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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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Social Media
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SugarSync is one of several companies competing these days to benefit from the disruptions in the market created by the new ways that people organize and share information from the any number of devices they use in their day. That's a fundamental shift that is happening as people move beyond the desktop as a place to keep their documents, their media and their productivity applications. Sponsor Services like SugarSync serve in many ways as personal clouds that people use for their own work. They seem like plain vanilla services but that as well is the benefit the services provide. They are very simple to use. Data is automatically backed up to the cloud. SugarSync's latest hosting numbers are revealing as they demonstrate how much data people are storing online. SugarSync reports that in the past year, the amount of data added to the SugarSync data centers went from an average of 1 terabyte of data to 5 terabytes of information. In total, the company now hosts two petaybtes of information. What's fueling this growth? The customers may provide some clue. About 33 percent of customers are from outside the United States. Mobile devices are far more predominant outside the U.S. It makes sense tht people would need an alternative place to store infromation besides their smart phone or netbook. In light of the booming mobile device market, SugarSync, Dropbox and a host of other services are companies that seem like it would make most sense to develop mobile apps. That appears to be true. In the past 18 months, Sugar Sync has released apps for the Android, BlackBerry and iPad. Services like SugarSync show how the data we create will become part of a personal cloud network. These services lay the grounwork for a new generation of personal and business offerings that work with users to create data as a service opportunities. That's down the road a bit but people do want so share. And they want to share outside the borders of a social network. Personal clouds could be a means to do that. Discuss
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SugarSync: 2 Petabytes and Counting - Welcome to the Personal Cloud
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As Google has worked to add more and more real-time search capabilities by adding content from sites like Facebook, MySpace, Buzz and Twitter, we've been able to see more and more what people are talking about online. Google's latest feature that it is announcing today takes real-time data and puts it into a perspective we can work with - the past. Sponsor Rather than letting all of this real-time data simply stream past and evaporate into thin air, Google is rolling out a "replay" feature, that lets you look at real-time data, in this case tweets, at any specific time in the past. The feature offers a timeline of tweets, showing the volume of tweets containing relevant search terms, broken down according to scale. After playing with it for a few minutes, we were able to see that it even gets as narrow as a minute by minute breakdown of tweets on a topic. It will be available by clicking on "Show Options" on the left side of your screen and then "Updates". For now, Google says that it will offer tweets going back to February 11, 2010 but will soon extend back to March 21, 2006. The company says that the feature is currently rolling out and should be available globally in English within the next few days, but you can give it a whirl before then. As Google points out, the "replay" feature may be a great way to explore " how the news broke about health care legislation in Congress, what people were saying about Justice Paul Stevens' retirement or what people were tweeting during your own marathon run? These are the kinds of things you can explore with the new updates mode." We're looking forward to seeing what this sort of interaction with real-time data, in the aggregate, will bring to the table. It might not only be an invaluable reporting tool, but a great way to find out when a local restaurant is at its busiest. Discuss
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Google's Twitter Timeline Lets You Explore the Past
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Twitter is asking you, its users, if you have 140 seconds to answer seven simple questions about its service. Now, in calmer times, a simple user survey might just pass by unnoticed, but with all the hubbub over the past week about Twitter buying Tweetie , Fred Wilson's over-analyzed blog post and the unveiling of Twitter's ad platform , everyone's looking for clues as to Twitter's next move. Sponsor The survey wants to know what third-party clients you've used in the past, what ones you would recommend, what types of people you follow on Twitter, what types you want to find more of, and your primary (and secondary) reason for using the service. The immediate conclusion to jump to, from these questions, is that Twitter is eyeballing other apps, either to buy outright or to work with on its ad platform. It still remains to be seen how Twitter ads will play out in third-party clients and Twitter could be getting some market data for precisely that reason. Another way to look at it is, we get to see what third-party clients and services are on Twitter's radar and exactly how the company sees itself. For example, when the survey asks who you follow, you can choose between actors, celebs, coworkers, industry experts, family, friends, local businesses, musicians and news sources. What about government agencies and political figures? The hundreds if not thousands of absolutely hilarious joke and humor accounts, like Shit My Dad Says and Drunk Hulk ? In the end, we're just as interested in the answers to these questions as Twitter is, and we're hoping the company releases the data to the public at some point. Not likely, but we can hope, right? One final note, if you do fill out the survey you have the option of giving your Twitter name and an email address to possibly be added as a candidate to test new products in the future - for that reason alone, I'm willing to tell Twitter what my favorite clients are. Discuss
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Twitter Survey Wants To Know Your Favorite Client
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