It’s been a long time coming and has a ways to go still, but Google Health is on the way.
Google confirmed last week that it is testing this new product (click here for a screen shot) with the Cleveland Clinic, followed by another update on Thursday by Google VP (and total babe, btw) Marissa Mayer:
One of the most exciting and innovative parts of Google Health is our platform strategy. We’re assembling a directory of third-party services that interoperate with Google Health. Right now, this means you’ll be able to automatically import information such as your doctors’ records, your prescription history, and your test results into Google Health in order to easily access and and control your data. Later, this platform strategy will mean that you will be able to interact with services and tools easily, and will be able to do things like schedule appointments, refill prescriptions, and start using new wellness tools.
Meyer assures us that Google is emphasizing privacy, security, and user control in its Health offering. But as Nick Carr points out, Meyer is careful to leave open a future loophole. “We won’t sell or share your data without your explicit permission,” she says (with my emphasis). Hmm.
Google Health is sure to be a useful product, but there is certainly a risk in putting your most private of information in a third party’s hands. When it is released, would you consider using Google Health?
Image used under a Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user j.reed.
A few days ago I wrote about the data portability debate sparked by the deactivation of Robert Scoble’s Facebook account following his attempt to siphon his social graph data out of that service. Well, now Duncan Riley at TechCrunch and Steve O’Hear at ZDNet are breaking the news that Facebook (along with Google and Plaxo) have joined the DataPortability Workgroup. Riley reports:
The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.
Riley congratulates Google and Facebook, but O’Hear is less optimistic:
Call me cynical, but while I welcome this move [...], I remain skeptical of how quickly users will actually see real-world benefits from Google and Facebook’s membership.
Whether there will be an immediate change in the services or not, this is a big step towards unlocking the social graph.
One of the big stories in the tech world this week was a showdown between controversial blogger Robert Scoble and Facebook. You can read this article to get a fairly balanced recap of the drama, or browse through Blogrunner’s aggregation of posts and articles. (On a side note, I just discovered Blogrunner and it may be the coolest thing I’ve found all week).
But the gist is this: Scoble was alpha testing a program being developed by Plaxo (a forerunner of social networks as we know them today) called Plaxo Pulse. The particular feature he was testing was a script which logged onto his Facebook account, and then rapidly browsed through his friends, profile-by-profile, collecting — or, “scraping” — their names, birthdays, and e-mail addresses. (For more on scraping, see this recent article in Wired). This data was to be imported into Plaxo to help populate a user’s address book there. Facebook picked up on the superhuman speed at which the profiles were being accessed, and promptly deactivated Scoble’s account while notifying him he had violated Facebook’s Terms of Use.
Most of the heavyweights have weighed in on the matter: Arrington, Battelle, Carr, Fake Steve, Hansell, O’Hear, and of course Scoble himself has a few things to say. And they’re not all singing the same tune.
Continue reading ‘Who Owns the Social Graph?’
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