A movie about the founding of the world’s largest social-networking site, Facebook.
Fire, Brimstone and Facebook.
Google has always been known for its mantra of “don’t be evil”, but in the past week Facebook has appeared as a force prepared to bulldoze through any sort of similar thinking by introducing “Open Graph”.
I’m going to make it simple. Very soon you will see elements of Facebook all across in the internet. You will see Facebook “Walls” on blogs, the Facebook commenting system on news sites, and the “Like” button absolutely everywhere. With this, Facebook hopes to weave itself into the very foundations of the internet and become the de facto platform for any online social interaction. With nearly 500 million users around the world, Facebook is beginning to flex their muscles and show just what they can do with the largest social graph in the world.
What does it mean for you? It means that you will be able to share anything you find with all of your friends on Facebook. You will have the ability to send anything and everything to Facebook. While this may look good and sound convenient, there is a bigger issue at play.
If Open Graph turns out to be successful, Facebook’s tentacles will creep into every web page you visit. Sites will begin to live and breathe through the elements of Facebook they choose to implement. Everything you do could eventually go through Facebook.
As Google grew in size and popularity in the early 2000’s, concerns over personal privacy flared as the search engine began to track everyone’s movements through the internet. It was worrying because one company new where you were and where you had been. Google took the hint from their concerned users and changed their privacy policy to only keep this data for 18 months.
Facebook on the other hand has had a shocking history of dealing with personal privacy. Last year Facebook added a clause to their terms of service which handed all ownership of everything you had on the site, over to Facebook, photos and all. Public outcry over the blatant breach of trust lead to Facebook quickly removing this clause.
With such a sketchy privacy history it is impossible to know exactly how Facebook with deal with your personal information. And when you think about it, they’re not just collecting impersonal information like Google does, like your IP address, they’re collecting the comments you make, the photos you post, the people you know, the stuff that you like. It creates a privacy scenario much more involved than Google’s and one which has the potential for greater damage if misused. Google only knew your internet history, Facebook knows exactly who you are.
Open Social has the ability to change the way you and I connect throughout the web. But along with it come some serious question about how much power and control we want to hand over to one company, the company who knows everything about us. Keep this in mind: Google has the motto “don’t be evil”, Facebook doesn’t.
Face What?
11:12 Jan 19th, 2010 | Notes
It’s 2010, as I’ve said about five times since it actually has been 2010. At the Consumer Electronics show in Las Vegas a few weeks ago, we saw a lot of Ebooks, the new medium for delivering books digitally.
It begs the question, is the physical paperback book beginning to die? And more importantly, what happens to Facebook once its gone? What happens in another one or two generations when “books” in their pure form don’t exist except as a collectors item? The social network will lose its meaning, the name won’t make sense. Not that it does now.
This raises a new question, one we must begin to urgently think about. What should Facebook be called once the book ceases to exist? How about Facetablet?
As a student, writing is a large part of what I do on a daily basis. Whether it be essays, reports or just homework, I’m always typing away. The internet is a distracting place as you are well aware, and the temptation to sneak a look at Facebook or the internet window behind your document becomes too great a lot of the time. Thus, I am always looking for new ways to focus my attention on my work.
Enter ‘Ommwriter’. The weird name comes from a meditation exercise in which the phrase ‘omm’ is hummed in an effort to clear one’s mind. Following this philosophy, Ommwriter’s soul purpose is to create a serene, tranquil environment in which to write until your heart (or essay word limit) is content.
Once you realize that Ommwriter isn’t a word processor, but a writing companion, you begin to see its true value. Its minimalist, and flaunts it. You’ll find Ommwriter amazingly simple and clean, offering only three fonts, three font sizes and three background images. Even the scroll bar is only a few pixels wide. What you won’t find it any formatting options, fancy graphics, imaging or even headers. There isn’t even a spellchecker built into it. Why? I guess because all of those features add clutter, something which Ommwriter goes out of its way to reduce.
“Find, it looks really boring. What else?” you may ask. Well before you jump to conclusions, Ommwriter has a few cool and unique tricks that set it apart from other writing programs like WriteRoom. Ommwriter has a series of ambient music tracks and key stroke sounds built in to bring you into your writing frame of mind. Seven of each for you to explore and enjoy, each beautiful and relaxing in its own way.
Of course, some people will find the sounds dreadfully annoying and will go out of their way to avoid it. But for me, Ommwriter provides a soothing, calming and distraction free environment. As a writing companion, Ommwriter is fantastic. It knows its place in a person’s workflow, and neatly fits into it, molding itself perfectly into the roll.
Ommwriter is currently in beta, and you can pick up a copy from their website. I don’t know when the final version will ship, all I know is that I can’t wait!
Internet Vices
This site is hilarious! It’s lists many of the internets most iconic addictive services and relates them to a real world vice. Brilliant.
And true.
All true.
Especially the Myspace one.
The Real World Finally Discovers Facebook Advertising Strategy, Gets Disproportionately Frazzled
7:04 Sep 20th, 2009 | 1 note
If you have any idea about how Facebook works, you’ll won’t be surprised to hear that the popular social network uses targeted advertising. If you don’t know how Facebook works, you may notice that the ads that appear down the right hand side of the site are eerily relevant to you. For example, if you’ve just changed your relationship status to “Recently Engaged”, you’ll start seeing ads for wedding planners, wedding dresses etc. If you’re a teenager who has “Twilight” in your favorite movies list, you’ll see ads for Facebook vampire games.
These ads are eerily relevant to you because advertisers buy ads that are displayed based the information you have on Facebook. This isn’t a new thing for Facebook, but for the rest of the market, such vigorous and pinpointed advertisements are. And so we have this article from the Sydney Daily Telegraph, which has recently discovered Facebook advertising. As expected, the tabloid publication immediately jumps into its default writing style in an attempt to “warn the public”: moral outrage and righteous indignation.
Naturally, the article screams “privacy invasion!”, thinking that Facebook has implemented this advertising scheme while wearing dark glasses, a large hat and a full length trench coat. But in actual fact, Facebook is known for having quite obvious terms of service and advertising guidelines. But the problem the Telegraph has is not with the implementation, but with the concept of target advertising. Let’s put into perspective just how silly the whole argument is.
You’re information isn’t being sold around the internet to shady dealers. Facebook doesn’t hand out your profile for advertisers to sift through looking for the right people to give ads too. Ads are filtered through based on basic information: Age, location, gender, relationship status, displayed interests etc. While you may initially freak out, step back and think about it first. Advertisers aren’t going to be able to use anything against you by knowing you’re 17, live in Sydney, are a single, white Male who likes Twilight. If you haven’t realized, your insurance company, your bank, your government and your employer know this (ok maybe not the Twilight bit). Heck, your insurance company and bank know way more than Facebook does! But unlike your insurance company, Facebook has no other purpose other than making sure your personal information is secure. After all, your personal information is their core business. They aren’t going to do anything to threaten that.
Another thing people have to realize before panicking that their privacy has been violated is that they already receive targeted ads. When you buy Woman’s Weekly, you don’t see ads for home hardware products, you see ads for makeup and clothes. Just like when you buy Twilight Magazine you don’t see ads for the Da Vinci Code (okay so I lied about buying a Twilight magazine, I honestly don’t). You’re receiving target ads all the time (from Google for example), you just don’t realize it because it’s not so obvious. Facebook is extending targeted ads into the 21st century with the more precise personal information that magazines never had.
Finally, you agreed to this. None of this farce of a situation would have come up if people had just read Facebook’s terms of service instead of blindly clicking ‘accept’ when signing up. You agreed for your information to be sold, you agreed to be advertised to. You have absolutely no ground to stand on when you say “I’m there to socialize with friends, not to make money for other people” because you’re not, you are there to make people money, you’re there to make Facebook money. They’re a business, not your buddy. It’s what you agreed to remember?
To all of you paranoid privacy people, I have a suggestion. If you want your information to be private, get off the internet. The most fundamental rule of the internet is that nothing is ever completely deleted. Your information is always on a server somewhere, sitting there, whether you like it or not. Facebook keeps all of your information even when you’ve ‘deleted’ it, and your account can never be deleted. All of that information is a sitting duck, there for the taking should someone successfully hack into Facebook and steal everything. You won’t be complaining about ads when thieves and hackers have your details will you? If you were so concerned about privacy, you would never had joined Facebook in the first place.
So, go and complain, go and rant, go and change the world of Facebook. Heck, you’ve already made a Facebook group in protest over Facebook’s advertising: “People Against Intrusive Advertising on Facebook”. That’s a bold, decisive statement about how serious your plight is, right? Let me know when you’ve beaten capitalism. God knows you’re going about in the most logical manner ever conceived.
Messing around with Services today I discovered a way to make a popup Facebook window! It’s like and easily accessible Facebook whenever you need it! I just have to hit control+F and up it pops! I also learnt how to get it to render in the iPhone format, so it fits neatly in this window.
If one Facebook window isn’t enough, you can open two, or seven or more!
Why Teens Aren’t Using Twitter: We’re Lazy
8:18 Jul 14th, 2009 | Notes
After reading Daniel Brusilovsky’s TechCrunch article Why Teens Aren’t Using Twitter: It Doesn’t Feel Safe, I felt compelled to put forward my own reasons for Twitter’s lack of popularity among our contemporaries. While Daniel says the reason is because teenagers don’t see Twitter as ‘safe’, I believe the reason teenagers don’t use Twitter is we are fickle creatures of habit.
It all stems from this question: “What is Twitter?”
That is the question that I, as a 16 year old like Daniel, hear from students every time I mention the addictive social network and the one I can never answer with any sort of adequacy. I can say anything; celebrities use it to get in touch with their fans, news sites post new stories, you can let people know what you’re doing, it doesn’t matter. I can say anything and be met with the same response time and time again: “Why?”
And there you have it, the unanswerable question. If you’re an average student with Facebook, there is no reason. The truth is there is no reason for the average student to use Twitter. It fills no gap in their social life like Facebook does.
But how did Facebook become that glue for every student to stay in contact? Simple, everyone started using it. Once enough people started using Facebook, everyone else followed. That flocking has not happened with Twitter. It comes down to that all important question: “Why?” While teenagers use Facebook, there is no reason why the average student should use Twitter.
Teenagers don’t use twitter because it feels unsafe, because Facebook gives them friends’ email addresses and instant messaging screen names and phone numbers, or because an SMS message costs too much. You have to understand that in schools, there are no discussions of ‘Social Networks’, there is only discussion of Facebook. There is no thinking of Facebook as a closed network and Twitter as an open one. You have to understand that there is nothing in students’ experience outside of Facebook.
Teenagers are lazy. We find one spot and we stay there, regardless of the fact that that grassy knoll over there looks more comfortable than where we’re sitting. Using that logic, the only reason teenagers don’t use Twitter is because Facebook came first and that’s where we’ll stay.
Likaholix is awesome! It’s an online service where you post things that you like! It’s like p0p that I talked about earlier, but it works better because of the larger community. It suggests recommendations based on what you already like, allows you to post other things you like and share your likes with twitter, facebook and friendfeed! As you can guess, my list is populated with Apple products.
I saw iJustine using this and so I just had to try it out!
