Archive for the 'Privacy' Category

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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. View 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. View 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.

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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. View 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. View 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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“…and nothing but the truth, so help me Google” [Guest Post]

Published by a Guest on March 18, 2008 in Facebook, Google, Legal Issues, News, Privacy, Social Networks and Web 2.0. View Comments

It’s a pleasure for me to present a guest post submitted by Jarry Taylor, a partner with Maynard, Cooper & Gale PC — one of Alabama’s leading law firms located in scenic Birmingham.  And… he’s my dad!  Thanks to Jarry/Dad for contributing to Tropophilia!

The American Bar Association’s Litigation News reports on a recent phenomenon many of us law types have been talking about, namely the change in the way investigations are performed and how to get information about people involved in legal cases.  Forget the old style gum shoe black cloak, long-lens photographer investigator (although they do still come in handy sometimes).  We’re now talking about finding out all sorts of neat and interesting stuff from MySpace, Facebook and even Match.com.

Have a witness you’re about to depose in a case coming to trial next month?  Worried you might not know all there is to know about him?  Think you should fork out money for an investigator to dig up information about him?  Nah, it’s all right there on the internet and in the social networking world where nothing is sacred.

“They” tell you to be careful what you post as a student because colleges, grad schools and employers will check out those crazy photos you thought it would be fun to share with your buds.  But, those beyond those years or the witless still include information that, sometimes, can be very helpful to the inquiring lawyer on the other side of a case.  Courts are now having to deal with evidentiary questions, and report decisions on whether such information is admissible in court or not.  Even if it’s not substantive information relevant to your case, it can always go to the credibility of that witness.

“I solemly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth, so help me Google.”  Oh, and that applies to lawyers, too!