Archive for the 'Privacy' Category

Annonymity and Secrets Online: Postsecret on Facebook

Published
by
Taylor
on June 8, 2008
in Facebook, Privacy and Social Networks
. 2 Comments

I’ve been reading Postsecret regularly for a few years now. I always get excited when a new batch of secrets pops up in my Google Reader window on Sundays. For those who don’t know, Postsecret is a community art project of sorts consisting of anonymous postcards mailed to the curator (for lack of a better term), Frank Warren. Warren picks out about 20 postcards from the week’s mail and posts scanned images onto the Postsecret site every Sunday. The postcards detail secrets ranging from hysterical to neurotic; tragic to troubling. Warren has produced a series of books filled with Postsecret postcards, and regularly speaks at college campuses about the unique project.

Recently, Warren started a Facebook page for the Postsecret project. Every week, he posts a photo album full of new secrets (beyond what’s posted on the blog), and (unlike on the Postsecret blog, where commenting is disabled) many Facebook users comment on the postcards.

This week on Facebook, Warren posted a single secret–one anonymous contributor’s list of “Secrets I Have Never Told To Men I Know.” He then challenged Facebook users: “What are your secrets? Write your list here [...]” Many comments followed, and things got pretty interesting.

One of the constant characteristics of Postsecret has always been the anonymity of submitted secrets. Part of why Postsecret is compelling is that readers generally know nothing about the source of wild or painful secrets. And yet, on Facebook, many readers chose to share secrets with their name and affiliation (High School/University, or location) in the open. I was surprised by what I read in the 2,100+ comments (2,141 as I’m writing this) that accompanied the original secret.

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Scaled Automation: Google and Facebook Start To Connect Your Dots

Published
by
Jarred
on May 12, 2008
in Data Portability, Facebook, Google, Privacy, Social Networks and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

A few weeks ago I wrote about Google’s baby step into the social networking game, when it announced it was testing social features in its branded start-page, iGoogle. In an attempt to be a blogger rock star (hah!), I coined the term “scaled automation” to describe the web giant’s approach to this arena. In a nutshell, it combines Google’s penchant for automatically interpreting your social graph (”automation”) with its “long-tail” philosophy of breaking down barriers to the flow of information across the entire web (”scaled”).

To its credit, Facebook — the reigning champion of social networking — picked up on the “scaled” trend and announced Facebook Connect last week. This new feature will serve as a gateway to Facebook’s so-called “walled garden” of social graphs. Websites external to Facebook will be able to offer users the option of logging in using their Facebook credentials. Additionally, users can port some of their social graph data (friend connections, photos, etc.) to those external websites. From the Facebook Developers’ Blog:

Developers will be able to add rich social context to their websites. Developers will even be able to dynamically show which of their Facebook friends already have accounts on their sites. [...] As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website.

While Facebook will begin scaling across the web, however, it has not embraced the “automation” side of Google’s philosophy. Indeed, in response to Facebook Connect, Google revealed the rest of their social networking plans today with the announcement of the similarly-named Google Friend Connect. Google’s VP of Engineering describes his company’s vision of the social web, and you can instantly see how it differs from Facebook’s:

The distributed model has worked well for the Web. That is what the Web does–many points of light loosely coupled and massively distributed, allowing users to connect to pages of information. [...] Now it is working to connect people to other people.

Google is basically launching the same initiative as Facebook, but the spirit behind the implementation is different. Google wants to connect you everywhere, just like Facebook; however, Google also wants to connect you to everyone.

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Do You See What I See?

Published
by
Jarred
on April 29, 2008
in Computing, Google, Privacy, Search and Web 2.0
. 2 Comments

The Problem

Unsurprisingly, the ever-innovative Google is conducting intensive research into improving image search.  The web giant’s mission – ”to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful” — requires that its computers be able to interpret and index images, in addition to text.  To date, as Mike Arrington explains, computers have not been so good at this:

Today when we talk about search all we really mean is text search. That’s sort of like only being able to see in one color. And when we search for image, video and audio content, the only data that search engines use to do those searches is the text that is associated with those files. That’s like trying to describe the color green when you can only see in red.

One approach to solving this dilemma is giving humans an incentive to label images themselves (see my earlier post on human computation).  Luis Von Ahn, the brain behind Google Image Labeler (an addictive game that pairs users together to attribute labels to images), says that all the images on the web could be sufficiently labeled in a short amount time with a critical mass of participants; to drive home his point, he often references the millions of potentially productive hours that go wasted on Solitaire each year.

There are two major shortcomings to this approach.  First, it is still completely text based — what happens when a certain image is only labeled in a certain language, or when pranksters “Google bomb“ image results (imagine every result for “miserable failure” being the face of George W. Bush)?  The second, major shortcoming of this approach is that there are untold numbers of new images being uploaded to the Internet every day.  Flickr alone gets as many as one million new photos from its users every 24 hours.  Is a human-centric approach to putting images in context sustainable?  Google doesn’t think so, and so it is beefing up its computer-based image search strategy.

Continue reading ‘Do You See What I See?’

iGoogle Goes Social: The Birth of Scaled Automation

Published
by
Jarred
on April 24, 2008
in Advertising, Facebook, Google, Privacy, Social Networks and Web 2.0
. 3 Comments

The Heat Is On

The cold war between Google and Facebook just warmed up a whole lot, and this time it’s Google with its fingers on the dial.

Garrett Rogers reports that Google is releasing tools for developers to begin building social applications for the iGoogle homepage, built on the OpenSocial API.  For those who don’t speak geek, this basically means that individuals and companies are able to tap into the social graph you’ve created through Google — primarily through your Gmail contacts — to build useful gadgets for your homepage.  Users will be able to see “updates” from their friends (see right column of image), paralleling Facebook’s News Feed and Mini Feed features

Who cares, right?  Well, as Garrett points out, the potential for a coup is enormous:

I wonder if this will have a significant impact on Facebook since there are twice as many people who set Google as their default browser homepage than Facebook according to comScore? Who knows, Google might win by default if they get it just right.

With this move, Google is forging together two movements that it has been leading under much scrutiny and controversy: scaling and automation.  Together, they become what I’m going to call scaled automation.  Like Tom Friedman says, if you name an issue you own it… so if this term somehow becomes popular, well, remember you heard it here first.

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Facebook Chat: Social Networking Comes Home

Published
by
Jarred
on April 15, 2008
in Data Portability, Facebook, Privacy, Social Networks and Web 2.0
. 9 Comments

This week, Facebook began slowly rolling out an update to their site that will probably have the most significant impact on the user experience since the introduction of the News Feed.  Ladies and gentlemen, Facebook Chat has arrived.

The upgrade hasn’t been applied to my account yet, and so this isn’t going to be an actual review of the new feature (though I’ve been reading about it and think I’ve got it pretty much figured out).  Rather, I just wanted to share some thoughts about how this is going to affect change revolutionize the social networking experience.

If you don’t count e-mail, instant messaging (I’ll refer to it as chatting for simplicity’s sake) was actually probably the first experience you ever had with online social networking.  Your buddy list was your first social graph.  It was the first time that you could connect and communicate with friends online.  It was the first time you could see how someone presented their online identity through their “profiles”, and the first time you could detect their online presence and know their ”status” through their away messages.  It is only natural, then, that the first generation of social networking is being reintegrated into the mainstream offerings.

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