Q 8 Blog Reviews » friends

Giving in to Facebook: A Weekend on the New "Instantly Personalized" Web (Op-Ed)

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:29:52 +0000

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

See the rest here:
Giving in to Facebook: A Weekend on the New "Instantly Personalized" Web (Op-Ed)

Do Kids Read Blogs? New Study Aims to Confuse

cgseo — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 15:13:59 +0000

A new study released earlier this month seems to contradict findings from Pew Internet Project's February report on the declining blog authorship and blog readership among the youngest generation of online users. Instead of seeing a downward trend in blogging, the latest research appears, at first glance, to have us questioning those prior reports. According to the latest study, this one from BlogHer and iVillage (red flag?) and co-sponsored by Ketchum and The Nielsen Company , young adults known as "millenials" are the top demographic group in both reading and writing blogs with nearly one-third reporting they read blogs and just over 40% saying they blog themselves. So was the earlier study - the one claiming "kids don't blog" anymore - wrong? Sponsor Odd Demographics Studied In the new study, the focus was on four age groups: millenials (ages 18-25), Gen X/Y (26-42), Boomers (43-61) and Seniors (62-76). This is a confusing segmentation of demographic groups because they've lumped in some of the millenials with the the "Gen X" group to create a hybrid group called "Gen X/Y." The term "millenials," however, is often used interchangeably with "Gen Y," so it's unclear why they've decided to break up that demographic group in this way. To boost Gen X's numbers, perhaps? We can't be sure. Ignoring Those Under 18 More importantly, the study simply ignores the youngest generation, the one we like to call "generation I" or the "iGeneration" (you can guess why), which was a major focus of Pew's study. In fact, Pew's study showed that only 14% of tweens and teens ages 12 to 17 now report that they blog , down from 25% only four years ago . And only 52% reporting reading and commenting on their friends' blog, down from over three-quarters back in 2006. In other words, the Internet's newest users aren't blogging or all that interested in reading blogs. Instead, they prefer Facebook, said the study. It's their method of communication between friends and for getting the latest news. Yes, sigh, Facebook is the new Internet. And the social network's latest moves will only further solidify that position with the launch of the universal "like" button for the entire web, the "instant personalization" provided by websites like Pandora and Yelp (to start), the "sign in with Facebook" boxes that appear on seemingly every site now and so on. How this youngest online generation uses the Internet is an important trend to watch. Although their habits may change over time, it's worth considering that their general disinterest in sharing their thoughts, feelings, news and ideas via blogging is a trend that will continue as they age. After all, who needs to blog when you have Facebook? BlogHer/iVillage's Findings For what it's worth, the BlogHer/iVillage study found that those 18-25 were the group most likely to write or read blogs, with 40.4% reporting the write blogs and 30.3% reporting they read them . The mysterious Gen X/Y group was a close second with 28.1% of the group saying they were blog authors and 29.3% saying they were blog readers. Some of the other numbers are questionable, although we have no way of proving their legitimacy or lack thereof. But really: 12.8% of bloggers are seniors? This is perhaps the most shocking number of them all. Nothing against seniors, of course, but I live in a state filled with them , and I have yet to meet a single senior who even knows what a blog is, much less authors one. At the end of the day, the study's numbers just feel a little too bullish on this whole blogging thing for my tastes. Plus, there's little info about the methodology included in the report and, then there's the fact that BlogHer, a blogging community for women, is, in part, behind the research. The truth of the matter is that neither this latest study nor Pew's research is likely painting an entirely accurate picture of the blogging landscape. We've questioned Pew's methodology many times in the past and we're skeptical of positive studies put out by those who would benefit from the news.

Facebook Data & Privacy: So Much Has Changed in Two Years

cgseo — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 01:01:18 +0000

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

Visit link:
Facebook Data & Privacy: So Much Has Changed in Two Years

Docs.com: Facebook and Microsoft Go After Google Docs

cgseo — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 19:24:06 +0000

During today's F8 keynote, Mark Zuckerberg announced a number of new products and features for Facebook, including a new collaboration with Microsoft. With Docs.com , Microsoft's FUSE labs just launched an online document editor and viewer that connects directly to Facebook and uses all of the new social features for third-party sites that Facebook announced today. Docs, for example, allows users to share documents with their Facebook friends, edit them collaboratively and discover documents that their friends have uploaded to their profiles. Sponsor Creating Documents in the Cloud and Sharing them With Your Facebook Friends With Docs, you can create new documents right in the web application or upload them from your desktop. Docs gives you the option to share documents privately or you can allow a select group of your Facebook friends to edit the document with you. A button next to every document allows you to add additional editors at any point. In our tests, the editor wasn't working properly yet (though the document viewer works just fine). We will take a closer look at Docs editing features once it is fully up and running. In addition to being able to create and view documents, Docs.com's Facebook integration will also allow your friends to discover these documents (if you choose to share them). You can also add a new tab to your profile page that shows all the documents you have shared with your friends. This also means that you can use Facebook to discuss these documents in public, just like you would discuss any other status update on the site. Attacking Google There can be little doubt that this is a direct attack against Google Docs . Even though Google Docs only offers relatively basic editing features, the service's collaboration tools allow it to stand out from Microsoft's products. Until now, collaborating on Microsoft Office documents was always a rather difficult task for Office users and generally involved using third-party software. It remains to be seen how many people in an office environment will really want to connect their documents to Facebook. For students and other Facebook users who aren't using this tool in a corporate environment and just want to share documents with each other, however, this looks like a great solution. Discuss

The rest is here:
Docs.com: Facebook and Microsoft Go After Google Docs

Facebook May Launch Recommendation Service For Other Websites

cgseo — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 03:34:52 +0000

Facebook appears to be preparing to launch a recommendation service that will be used on sites around the web. On the day before the F8 developers' conference, independent developer Jesse Stay has posted code found on Facebook's GitHub open source code repository account. Facebook is already very practiced at offering recommendations on-site: its News Feed technology pulls the items out of its Live Feed based on who and what you've shown is most important to you among all your friends and their activities. Facebook knows more about you than probably any other consumer service online, probably more even than Google. Recommendation could in fact become bigger than search, and so this feature could become one of Facebook's biggest moves. Sponsor Stay believes the feature will function like Google SideWiki , the sidebar of running commentary about a page that website owners have no control over but that hasn't really caught on with users, either. Two things you can be sure of: Facebook recommendations will make use of a website visitor's Facebook friend connections and the feature will almost definitely make publishers happier than the uncontrollable Google SideWiki did. recommendations site="abc.com" height="300" width="400" /> should be replaced by an iframe showing recommendations for the abc website (pending checkin on the server side). Recommendation would be huge for Facebook. Beyond just being cool for users, recommendation is compelling for site publishers because it's like pre-emptive search. The language in that code implies to me that the feature will display content recommended to a user because of interest by friends in certain content on the site. Presumably if any of your friends have shared links to the site you're visiting, you'll be encouraged to visit those pages in particular. Perhaps recommendation will go further than that. It's really hard to know, but we'll probably find out tomorrow. That's the question: is this a way for you to recommend content or to have content recommended to you? If it's primarily one, I'm guessing it's the latter. Make no mistake: recommendation could be a huge addition to Facebook's arsenal. Recommendation technologies are something we've covered for years here at ReadWriteWeb . We asked a year ago if Facebook was secretly working on a recommendation technology , though the feature we saw then turned out to be something else. Beyond just being cool for users, recommendation is compelling for site publishers because it's like pre-emptive search. Everyone wants to give their site owners an opportunity to search for the content they want to find, but even better is prompting them with what's effectively personalized search results as soon as they land on a page. Opt-out/opt-in? This essential question of privacy will be put to the test in many ways, as Facebook continues to extend its system of identity across the web. Facebook knows enough about you, your interests, your friends, their interests, their friends and their interests too that it should be able to nail recommendations fairly well. Discuss

More here:
Facebook May Launch Recommendation Service For Other Websites

YouTube Launches Twitter-Like Channel Bulletins

cgseo — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 23:10:11 +0000

YouTube has launched a new feature that allows channel owners to send text messages and links to videos to the front page of their subscribers' YouTube accounts. It's a cool, if logical, feature to offer and one that could make visiting YouTube a lot more fun. Called Channel Bulletins, the feature is pretty simple. But am I looking forward to seeing little updates sent out between videos from the people I'm subscribed to? Yes, I am. Sponsor It would be nice if YouTube allowed channel owners to pipe in RSS feeds, maybe Twitter messages. The personal touch should be nice too, though. If you aren't subscribed to any channels on YouTube, you're missing out on one of the best ways to experience the site. I'm subscribed to Steve Gillmor , Breaking the News , Social Data Revolution and Brown Man Thinking Hard , among others. (Would love to get your suggestions for video channels to subscribe to, RWW readers.) Blippy co-founder Phil Kaplan brought this feature to our attention and framed it as YouTube's version of Twitter. It may play out that way for hard-core YouTube users, but I hope more casual publishers will regularly send out bulletins as well. I wouldn't mind getting them as emails, even. It would be nice for subscribers to be able to reply easily to Channel Bulletins, too. There are lots of ways this could go, but getting it started, offering messaging other than videos and comments, is a good move. Channels have long been a part of YouTube, Paris Hilton got the first branded one in 2006 , and it's pretty far-out to think that text message communication between channel owners and subscribers has taken this long to arrive. Perhaps when you're coming from a video-centric perspective, these things don't always come to mind. There are many other social features that could be added to make YouTube a more compelling site. Could I please be shown the YouTube channels and favorites of my friends on Twitter, Facebook and Google Accounts, for example? That would be great. Discuss

See more here:
YouTube Launches Twitter-Like Channel Bulletins

Weekend Reading: The Referral Engine, by John Jantsch (Preview)

cgseo — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 19:00:00 +0000

There is a phenomenon among consumers that is evidenced by the rise in popularity of sites that allow users to share information about the products they buy or want to buy with friends and other shoppers like them. These sites exist because consumers inherently trust the opinions of their friends and their peers when it comes to purchasing and business related decisions, and they trust them a whole lot more than they trust most marketing campaigns. Author John Jantsch , who previously penned the book Duct Tape Marketing is a few weeks away from publishing his second book which focuses specifically on the power of referrals. Sponsor The book, titled The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself , hits bookshelves in mid-May, and could be an excellent resource for early-stage startups and entrepreneurs-to-be. Jantsch's first book did so well that it lead to the creation of the Duct Tape Marketing System and the Duct Tape Marketing Coach Network, while additionally earning accolades for both Jantsch's blog and his podcast on small business marketing which continues to release episodes today . In his new book, Jantsch explores how companies can strategically market their products to take advantage of the referral and peer review phenomenon of consumer buying habits. As Jantsch points out in a video explaining his motives behind the book (embedded below), he discovered that most successful small business which are thriving off referrals didn't do so by including some special sauce into their recipe. Instead, he says that these companies are, by their very nature, "more referable" than others. Some of Jantsch's suggestions for being more referable include making and effort to communicate personally with customers via social media and other means, being sure your customers know who they should be referring to, and getting your sales team on board with referral strategies. Early anticipatory praise of the book is already coming in from the likes of author Chris Brogan, Silicon Valley investor Guy Kawasaki, and Zappos founder Tony Hsieh whose upcoming book we previewed a few weeks ago . A free download of the first chapter is also available on the book's homepage, and the full book, coming in around 250 pages, will be available on May 13 according to Amazon . Check back here next month after the book publishes for a more in-depth review, and in the meantime, keep an eye out for ways to boost your company's referral engine. Discuss

Read this article:
Weekend Reading: The Referral Engine, by John Jantsch (Preview)

MySpace Launches Events Platform

cgseo — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 02:00:00 +0000

A couple of months ago, we asked whether MySpace could make a comeback . Since that time, they've become #1 on Android and jumped into bulk user data sales . Today, MySpace has unveiled a new events plaform . Called MySpace Events , it presumes to be "a global events and calendar platform providing users with new tools to create, discover, share, and manage events across MySpace and multiple social networks." Sponsor Key features include the following. A new social and pop culture calendar that "combines your friends' events, your events, events from your favorite artists, with pop culture events and sponsored events." Ability to buy concert tickets directly from an artist's profile. "Social advertising," wherein advertisers can purchase ad space inside users' social calendars. Cross-plaform event viewing in which a user's MySpace calendar includes Facebook events. "We're providing features to share events on MySpace via the Stream and across the web including on Facebook, Twitter, and tiny url." The announcement focuses on the benefits to both the Myspace users and the individual, up-and-coming "artists" who have used the service to promote themselves. It will be interesting to see how bigger companies use the platform. Discuss

Read more here:
MySpace Launches Events Platform

Rally Up Brings Location-Based Social Networking to the iPad

cgseo — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:35:00 +0000

Rally Up , a new location-based social network with a strong focus on privacy , just became the first fully featured location-based social network with an iPad app. The app, which is available for free ( iTunes link ), includes all of the features of Rally Up's iPhone app. Thanks to making good use of the iPad's expanded screen estate, however, using the iPad app is far easier and a lot more fun. Sponsor Location-Based Services on the iPad: On Hold Until the WiFi + 3G Models Arrive The current version of the iPad has to rely on WiFi triangulation to pinpoint a user's location. As long as you are in a city, this works reasonably well. We expect to see more location-based iPad apps, including from Foursquare and Gowalla, once Apple launches the WiFi + 3G version of the iPad, which will include a GPS chip. For now, Loopt's Pulse is the only other location-based social network that has arrived on the iPad, but Loopt's app doesn't allow users to check in from the app and focuses on letting users browser photos, places, events and their friends streams instead. Rally Up on the iPad When we first reviewed Rally Up's iPhone service a few weeks ago, we noted that the application puts a very strong emphasis on privacy and allows you to tweak these privacy settings individually for every single on of your followers and the people you follow. As Rally Up's co-founder Sol Lipman told us, Rally Up is really more about connecting you to your "real" friends. It is important to note that Rally Up's sophisticated privacy controls also gives you the flexibility to follow whoever you want to and just broadcast very little to none of your location data to people you don't fully trust or know. Using the iPhone version of Rally Up is a lot of fun - in part thanks to the application's minimalist design - but as with so many iPad apps, the larger screen makes browsing your friends streams and looking at their locations on a large map a lot easier. Rally Up's iPad app also emphasizes the microblogging aspects of the service, where the extra screen estate comes in handy for posts with photos, for example. Discuss

Continue reading here:
Rally Up Brings Location-Based Social Networking to the iPad

Your Inbox as Platform: Google Calendar More Closely Integrated With Gmail

cgseo — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 17:29:37 +0000

Email may be old fashioned, but it's still where we spend a lot of our time online. Today Google announced that it's webmail service Gmail is becoming all the richer with the inclusion of support for sending Google Calendar invitations inside the email composition window. In addition to being able to insert invitations, you can also cross reference your calendar availability with the availability of anyone included in your email thread that you have permission to see the Google Calendar for. It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty neat and it demonstrates the potential for building cool new features on top of our email inboxes. Sponsor Mashups and platforms are all about cross referencing multiple sources of data or functionality, as in this case: email plus calendar. We wrote earlier this Spring about a startup called Rapportive that cross references email and social media data about an email's sender (see also competitor Etacts ) and earlier this month we discussed the incredible potential in Google's announcement of a way to give developers secure access to the contents of your emails for analysis and the creation of innovative services. Yahoo has been calling this kind of approach Inbox 2.0 and has been working on it for more than two years. Here's what we wrote in November, 2007 coverage of Yahoo's vision - how do you think it's worked out? ( Yahoo Says the Future Will Be Modeled on Facebook ) The social network of the future will be populated by the RSS feeds of the activities of your friends and your friends will be determined by email. The big players won't put a major push into building a new social network. "It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand," are the words Google's Joe Krause. Your email account isn't valuable because it's got the email adresses of other people who could be solicited commercially - it's valuable because it articulates who in the world is able to command your attention. It contains analyzable, direct communication between you and the people most important to you. [Yahoo's] Garlinghouse says that in the future email and IM will be prioritized depending on the importance to you of the people who send it to you. We're not talking about the number of times people email you - we're talking about the percentage of times you open those emails, the keywords used in them relative to your personal/work profile, there are metrics so crazy we can hardly imagine that are available for determining the importance of people in your life. In your email. Facebook's people-search uses some similar math already. Various Ways Email Gets Innovated On Clearly there are all kinds of different levels of sophistication that can come with these sorts of developments. In fact, two plus years after Yahoo's call to action, things still seem relatively elementary. Rapportive displays data uniquely well but Etacts displays more data. This new Google Calendar integration with Gmail offers some visibility into your and your contacts' availability, but it doesn't tell you what you've got scheduled at a given time. Etacts offers inferior invitation sending but has a whole set of reminder and follow up features that Gmail doesn't offer natively. And Yahoo Mail more closely ties in Facebook than any other email, something millions of people are sure to enjoy. So while all the kids rant and rave about Twitter, Facebook, Augmented Reality, iPads and location based social networking, don't let them deny: email can still be very exciting. Discuss

See the original post here:
Your Inbox as Platform: Google Calendar More Closely Integrated With Gmail