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At last week's F8 developers' conference, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg unveiled plans to offer "instant personalization" all over the web , a way for websites to become instantly more social. Without even signing in, sites gain access to publicly available Facebook information like your name, profile picture, friend list and more, in order to personalize your experience on the site. At launch, only three partner sites are offering this feature: Microsoft's new Docs.com , Internet radio Pandora and user review site Yelp . You can opt-out of this experience if you like, but by default, you're opted in. Sponsor These changes have raised concerns among privacy advocates and are even now being questioned by government officials like U.S. Senator Charles Schumer who is urging the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to look into how social networks handle our private information. And yet... and yet ...after spending the weekend on these "instantly personalized" sites, I have to admit...begrudgingly, mind you...that the experience itself is amazing. Online Music Gets Personal, Too Personal? Pandora's Internet radio is a service I usually partake of via its mobile application on my iPhone, not its regular website. But after the launch of the newly personalized Pandora , I had to take a look. And it was worth it. I immediately discovered which of my friends had the same musical interests as I do. My editor, Richard MacManus, for example, is also a fan of The Killers! Who knew? And apparently, a whole bunch of friends are getting into MGMT now. But finding connections like these aren't the only types of discoveries you can make here. As social media user extraordinaire Robert Scoble found out , you can easily discover your friends' more embarrassing personal tastes too. Kenny G?, Scoble laughingly chides a co-worker after stumbling upon his decidedly unhipster musical interests. These are precisely the types of things we want to stay hidden. Kenny G, for instance. But also our secret obsession with that attractive actor or actress, our fondness for pictures of cute kitties, our forays into celebrity gossip sites when we have a reputation for being intelligent thinkers, our secret Star Wars addiction and so forth and so on. While there aren't " instantly personalized " sites showing you all these types of interests just yet, believe me, there will be. If Facebook has its way (and guess what? It will), your real identity , not just the public parts you've willingly shared in the past, will be revealed to anyone and everyone unless you take action to opt-out. The Real You Can No Longer Be Hidden This is precisely as it should be, Facebook CEO Zuckberberg, more or less said. Earlier this year, he made statements regarding Facebook's new openness, claiming that if he built the social network now, he would make a lot of the data housed there more public by default. This would reflect the current social norms, he said. But that's not exactly true. Facebook isn't reflecting social norms, it's attempting to create them. That said, what an amazing creation it is. On Yelp, I can find the reviews my Facebook friends authored with just a click. I can see who else really digs that local sushi place. And I can do all this without going through the whole "re-friending" process that Web 2.0 sites have put me through in the past again and again. I'm there, my friends are there, and I didn't have to do anything to make that happen. Frankly, it feels right. (Fellow ReadWriteWeb blogger Mike Melanson agrees .) A Minute on the Lips... But it's oh so wrong, isn't it? By giving into to Facebook's vision for the web, we're ceding control of our data, our likes, our interests, our "social graph" (aka who we know, who we friend) - everything - to one company. Historically , one very, very closed company . We're definitely worried about the implications of that. You should be too. But in the meantime, like that calorie-rich dessert we know we shouldn't eat, we're sampling Facebook's web and secretly savoring its deliciousness. Why does everything that's so wrong have to feel so good? Blast you, Facebook. Blast you. Discuss
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Giving in to Facebook: A Weekend on the New "Instantly Personalized" Web (Op-Ed)
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facebook,
federal,
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implications,
Microsoft,
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secret,
senator-charles,
social,
Social Media
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Fans of augmented reality (AR) will be excited to learn that their favorite emerging technology is now front and center of a brand new marketing campaign based around one of the Discovery Channel 's most popular television shows. Unfortunately for most tech nerds, it's not Mythbusters, though I wouldn't be surprised if the campaign was successful enough to spread to other shows. Instead, Discovery is promoting its docu-drama hit Deadliest Catch with a desktop-based AR ad campaign . Sponsor During episodes of the popular show, Alaskan king crab fishing enthusiasts are encouraged to visit a special webpage where they can print a flier that allows them to experience the adrenaline pumping action of "crabbing" for themselves. Okay, not really, but the experience - a 3D game controlled by the flier - actually looks pretty neat. By holding the flier up to a webcam, users can steer a 3D fishing boat that appears on the flier in a race against the clock to snatch up 20 crab pots (see video below). The experience was developed by Total Immersion , one of the top AR vendors profiled in our recently published report on augmented reality marketing . Though the popular show has just returned for its sixth season earlier this week, the AR game was tested in March with the show's Facebook fans - an effort that the company says reached over a quarter of a million viewers. But one of the great things about this AR experience is not the game itself, but rather the all out blitzkrieg of marketing behind it to make sure it reaches as many people as possible. Discovery and their marketing agency PHD are not only promoting the game through on-air mentions during episodes of the show, they are also providing print, online and experiential (ie: big trucks with giant monitors parked in public locations) advertisements as well. The print ads are running in some of the most popular magazines on newstands today, including ESPN the Magazine, Sports Illustrated, People and Entertainment Weekly. The online ads can be found similarly targeted websites, including ESPN.com, MSN.com and TVguide.com. The public kiosk-style displays were parked last week in Union Square and Citi Field (home of the Mets) in New York and in Washington D.C. at Nationals Stadium and on the National Mall. Clearly PHD sees sports fans as a crucial cross section of Deadliest Catch fans, as they strategically placed the kiosks at baseball stadiums during the first week of the MLB season. But I'm not excited that Deadliest Catch is getting a big marketing push for the debut of its new season, I'm thrilled that augmented reality is at the center of it, and is getting huge play infront of mainstream eyeballs. A prominent campaign for one the highest rated shows on a very popular cable channel is exactly the primetime exposure that AR needs to keep pushing on the brink of universal adoption. That being said, there could be a downside to this exposure. Is this experience the best form of AR that should be placed in the national spotlight? Could this further the notion that AR is a gimmicky advertising trick because of the gaming aspect? There are plenty of experiences, which we have discussed at length , that provide practical services and applications by way of AR, and steering a fishing boat is hardly one of them. My fear, as a fan of the technology, is that widespread exposure of this type could actually damage AR's growing reputation. So I guess theres a bit of a risk/reward balance that needs to be found in these AR experiences with the potential to reach millions of viewers. The chance to put the technology infront of that many people is impossible to turn down, but at the same time, depending on the application, it could backfire and leave a lasting impression in many minds that AR is nothing but a fun toy that ad agencies get to play with in hopes of engaging users with the "wow factor." Personally I have a preference for AR experiences that actually provide a practical service , but I can't help but be excited for this new campaign from Discovery and Total Immersion. Discuss
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Discovery Channel Puts AR In Front of Millions of Eyeballs
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augmented-reality,
deadliest-catch,
entertainment,
experience,
facebook,
flier,
gaming,
marketing,
national,
popular,
technology
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Sugar CRM is launching a new user interface as part of Sugar 6. It comes with a focus on what is becoming a prerequisite: an emphasis on speed, search and deeper integration with third party applications and mobile devices. The speed issue is one that SaaS providers always seek to mitigate as they want the service to seem as responsive as if it were worked on the desktop. Sponsor To do this, Sugar CRM is providing a revamped set up that when completed is supposed to be optimized for speed and designed for the experience that comes with using a social network. It includes a new, global search, another effort to optimize the experience for the end user. Search is becoming increasingly critical as more data is available for integration with third party apps. Sugar CRM will strengthen its search with an open-source engine such as Lucene . SugarCRM is paying close attention to the user experience, knowing it is a key to acceptance among users of CRM environments. SugarCRM also includes native application support for the iPhone Android and the Blackberry. The company has also introduced a native app for the iPad. Application integration is the hallmark of the emerging social CRM application. SugarCRM fits with LinkedIn, Hoovers and Jigsaw through its Cloud Connectors service, which connects third-party data service. SugarCRM also works with Sugar Plug-Ins for Microsoft Outlook, Word and Excel. But can't this all become a bit overwhelming? All this data flowing into one CRM environment means that the customer needs to think carefully how to organize, discover and share what comes into the network. That's why it makes sense that a search and potentially analytics component will become standards for services like SugarCRM. It's also why SugarCRM has a certain advantage. Open-source platforms will thrive in the data deluge to come. Third-party services become critical as components that make sense of internal and external information. It's just a matter of how those applications are applied so customers can get relevant information that they need for the opportunity at hand. Discuss
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SugarCRM: Speed, Search and the Data Deluge
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blackberry,
data,
desktop,
experience,
iPad,
iphone,
news,
phone-android,
sugar
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So before the purists go off the deep end, fuming about the iPhone OS 4.0 announcement today , let's just concede one point - it isn't truly multitasking. Apple announced "Multitasking" with seven key points, one of them being "Fast App Switching", and this is what they meant for much of multitasking. But, here's the thing - for some of the most exciting things we've wanted to do, multitasking-wise, with our iPhones, the new OS will indeed offer true multitasking, and for that we're fairly excited to say the least. Sponsor Multitasking, for the most part, is handled by a double click on the home button, which pulls up a screen showing icons of all the apps currently hanging out in the background. Some, like Skype or Pandora, will actually be running, while others will simply be in a frozen state. The multitasking feature will be available for iPhone 3GS and iPod Touch 2nd Generation starting this summer and Apple is guaranteeing that it will not only keep your device moving quickly but will work to conserve battery life. In this effort, the company has released 7 APIs to handle the "multitasking". Instead of allowing the application to continue running a full instance in the background, potentially clogging up the system and draining power, the OS will handle background operations for several specific processes. [Image courtesy of GDGT .] For other applications not using these specific background services, switching out of the app will simply freeze it in its current state for the user to return to later. Otherwise, Apple certainly nailed it as far as the types of services we were hoping to run in the background. You want music to keep streaming through Pandora while you catch up with reading on Read It Later? You got it. How about keeping track of your bike ride across town with Map My Ride and being able to look up directions on the way? Sure! Keep Skype running in the background and get phone calls and chat notifications? Indeed. The iPhone will even complete tasks, such as uploading photos and videos, in the background - a feature sounds rather like "true" multitasking to us. We admit, "true" multitasking or not, this fulfills many of our wishes and we're quite excited. The only thing we'll have to hope for now is that the apps we want to multitask implement these new APIs. By doing multitasking this way, Apple has tried to assure that it can control the quality of the experience, but we'll have to hope for companies to follow along and release updated versions. Discuss
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Apple Announces Multitasking for iPhone? Close Enough.
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experience,
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the-background,
true multitasking,
user
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Rackspace launched an iPad app to manage a cloud infrastructure, one of the first to offer such a service. Amazon Web Services (AWS) does not have apps for the iPhone nor the iPad platforms. It has historically not offered mobile apps for AWS. Sponsor You can still access AWS on the iPad through the Safari browser. But is the experience as rich as what you would have as on a native app? Mike Mayo built Rackspace's iPad app. He says it is the functionality that gives apps their value. It's evident in both consumer and enterprise apps. Users get a rich user experience. You can see it in the Racskpace cloud app. Mayo humorously says that the app offers administrators "a life." Meaning that you can go out for dinner without the anxiety of not knowing how the infrastructure is faring. If you see a problem, you can reboot, directly from the device. The app does have a new service not available on the iPhone version. You can delete your servers on it. Mayo kept the feature off the iPhone due to the concern that it's such a small device, easily left at a bar or restaurant. He feels people are less likely to leave an iPad due to its size. We're not so sure. People leave their laptops behind all the time. We could go into details about the app and what it offers but Robert Scoble's video does a good job of that. Mayo is currently developing a Rackpace cloud app for the Android. Disclosure: RackSpace is a sponsor of ReadWriteCloud's parent site, ReadWriteWeb. Discuss
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Does the iPad App Give Rackspace An Advantage?
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cloud computing,
experience,
from-the-device,
functionality,
humorously-says,
infrastructure,
iPad,
iphone,
racskpace,
Robert Scoble,
safari