttons for sharing content on a wide variety of social networks. One line of javascript adds a series of sharing buttons to a site, which the site owner can edit. Given that there are any number of ways to do more or less this same thing, and that these are very smart people working on this, we're sure there's a lot more in the works. The project describes itself on its site as "an open protocol to allow sharing the things people like in a simple and standard method between web applications." We'll share more details if and when this project develops. Related: See also developer Jesse Stay's blog post How Do You Compete With This Beast: Here's How , about long-time open standards community member Phil Windley's new product Kynext . The battle over control or absence of control over the internet is far, far from over. There are lots of people getting ready to step up and challenge Facebook's powerful, seductive, expanding control. Discuss
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OpenLike: All-Star Team to Challenge Facebook's Expansion
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Imagine visiting a website and finding that it already knows who you are, where you live, how old you are and who your Facebook friends are, without your ever having given it permission to access that information. If you're logged in to Facebook and visit some as yet unnamed "pre-approved" sites around the web, those sites may soon have default access to data about your Facebook account and friends, the company announced today . Barry Schnitt, Senior Manager, Corporate Communications and Public Policy at Facebook, told us in an email that "the right way to think about this is not like a new experience but as making the [Facebook] Connect experience even better and more seamless." There will be new user controls made available, but this is a new experience: this makes Facebook Connect opt-out instead of opt-in. Sponsor The proposed change was first written about by Jason Kincaid on TechCrunch, who called it Facebook's Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For . Here's the language Facebook used to describe the draft policy: Pre-Approved Third-Party Websites and Applications. In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook). Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website). In these cases we require these websites and applications to go through an approval process, and to enter into separate agreements designed to protect your privacy. That sounds downright creepy. It's nice to have one-click access to your Facebook info if you decide to share it with other sites - that's what Facebook Connect does - but the prospect of having that information automatically shared when you show up on another website seems like an idea that won't be well received by users. There's a big difference between opt-in and opt-out "data portability." Schnitt says: "People love personalized and social experiences and that's why Facebook and Facebook Connect have been so successful. We think there are some instances where people would benefit from this experience as soon as they arrive on a small number of trusted websites that we pre-approve." Shnitt is the man who told us in a previous interview about Facebook's fundamental shift away from being private by default ( Why Facebook Changed Its Privacy Strategy ) that users generally go along with the company's default privacy settings because they agree with the company's recommendations and because the world is changing to be less private. He cited the growth of Twitter, blogging and reality TV as evidence that the world was changing this way and that people are less interested in privacy. In that interview, Schnitt also acknowledged that business reasons, like pageviews and advertising, were part of why Facebook was transforming away from privacy as well. We asked if this new opt-out Facebook Connect was the first step in a Facebook Ad Network, where your profile on Facebook is used to target ads that Facebook sells on sites all over the web. Schnitt told us, "this has absolutely nothing to do with advertising." Do you buy all that? Do you trust Facebook to select trustworthy websites to automatically share your data with when you browse around the web? If you don't trust Facebook's judgement, you will be able to opt-out of exposing that data. But by default you'll be sharing it. By default, you're sharing more and more these days, with more and more people. Perhaps that's because of your love for Twitter and reality TV, but perhaps its because of Facebook's cultural and commercial agenda. Discuss
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Facebook May Share User Data With External Sites Automatically
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We've seen the feature before on services like MapMyRide and surely many other maps, but as of yesterday, we will probably begin seeing it pop up all around the web - elevation on maps. Google announced yesterday that it would be bringing elevation to its Maps API, ensuring a whole new slew of Google Maps mashups. Sponsor The new service, available for use as either the ElevationService class or the Elevation Web Service (which doesn't require an API key to use), provides "the elevation in meters for one or more sets of coordinates" or a select number of points, equally spaced along a path. As Google points out in its blog, the most obvious use for elevation is in planning out something like a bicycle route. "In fact you'll be happy to hear," the company writes in its blog "that the Maps API bicycling directions already factor in elevation". Already, for bicycling junkies like myself, the ability to check out routes and elevations on sites like MapMyRide is extremely useful, if not just really interesting. The mashup on Google's blog post about this new feature shows how the data can be used to give a side-view of any path, alerting you to any unforseen inclines or descents. Aside from bicycling, there are any number of uses for this sort of data - avoiding hills in icy winter travel, figuring out sight lines or just choosing the best route to drive that moving van and not have everything slide to the back end. While there are other services, as we've mentioned, that have already offered this feature, there's something about it coming to Google Maps. We already use Google Maps to plot out our routes and get directions, so why go somewhere else to get elevation? Now, you might not have to. We're hoping this gets added as a standard feature on Google Maps soon. Take a minute to play with the embedded map below and see how the elevation data can be used with Google Maps. Discuss
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Google Maps API Gets Elevation
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Real-tme feed publishing startup Superfeedr has quietly turned on automatic location data in the feeds it republishes from around the web, we confirmed with the company today. Founder Julien Genestoux explained the feature using Twitter as his example, but the same content extraction and analysis is being done on all kinds of feeds run through the service. "If you turn geolocation on in Twitter, then your feed will include geolocation in your Tweets and we'll just push that through," he said. "If you don't do that but you Tweet about Austin, we will deliver the latitude and longitude for Austin in the XML." In other words, developers building apps on top of Superfeedr's real-time feeds will now know programmatically what geographic locations are discussed in the content coming through the feeds. Future feature? Subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL. Sponsor Genestoux says he is using a number of 3rd party services to extract this data, including the Yahoo Placemaker API . Along with this location data, the service also offers automatic language identification and is working on entity extraction and sentiment analysis. The prospect of subscribing to content by location instead of by feed URL is an exciting one, though Genestoux says he's just beginning to develop it. Could that facilitate a location data stream that crosses and goes beyond the siloed location based social networks so widely discussed these days? We suspect that it could. Superfeedr could be described as "FeedBurner 2.0" - for a more real-time and meta-data savvy web. The company was funded this Fall by real-time incubator Betaworks and media mogul Mark Cuban . Betaworks announced today that it has raised $20 million more to build out its portfolio of companies like Superfeedr, Bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Tumblr and more. Discuss
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Superfeedr Now Adds Location to Feeds Automatically
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Google just launched a new Google Labs product for Google Reader: Google Reader Play . Reader Play is a new, highly visual way to browse your Google Reader subscriptions that is somewhat reminiscent of Google's Fast Flip . It replaces the busy Google Reader interface with an interface that focuses on a single story. Whenever a post includes videos or images, Play with highlight these and give you the option to read more of the text as well. This new interface allows you to browse through the feeds you already subscribe to, but Google Reader Play also emphasizes Google Reader's ability to recommend items from around the web for you based on your preferences. Sponsor Big on Recommendations As Google notes, Play will learn from your preferences, based on the articles you read and "like." You can also choose from a set of categories (tech, entertainment, arts, business, etc.) and Google Reader will create a personalized stream of items just for you. According to Google, Play uses the same algorithm as the Recommended Items feed in Google Reader. Play will even work if you don't have a Google account. While you can't star, like or share items, you can still browse interesting posts based on the categories you choose. This should make it a good tool for those users who don't want to go through the effort of setting up a feed reader and subscribing to hundreds of different feeds. Get Started To use Google Reader Play, just head over here or look for "View in Reader Play" in the folder settings in Google Reader. You can switch stories by using your arrow keys or choose the slideshow mode that will automatically forward to the next story after a few second. Discuss
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Reader Play: Google Reader's New Fast Flip Style Interface
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