Demetri Kofinas: "That's why we have evolution."

'Facebook is not only on course to go bust, but will take the rest of the ad-supported Web with it. Facebook's business only grows on the unsustainable basis that it can add new customers at a faster rate than the value of individual customers declines. It is peddling as fast as it can. And the present scenario gets much worse as its users increasingly interact with the social service on mobile devices, because it is vastly harder, on a small screen, to sell ads and profitably monetize users. On the other hand, Facebook is, everyone has come to agree, profoundly different from the Web. First of all, it exerts a new level of hegemonic control over users' experiences. And it has its vast scale: 900 million, soon a billion, eventually two billion (one of the problems with the logic of constant growth at this scale and speed, of course, is that eventually it runs out of humans with computers or smart phones). And then it is social. Facebook has, in some yet-to-be-defined way, redefined something. Relationships? Media? Communications? Communities? Something big, anyway. The subtext—an overt subtext—of the popular account of Facebook is that the network has a proprietary claim and special insight into social behavior. For enterprises and advertising agencies, it is therefore the bridge to new modes of human connection. But so far, the sweeping, basic, transformative, and simple way to connect buyer to seller and then get out of the way eludes Facebook. So the social network is left in the same position as all other media companies. Instead of being inevitable and unavoidable, it has to sell the one-off virtue of its audience like every other humper on Madison Avenue.' -- Waiting for Godot

'It was the great unwinding of the Zynga arbitrage. As Matthew Ingram of GigaOm pointed out, Zynga had been something of a Facebook proxy before the latter went public. It makes sense: the companies are symbiotic. Without Facebook, Zynga wouldn't exist. And without Zynga, Facebook wouldn't have about 12 percent of the revenue that it does. Once that had sorted out, Zynga's stock began trading more normally. But if Zynga and Facebook are so connected, why did one tank while the other didn't? The answer is that they both tanked -- kind of. Remember: Facebook's underwriters wouldn't let its share price fall below $38 a share today. That's what underwriters do. They take a company public in return for a guarantee to buy at the IPO price. So if traders thought that the IPO price was overvalued, they might have taken it out on the next best thing. Which was bad news for Zynga. That's why the news didn't get any better for the FarmVille creator even after its stock stopped flash crashing. Just look out on Monday. The underwriters won't be there with their safety net.'

'...its $100bn-plus valuation vastly exceeds the value of its relatively low value ads, meaning it really has to become much more like television than like Google. Except that it isn't television. It doesn't really even have an audience – that is, people thinking and feeling something similar (ideally, all at once). And it isn't run by people who even care about media – or doing what media does: that is, holding people's attention by means of pain, or charm, or jokes. (Facebook will eventually try, like all other internet companies, to hire media people – but they won't get the jokes.) Of course, the future is coming and we have somehow convinced ourselves that forward-thinking technology companies, by learning so much more about people's behavior and habits and knowing more about them than they do themselves, will somehow, with undreamed-of efficiency, sell them something. And these social media savants will be able to do this without having to rely on the much more mysterious and hit-and-miss process of producing good stories.'

'But here's the rub. In 2011, Facebook made $4 per user per year. To earn its market cap of $100 billion today, it would have to earn five-times that figure per user. This sets up a tug-of-war over user information. Facebook has lots of it. Advertisers want to see more of it. Users want them to see less of it. The true value of Facebook could depend on who wins that turf war. The upside is that Facebook has created something without precedent: an addictive product for hundreds of millions of people who spent their time creating, for free, something of huge importance to advertisers, which is personal information about their lives and interests. The downside is that Facebook is still extremely protective about the sort of ads it displays, partly because it's extremely sensitive to the fact that its users consider Facebook private. -- Ultimately, Facebook isn't like Google, or the yellow pages, or TV, and it doesn't want to be. It wants to be something totally new: an infrastructure for the social web that can attract old-fashioned ads, create new ads that blend user content and marketing, create software that underpins that social web, and charge monopoly rents for its sprawling influence. And its investors are betting on the fact that no company this wide, this deep, this addictive, and this influential could possibly fail.'

'Where is this business model? Google provides a service – a search algorithm. Microsoft provides computer software. Apple provides innovative and beautiful software.What exactly is the bottom line for Facebook? Essentially, the company is worth whatever information it can pilfer from its client base. And that information may be worth more to the American intelligence companies that apparently crowd around Facebook than to the private sector itself. This is a company, then, that is fundamentally at war with its users. It provides the "thinnest" of services – social connectivity. Go online and it is hard to find a kind word for Facebook. Feedback to articles (not the articles themselves) is crammed with comments on Facebook's various problems from a business standpoint. Many deplore Facebook's lack of real privacy and manipulation of data and are skeptical about the company's prospects going forward. We share the same sentiments. We cannot account for the US$ 104 billion that the company is putatively worth now. Google, with ten times the earnings, is worth the same amount, capitalization-wise. The money being tossed around this Facebook deal is phenomenal. Central banks, in fact, have printed so much money over the past four years that some of it has got to go somewhere. Some of it has gone toward Facebook.'

'We are apparently betting the nation’s (perhaps the planet’s) economic future on a service that essentially enables petabytes of frivolous banality to flow through the world’s data pipes. The critics are not wrong. Facebook is frivolous. Incredibly so. What they get wrong though is assuming that old economy stuff is not frivolous. Take the auto industry. For a century people have used cars for completely frivolous things like taking road trips, going to dumb B-movies, going over to visit friends to play board games, or to a workplace to sit in a cubicle and be bored for 8 hours. Drag races, NASCAR, random drives to feel the wind in your face (why not go running so you can lose some weight at the same time?): what is so “serious” about any of this? Still think the old economy is more serious than Facebook? Suddenly, Farmville seems very green and eco-friendly. Ultimately, to a scary degree, everything in the American economy is about sustaining frivolity. Much of it obesity-inducing, gas-guzzling, non-renewable, planet-destroying frivolity. If we’re going to do this, we might at least do it more efficiently. Enter Facebook. By digitizing much of the frivolous banality in our lives that currently takes expensive physical infrastructure, gasoline and tens of millions of jobs to sustain, Facebook is showing us the true value of the fading American industrial economy itself. -- The Facebook IPO is ultimately unsettling for just this reason. It shows us that even those who toil away today at apparently noble, uplifting professions that elevate minds and nourish souls, ultimately do so in service of a fundamentally frivolous economy. An economy that is basically one giant feedback loop between frivolous consumption driven by television and complicated production systems that absorb the talents of millions. It is really a huge circus of sound and fury signifying almost nothing.'

'Social-media data collection, though, makes the illusion of a unified self hard to sustain. By imposing a single persistent identity, social media inevitably confront people with their inconsistencies. Yet one can’t abstain from Facebook without suffering growing economic consequences. What emerges from this pressure is social media’s tendency to both instantiate and discredit authenticity. They validate the quest for it while dismissing the possibility that you’ll ever arrive at it. The self-directed consumers who shop to express intrinsic inner being is supplanted by the well-connected, autoconfessional self who never pauses in disclosing information and thus runs ahead of any need to self-impose consistency. -- Social media gives us more information about ourselves than we can process, so any schematization of it seems to add to self-knowledge rather than limit it, broadening our identity repertoire. -- The data self coalesces in social media’s mircoaffirmations: we are matched with people who can affirm us, we see a reflection of ourselves in the data that makes us feel recognized, we are told what to want in a way that assures us we will be doing what is right and normal. What threatens the data self is not inauthenticity but lack of access, a disruption of the information flow. If the sharing process is disrupted, we are left with the underlying terror that there might be something crucial about our lives that can’t be expressed in data. The true existential threat is not that our identity will be exposed as fake, but that endless sharing of it will make it feel increasingly inexpressible. Key things might seem to escape our attempts to tell all. ...it becomes impossible to feel that something meaningful could also be unsharable. We are only what we share. Activity only means something to us because we know we can share it.'

'Facebook is basically a glorified family photo album for the entire human race. However, a photo album is not a business model. -- There is only one scenario under which the company will become a screaming buy – legalised gambling. Presently, Facebook receives more than 15 per cent of its revenue from Zynga, but there are only so many people on this planet who are willing to waste their time playing Farmville and Mafia Wars. Online poker, however, is another story altogether. If Facebook can become the virtual casino to the world, its profit potential will be enormous. Until that time, I would pass on the stock.' -- Roaring Naughties

'...[the] response that Facebook sent back ... includes text printouts of Markoff's wall posts, photos he uploaded as well as photos he was tagged in, a comprehensive list of friends with their Facebook IDs (which we've redacted), and a long table of login and IP data. This document was publicly released by Boston Police as part of the case file. In other case documents, the police have clearly redacted sensitive information. And while the police were evidently comfortable releasing Markoff's unredacted Facebook subpoena, we weren't. Markoff may be dead, but the very-much-alive friends in his friend list were not subpoenaed, and yet their full names and Facebook ID's were part of the document. So we took the additional step of redacting as much identifying information as we could -- knowing that any redaction we performed would be imperfect, but believing that there's a strong argument for distributing this, not only for its value in illustrating the Markoff case, but as a rare window into the shadowy process by which Facebook deals with law enforcement.' -- Innocent until associated with the guilty.

'The research comes amid increasing evidence that young people are becoming increasingly narcissistic, and obsessed with self-image and shallow friendships. Vignoles said the correlational nature of the latest study meant it was difficult to be certain whether individual differences in narcissism led to certain patterns of Facebook behaviour, whether patterns of Facebook behaviour led to individual differences in narcissism, or a bit of both. "If Facebook is to be a place where people go to repair their damaged ego and seek social support, it is vitally important to discover the potentially negative communication one might find on Facebook and the kinds of people likely to engage in them. Ideally, people will engage in pro-social Facebooking rather than anti-social me-booking."'

'...the new formats will draw their content exclusively from posts to brands' Facebook Pages, rather from advertising copy written independently. While Facebook had already been moving in these directions with its previous ad units, the decision to draw ad content from Page posts is the most significant new feature--and a potentially radical departure from conventional notions of advertising. The ads don't simply repurpose content from brands' Pages. By giving users the ability to respond to the content inside the ad, just as if they had seen the content on the brand Page itself, and then by posting those responses to the user's friends' News Feeds, as well as on the brand's Page itself, the ads are acting less like traditional broadcast advertisements and more like viral mechanisms to expand and perpetuate the conversation off into the far corners of the social network, effectively giving the brand visibility in places it might not otherwise have reached and in a much more organic way than if it had simply plastered the site with a bunch of banner ads. "Everything starts with great content from the Page," says one of the Facebook documents. "Paid, owned, and earned work seamlessly together."'

'I'm basing this on one, and only one, criteria – the rate of acquisition of new accounts is slowing. That's all I need to know and it should be all you need to know – the company filed the S-1 as soon as they detected this slowdown in December. In addition participation is narrowing; there were 1.74 users monthly per daily user in 2011, but 1.86 a year prior. These are potential signs of leveling off. The company identifies no particular need for the capital; it has cash. This strongly implies that the only reason to IPO is for the insiders to monetize their position.'

'...one is struck by the paucity involved in the actual business model. Facebook's content is furnished by its users – and user information is then resold to advertisers. The model is simplicity itself and involves little creative content. This is probably one reason why Facebook is constantly getting into trouble over its privacy policy. The company really has nothing to offer but user-driven data. The more of it that the company can extract, the more valuable the company becomes. It is perhaps, therefore, the first company in history where the business model is based almost entirely on spying. Google does much the same thing, but at least Google provides a search algorithm. Facebook's business posture is almost irredeemably hostile to its users. It's a strategy based on a kind of deception. The data Facebook gathers is valuable to more than just advertisers. Anyone who investigates Facebook in an unbiased way will find clear evidence that the website is being used for "Intel" purposes, much in the same manner as Google.'

'FACEBOOK has released details of the extraordinary security infrastructure it uses to fight off spam and other cyber-scams. Known as the Facebook Immune System (FIS) ... It took just three years for FIS to evolve from basic beginnings into an all-seeing set of algorithms that monitors every photo posted to the network, every status update– indeed, every click made by every one of the 800 million users. There are more than 25 billion of these "read and write actions" every day. At peak activity the system checks 650,000 actions a second. "It's a big challenge," says Jim Larus, a Microsoft researcher in Redmond, Washington, who studies large networks. The only network bigger, Larus suspects, is the web itself. That makes Facebook's defence system one of the largest in existence. The system is overseen by a team of 30 people, but it can learn in real time and is able to take action without checking with a human supervisor.'

'Faced with a mandate to cut the state's prison population by 30,000, the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation announced Monday it would begin allowing prisoners to serve their sentences online. "Inmates are required to log in promptly every morning at 6 a.m.," CDCR secretary Matthew Cate said. "But make no mistake, this is not some online holiday resort prison. Offenders spend at least eight hours a day entering data and can only see visitors in the chat room once a week."'

'The backlash has been fierce. But no matter how disgruntled, users find it hard to leave Facebook because all their friends are there.' -- The Facebook has you, Neo.

'...the dark-suited gentlemen sitting erectly in your office indicating that as a "patriot" and successful businessperson you ought to be helpful to your country, is politely pressuring you. The young man was on a fast track. He wore a hoodie and kept quiet about his government associations. Eventually, like Bill Gates, he'll "donate" his enormous wealth to social causes. Actually, he'll be instructed to. It'll go to some Foundation the Anglosphere elites control. They don't leave outsize fortunes in private hands if they can help it. This is how the elite operates. They both support and control their enablers. One can see it with Julian Assange, another seeming Intel asset. The Economist is trying to present a kind of elite promotion. It is talking up social 'Net media – which the establishment can control fairly easily from the top – at the expense of myriad bloggers and websites. These are the writers and poets one could compare fairly to pamphleteers of days past. Not Zuckerberg.'

'Axe has come up with a mildly amusing Facebook app for young men that generates a fake relationship-status update to make it appear as though the user is involved with hundreds of women at the same time. When friends click on the update link, it takes them to an Axe Facebook app page, where they can install the custom relationship app themselves.' -- Dragnets

'I can only imagine the reaction in the boardrooms of those traditional firms when Facebook and Google built their Psychographic Marketing Honeypots and disguised them as a social network and a search engine. "All that data we've worked so hard to source! Merde! People just sit there all day giving it to them!" Faust at least knew the terms of his agreement. Here's what you need to know: Your mind is advanced enough to experience a self, a self that you think has intrinsic value. But that's just a construction in your head. Your actual extrinsic value, I'm sorry to say, is just the sum of your known behaviors and the predictive model they make possible. The stuff you think of as "your data" and the web thinks of as "our data about you — read the ToS," is the grist for that mill. And Facebook's shiny front room is just a place for you to behave promiscuously and observably. While you're farming, well, fake carrots or something, they are farming your amygdala.'

'Reppler is a new online reputation management tool that scans a user’s Facebook profile for objectionable content, privacy leaks, and security threats. The free tool can help users, especially young adults in the job market, ensure that their Facebook profiles don’t jeopardize their future prospects. When users visit the Reppler site, they’re asked for long list of extended permissions. Once granted users must wait a few minutes for their data to be analyzed before seeing the results in four different sections: My Impression, My Inappropriate Content, My Information, and My Privacy and Security Risks. They can also connect their YouTube, Flickr and Picasa account for scanning. While Reppler can’t provide total assurance for one’s reputation yet, it can offer users a reality check of their safety, security and the impression their profile can give.' -- I've seen slave ships off the shores of Orion fire blazin'. (El-P)

'Reppler is a new online reputation management tool that scans a user’s Facebook profile for objectionable content, privacy leaks, and security threats. The free tool can help users, especially young adults in the job market, ensure that their Facebook profiles don’t jeopardize their future prospects. When users visit the Reppler site, they’re asked for long list of extended permissions. Once granted users must wait a few minutes for their data to be analyzed before seeing the results in four different sections: My Impression, My Inappropriate Content, My Information, and My Privacy and Security Risks. They can also connect their YouTube, Flickr and Picasa account for scanning. While Reppler can’t provide total assurance for one’s reputation yet, it can offer users a reality check of their safety, security and the impression their profile can give.' -- I've seen slave ships off the shores of Orion fire blazin'. (El-P)

'The CIA's invention of Facebook has saved the government millions of dollars.'

'In what is being termed as pure Wall Street Gordon Gecko tactics, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has decided to make an offer of $150 billion to buy out Facebook. Inside sources within the kingdom suggest that the King is very upset with Mark Zukerberg for allowing the revolt to get out of control, Ahlul Bayt News Agency reported. In a personal meeting between Mark Zuckerberg and King Abdullah on Jan 25, 2011, Zuckerberg had promised that he would not allow any revolt pages to be formed on Facebook even while he allowed Egypt and Libya revolt pages to be formed. Left with no option, Abdullah advised by Goldman Sachs has decided to buy out Facebook and “clean out the weeds”. Most analysts believe that Zuckerberg will not take the offer and will wait for King Abdullah to up the offer to at least $500 billion.' -- [Spoof]

'Maybe Zuckerbro has some ideas for a new age democracy where every1 just votes on issues utilizing facebook, and we don't need Congress any more, and Zuckerbro can just ride dictator waves/rig some votes. Is 'technology'/'the internet' really a big deal that deserves national attention, or just another 'fad' that will be outdated 1 day? Are tech CEOs just 'legalized dictators'? Is Mark Zuckerbro trying 2 hard 2 be famous and control the world? It seems like this was some sort of modern illuminati meeting, with every1 who controls the world (because the world = 'the internet') Seems like this was probably some sort of huge meeting to 'control the future of the world.' Here they are toasting to 'enslaving' ppl with less than 100 friends on Facebook and making them do 'data entry enslavement' 4 the rest of time.'

'Mikalah uses Facebook but when she goes to log out, she deactivates her Facebook account. ...when she’s not logged in, no one can post messages on her wall or send her messages privately or browse her content. But when she’s logged in, they can do all of that. And she can delete anything that she doesn’t like. ...she wants to be a part of Facebook when it makes sense and not risk the possibility that people will be snooping when she’s not around. ...you’re not searchable when you’re not around. You really are invisible except when you’re there. And when you’re there, your friends know it, which is great. What Mikalah does gives her the ability to let Facebook be useful to her when she’s present but not live on when she’s not. -- Shamika doesn’t deactivate her Facebook profile but she does delete every wall message, status update, and Like shortly after it’s posted. When she’s done reading a friend’s comment on her page, she’ll delete it. ...“too much drama.”' -- Ghosts in the shell

'Facebook is launching a new ad format called "Sponsored Stories," which allows participating advertisers to promote your Facebook activity by turning it into homepage ads seen only by your friends. This activity can include liking a Facebook page, checking in via Facebook Places or sharing content to the News Feed from a Facebook application. With Facebook's Sponsored Stories, your activity is now up for grabs, available to the advertiser associated with the brand, business or app you interacted with. Just checked in to a restaurant? That's an ad. Just liked a brand? That's an ad. Just shared a news story from the Web? That's an ad. -- ...it's unclear what level of control advertisers have here. It's important though, because real personalized recommendations work both ways - they deliver the good news and the bad. Without both sides represented, this is just a new way to spam your friends.'

'We think we can tell a sub dominant social theme when we see one. Social network companies get a lot of press and attention because they represent the controllable side of the Internet, in our view. Social networking is the "softer side" of the Internet from a power elite standpoint. A small intergenerational, familial elite has seen its secrecy ripped asunder by the Internet. But these sites, especially Facebook with some 500 million users, are far less challenging to elite plans for global centralization. If anything, one could argue that such networks offer the kind of naïve openness and frivolity that the elite is pleased to take advantage of. Social networking is perhaps a preferable Internet construct. It also provides a far more controllable template for manipulating public use of electronic communications. Outfits like the CIA never create ventures, but they do apparently encourage the growth of the ones that they deem most useful.'

'Just because we have the ability to invite people into Groups or to check them into Places, we have to consider the social costs of doing so. What is the impact of this action on my relationship with this individual? Does adding them to this Group or checking them into this location hurt or help the stature and value of my position? As an online society of social denizens, we typically underestimate the potential of social networking and the economy that governs it. Social capital is more valuable than we realize and the currency that determines its net worth is represented by our individual social actions and how they accumulate in the short and long term. This is your time to define who you are and the value you behold…' -- 'Groups represents the future of social networking. We can design groups where we communicate, collaborate, and co-create with purpose, whether it’s personally or professionally.'

'If Amazon helps Facebook figure out how to make malls-with-walls and consequently make real shopping money, I have no doubt other e-tailers will follow. If PayPal’s 2009 revenue was $2.8 billion with 87 million active accounts, it’s not a stretch to predict that five years from now Facebook too will have 100 million to 150 million active Credits accounts (at least!) bringing in $5 billion in revenue from this business unit alone. Commerce is the grease that accelerates everything, so it seems like it’s just a matter of time before Facebook can acquire PayPal (for its volume, its risk management, and its fraud detection expertise) and fold it in together representing let’s say $12 billion in annual revenue five years from now, creating a true new currency for the world economy.'

'Facebook fans overwatered the plant, loving it to death. Since its unveiling two months ago, Isai said Meet Eater had attracted more than 5,000 fans from across the world -- including a five-fold spike in the past two weeks -- literally drowning it with love. "We found that it's been over-loved, it's actually died two times from having too much stimulation, which is an interesting outcome for us," said Isai, a Queensland University student in interactive design. -- He said the research showed meaningful connections could be made online, but also some "needs and responses" could not be met via computers.'

YESSS

'The aim of this project is to humanize the Facebook default avatar provided at the first login.'

I see Facebook people.

'It is a game of privacy cat and mouse that has prompted some users to rebel and others to unconsciously outsmart Facebook. Social technology commentator Laurent Haug believes changes to the privacy settings are altering the way people use Facebook. "People understood that their privacy was at risk and therefore they will falsify the information. Fewer of us are putting down our real details, many of us fabricate our lives online and some even have multiple identities on Facebook. There is a real possibility then that much of the personal data Facebook has been collecting from us might actually be false.' -- Haha! Poison the well.

'Kyle, Cartman and Kenny make Stan a Facebook profile against his will and he becomes embroiled and frustrated with everyone asking him for friend requests. Cartman introduces Kyle to Chatroulette as a way to make new friends, but all Kyle finds are men masturbating on webcam. Meanwhile Stan now has almost a million friends on his account and has decided to commit "online suicide" by deleting his account only to find Facebook refuses to allow him to. Instead of deleting his account, he is forcibly transported by the software into the virtual world of Facebook, where he meets "profiles" of everyone he knows, who talk to him in Facebook language, and is forced to engage in Facebook activities such as Yahtzee.'

'Remember that torrent yesterday that contained the personal information off of 100 million scraped Facebook profiles? I thought it was strange that the guy didn't sell this information, since many companies would be interested. Turns out they are interested. Here are the major companies that are downloading the torrent.' -- Leaky is as leaky does.

'While Facebook needed four and a half years to reach 100 million users, Zynga crossed that mark after just two and a half years. “Most people think Facebook would have been a phenomenon without games,” says Mr. Pachter, the Wedbush Securities analyst. “I am not sure that’s right. Twenty to 30 percent of visits to Facebook are to play games.”

POKE. PANIC. SNITCH.

'What do we need? We need a really good webserver you can put in your pocket and plug in any place. It should know how to collect all your stuff out of the social networking places where you’ve got it. It should know how to send an encrypted backup of everything to your friends’ servers. It should know how to microblog. ...it should know how to be you in a free net that works for you and keeps the logs. You can always tell what’s happening in your server and if anybody wants to know what’s happening in your server they can get a search warrant. Then we go to people and we say $29.99 once for a lifetime, great social networking, updates automatically, software so strong you couldn’t knock it over it you kicked it, used in hundreds of millions of servers all over the planet doing a wonderful job. You know what? You get “no spying” for free. -- Mr. Zuckerberg richly deserves bankruptcy. Let’s give it to him. For Free.'

'The human race has susceptibility to harm but Mr. Zuckerberg has attained an unenviable record: he has done more harm to the human race than anybody else his age. Because he harnessed Friday night. That is, everybody needs to get laid and he turned it into a structure for degenerating the integrity of human personality and he has to a remarkable extent succeeded with a very poor deal. Namely, “I will give you free web hosting and some PHP doodads and you get spying for free all the time”. And it works. Facebook is the Web with “I keep all the logs, how do you feel about that?” It’s a terrarium for what it feels like to live in a panopticon built out of web parts. -- I’m not lamenting progress of a sort of democratizing kind. On the contrary, I’m lamenting progress of a totalizing kind. I’m lamenting progress hostile to human freedom. We have to fess up if we’re the people who care about freedom, it’s late in the game and we’re behind. '

'If Facebook continues its growth on mobile platforms, then Facebook Credits will have the opportunity to become the default mobile payment currency accepted worldwide. Half a billion people would not have to sign up for an account to use them, because they already have the account. The data, learning, market research, and point-of-sale advertising implications are potentially limitless. The opportunity for Facebook Credits is to reward people for engaging with brands and retailers. If using Facebook Credits more often, or sharing information about their purchases results in discounts or even the earning of more Facebook Credits, you can count on consumers to reveal more to their friends and Facebook, as long as the value exchange is clearly identified. This kind of access to purchase habits and behaviors may finally be able to help justify using Facebook as a true CRM tool for brands, allowing for the tracking of sales back to influence and relationships...'

'#Step one: Facebook is going to make the whole Internet a community space. #Step two: Facebook is going to be your identity card for the Internet. #Step three: Facebook will aggregate this data into a new type of search. #Step four: Facebook will be your virtual wallet. #Step five: Facebook will push this into the real world, and become your id card for reality. -- But I left out the part where people create Facebook identity skimmers and stand in front of the movie theater; where your history of likes gets analyzed by a third party and turned into direct marketing spam; where there’s a data breach and your credits get taken; where you lose a job because you once liked the wrong kind of site; where companies start paying people to form fake social graphs (“friend me and get free stuff!”) in order to push astroturfing influence into social recommendations; where Facebook bans you because you got rowdy, and now you have no virtual identity. Welcome to a crazy new world.'

'At the very top of Facebook’s agenda in D.C. is privacy, [Andrew Noyes, facebook manager of public policy communications] said. There’s much at stake. The ease of data collection and sharing on the web is on a collision course with privacy. The suite of projects the company unveiled yesterday at its f8 conference in San Francisco may spark further privacy concerns about the mass of data it will now be tracking on users as they traverse the web. To head off concerns that it is too cavalier with pushing users to be more public, Facebook made a savvy move when it brought longtime privacy advocate Tim Sparapani from the American Civil Liberties Union on-board last year.' -- Useful idiots are useful.

Shame in nurturing games within social environments eg. Farmville: "If you know your friends are visiting your farm everyday you'll spend more time and money to keep it tidy." -- Thoughts/gists: Gameification is inevitable in an attention economy. Once offered, people like maximising reward/loyalty points. New real-time tracking/feedback technology will enable more compelling collecting/optimising/completion experiences. Companies are going to be trying to figure out ways to give you points for doing things. They want to own data you care about. "As a game designer you better figure out what side you're on: 4 groups: #persuaders: motivated by money, #fulfillers: create deep experiences, #artists: advance the medium, #humanitarians: motivate 'better' behaviours"

'FB: "working with some partner Web sites that we pre-approve to offer a more personalized experience" at those sites. The potential downside seems obvious. You'll see that some random site knows who your Facebook friends are and fret about other once-private information Facebook might be leaking. But what will you be able to do when so much of your life is tied up there? As Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an e-mail Thursday: "There is a sense of the 'investment' in Facebook being so great that one is beholden to it. This is not empowering."'

'Facebook.com has blocked outgoing links to collateralmurder.org (but not as yet,.com)'

'In 2010, we’re beginning to see what could become a larger and quite interesting trend: Chinese developers moving into western markets via Facebook, and even some western Facebook game developers beginning to move into China. The trade routes for virtual goods exports are picking up. Despite their absence to date, we’ve been hearing more rumors lately of China’s gaming giants preparing to put “large amounts” of capital into establishing a presence on the Facebook Platform – in some cases, over $50 million. “Who else is going to challenge Zynga?,” one industry veteran says. -- Restaurants in Taiwan are giving out coupons for virtual currency in Facebook games to attract customers.' -- Neo colonisation via social networking games. Crazy but true.

'... just because these Facebook users made their profiles publicly available does not mean they are fair game for scraping for research purposes. ...the purpose of this public availability is to help people—humans, not bots—find [people]. ...my profile is only “public” if a human being takes specific and conscious action to find me. -- Warden’s actions, however, violate this implicit understanding for making profiles publicly searchable. Rather than trying to find me, Warden is systematically sought everyone, letting a script to the work of seeking and harvesting my data. There is no genuine desire to find me, to friend me, and so on. He’s just collecting data. The point is whether the 215 million Facebook users who now have some of their information in Warden’s database contemplated such harvesting and aggregating when they built their profile and configured their privacy settings.' -- Asperger's social web?

'...picture our perspective leaving our own experiences, zooming out and up until we can see how all the different groups are interacting on a worldwide social network. That bird's-eye view could be both beautiful and horrible if the resolution was clear enough. ...the next stage of innovation online may be services like recommendations, self and group awareness...' -- Warden: "Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they're generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It's like we're constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I'm a starry-eyed believer that we'll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It's like an x-ray for the whole country - we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we're friends with, where we live, what we like."' -- Here be dragons.

'Public-ness has always been a privilege. For a long time, only a few chosen few got to be public figures. Now we've changed the equation and anyone can theoretically be public, can theoretically be seen by millions. So it mustn't be a privilege anymore, eh? Not quite. There are still huge social costs to being public, social costs that geeks in Silicon Valley don't have to account for. Not everyone gets to show up to work whenever they feel like it wearing whatever they'd like and expect a phatty paycheck. Not everyone has the opportunity to be whoever they want in public and demand that everyone else just cope. I know there are lots of folks out there who think that we should force everyone into the public so that we can create a culture where that IS the norm. Not only do I think that this is unreasonable, but I don't think that this is truly what we want. -- It kills me when the bottom line justifies social oppression. Is that really what the social media industry is about?'

'Seppukoo.com deals with the liberation of the digital body from any identity constriction in order to help people discover what happens after their virtual life and to rediscover the importance of being anyone, instead of pretending to be someone.'

'The popular casual game boasts a current 69 million monthly active players, making it the largest Facebook (Facebook) application by a factor of more than two... Their daily active players count is now up to 26.5 million, up from 11 million just three months ago. While Twitter hasn’t itself released official user stats, research puts the figure close to 18 million by the end of the year.'

Max's Casino Gulag / Subsistence Clicking Model: predicts Facebook will become a casino; will give heavy users the ability to buy shares in its IPO whilst regular users play 'social gulag' games for FB's virtual gulag currency, spending it on real world survival items, always dreaming of earning enough to buy shares in 'the house'.

'“This is the first case that I’m aware of in which a Facebook update has been used as alibi evidence,” said John Browning, a lawyer and member of the Dallas Bar Association who studies social networking and the law. “We are going to see more of that because of how prevalent social networking has become.” -- Mr. Reuland acknowledges that, in principle, anyone who knew Mr. Bradford’s username and password could have typed the Facebook update, but he regards it as unlikely in this case. “This implies a level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this; he is not Dr. Evil,” Mr. Reuland said, adding that the Facebook entry was just “the icing on the cake,” since his client had the other alibis. -- Joseph Pollini said prosecutors should not have been so quick to drop the charges. “...there is a multitude of reasons why someone of that age would have the knowledge to do a crime like that.”' -- Exploitable

'#The myth of personal empowerment takes root amidst a massive loss of personal control. -- Social technologies are cloaked in a rhetoric of liberation (customers are in control, the internet fosters democracy, social technologies propagate truth etc.) that tend to obscure the fact that never before have we handed so much personal information over in exchange for so little in return. This loss of control over personal information is on a collision course with the law of unintended consequences... Amidst this barrage of good news for how much power we wield in the transaction of commerce one has to wonder if we are giving away something quite precious in the bargain.' -- Give all your information over to Facebook and they'll rent your identity back to you.

'It follows some cases of members receiving updates about dead friends. If a user is reported as deceased, Facebook will remove sensitive information such as status updates and contacts. When reporting a death, users must offer "proof" by submitting either an obituary or news article. Memorialised accounts will have new privacy settings so that only confirmed friends can see the profile or locate it in search. "We understand how difficult it can be for people to be reminded of those who are no longer with them, which is why it's important when someone passes away that their friends or family contact Facebook to request that a profile be memorialised."' -- Proof. Is fb becoming a global Births, Marriages and Deaths database?

More on the fuckbook theory of fb. '...men are more interested in following women who they can find real information about, but women in general share less personal information (like you’d find on their Facebook profile) on Twitter, so as a result men follow women less on Twitter.'

'The idea, one that is generally accepted in social psychology, is that word choice can reveal a person’s mood. This is true in ordinary writing, these experts say, and even more so in writing like Facebook updates or the tweets of Twitter users, which ostensibly are attempts to describe what you are doing right now and how you feel. The Facebook happiness index could be the first step in reorienting the nation’s sense of self-worth. “We have tracked the economic health of the nation for a long time. The reason we track those things is that the government is full of economists, not psychologists. I could imagine it would allow us to look at a group of people, get a sense of what their concerns are, how insecure they feel. It could be an advertiser’s dream. Yes, it is creepy from a government perspective, but it is even creepier from an advertising perspective.”' -- Creepy and extremely dumb. Measure actual behaviours not claims on behaviours. "I'm happy." "I'm sad." You're confused.

'An Australian online marketing company is selling friends and fans to Facebook members after offering a similar service to Twitter users.“The simple fact is that with a large following on Facebook, you have an instant and targeted group of people you can contact and promote whatever it is you want to promote,” he added. “The only problem is that it can be extremely difficult to achieve such a following, which is where we come in.” The company offers packages for Facebook, the world’s number one social networking site, that start at 1,000 friends up to 10,000 friends at costs ranging from $177 to $1,167. “All we do is send them a welcome message or friend request from the client. If they decide to go ahead and add that person as a friend or a fan then they will; if not, then they won’t." -- Surely someone can write a friend bot to do that.

'Social networking apps can hit hyper-viral levels in China due to a higher tolerance of intrusive app invitations. It is not uncommon for apps to essentially force new users to invite people and perform tasks before being able to join their friends online. Once friends have joined they are required to interact much more with the apps and advertisements than on Western applications. While this model is not replicable for the US market, certain aspects of this strategy/cultural mindset are necessary if companies like Facebook or Myspace want to compete in China. -- Western companies cannot innovate in the same way due to institutional problems stemming from their own struggle for an identity and revenue. [Facebook] are a self-styled guru of dynamic human interaction. If they opened up their platform to become an apps store, their major revenue streams would put them into a pigeonhole, calling their $15 billion valuation into question.' -- Be specific.

''E-Mom' Gloria Bianco shows Jim and Tracy how geographical distance is no longer a roadblock to shamelessly interfering with the lives of your children.' -- HAHAHAHAHA

FFS! -- 'Social competition is and will always be the central preoccupation of the country club set. There are five key rules to using your status update to maximum status-signifying effect. Learn from the masters. #1. CAREFULLY NAME-DROP #2. UNDERSHARE FABULOUSNESS: Though you would be wise to merely spit out an update, the update’s very efficacy rests on the premise that it is an undercrafted ejaculation. #3. COMPLAIN: Your life is worthy of envy, but it is not perfect — otherwise everyone would hate you, and we can’t have that. #4. SELF-AGGRANDIZE VIA SELF-DEPRECATION: Your personal glories should be wrapped in the leaky sackcloth of self-deprecation. #5. PROJECT: Taking a cue from Shakespeare’s King Lear, another avenue of the indirect boast is putting the goods in the mouths of fools...' -- Facebook needs a SLAP button.

Soon you'll deny you ever had a facebook -- '"Online, people can't see the yawn," says Patricia Wallace, a psychologist... Amidst all this heightened chatter, we're not saying much that's interesting, folks. Rather, we're breaking a cardinal rule of companionship: Thou Shalt Not Bore Thy Friends. -- So what's the solution, short of "unfriending" or "unfollowing" everyone who annoys you? To improve our interactions, we need to change our conduct, not just cover it up. First, watch your own behavior, asking yourself before you post anything... And positively reward others, responding only when they write something interesting, ignoring them when they are boring or obnoxious. (Commenting negatively will only start a very public war.)' -- New tag: ambientinanity Perhaps not.

'... teenagers have nothing to say on Twitter. Twitter is a huge promotional tool – for businesses, for bloggers, for self-described experts – but teenagers aren’t as concerned with these things as a whole. ...Twitter in its current form will be dominated by the over 25 crowd. Twitter offers something that adults crave more than teenagers: an audience. Facebook doesn’t fulfill this need as well as Twitter does, but the offset is that teenagers turn to Facebook to communicate with their friends.'

'High Frequency Trading (HFT) aka ‘flash trading’ will continue to grow exponentially. Trading will become so fast, time itself will have a public offering after Microsoft secures a patent on it and trading time futures will catapult traders backwards and forwards through time until they need bailouts on debts they have not yet incurred.' -- 'People will start taking themselves public on new Citizen Exchanges created by Obama; commit public sex acts to boost their stock price then short themselves before committing suicide to cash in out-of-the-money puts they bought on themselves. As a result, the porn industry will need a bailout.' -- 'Facebook and Twitter will go public... The more you look in the mirror the more you get paid. Narcissism will get monetized by the Feds with some help by Nassim Taleb. -- Thanks Lloyd Blankfein, current CEO of Goldman Sachs and future President of the United States. We are eternally in your debt.' -- HERDAQ

'...I forgot about my own account with the site and went back to thinking of Facebook as an abstract evil that others are caught up in. The site seemed a place to turn in anxious moments of loneliness or existential vertigo for pseudo-sociality and pseudo-connectedness; it was a place to turn to relieve the sense of being hopelessly mired in ourselves how we are and do some illusory work on our own characters instead by fine-tuning some settings, making some updates, passing some surreptitious judgment on those friends of ours who seem, judging by their updates, to be even more desperate than we are. Of course you’d have to sort through the chipper updates from the pathologically narcissistic who evince absolutely no trace of self-doubt or troubled introspection, but they made for a bracing backdrop; they set up a kind of grim ideal for what we’d have to eventually become, or else. But now it is starting to seem like that the threat of that dystopia is receding.'

'All you have to do to prevent this is sign in to Facebook and click through to (get ready) -> Settings -> Privacy -> News Feed and Wall -> Facebook Ads -> Appearance in Facebook Ads and click "no one." Unless, of course, you want to be semifamous and have your picture used to push some garbage product or website without your knowledge.' -- Something tells me FB users are going to have to do a lot unpublishing.

'On Facebook, users have every interest in lying or exaggerating about their preferences to signal various commitments and so on. They are hardly sharing their “real thoughts and tastes” in every instance. But when they do Google searches, they actually are interested in getting the information; there is not point of pretense. So having that record of what actually gets searched allows Google to spy much further into the individual user’s psyche. That seems for more “real,” for marketers’ purposes... Facebook is a performative space; the Google search window is not. -- Built into this social-search idea as well is this annoying presumption that no one can generate an interest in something without a friend already being interested in it. Whatever happened to autonomous curiosity? The “social graph” is more a primary source for what is being gossiped about; it would be terrible if that constituted the horizons of what I learned about the world.' -- Facebook, The Ministry of Friendship

'Facebook management is acting like a group of cult leaders intent on changing the rest of us into more social, less private people than we might want to be. -- ...a cult-like group "offers considerable security to young people because it greatly simplifies the world and answers a contemporary need to combine a sacred set of dogmatic principles with a claim to a science embodying the truth about human behavior and human psychology." Facebook's claim to speak to the basic human need to "connect," combined with the company's number crunching and shiny new graphs, certainly seems scientific and all-encompassing. But isn't there a lot more to human connection than one liner status updates, photos posted online, "thumbs up" and the other relatively mechanistic interactions that people have on Facebook? What's the end result of all these magical connections through relatively shallow communication? Advertising!' -- What have you bought your self into? How much will it cost to buy you out?

'The new feature, called a Live Stream Box, can run on sites "next to live streaming videos of concerts, speeches, sporting events, webcasts, TV shows, presentations, or webinars..." -- "Users log in using Facebook Connect and share updates that appear both within the Live Stream Box and on their Facebook profiles and in their friends' home page streams. Each post includes a link back to the Live Stream Box on your site so users can discover the live event and immediately join based on their friends' recommendations."'

'Dylan: "as for twitter, we are totally not representative, but ya a lot of people use twitter. it's funny because the way they are using it is not the way most do... they make private accounts and little sub-communities form. like cliques, basically. so they can post stuff they don't want people on fb to see, since fb is everybody." -- What Dylan is pointing out is that the issue is that Facebook is public (to everyone who matters) and Twitter can be private because of the combination of tools AND the fact that it's not broadly popular.' [Darknets] 'My guess is that if Twitter does take off among teens and Dylan's friends feel pressured to let peers and parents and everyone else follow them, the same problem will arise and Twitter will become public in the same sense as Facebook. This of course raises a critical question: will teens continue to be passionate about systems that become "public" (to all that matter) simply because there's social pressure to connect to "everyone"?'

'Those who use those sites have short attention span and those sites are forcing people to make it even shorter. But this plays against those sites. The very same technology they push (stream, real-time, NOW NOW NOW) is going to be the key factor in their fall. When something new arrives and media would think it’s a good new distractor - this crowd with “attention deficit skill” will move on.' -- All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. (Marx)

"Sure, the two services overlap. Groups of friends do share on Twitter, but the service makes even more sense as a tool for reaching people you do not actually know. There is a reason why celebrities like Twitter. It allows them to reach fans with little expectation they will actually interact with them. Facebook, meanwhile, demands interaction. Twitter's length restriction, doubtless part of its genius, also makes it better suited for announcements than conversation. Facebook, by comparison, is a two-way street. I have had long discussions on Facebook that eventually involved perhaps a dozen people, each of whom could easily read all the others' sometimes lengthy comments. Maybe there is a way to do this on Twitter, but I have not found it." -- Like chance encounters in the street, exchanging 'catch-ups', then moving on to the pub for a proper 'conversation'. Shifting into different 'performance' space-places is half the fun.

"Choose a keyword from the tag coud, and the generator will automatically give you a message you can add to Twitter, Facebook, Friendster."

"As Facebook searches for ways to increase their revenue, some users are being asked if they are willing to pay for vanity URLs."

'The more than 600,000 users who voted constitute a significant number of people, but at the same time that's a small number compared to our user base of more than 200 million. We'd hoped to have a bigger turnout for this inaugural vote, but it is important to keep in mind that this vote was a first for users just like it was a first for Facebook. We are hopeful that there will be greater participation in future votes.' -- Facebook has a government??

Keep Calm And Give Us All Your Data

'This safe and happy community is very much a product of design. The old web, the frontier world of autonomy, anarchy, fantasies, and self-made porn, is being tamed. The flaming, snarky, commenter-board culture that dips in periodically to bang heads against the floor and foster self-hate among humanity’s ranks has been deemed not good for business. Now online life is a series of Victorian drawing rooms, a well-tended garden where you bring your calling card and make polite conversation with those of your kind, a sanitized city on a hill where amity reigns, irony falls flat, and sarcasm is remarkably rare. We prepare our faces, then come and go, sharing little bits of data, like photos, haikus, snippets of conversations—the intellectual property that composes our lives.' -- Life in a Gap advert.