broadstuff

Its good to be able to report good news from Facebook, their strategy over the last few months has been fairly..."interesting" . However, they have just taken the step of opening up their social network a bit more. As they put it on their blog - they've essentially set up a Javascript library that:

allows you to make Facebook API calls from any web site and makes it easy to create Ajax Facebook applications. Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML without any server site scripting.

What the library effectively does is de-skills the task of building client-side applications, opening it up to a far wider potential customer base. As always with Facebook, this is still not a fully open platform, more an attempt to extend its platform onto others' real estate. As the The Blodget Blog notes:

For obvious reasons, Facebook wants to resist going completely "open" and allowing members to export their information and relationships at will, as Facebook might lose its control over its core asset (the billions of relationships among its millions of members, a.k.a., the social graph). This move seems another smart step toward a hybrid strategy: Allow app makers (and Facebook) to extend social-graph functionality to the web, gather more app users, and recruit more members--but retain full control over the social graph itself.

Also what's not clear is how this service inter-relates with Beacon, especially how it impacts client sites - one assumes it works in a similar way to existing sites, if so it has hugely increased Facebook's reach and ability to take user behaviour data..

Update - a bit more clarity on my meaning following a few emails - the thing is, Facebook, by doing this, allows others to start to integrate services and thus open Facebook out that bit more (in ways Facebook probably hasn't thought of and necessarily wants, I'm sure) - but it will happen nonetheless. But Beacon is lurking in the background I am also sure, so be careful....

...is the answer to Techdirt's question is IPV6 a solution in search of a problem.

Has been for at least 10 years, will be for another 5. Too much co-ordination and change is required in diverse backbones to change over, and it solves too few problems for that.

Would you pay $1 for a feed, asks Center Networks?

No.

There is no value in it, I can sub to all that stuff myself and get my own choices - bundling is so old media.

You know what I would pay for though, is some service that winnows out the sheer volume of stuff but avoids Techmeme and Digg' et al's problem of lowest common A-Lister pickup.

Uh Oh...looks like Twitter's users are revolting*

They are starting to take stylus to blog about issues with the lack of ongoing development, and the flaky back end infrastructure.

I've been on Twitter since fairly early days, it reminds me of the alt.net in the early 1990's - except with pictures and a voyeuristic ability to see who else the people you were talking to are talking to. Functionally both were pretty crap as services go in the early days. Problem is, the altnet grew up with proper email clients etc, whereas Twitter is really still a toy - there is no ability to sort posts, no really usable persistence, etc etc.

Mind you, with the users calling 'emselves "Tweeters" and sending "Tweets" to each other, no wonder its still seen as a toy

However, it did do something very interesting - Telcos have been trying to solve the Unified Messaging Service problem for at least 10 years, but tried to build a Rolls-Royce medium, whereas Twitter simplified the problem by reducing the message to 140 characters. This facet imho has huge promise, just look at the added value services that have been developed around Twitter.

And I must say I find it more attractive now - could be that the user base is maturing, or that there are only so many times you can stomach writing about your lunch, but people seem to be writing less insipidly inane stuff, the signal / noise ratio is growing.

And for some reason, I perceive a huge growth in the last 3 months or so - in my experience its driven hugely by people coming off Facebook, but wanting to stay connected to the same social networks - golden Early Adopter opinion drivers. But these are fickle beings, and can flitter off to the next new shiny thing at the drop of a heartbeat - not so much "mavens" as "magpies" - and many potential competitors are waiting to pownce, hoping for a seesmic shift their way.

Tempus Fugit. Carpe Diem. Cave Canem.

*Actually they are very nice individually, its just when they flock together.....

From Techdirt....the US Patent System in its full glory....

This past Tuesday, the US Patent and Trademark Office issued a patent on "a mobile entertainment and communication device." Reading the patent, you realize it describes the quite common smartphone. It's a patent for a mobile phone with removable storage, an internet connection, a camera and the ability to download audio or video files. The patent holding firm who has the rights to this patent wasted no time at all. At 12:01am Tuesday morning, it filed three separate lawsuits against just about everyone you can think of, including Apple, Nokia, RIM, Sprint, AT&T, HP, Motorola, Helio, HTC, Sony Ericsson, UTStarcomm, Samsung and a bunch of others.

Techdirt notes that this was despite demonstration of prior art immediately beforehand by Apple.

Update - one of the Techdirt commenters makes the point that the original patent was filed in 1997, and this is a continuation of that. But there has to be some tests of validity (one of which, iirc, was that a patent has to defend an actual product build - does this apply here?). We were all imagining devices of the future in 1997 - heck, BT invented the concept of the world wide web some 10+ years before it came about, but this is a dangerous path to go down if we allow people with funds to "imagineer" and patent things that could be 10 years hence.

From Bubblegen, comes the news from Adweek that Yahoo is dropping its Brand Universe, where we were supposed to worship Brands

Dubbed "Brand Universes," the sites were intended to tap into the allure of hot brands—notably those in technology and entertainment—by creating one-stop shops featuring user-created videos, bookmarks, photos and reviews.

As we noted earlier, Yahoo will have to kill some scared cows - and this seems to be a good start.

There is this complete mythos around our relationships with Brands that the online Ad fraternity is desperately clinging to - that we actually value them, that we are actually prepared to be "Fan-Sumers" en masse. Its what Facebook is banking on to get that $15bn valuation, but they are medium term wrong....as Bubblegen puts it so succinctly:

there's a simple existence proof that this proposition must be false: if consumers loved brands, brands wouldn't have to advertise.

The internet works differently to old media though - it routes around any friction, including Ads. As Doc Searls noted in his concepts of the Intention Economy:

The Intention Economy is built around truly open markets, not a collection of silos. In The Intention Economy, customers don't have to fly from silo to silo, like a bees from flower to flower, collecting deal info (and unavoidable hype) like so much pollen. In The Intention Economy, the buyer notifies the market of the intent to buy, and sellers compete for the buyer's purchase. Simple as that.

Whether or not you believe that the endgame is quite as Ad free as Doc describes it, I think he is on the right track - there is just too much media channel bandwidth out there for brands to attempt to create gatekeeper roles for themselves, or create friction via annoying Ads - and setting up hubs for us to worship brands at is going the wrong way..... as Yahoo has now admitted.

I wonder if Facebook's Pages will go the same way?

It seems to have been replaced by a cable supply company......pity, I like the blog and wanted to see what Marc made of the French bank blunders...

Update - Marc has commented saying the URL goes to the blog for him...most odd indeed.

Update 2...its Sat am, and I can see Marc's blog again - and yes, he's as cynical about SocGen's Rogue Trader as I am...more actually...

In highly interlinked complex systems, a butterfly flaps its wings and therefore a tornado hits Kansas....

In 2007, the highly interlinked global financial systems allegedly means that a French trader drops a £3.5bn wad (that could only have been built up via electronic trading - and extraordinary banking laxity, despite the Leeson lessons) and the US drops its interest rate more sharply than they have for 25 years.

I wonder if we will see more of these sorts of "phase change" behaviours of systems as they become more complex, and possibly take on chaotic (in the mathematical sense) properties. Maybe its possible to be a bit too interlinked? The benefits are we get the wisdom of crowds, the risk is we get the madness.

Fascinating....study up on O'Reilly Radar from Virgil Griffith, who has looked at Facebook profiles and correlated books read vs average SAT scores of schools attended. Fascinating for 3 reasons:

(i) Its just interesting..... If you want to hothouse your kids then the way to go is Freakonomics, Ayn Rand, Dostoevsky and....Lolita. Oh, and easy on the porn and religion.....

(ii) This is just one of the many delightful data minings that is being done right now, by organisations fair and foul, on your social media data.

(iii) We can already start to argue about metadata - Brave New World is filed under Sci Fi, but 1984 is under Dystopian genres.

Of course, this is too too terrible for words, as one commenter stiffly notes

This is a horrible use of data and I'm surprised you would propagate it on a blog like this. Even if the books people read were correlated with their SAT scores there are almost certainly other factors at play here. For example:

1. Look at the average lower SAT scores of African-American literature. The SATs generally do a poor job of measuring the intelligence of African-Americans (who likely comprise a larger segment of the population reading these books).

2. The Bible is read by such a broad audience that it probably correlates weakly to any measure of intelligence compared to a book like Freakonomics would (which is more targeted at the general demographic that does well on the SAT).

A much better measure would have been to put together a graph showing the correlation of various books to SAT scores. That will would not establish causality but at least you could draw some statistically relevant conclusions from it.

The only thing that might be useful about this chart is that it demonstrates how amazingly easy it is to misuse the abundance of data we have available on the net to wrongly draw conclusions or confirm predispositions.

However, as a public service we would draw your attention to this note as well......

Aw man, a Dan Brown book is on the upper end of the SAT scores? Really? We're in trouble. Start stockpiling water and cans of food NOW

We have increasingly been hitting load limits from traffic over the last few weeks, and today we finally went totally over for a sustained period - a good problem to have, but a problem nonetheless. So we bit the bullet took the opportunity to re-size and do an upgrade of Serendipity (our open source blog platform) at the same time.

Apologies for any inconvenience, service has now been resumed.............