Diaspora, an open Facebook?
A few weeks ago, four recent NYU graduates announced – to the background noise of the latest (of many) major Facebook privacy fail – that they intended to build a privacy-focuses, decentralized, open-source alternative to Facebook. A social network, installed on a server of your choice, the data controlled by you alone. Their fundraising period [...]
Facebook turns against its users, pro marketers
The EFF has put together a timeline of Facebook’s Eroding Privacy Policy. And it’s a deeply disturbing thing to read. Please read the whole (brief) post over at the EFF website, but I’d like to highlight the development with just two quotes. From the 2005 Facebook privacy policy: No personal information that you submit to [...]
News from the Twitter Farm
Five journalists using only Twitter and Facebook as news sources to provide their reporting, that’s the basic setup of an experiment going on for five days. The headline, by the way, of this post is just a translation of “Nachrichten aus der Twitterfarm“, the title of a blog post announcing a news-gathering experiment by five [...]
Social Media Campaigns: My Facebook Is Mine
Working with companies on their social media campaigns can pose a tricky dilemma for the consultants: on the one hand you’re hired because you know your way around the social media sphere, which of course you do because you’re very active there. On the other hand, you don’t want to abuse your personal social network [...]
Social Network Use By Country
(Click the image or this text to jump to the original map.) French newspaper Le Monde has this great chart showing which region prefers which social network. (Funny: Friendster is even bigger in Asia-Pacific than I thought, and Germany doesn’t seem to have any social network preference. I guess StudiVZ should be listed here, no [...]
What’ll happen to our data after Facebook jumps the shark?
Facebook has, very recently, made it possible to delete accounts instead of just deactivating them. Deleting the account is the only option to really make Facebook let go of your personal information, and until recently this was notoriously hard to accomplish. Facebook has pretty decent privacy features, or at least privacy control features, as online [...]
Facebook, Google & Plaxo Join the DataPortability WorkGroup
This rocks: Duncan Riley just has a scoop on Techcrunch announcing that Facebook, Google and Plaxo are joining the DataPortability Workgroup Duncan had been hinting at something big on Twitter, and what can I say, he was right: “I don’t joke when I say that the post I’ve written changes the entire game.” DataPortability, and [...]
Human vs Machine: What’s Better In Search?
The next few months should be interesting to watch: Monday, Wikia Search goes online. So there we have another powerful player in the next wave of search engine wars. For the last few years, Google with its (mostly) machine-based search algorithms has been the dominant player in the search market, producing more or less the [...]
Study: Real vs Fantasized Identity on Social Networking Sites
FaberNovel Consulting has just published a study on best practices from social networking sites. The whole study contains a great overview over what’s important if you analyze social networking sites. Two aspects stood out for me, though: First, the authors pointed out four dimensions to help distinguish social networks: Second, the study also covers the [...]
Facebook Beacon is Serious Breach of Trust
Facebook recently introduced Facebook Beacon, a new technique for businesses and website operators to “enable your customers to share the actions they take on your website with their Facebook friends.” Beacon can be installed by simply adding a few lines of code: Simply determine which user actions you would like publish to Facebook (…) Facebook [...]
