There’s nothing more frustrating than reading an article that disparages online advocacy as “slacktivism” or “clicktivism.” Both terms derogatorily define online petitions, tweets and web messages as nothing more than feel-good measures that purport to support some kind of issue or social cause but really have little practical effect.

The ”slacker-activists as armchair do-gooders who don’t make a difference” argument has been made by the Guardian and Malcolm Gladwell, among others. Social movements with strong online interactions rarely are granted any credence compared to offline actions.

However, a few thought leaders have been recently rethinking online advocacy. In a New York Times piece last month, “Hashtag Activism, and Its Limits,” David Carr made the case that online advocacy can indeed affect real-world decisions. Carr offered several recent examples (the defeat of the SOPA bill and the Susan G. Komen incident to name a few) of how online pressure and awareness-building can create change. A Public Radio International piece on slacktivism also evaluated recent online social movements favorably. And Sortable.com’s recent infographic, “The Rise of the Slacktivist,” embraces the term and cites several examples of how slacktivism can actually lead to more real-world engagement. Check out their fantastic infographic below.

Online activism is — and has always been — a means to an end, just like phone calls, handwritten letters, and in-district meetings. Online petitions can have extraordinary reach to alert and activate tens of thousands of people around the world (or in the case of our current Thrive campaign, hundreds of thousands). A petition alone — as with any action by itself — cannot sustain a campaign or is unlikely to create change. But coupled with offline actions, media and grassroots activism, a petition can bring new voices into a campaign and help push direct action. And they are incredibly easy to share with others, so they can get passed around quickly and efficiently.

In the next two weeks leading up to the G8 summit, ONE will roll out some fantastic online actions to push global leaders to fund solutions to hunger and malnutrition. These actions, along with the postcards, petitions, #DearG8 hashtags, photos, and events are just part of a multifaceted campaign that pushes decision-makers to act. So, don’t think a click won’t count. That Facebook share graphic or the iPhone app petition has an overall affect for a campaign. To quote a trusted ONE staffer when discussing how to move US legislators, “A tweet by itself is just a tweet, but a thousand tweets are a song.”

Photo credit: Geek.com and Sortable.com

Garth Moore is US deputy director of new media for ONE and is a social media junkie. Catch him on Twitter at @garthmoore.

Before we dismiss appearances by Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg on ABC News Tuesday as orchestrated, feel-good public relations events less than a month before Facebook holds its initial public offering, consider this:When Zuckerberg and Sandberg introduce and explain the new initiative, they could be revolutionizing health care.



Zuckerberg will appear on Good Morning America, and later on Tuesday, Sandberg will appear on World News With Diane Sawyer. Facebook is declining comment, but almost all observers are expecting them to introduce a tool that will “save lives.” That could be an expanded version of its Lifeline program, which allows people to alert the company when they think a friend is expressing suicidal intentions, a broader rollout of anti-cyberbullying initiatives or perhaps something altogether different. Take, for example, a tool that helps friends alert Facebook when they are worried that a friend may be showing signs of suicidal intentions. Brian S. McGowan, a health care educator and education technologist who writes for The Atlantic, sees such a technology as being a way to end the isolated feelings patients suffer from. In March, McGowan wrote a general blog post on the concept of isolation in health care, but finding ways around it could be particularly useful in fighting depression."'Has anyone else gone through this before?’ That's one of the first things a person asks himself after being anointed a ‘patient.’ In illness, as in any other life events, we are social creatures looking for shared experiences and in need of support,” McGowan wrote. “But the reality is that our health care system is not designed to serve this purpose. Instead, our system evolved to promote isolation. And, in many ways, this isolation is very much at the heart of the patient experience.”McGowan goes on to say building those ties between patients may be easier than developing a culture of shared decisions between doctor and patient.“There are two solutions to the isolation experience. The first is to build layers upon the patient-clinician relationship - to build stronger ties, more connections, and a culture of shared decision-making between patient and physician. There are many advocating for this idea, but it requires cultural shifts across a medical profession that typically evolves at a snail's pace and would require systemic changes in both policy and reimbursement," he said. "The second is to build communities of patients with shared experiences, shared fears, and shared data - and it is this second solution that deserves much more public discourse, lest we get ourselves in an unexpected and unfortunate jam.”While we’re all conscious about privacy, particularly when it comes to all things Facebook, such a tool could be a major groundswell in easing some of the hypertight privacy concerns surrounding online health care. By making it social on a platform like Facebook, the company could essentially be launching the cyber equivalent of being able to ask a friend “Is everything all right?” or “Are you feeling OK?” We’re more inclined to give honest - and potentially lifesaving - answers to a friend.

Facebook is headquartered in Menlo Park, California at a site that used belong to Sun Microsystems. A large sign with Facebook's distinctive "like" symbol—a hand making the thumbs-up gesture—marks the entrance. When I arrived at the campus recently, a small knot of teenagers had congregated, snapping cell phone photos of one another in front of the sign.

Thanks to the film The Social Network, millions of people know the crazy story of Facebook's rise from dorm room project to second largest website in the world. But few know the equally intriguing story about the engine humming beneath the social network's hood: the sophisticated technical infrastructure that delivers an interactive Web experience to hundreds of millions of users every day.







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The red hot startup of late, Pinterest, certainly has a friend in Facebook. Users of the pinning site can sign in with an account from the dominant social network. In a new post, Facebook suggests it’s Pinterest’s inclusion in Facebook Timeline that is driving its growth.

Facebook points to Pinterest in its early success stories of the Timeline feature:

Pinterest: Since launching their open graph integration less than a month ago, the number of Facebook users visiting Pinterest every day has increased by more than 60%. The virtual pinboard site has made it fun and easy to share the items you’ve pinned and follow the boards of people you find interesting.

No doubt, Pinterest is using the Facebook platform wisely. From my experience, I’m receiving a number of email notices every day when friends join Pinterest. And when I joined, Pinterest auto-followed those friends, causing them to receive the same email notices.

All of those actions do end up as Facebook actions on the Timeline. Non-Pinterest users won’t see the action, except perhaps on that same panel that tells you what music your friends are listening to.

Pinterest has a new API (see our Pinterest API profile) and plenty of word of mouth outside Facebook. If it’s a poster child of growth thanks to the Timeline alone, then I’ll look forward to Facebook or Pinterest’s more in-depth case study.

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Related ProgrammableWeb Resources Pinterest API Profile

Facebook API Profile, 337 mashups

Over the last few years I've created a few popular visualizations, a lot of duds, and I've learned a few lessons along the way. For my latest analysis of where Facebook users go on vacation, I decided to document the steps I follow to build my visualizations . It's a very rough guide, these are just stages I've learned to follow by trial and error, but following these guidelines is a good way to start if you're looking to create your first visualization.

Play with your data

I was lucky enough to spend a few hours with Andreas Weigend recently, head of the Stanford Social Data lab. He has nine rules of data, and the first is "Start with the problem, not the data." What struck me about visualizations is that I actually take the opposite approach. I find the only way to begin is to explore what information is available and get a feeling for what stories it can tell.

In my case, we have a Cassandra cluster with information on more than 350 million photos shared on Facebook. I've been running Pig analytics jobs regularly to get a view of what we have in there. One of the reports we generate is a count of how many photos and users we have for particular places:

Click to enlarge.

I was chatting with my colleague Chris Raynor about this, and he asked me if we could tell where all the visitors to those places were coming from. This was something that had been at the back of my mind for a long time. Seeing how much information we had on each destination made me realize we had enough data to produce significant and meaningful answers.

When I was learning engineering, one of my favorite case studies was an investigation into an air-traffic control system. Software engineers couldn't understand why fully-computerized control rooms were actually less efficient and safe than more old-fashioned sites. What the researchers discovered was that the old process of passing around and arranging small cards that each represented a plane gave controllers a much stronger awareness of the situation than a screen that didn't require their involvement for tasks, such as handing an aircraft to a colleague. I think the same is true of data. The more time you spend manipulating and examining the raw information, the more you understand it at a deep level. Knowing your data is the essential starting point for any visualization.

Pick a question

Now that I had a rough idea for what I wanted to visualize, I really needed to focus on what I would be doing. The best way to do that is to chose the exact title you want to give your visualization. I actually messed this up on one early map I created, giving the blog post the title "How to split up the US." Everyone subsequently described it as "The Five Nations of Facebook." Since then, I've tried very hard to pick the most natural title for what I'm going to be presenting, and then ensure I can deliver on the promise of the headline.

In this case I had a clear idea of the question at the start, it was going to be "Where do people go on vacation?". However, as I thought about it, I realized it needed to be a lot more specific and concrete. There's already a lot of "top travel destinations" lists out there, so what made mine different? It was the use of Facebook to gather much richer and more detailed information, so I refined it to "Where do Facebook users go on vacation?".

Sketch out your presentation

I now had the data and a question I wanted to answer. The next step was figuring out how to show the information in a visual form. I'm in love with network diagrams showing connections between thousands of objects, but so often they are completely baffling to the rest of the world. I still remember David Cohen threatening to strangle me if I showed him another one of "those damn spider webs" instead of a business plan. However, network diagrams are a good way of hinting at how much data is available for querying; they can really give an idea of the sheer scale of what's there.

One of my favorite recent visualizations was Paul Butler's map of friendships on Facebook, so I decided to use that as a visual reference:

See the full version of Paul Butler's "Visualizing Friendships" visualization.

I borrowed a couple of key ideas from his work: the general color palette of the blue lines on a dark background and the use of great circles to create flowing arcs for all connections.

As I thought about the presentation, I realized that I had to simplify what it would be showing. With sources and destinations plotted all over the world, both the visual look and the querying interface would be overwhelming. Our user-base is primarily American thanks to our reliance on English-only natural language processing, so with that in mind I decided to make life simpler by only showing data from people who lived in the U.S. Accordingly, I changed the question in my title to "Where do American Facebook users go on vacation?".

While I'm mostly presenting this as a linear, waterfall process, what I've just described is a good example of how iterative cycles drive the real workflow. It's hard to know how well a lot of things will work until you try them. As you're still making some progress, don't worry if you find yourself going in circles.

Crunch the data

If you know your data, and you have a good idea of the question you're trying to answer, this should be the simplest stage. You'll hopefully have a clear set of requirements and it's just a matter of executing the right queries over your data.

In this case I already had some Pig scripts asking similar questions, so I was able to adapt one of those. The biggest surprise was when I ran into issues with some of the joins. The hard part was running the Hadoop job to gather the raw data from our Cassandra cluster, and that worked. I was able to output smaller files containing the gathered data, and then run a local Pig job to do the joins I needed.

The next stage was turning the raw information into a form that could be displayed. For example, I needed to take all of the user locations from the unstructured text strings that Facebook gave me, and convert them into latitude-longitude coordinates for plotting on a map. For this sort of work I usually turn to a general-purpose scripting language, and most of Jetpac is already written in Ruby, so that was an easy choice. I wrote a script that walked through the data, using the Data Science Toolkit to match coordinates with names, and then output it into a file containing a JSON array of all the information.

Build an interface

A lot of the best visualizations have no interactivity. They just tell a story with a static image. That's why it's worth considering whether you need an interface at all. I actually had the interactive site that I used to create the "Five Nations of Facebook" visualization up for several weeks before that post, and nobody used it because it was too confusing. It was only when I boiled it down into a single picture with labels that it became a hit.

My problem is that I want other people to have as much fun exploring the data as I've had, so I couldn't resist adding some interaction to the vacation visualization. I still wanted to retain the immediate visual appeal of a static image, so I decided to create a background showing the full data to introduce the visualization at a first glance, and then overlay an interactive foreground once the user started exploring it more deeply.

In most cases you're better off using one of the excellent off-the-shelf visualization frameworks like D3. Since I needed something client-side for interaction, and was working with both geographic and network rendering, I couldn't find anything that met my requirements. Instead I cannibalized one of my own projects, the jQuery component from OpenHeatMap, and combined it with HTML5 canvas rendering to produce a custom JavaScript renderer. I used it to pre-render a background containing all the possible connections between home towns and travel destinations, and saved that off as a static image. That's useful to save rendering time on page load, and lets me fall back to a static visualization on older browsers that don't support Canvas.

Click to enlarge.

I then tied in rendering the connections of any places that the user was hovering their cursor over, so that they could quickly get a feel for the relationships expressed in the data. I also wanted to display the details underlying the picture, so to drill down I added a dialog listing the raw statistics about a place. Users can bring this dialog up by clicking.

Click to enlarge.

One problem with that interaction is that a lot of different cities are in a very small area, so it becomes extremely difficult to pick the one you want with the mouse cursor. To make that a little better, I prioritized the most popular U.S. cities so that in case of a conflict, they're chosen over their smaller neighbors. I realized I also needed to add a search box. Thankfully we're heavy users of Twitter's Bootstrap framework, so it was a simple matter to add a search field and tie it in with Twitter's excellent autocomplete component.

Find the surprises!

I build these visualizations so I can explore them myself, so my favorite part of the whole process is the chance to sit and play with the results. There's always unexpected stories hidden in there, and I love uncovering them. For example, who knew that the city that had the most visitors to Paris was West Hollywood? When I lived in Los Angeles I used to love popping by the wonderful patisseries. Now I know why they're so good! These little details are the stories that catch people's imagination and cause them to spread the word, so think about writing a few of them up to help visitors understand what the page can tell them.

You'll never know whether one of your visualizations will become popular ahead of time, but the real reward is enjoying your own work. I hope this short guide gives you some ideas f[…]

"Can you pick me up at my place in 15 minutes? Text me when you get here." No, this isn't a text message to a friend or a call to a car service—it's a direct message sent through Twitter to a driver of a Chicago cab. Rashid Temuri, who goes by "Chicago Cabbie" online (@ChicagoCabbie on Twitter) has taken what would otherwise be considered a traditional taxi business and integrated it with social media in a way that is still exceedingly rare in the service industry. How much better can it be interacting your clients through Twitter, FourSquare, Facebook, or Google Latitude? Apparently a lot—Temuri is not only seeing success from his social media strategy, he's building a loyal repeat customer base because of it.







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Although Google+ is still only a few months old, there seem to be plenty of people willing to write it off as doomed, or close to it. Steve Rubel of Edelman says that he has given up on it, Robert Scoble says that its brand pages are a mess, and Farhad Manjoo at Slate argues that it is all but dead — killed by its failure to offer enough right out of the gate. While it would be tempting to agree that Google has flubbed yet another attempt at social networking, since its track record in that area is so famously underwhelming, there are good reasons to believe that Google+ will be around for awhile. If anything, it is only beginning to show its real power.

Rubel says that he has quit the network because there just isn’t enough going on there in terms of engagement, and so he has retreated to his Tumblr blog and to Twitter (Rubel, the head of digital strategy for the global Edelman PR agency, recently nuked his blogs and switched over to Tumblr as his main communications channel). Others, including Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, have also complained that Google+ doesn’t offer enough to make it worth their while, and that the “signal-to-noise” ratio on the network is too low, despite Google’s circle-based follower system.

For his part, Robert Scoble says that Google’s rollout of brand pages is flawed in a number of crucial ways, despite the fact that the company has been working on this feature for some time, and has an obvious model for how pages should work in Facebook. Scoble notes that pages can’t be added to or modified by more than one person — which makes them difficult to use for companies with social-media teams — and others have pointed out that Google’s policies currently prevent brands from offering contests or promotions directly on their Google+ pages, which seems shortsighted at best.

Is Google+ fatally flawed? Far from it
Manjoo, meanwhile, seems to be arguing that all of these flaws mean that Google’s “beta mode” approach has failed them, and that Google+ is functionally crippled to the point where it will never be able to compete with Facebook. As he puts it:

Although Google seems determined to keep adding new features, I suspect there’s little it can do to prevent Google+ from becoming a ghost town. Google might not know it yet, but from the outside, it’s clear that G+ has started to die

I’m far from being the biggest supporter of Google+ (Scoble seems to be happy to claim that role). I’m still not convinced that enough “normals” — i.e. non-geeks — are going to adopt the platform, despite the fact that Google says it has more than 40 million users, and there are a number of things that have bugged me about the service, including the company’s steadfast refusal to allow pseudonyms until recently. I also haven’t found the signal-to-noise ratio to be all that high, despite my use of Circles — but then, it took me two years before I got Twitter to the point where it was providing a consistently high signal.

But the problem with many of these criticisms — as with Manjoo’s premature obituary writing — isn’t just that social networks take time to evolve, and users need time to find out what they are useful for and what they aren’t useful for (Twitter is a perfect example of that, since its own creators didn’t really know what it was for when they built it). The problem is that they are seeing Google+ as JASN: just another social network. So Manjoo seems to be saying that Google has no chance because Facebook is too well established, has too many features, too many users, etc.

Google has some powerful levers yet to pull

But Google has made it clear that it has a lot bigger plans for Google+ than just making it a Facebook clone. Chairman Eric Schmidt has said the company wants to make the network an identity platform for all of its properties — something it is already in the process of doing by integrating it into products like Google Reader — and is building support for it into search as well, with the launch of what it calls “Direct Connect,” which will allow users to go from a search result to a company’s Google+ page with a single click. Can Facebook offer that?

And that’s likely just the beginning: Google could easily extend the integration of Google+ into its Chrome browser, as some have speculated it might, and it hasn’t even turned on what could be one of the biggest drivers of adoption — namely, integration with Gmail. That’s hundreds of millions of people being connected to Google+ immediately from their email inbox, another thing that Facebook can’t offer (it has tried moving into unified messaging as a way of increasing its hold over users, but so far the jury is out on that strategy).

As Edd Dumbill of O’Reilly argued recently, Google is pretty well positioned to turn Google+ into a “social backbone” — something far more advanced and pervasive than just a social network. Obviously Facebook would like to fill this kind of function as well, but it is missing many of the crucial ingredients that Google has, and it is also a much more walled-garden approach, which could impede its progress. Facebook is more than happy to have you build apps and services that work on Facebook, but it is a lot less interested in being open than Google is, and that makes it a somewhat harder sell.

So yes, Google+ is noisy for some, and for others is a ghost town. Many of its features are raw and need work, like the brand page rollout. But Google is not just trying to build a place to share photos of your cat — it wants Google+ to be a social layer for everything it does, and it has some powerful levers it can pull when it comes to encouraging people to use it, such as search and email. The full impact of that integration remains to be seen, but it is far too soon to call the network dead or a loser. It’s barely even the third inning.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users World Economic Forum

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iPad only: Flipboard, the stylish, magazine-style iPad application that just won "App of the Year" from Apple, has updated with support for Google Reader and Flickr feeds, as well as settings to pull in specific sections of your Twitter or Facebook life. More »

Facebook users who choose not to link their user accounts to Facebook's public Pages are ending up with blank profiles containing no information at all. If you haven't experienced this problem, it's probably thanks to the somewhat high-pressure tactics Facebook is using to get you to accept these changes.

The next time you visit your Profile page (if you haven't done so already), you'll be introduced to the new "Connected Profiles" option, one of the many potentially concerning privacy-related changes announced at Facebook's f8 developer conference last week. With this option, the text in your Facebook profile section where you list your hometown, education, work and interests, is now being linked to the respective pages on Facebook. So for example, if you live in New York, that's linked directly to a page for New York. If your favorite TV show is "Lost," you'll be linked to that show's page, and so on.

Those who choose not to link, though, are informed via a Facebook pop-up box that their Profile page will be left empty.

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Your Profile Gets More Connected

According to news posted on Facebook's official company blog last week, the Connected Profiles option offers more than "just boring text," wrote Facebook software engineer Alex Li. "These connections are actually Pages, so your profile will become immediately more connected to the places, things and experiences that matter to you," Li says.

Sounds good, right?

Well, maybe not. Whether or not this change is actually an improvement for the social network's end users is still up for debate. For starters, many Facebook users had included in their profile section witty sayings and other text that couldn't be exactly matched up with a Facebook Page. Now, if you want to express yourself in this more "free-form" way, you'll have to do so in the "Bio" section of your Profile instead.

That may be bit of an inconvenience, but it's not necessarily the most concerning aspect of the new Connected Profiles. It's their by default public nature that's most troubling.

How Connected Profiles Work

When you revisit your Profile page, explained Li on the Facebook blog, you'll see a box pop-up asking you to link your profile to Pages that reflect your listed interests and affiliations. You can either pick some of these pages or click "Link All to My Profile" to accept all of Facebook's suggestions.

Yet in examining the design of the pop-up box itself, it's clear that it's been crafted so that the "Link All" button, shaded in blue, is the option hurried users will click in an effort to get back to what they were doing - attempting to edit their profile.

Years of poor web experiences filled with pop-up ads, long user agreements no one reads and unnecessary screens on software installations that seem to serve no purpose but to have you click the "Next" button have created a certain type of blindness to pop-up text on the web. Instead of thoughtfully considering the options, a majority of users simply click the button that makes the message go away. You can bet that Facebook is counting on precisely this behavior regarding the new Profiles.

Opting-Out a Poor Option

But even for those who actually do consider the implications of everything about themselves being made public, they'll soon encounter another issue. Something that Li didn't explain in the cheery blog post was what would happen if you refused to link to these new Pages: your profile information will be removed and your profile page will be left empty.

According to a FAQ from Facebook's Help Center:

"If you don't want to connect to any Pages, the corresponding sections on your Profile will be empty. Connecting to Pages will now be the main way to express yourself on your profile, and you can always edit your profile to remove specific suggested Pages that you don't want to connect to."

This isn't a forced "opt-in," like the instant personalization option that's currently being examined by several U.S. senators, including Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, Mark Begich and Al Franken, but it certainly feels like an arm-twisting on Facebook's part. It makes opting-out a poor choice, one that degrades the overall Facebook experience.

Making Your Interests Public

That's not to say that this forced link-building doesn't have its pluses - Facebook can now build a web of connections from people to their interests and then allow those details to be shared with the "instantly personalized" websites like Pandora and Yelp. If you leave the privacy issues aside momentarily, you'll see that does offer some intriguing possibilities for a more social web. In addition, other sites can offer Facebook "like imports," an optional feature that would allow you to immediately get a web service up to speed on who you are and what you're into. This is a great feature for recommendation-type sites like Lunch.com, for instance, which is implementing this option today.

However, the high-pressure tactics being used to get people to link to Facebook Pages are a good example of how Facebook is coyly forcing people to go public with their previously more private, personal data. Although the pop-up box quietly warns "Remember, your Pages are public," few Facebook users will likely take note of that text. (After all, if thousands of people managed to confuse this blog with Facebook, we doubt they can grasp the finer points of data privacy.)

So what should your takeaway be from all this mess? Look before you link.

In fact, it may be best if you just assume that everything on Facebook will be public from now on and act accordingly.

Discuss

Firefox has thrown down the gauntlet in the race to take charge of your online identity, saying it will soon add identity management features to its browser, and hopes at some point to build recommendation services into the browser as well. The move pits the Mozilla Foundation and its open-source model against the proprietary approach taken by Facebook, which recently launched a series of features that it hopes will convince users and websites to use Facebook profiles as their default login for online services, and to implement the social network’s “Like” plugins as a universal standard.

The new addition to Firefox is called Account Manager, and it effectively transfers authority over logging in to various websites and services to the browser. Using a single menu in the main toolbar of the browser, next to the address field, Firefox will be able to log a user — or multiple users — into and out of multiple services, and will even be able to generate random passwords for users who don’t want to come up with their own. The service will apparently also support any standard for authentication such as OpenID (or presumably OAuth as well, which Facebook now supports), and is designed to be an open standard.

Firefox has effectively promoted the Account Manager plugin (or add-on, as it calls them now) from its Labs experimentation project to the official browser development stream. The add-on is available as a beta here, and after some testing and development will be added to the shipping version of the browser. The Firefox team said it is looking to “ship this feature as soon as possible,” and that adding support for it to an existing website or service should only take “as little as 15 minutes of hacking.”

It’s clear that Firefox sees the browser as the primary agent that stands between a user and the services and websites she wants to visit. That effectively means Firefox is going to go head-to-head with Facebook, which also wants to be the primary means by which users log in to websites and services. According to the Firefox blog, the Account Manager add-on is just part of a larger “online identity concept series” that Mozilla Labs has been working on, which includes looking at all the ways the browser can help users interact with the web:

Your Web browser, as your most trusted relationship in your life online, has nearly perfect knowledge of everything you do on the Web. We envision a world where your browser will play an even more active and critical role in helping you control and shape your online experience. To realize this vision, we need to increase the browser’s understanding of your online identity and provide a platform for building new capabilities that securely take advantage of this rich, dynamic set of data that represents the digital “you.”

According to Mozilla Labs, some of the ideas it’s working on include managing account information, but also questions such as “How can your browser help when you discover something cool on the Web that you want to share with your friends?” and also “What can your browser do to enable you to securely share data with websites and third-parties in return for context-rich Web experiences?” Those are both goals that will also bring the Firefox developer into direct competition with Facebook for access to user’s data and personalization or recommendation features.

Identity online seems to have gone from being a two-way race, with Google and Facebook, to being a three-way contest. May the best service win.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): There’s No Stopping Facebook

Interested in finding out what information Facebook is sharing about you through the company’s new open-graph API? Developer Ka-Ping Yee has come up with a simple tool that shows you everything the social network sends to anyone whose app or service decides to plug in to the new feature — all it requires is a user ID or user name. You can find out what information you’re sharing via your public profile by looking at your settings within Facebook,too, of course. But Yee’s tool shows you exactly what data a developer would get when it asks Facebook for info via the API, such as your name, birth date, location, etc. and also any public information such as your “likes” (formerly pages you were a “fan” of), your photos and so on.

As of yesterday, the tool was also showing some information that most users had not made public. Yee — a Canadian-born programmer who works for Google’s charitable arm, Google.org, and developed the “people finder” tool used after the Haiti earthquake — found that the API was showing what events he had recently attended, and even those he was planning to attend, information he didn’t recall giving Facebook access to (another developer says the old API provided this as well).

Thanks in part to Yee flagging the issue in a blog post and contacting the social network, Facebook now appears to have fixed it so that the API no longer makes this available by default (the developer says that his experiments with the Facebook API were the result of “personal dabbling” and don’t have anything to do with his work for Google).

Even though this glitch has been fixed, however, Yee’s tool has managed to surprise even some of the savviest tech users with what it reveals. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch.com, for example, on Twitter called it “immensely useful [and] potentially scary. I’m a sophisticated privacy vet & found things I hadn’t known I was sharing!”

Facebook has come under fire from a number of sources over privacy related to its new features, particularly the fact that users have been “opted in” to services such as “instant personalization,” which allows several sites that Facebook has partnered with to show users personalized content by drawing on their Facebook profile. Four senators sent the social network a letter today complaining about this kind of behavior, one of whom has also written a letter of complaint to the Federal Trade Commission.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user dirac3000

Since Facebook has become a pretty serious mainstay of social media, researchers have become interested in using it to find out which types of social interaction people prefer. A study done at the University of Missouri used physiological data to determine that Facebook users enjoy seeking out specific information and interactions, like Facebook wall posts, far more than more general and passive uses, like browsing the newsfeed or other aggregated sections.

In the experiment, 36 participants were tracked while they browsed Facebook from their own accounts. Researchers monitored physical outputs that correspond to emotional and motivational responses, such as skin conductance and eye movement; they also took screen shots and timed how long participants spend on each page. They broke down Facebook use into two categories: social browsing—looking at newsfeeds, invites pages, and so on—and social searching, such as seeking a friend's profile page or writing on a friends' wall.

The results showed that users spent the most time on activities that were classified as social searching, and had stronger responses to them. Ocular monitoring suggested they also experienced more "pleasantness" during those interactions. Over time, social searching remained more interesting, according to eye movements, while social browsing was a bit boring, and became more so as time elapsed.

The researchers say the data suggests that social searching, or interacting with an individual's more complete information rather than a sea of informational clips, stimulates an appetitive response. Appetitive responses are typically initiated when a person encounters something that promotes species survival, according to the authors. Taking steps to make friends contributes to survival, so this doesn't seem terribly surprising.

However, the results pose an interesting paradox for Facebook, as it seems the things we're most interested in are buried a level deep in searches or menus. Furthermore, the newsfeed, a flagship feature that's intended to combine Twitterlike aggregation and extensive content controls, is the one we care far less about than in-depth knowledge about our friends. It seems we'd rather use Facebook for its more unique feature—interactions and profiles that tell us where our friends work and what movies they like.

Researchers note that they did not study some secondary features of Facebook, such as games like Farmville or Facebook Marketplace, but that they might be worth looking into.




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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.

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These changes have raised concerns among privacy advocates and are even now being questioned by elected 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 in 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 Facebook's vision for the Web, we're ceding control of our data, our likes, our interests, our "social graph" (a.k.a 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.

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Facebook just shook the tech world by announcing several major initiatives that collectively constitute an aggressive move to weave the social net on top of the existing Web.The rumors were that the leading social network would launch a "Like" button for the entire Web. Instead, Zuckerberg & Co. unveiled a bold and visionary new platform that cannot be ignored.

The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook's vision is both minimalistic and encompassing - but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web.

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Whether we like it (pun intended) or not, we have to understand what this move means. It impacts users, publishers, competitors and, of course, Facebook itself. In this post, we summarize what Facebook announced and ponder the impact this will have on everyone.

Facebook Open Graph: Publisher Plugins
The Open Graph is a set combination of publisher plugins, semantic markup and a developer API.

"This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of user's tastes."Login with Faces & Facepile: The simpler publisher plugins enhance Facebook Connect. They makes it easy and compelling to sign in by leveraging Facebook cookies and showing faces of Facebook friends who are already members of the service.

Like Button and Like Box: These plugins add the liking feature to any content, typically the whole page. Both can be enhanced with semantic markup, described below. But the very basic intent for these is to get users to Like on the site and post a link to Facebook, which is then permanently stored on a user's profile and points back to the original site.

Activity Feed and Live Stream: These plugins show static and dynamic activity on the site. Activity Feed lists recent likes and comments from the site, while Live Stream shows a real-time view of activity on the site and is intended for interactive events.

Recommendations: This plugin surfaces personalized recommendations for the user based on what friends and everyone else is liking on the site. It is intended to drive the users to other pages on the site.

Facebook Open Graph: Semantic Markup
Facebook announced simple, RDF-based markup to make the plugins smarter. In a nutshell, the markup enables publishers to say what object is on the page - a movie, a book, a recording artist, an event, a sports team, etc. This automatically enables semantics, that is, an understanding that the user is not just interacting with a webpage, but that he or she is liking a specific kind of thing. Semantics then leads to bucketing of the objects into categories like books, movies, music, etc., and gives rise to all sort of applications, including personalized recommendations.

Perhaps even more importantly, the markup helps Facebook connect the users across common interests across different websites. For example, if both Pandora and Last.fm annotate a page about The Beatles using Facebook's markup, then users will be able to see their friends, who like the Beatles across different sites. This is very significant, because the data around friends is sparse and scattered around the sites. Previously, Facebook would surface this data in the stream without persisting it. Now, the information about a friend's likes of movies, music, books, recording artists, events, sports team, etc. will be permanent on Facebook profiles and readily available in context around the Web.

Facebook Open Graph: New API
The new Facebook API is elegant and streamlined. It makes it easy to access user information (with permission of course) such as profile, friends, etc. All of the calls are REST based and return JSON objects. For example, my profile information can be fetched like this: http://graph.facebook.com/alexiskold. The authentication is based on OAuth 2.0 protocol and makes it simple not only to connect, but to also prompt for permissions to access user information.

This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of users' tastes. And not just one user - all Facebook users.


Implications for the Users
With this release, Facebook asks users if they are willing to trade off privacy for personalization. To be clear, no personalization is ever possible without users telling a system about their tastes. What Facebook is asking for is necessary in order to then create personalized Web experience. Whether users want this sort of thing is a different question, but assuming that you want to know more about your friends you will.

Friends' interests around entertainment, sports, travel, etc. will be categorized and available. It will be easy to figure out what your friends are into both on Facebook and around the Web. In addition, Facebook is going to be using its own engine to bring you recommendations for related content. This will further accelerate the discovery and cross linking between friends. This will likely further impact the amount of search people do around the Web. As Fred Wilson pointed out - passed links replace search.

Yet, the crux of user implications is neither of the above, but one single issue: privacy. It is unclear at this point that this issue is a concern for actual Facebook users, but it is clear that tech world is raising its eyebrows: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis and many others expressed their concerns. People are saying that not only Facebook will know too much about us (because Google is already there today), but that it will be able to control too much.

Personally, I am skeptical that the average Facebook user is going to care all that much. People are notoriously naive about being watched on the Web, and this is likely to be no exception. More likely than not, Facebook users will enjoy the personalization aspects of the new platform and won't think much about it - until Facebook starts openly targeting them.

This was not been part of f8 of course, but Facebook is likely to use the information for targeting. After all, advertising is a major part of its monetization already so why won't it make it even better? If this targeting is too spot on, lots of users will probably get annoyed. Facebook is likely to sooth them via Facebook credits and heavy discounts, negotiated because of their massive volume.

How exactly users react remains to be seen, but they will probably like the new Facebook more because of increased relevancy and interaction with friends around the Web.


Next page:Implications for Publishers

Implications for Publishers
On the surface, this Facebook offering is a no-brainer for publishers. Who does not want more social activity on their site? However, in reality this is far from a slam dunk. To understand why, consider two types of sites: sites that are either social networks or have social networking integrated, and the sites that have their own commenting and ratings systems. In the first camp you will find Last.fm, Flixster, Goodreads, etc. None of these sites were a launch partner, understandably so. Social connections around music, movies and books are their bread and butter as are the ratings, reviews and recommendations. If they switch to Facebook for all of this, what do they have left?

So any site that already has social networking built in has to decide to abandon that before jumping into the Facebook Open Graph. The even worse problem is the ownership of ratings and comments. Are publishers really ready to give that up? Nobody seriously thinks that users are going to be rating through Facebook and then through the site again. So how is this going to work? It is unclear at this point, but it's likely publishers will ask for ways to replicate or export comments and likes that users sent to Facebook via their site. Perhaps an open API that allows publishers to manipulate the data is the answer, but it is easy to see how some publishers would be very concerned.

"You don't need to look too closely to see that Facebook is creating a feedback loop, which includes it, users and the rest of the Web and excludes its competitors."However, if you run a website like eCommerce or a blog or a service like Pandora that currently does not have a lot of social built-in, this offering is a no-brainer as it will instantly start recycling your pages through the massive Facebook power of passed links.

Implications for Competitors
This is aggressive and brilliant move by Facebook - and Twitter, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, eBay, Amazon and others, except for Microsoft, should be really worried. It appears that Microsoft is content with just partnering with Facebook, perhaps rightly so. Possibly a Bing deal is in the works, which would make a lot of sense.

For all other players on the Web, the worry is that Facebook is trying to close the loop in exclusively owning user eyeballs. Apparently Facebook is not content with just connecting people; it wants to connect people and things. And not only that, it wants to do it around the Web. And not just any people - friends. You don't need to look too closely to see that Facebook is creating a feedback loop, which includes it, users and the rest of the Web and excludes its competitors.

There are several things that other big players might try to do, the worst of which is to try to mimic Facebook. The "me too" that we've seen way too many times recently has not worked, and will not work now. The second best choice is to try to block it. As strange as it sounds it might just work. Between publisher and user issues there are a lot of concerns, and a carefully orchestrated and coordinated campaign may seriously hurt this initiative. Remember, Beacon was brought down fairly quickly by a combination of user backlash and derogatory press.

The third option - to embrace and extend this platform, to innovate on top of it - is likely to be the best move. Innovation has always tr[…]

The knee-jerk reaction has begun. Friend after friend after friend is posting the same chain-letter-like status update with simple directions on how to opt out from Facebook's new sharing capabilities.

It's spreading like wildfire, but we have to ask - has anyone considered the up side to any of these changes?

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The status we're seeing, along with a number of variations thereof, reads as follows:

As of today, FB has a new privacy setting called "Instant Personalization" that shares data with non-facebook websites and it is automatically set to "Allow." Go to Account > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and uncheck "Allow", then repost this to your profile.

Is each and every one of these people going and reading the terms of service or the privacy policy to find out what exactly they're blocking out? We quite doubt it. And while the sharing of your data sounds quite scary, we have to wonder if this reactionary unchecking is causing some who would otherwise benefit to miss out. After all, are we really all that concerned about Pandora knowing, from the moment we load the site, that we're huge Weezer fans?

The setting in question actually pertains to three partner sites - Docs.com, Pandora and Yelp. Facebook's explanation of the proposed experience:

We're working closely with these partners so you can quickly connect with your friends and see relevant content on their sites. These sites personalize your experience using your public Facebook information.

When you arrive on these sites, you'll see a notification from Facebook at the top of the page.

You can easily opt-out of experiencing this on these sites by "No Thanks" on the blue Facebook notification on the top of partner sites.

The particular setting in question reads "Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites."

Caution is good, but the cautionary tales of people losing their jobs, wives, husbands, whatever, because of Facebook have potentially gone a bit too far. We are a generation constantly terrified by the idea of someone, somewhere, effectively advertising to us by way of glancing at our "data" and knowing whether or not we like country music or alternative 1990s rock. But is it really so terrifying to have annoying banner ads offering deals on some product you might actually enjoy? We wear t-shirts declaring our fandom of certain bands; we paste bumper stickers on our cars professing our ideals; heck, we tell Pandora night and day what type of music we like and don't - but the second we hear about Facebook sharing info (such as our list of musical interests) we run in fear.

Now, after going and looking at the terms of service, privacy policy, or even just the simple text in the settings page, you may very well decide that you do not want your information to be shared. That's fine and valid. But at least consider the options first.

Facebook has offered a copy of the new privacy policy, with all of the changes highlighted, that you might want to take a look at before deciding. Privacy is, after all, a personal preference and something that ought to be finely tuned according to your own reservations and judgements, not something that should be determined by a viral tidbit that everyone copies and pastes to their profile.

For an in-depth look at how (and why) you should delete applications from your Facebook account, take a look at Sarah Perez's take on the subject.

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Worried about Facebook "like" fraud? You should be. Thanks to Facebook's overly simple implementation of the new Facebook Like Button, anyone can post a "Like This" button on their website pointing to any URL of their choosing. In other words, users can be tricked into liking websites they're not even on. You can bet that enterprising spammers have already figured out how to use this technology for their own nefarious purposes.

If you want a safer solution, there's a new Facebook "like" bookmarklet you can use instead.

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The bookmarklet was created by Kyle Bragger, formerly the CTO of Cork'd, a social networking site for wine lovers, and now working on his own project, Forrst, an invite-only community for developers and designers.

Not only does using the bookmarklet he created protect you from like fraud as described here, it's also a handy way to like anything on the Internet - even if there's no like button available on that page.

How to Use the Facebook Like Bookmarklet

To use the bookmarklet, just drag this link to your bookmarks bar in your Web browser: Like-o-matic.

Once it's there, you can click it anytime you're on a page or website you like.

Like ReadWriteWeb, for example? Click the button. Although there's no "Facebook Like Button" for the website as a whole (you can, however, find us on Facebook), you'll be given the opportunity to like ReadWriteWeb.

After clicking the bookmarklet once, you'll see a message appear at the top of the screen: "Be the first of your friends to like this." Click the button with the thumbs up on it and it will register your like on Facebook and post it to your News Feed.

That's all there is to it.

By using the bookmarklet instead of the like buttons on the websites themselves, you can be sure that your Facebook like will be pointing to the real thing. Plus, it allows you to like anything you want - even a site that isn't using Facebook buttons. Nice!

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Given Mark Zuckerberg's announcements at the Facebook F8 conference, one thing is certain: newspapers can no longer ignore Facebook's impact and reach. Whereas publishers continue to scapegoat Google for many of their current troubles, they should be equally, if not more, wary of Facebook.

Whether they acknowledge it or not, newspapers are losing out to the social networking site on the fundamental fronts of community relevance, attention and information dissemination. Yet behind the perceived threat from Facebook, there is also a new opportunity for publications to achieve newfound audience relevance.

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Guest author Chris Treadaway (@ctreada) is founder and CEO of Lasso, and author of the upcoming book Facebook Marketing: An Hour a Day, an imprint of Sybex. He blogs at treadaway.typepad.com.

Facebook's rise to dominance has been astounding. It is currently the most visited site in the United States, and boasts 400-plus million worldwide users. We've seen it go from a dorm room distraction to now being larger than the combined population of the United States and Mexico. With the social network claiming that roughly 70% of its user base is outside the United States, that means that there are at least 120 million Americans on Facebook today.

Taken down to the local level, though, this means that Facebook might just already have more reach in the community than any other media outlet - especially local newspapers. With the unveiling of their Web-ubiquitous "Like" button and "social bar," as well as their Graph API, Facebook is now using its strengths to redefine how we interact with the Web in its entirety.

So what does all of this mean for the publishing industry and for newspapers in particular? A few very important things:

Facebook is now a legitimate threat to Google. It has accomplished this by changing the game from search discoverability to social context, which wasn't doable with 40 million users but is with 400-plus million users. Facebook is trying to become the first place people visit when logging into their computers every morning. The site that leads this battle carries the most online leverage, at least until it is knocked off the pedestal.
Facebook is attempting to become pervasive across the entire Web, and without permission. Like it or not, site owners are going to have to deal with social media, but now in a much more pervasive way than ever before.
Facebook is a competitor for the attention of local audiences. One minute spent on Facebook is a minute not spent on another Web property. Facebook will become a more interesting place as it aggregates data on what people are doing and how they are reacting to the Web as a whole, not just Facebook's network. So it isn't just necessary for media outlets to build a better Web sites anymore - they have to build engaging content that can appear on Facebook and drive value to their paper. It isn't impossible, but it has to be a priority.
All of these things impact discoverability of a newspaper's content, who monetizes it and how. Those that succeed in becoming a viral Facebook content commodity will grow rapidly. Likewise, the decline of those news sources that fail to realize the necessary potential of Facebook will be swift. A deep and complete understanding of social media is necessary for publishers of any kind to modernize, grow and ultimately survive. It's becoming a necessary core competency, and fast.

Yesterday, The Washington Post announced their "Network News" initiative, integrating Facebook into the paper's website. The Post's incorporation of activity from users' Facebook friends immediately creates a value of social relevance that trumps efforts like the New York Times' similar, though detrimentally insular, TimesPeople network.

More importantly, however, are the possibilities such integration might provide for local newspapers. Relevance is a central theme to both the content shared on social networks and the community publication. Facebook offers those newspapers a readymade audience that is already connected to their desired local demographic. Local publications need to recognize the importance of tapping into Facebook's community, because, first and foremost, it is precisely where their readers are finding, sharing and discussing the types of pertinent content that the papers seek to champion.

Newspapers no longer need traditional Web developers. Papers now need Facebook developers, experts who can partner with creative social-savvy businesspeople who know how to take advantage of the social graph. In the wake of Facebook's new features, it will not be long before newspaper and media executives are attacking and blaming Facebook for their problems in the way they do Google today. However, those publications that more progressively pursue the opportunities and value opened to them by Facebook's new tools will have a very different reaction.

Photo by Michael Rogers.
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Facebook has just introduced several sweeping new changes to its platform at F8, the annual conference for Facebook developers. The web has been abuzz about the implications of Facebook’s latest move towards making its platform available on as many web sites as possible.

As Bret Taylor, head of Facebook Platform products, noted on the Developer Blog, the next evolution of the platform focuses is based on two fairly important themes:

First, the Web is moving to a model based on the connections between people and all the things they care about. Second, this connections-based Web is well on its way to being built and providing value to both users and developers — the underlying graph of connections just needs to be mapped in a way that makes it easy to use and interoperable.

Targeting these two themes, Facebook has released three new components: social plugins, the Open Graph protocol, and the Graph API.

Social plugins enable developers to easily add user interaction to web pages (e.g., a “Like” button) using an <iframe> or a combination of XFBML and FaceBook’s JavaScript SDK. These plugins essentially provide establish a distributed means for content sharing and interaction in a fairly seamless way.

The Open Graph Protocol provides a way for developers to integrate content with Facebook’s social graph. In essence, this means that content can be linked with one or more users, across different parts of their profiles, including profile pages, activity streams, news feeds, and even search results. Currently the protocol is implemented by adding several tags to the <head> of a web page (based on the Open Graph Protocol namespace) and by including a “Like” button (social plugin). The specification for Open Graph Protocol has been published at http://opengraphprotocol.org/.

The Graph API is the next generation of the Facebook API, and it is aimed at providing access to various parts of Facebook’s social graph data. The new API is completely RESTful, and by default results are returned in JSON. Access to various data objects has been streamlined, as is evident by the examples below:

Users: https://graph.facebook.com/btaylor (Bret Taylor)
Pages: https://graph.facebook.com/cocacola (Coca-Cola page)
Events: https://graph.facebook.com/251906384206 (Facebook Developer Garage Austin)
Groups: https://graph.facebook.com/2204501798 (Emacs users group)
Applications: https://graph.facebook.com/2439131959 (the Graffiti app)
Status messages: https://graph.facebook.com/367501354973 (A status message from Bret)
Photos: https://graph.facebook.com/98423808305 (A photo from the Coca-Cola page)
Photo albums: https://graph.facebook.com/99394368305 (Coca-Cola’s wall photos)
Videos: https://graph.facebook.com/614004947048 (A Facebook tech talk on Tornado)
Notes: https://graph.facebook.com/122788341354 (Note announcing Facebook for iPhone 3.0)

Documentation for the new API is available, including advanced parts of the API such as FQL and FBML as well as the now deprecated “Old REST API.” Note that the new API utilizes OAuth 2.0 for authentication and it also includes integration with Insight, Facebook’s analytics service.

And there was one policy change announced today that got a big round of applause from the developer audience: third party applications may now retain Facebook for longer than 24 hours. According to Justin Smith at Inside Facebook, “the change was one primarily motivated by technical costs being created by the policy for developers, instead of any intended change in how developers should use user data.” And Mark Zuckerberg said that

Zynga has had to download user information 100 million times per day because of our policy. Developers were having to architect entire systems just to do this. There aren’t any other changes in the policies on how developers can use the data.

Whatever the motivation, while this can indeed make developers lives easier, it also raises privacy issues as more and more Facebook data gets moved outside of Facebook.

Overall, this is certainly a bold move by Facebook in its effort to expand its reach both in terms of users and content across the web (or what Jeremiah Owyang refers to as a “Crusade of Colonization”). The new API, coupled with the Open Graph Protocol and social plugins, present developers with several ways of tapping into the Facebook platform without much heavy lifting.

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources Facebook API Profile, 146 mashups

There has been plenty of talk about what Facebook would announce at the f8 conference this week, but the full magnitude of what the company has in mind didn’t really hit home until after the keynote by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a related presentation by Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor (Liz has a great overview of the issues here).

Both carried a single, unmistakable message: Facebook wants to own your activity on the Internet. Zuckerberg did his best to portray this as a great thing for users, but the corollary is inescapable: Facebook will be everywhere you are, watching what you do, keeping track of that data, and talking about what you’re doing to your friends and companies you “like.” A quick survey of the web shows that some seem to see this as a great idea (“Hey, I can show lots of cool stuff to my friends!”) and some are less enthusiastic (“Facebook is going to be following me and tracking my every movement!”).

The reaction from some observers on Twitter was positive. The LA Times said that it would “make sharing easier,” while Deborah Schultz of the Altimeter Group said, “A world that is more open and connected — always a good thing (despite some snarky comments); thanks FB for pushing open!!!” Her fellow Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang was less enthused, however, describing it as Facebook’s “crusade of colonization.” The New York Times’s response was somewhat more tempered, calling it “Facebook to Go.”

Silicon Alley Insider called it a plan to “infiltrate the web,” and Silicon Beat said Facebook wants to “conquer the world.” Kevin Marks of BT, a former engineer with Technorati, said that “Facebook wants to replace links between sites with a database stored on their servers that they control access to,” and Eric Marcoullier (co-founder of Gnip and MyBlogLog) quipped: “Coldplay’s ‘when I ruled the world’ playing at F8. Interesting, if appropriate, choice.” Dan Gillmor of the Knight Center for Media Entrepreneurship summed it up by saying that “Facebook wants to be the Internet,” while Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch, said “we might look back at the 00’s as the golden age of the web, when we were ruled by Google, a benign dictator.”

As Liz has pointed out, the key to what Facebook wants to do is to control the hooks and tools that allow it to understand and participate in the social web, the “people-centered” web. By watching and indexing your “likes” and the likes of millions of others — Zuckerberg said that within 24 hours of his keynote, there would a billion “Like” buttons and plugins around the web — the company can create an incredibly powerful map of the relationships between people and their friends, and between people and the things they like, whether they are movies or bands or dishwashing detergent.

That’s a tremendous power to have, and the youthful CEO of Facebook makes it seem friendly and appealing. Why wouldn’t you want to share with your friends? But to use a popular phrase from Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. Let’s hope Zuckerberg chooses to use his powers for good instead of evil.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Andrew Feinberg

Facebook, with its open graph announcements at the f8 conference today, is digging itself deep into the infrastructure of the web. Outside developers and existing sites will now be able to hook into Facebook users’ data and activities directly and persistently, keeping logs well beyond the previous limit of 24 hours.

Organizing the world’s information by powering it is clearly a direct affront to Google. Where Google observes links and relationships between web sites from a distance, Facebook aims to be the glue that connects the web itself. The implications are thrilling, but also scary — what if Facebook goes down?

The benefits of using a Facebook authentication system were already strong. Bret Taylor, Facebook’s director of product, at today’s keynote explained just how strong when speaking of his own struggle to grow FriendFeed, the real-time social company Facebook eventually acquired. Users who signed up for FriendFeed with Facebook Connect were four times more likely to become active than any other form of sign-up, said Taylor.

But now, beyond fostering better participation by inviting users to connect their real identities and their real relationships, web services will be able to use Facebook to explode user engagement and relationships. They can use Facebook’s social plugins to expose personalized friend activity and recommendations. And Facebook will establish persistent, dynamic links to users’ participation on connected sites around the web through its “like” buttons.

Users now have the ability to express their interests not only by saying what they like — say, a local restaurant — but by saying what web site represents it — say, a Yelp review page, instead of the official restaurant site. Web services would be silly not to participate.

As a user, having your social self represent you around the web will at first be creepy but ultimately be useful. As one Facebook engineer put it to me today, “Imagine if you had one login for the whole web. That would be so sweet.”

In preparation for f8, a few Facebook employees hacked together examples of what outside developers could do given the new open graph tools. For instance, Facebook.me would allow users to use Facebook as a CMS. Say you’re one of those crazy MySpace devotees who wants blinking disco lights on your profile. Great. Make a web page, host it at whatever URL you want, uglify it to your heart’s content, and port in data that dynamically connects to Facebook. You can imagine brands and small businesses might want to use this in lieu of a traditional web page.

Another demo, KlugePress, gives the ability to use a nice template and port in Facebook event information. Only users who are invited to the event on Facebook would be able to load a KlugePress invite (this is tricky, and wasn’t really figured out yet for the demo). If users are logged in to Facebook and have permitted access, they can RSVP, comment and see details as they would on the bland Facebook event page. The data itself is sent right back to Facebook. (Pictured above is a KlugePress skin on an older event from my own profile.)

By inviting developers to integrate with it so tightly, Facebook is enabling new opportunities — but also asking for an awful lot of trust.

Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

Been asked a few times in the last few days about where my slides are from my MySQL keynote from *last* year.

Ooops.

Um, yeah.  Sorry about that.  Here’s a link to ‘The SmugMug Tale’ slides, and you can watch the video below:

Sorry for the extreme lag.  I suck.

The important highlights go something like this:

Use transactional replication.  Without it, you’re dead in the water. You have no idea where a crashed slave was.
Use a filesystem that lets you do snapshots.  Easily the best way to do backups, spin up new slaves, etc. I love ZFS.  You’ll need transactional replication to really make this painless.
Use SSDs if you can. We can’t afford to be fully deployed on SSDs (terabytes are expensive), but putting them in the write path to lower latency is awesome.  The read path might help, too, depending on how much caching you’re already doing.  Love hybrid storage pools.
Use Fishworks (aka Open Storage) if you can.  The analytics are unbeatable, plus you get SSDs, snapshots, ZFS, and tons of other goodies.
Use transactional replication. This is so important I’m repeating it.  Patch it into MySQL (Google, Facebook, and Percona have patches) or use XtraDB if you use replication.  We use the Percona patch.

Holler in the comments if something in the presentation isn’t clear, I’ll answer.  Apologies again.

Shameless plug - we’re hiring. And it’s a blast.

Before a dramatic split last August that saw Google CEO Eric Schmidt booted from the Apple board, Apple and Google had been the best of friends. Now that the two titans are broken up, it’s looking increasingly likely that Apple will buddy up with Facebook.

Apple and Google once shared a common enemy — Microsoft — and had different enough products and goals to coexist symbiotically. But with Google creating and selling Android devices as a direct competitor to the iPhone, swooping in to buy companies like AdMob under Apple’s nose and bringing the FCC in over anti-competitive maneuverings in iPhone app rejections, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has rallied his troops by calling bullsh*t on Google.

See our infographic on the chronology of the Google-Apple breakup

The situation poses a promising opportunity for other existing and emerging technology powerhouses. Who will be Apple’s new most-favored nation? It probably won’t be Amazon, given that little issue of the iPad and the iTunes Store. It could potentially be Microsoft, which is ironically looking for friends as it faces up Google in search and productivity products. But it’s clear that Apple holds grudges. How about Yahoo or AOL for their reach? They may have more baggage than assets. At this point signs and logic are pointing to Apple’s new best friend being Facebook.

TechCrunch reported earlier this week based on uncited sources that Apple will soon add Facebook Connect integration to iTunes. I’ve heard the same thing, and further that Facebook could become the social layer on top of the Apple experience. It would be similar to but broader than the way Google Maps is integrated into location information across iPhone applications — with deep implications for personalization and easy authentication across the user experience and for app developers. Instead of that crappy experience of leaving every app to go to the web to log in to Facebook Connect, you could integrate your Apple and Facebook accounts once, directly.

Apple, which has completely missed out on the social web, would get a huge leg up with the web’s premium social service. And the partnership could be just as helpful for Facebook (which, of course, has positioned itself squarely against Google as well), in terms of enabling commerce.

Facebook Connect on the iPhone today

That’s because the real prize here, for both Facebook and Apple, is authenticated payments for digital and real-world goods. Probably the single most important alliance to be brokered today is the connection between users’ online identity and their bank accounts. Spending money online and encouraging your friends to follow your lead is a huge market (here’s the obligatory call-back to the problematic but perhaps just before-its-time Facebook Beacon product). The Facebook social graph plus iTunes’ 125 million credit card accounts would be formidable. With their powers combined it would be much harder for PayPal, Google and Amazon to compete.




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 Facebook and Apple have long been chummy, with some of the earliest corporate participation on the site being the “Apple Students” group, which dated back to at least 2006 and foreshadowed the current Fan Page product. And funnily enough, just like Apple has lagged on social, Facebook has lagged on music.

Facebook already has the beginnings of an alliance with PayPal to allow international advertisers to pay without credit cards (PayPal says it has more than 81 million active accounts). But as TechCrunch points out, Apple’s Lala acquisition could help be the connector between the two companies, given the music startup’s previous experience working with Facebook on allowing users to gift songs.

Still, there’s one indicator that Facebook and Apple are definitely not on the same page yet. At launch, there was no Facebook iPad application — an obvious fit for the device — and someone on Apple’s crack app review team let through a paid Facebook rip-off app that fooled and confused customers last weekend until Facebook had it shut down for trademark infringement.

Photo of Steve Jobs by Curious Lee. Mark Zuckerberg by Deney Tereio via Flickr, Under CC License.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):

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Please see the disclosure about Facebook in my bio.

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark says that he believes social networking and the rise of distributed trust and reputation networks are helping to shift the balance of power in society, away from those with nominal power and money and towards people who emerge from the grassroots. Although personal social networks are relatively small in real life, unless someone is a celebrity or a politician, Newmark says that social networking allows online networks to be much larger and much more powerful by comparison.

While distributed trust systems are just emerging through services such as Facebook and LinkedIn and new ventures such as Unvarnished , the Craigslist founder says the potential implications of such networks are significant.

By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power. That is, peer networks will confer legitimacy on people emerging from the grassroots. This shift is already happening, gradually creating a new power and influence equilibrium with new checks and balances. It will seem dramatic when its tipping point occurs, even though we’re living through it now.

Newmark also says in his post — which he is discussing in a live-streamed talk this morning at the Reynolds Journalism Institute — that he sees the need for reputation networks that can manage the distributed identities and trust information of people online, just as banks manage money.

The repositories of trust information are the banks in which we store this big asset. Like any banks, having a lot of this kind of currency confers a lot of power in them. Having some competition provides some checks and balances. We need to be able to move around the currency of trust, whatever that turns out to be, like we move money from one bank to another. That suggests the need for interchange standards, and ethical standards that require the release of that information when requested.

Newmark’s blog post expands on ideas he raised when I had coffee with him recently at his favorite cafe in San Francisco, where I shot a short video embedded below. At the time, he said that managing trust and reputation online was “the next big problem for the web,” and called some form of distributed trust system “the killingest of killer apps.”

Newmark suggested that big players such as Google, Facebook and Amazon were the kinds of entities that would have the scale to handle such a distributed trust or reputation-management network, and said that despite some occasional missteps by both Google and Facebook when it came to privacy (Google Buzz and Facebook Beacon, respectively), he believed that both were acting in good faith and had a policy of “not being evil.”

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

There’s no point in worrying about your reputation anymore, TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington has decided; everything will eventually find its way into the public sphere anyway. Union Square Ventures investor Fred Wilson, however, thinks there is a way to manage your reputation, namely having your community of friends and those who know you through social networks defend you. Pete Kazanjy says his new service Unvarnished, a social network for reputation management that launched yesterday, takes something from both of those ideas.

Unlike LinkedIn, which gives a user ultimate control over what appears on their profile, Unvarnished takes the same approach as Yelp does to restaurants: Anyone can create a profile for any person and then review them, at which point the person being reviewed can “claim” their profile. They can’t delete or vote on negative reviews they’ve received, but they can respond to them — and they can encourage their friends, coworkers and social network followers to vote on them or provide their own.

Perhaps the most controversial aspect of Unvarnished is that the reviews are anonymous (Kazanjy prefers to say that the reviewer’s identity has been “obscured”) so that you never know, for example, who exactly provided that two-star rating. Although it seems like the kind of thing that no one in their right mind would want, Kazanjy says such anonymity is a crucial part of what makes Unvarnished different from LinkedIn. Human nature, he says, means that the reviews on a LinkedIn profile are almost always positive, and are often so banal and vague that they convey virtually no real information whatsoever.




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In some cases, those reviews may even be flat-out wrong. But no one will actually say what they really think because they don’t want to offend the person they’re reviewing — and besides, no one would ever authorize anything less than an enthusiastic review on their LinkedIn profile. Which, Kazanjy says, is like letting the owners of restaurants control what reviews appear on their Yelp pages — it ensures that nothing bad ever appears, and thus that no one ever gets a completely objective summary of all the information about that restaurant.

Even though you don’t know the identity of the person who left that bad review on Unvarnished, Kazanjy says the system is designed to track their behavior throughout the site, and that over time it creates a kind of persistent identity that’s almost as good as knowing who the person is (and users can reveal themselves in a comment or review at any time if they want to). Reviewers gain trust within the system by providing more reviews, and the service has an algorithm that looks at how long they’ve been a member, how many of their reviews are one-star vs. four or five, and so on. Users are awarded badges — new, novice and trusted — based on their activity, that others can view.

The bottom line is that the principle behind Unvarnished is a very real one: Your reputation is already being outsourced, whether you like it or not. All you can do is respond to criticism wherever it appears, and to get your friends and coworkers to do the same. Unvarnished offers a way to do that all in one place. It’s a valiant effort — but will it take off? The biggest issue for the service is that not everyone is going to want to confront those negative reviews, and/or hustle their friends to review them positively to counterbalance them. Of course, people already do that to some extent with LinkedIn, so what Unvarnished has to do is show that there is more value in the way it approaches online reputation.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user seeveeaar