broadstuff

As you all know, Facebook changed its privacy settings "for your benefit". As we noted earlier, this is bollocks, its all about getting their mitts on your data. The Electronic Frontier Foundation has the best analysis of this so, being a lazy blog, we precis its analysis:

The Good: Simpler Privacy Settings and Per-Post Privacy Options

The new changes have definitely simplified Facebook's privacy settings, reducing the overall number of settings while making them clearer and easier for users to find and understand. The simplification of Facebook's privacy settings includes the elimination of regional networks, which sometimes would lead people to unwittingly share their Facebook profile with an entire city, or, as Facebook's founder Mark Zuckerberg explained in a recent open letter, an entire country.

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The Bad: EFF Doesn't Recommend Facebook's "Recommended" Privacy Settings

Although sold as a "privacy" revamp, Facebook's new changes are obviously intended to get people to open up even more of their Facebook data to the public. The privacy "transition tool" that guides users through the configuration will "recommend" — preselect by default — the setting to share the content they post to Facebook, such as status messages and wall posts, with everyone on the Internet, even though the default privacy level that those users had accepted previously was limited to "Your Networks and Friends" on Facebook

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The Ugly: Information That You Used to Control Is Now Treated as "Publicly Available," and You Can't Opt Out of The "Sharing" of Your Information with Facebook Apps

Looking even closer at the new Facebook privacy changes, things get downright ugly when it comes to controlling who gets to see personal information such as your list of friends. Under the new regime, Facebook treats that information — along with your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a "fan" of — as "publicly available information" or "PAI." Before, users were allowed to restrict access to much of that information. Now, however, those privacy options have been eliminated. For example, although you used to have the ability to prevent everyone but your friends from seeing your friends list, that old privacy setting — shown below — has now been removed completely from the privacy settings page.

In other words, the word "Privacy" has been redefined by Facebook (and, it must be said some other Web 2.0 darlings) to mean "rampant extraction of your private data for general exposure and datamining". This is an inevitable result of the failure of the Advertising business model to fund te social networks, as we pointed out in our paper "FreeConomics - Why your data is free but everywhere in chains"

If you add this to the Facebook Terms and Conditions (Facebook has the right to use your content for itself in any way into perpetuity) then its very clear that if you use the system for much more than the most banal of things, and expect your privacy to be kept intact, you are an A List sucker. But then, they already have 350m of them and, as others have noted beforehand, new ones are born every minute.

It will be interesting to see how this plays to the EU Data Protection regulations. While the regulations are a bit fuzzy, this definitely flies in the face of the intent

(Update - its Monday 14th, 5 days later and the whole shebang has finally hit the fan, this one is typical)

Like many people, I've been increasingly uneasy about where Google is going. There is a typical article on these concerns from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Google says it does recognize the threat. Like Microsoft a decade ago, it has dramatically scaled up its lobbying and public relations efforts. It has recently sought to partner with the industries complaining most vocally about its disruptive technologies and has given users more power to edit information stored about them.

You just know that a business that responds to concerns by bumping up its lobbying and PR push has already crossed the line. But the things that made me finally conclude that this wasn't a bumbling transgression from a clumsy but friendly large organisation was when Eric Schmidt said (as reported in the Huffpo):

CNBC's Mario Bartiromo asked CEO Schmidt in her December 3, 2009 interview: "People are treating Google like their most trusted friend. Should they?" Schmidt's reply hints that if there's scandalous information out there about you, it's your problem, not Google's. Schmidt tells Baritoromo:

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place."

That has been the rallying cry of small time despots and people with unsavoury motives throughout the ages. It rings of the way the Nazis, Stalinists and Stasi grasped and kept power. (Yes, after 1,989 posts on Broadstuff we finally reach for Godwin's Law )

Which means, when you look at things like the new idea of Personalised search, you need to look at it very carefully, as Search Engine Land observes:

This isn’t the personalized search system of old, where Google only personalized results if people were signed in. In the new personalized search, millions of Google users have been opted-in to the system even if they aren’t signed-in using a Google account. While people can opt-out of personalized results, I doubt many will do so.

And take it up a level - this is by and large an assault on user privacy, which many of the "Web 2.0" companies are indulging in, as that is the golden motherload of value for them. And not just for them. As Huffo notes:

He [Eric Schmidt] expands on his answer, adding that the your information could be made available not only to curious searchers or prying friends, but also to the authorities, and that there's little recourse for people worried about unintentionally "oversharing" online:

"But if you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines, including Google, do retain this information for some time. And [...] we're all subject, in the US, to the Patriot Act, and it is possible that that information could be made available to the authorities."

What to do? Well, one of the lessons in observing States that move to despotism is that there comes a time when its too late to get out, but before that there are a number of events when the warning signs of future intentions become clear. At that point you know its time to get out. To my mind, this is that time for Google. That statement from Eric Schmidt makes it very clear where their heads are at.

Caveat Emptor........

Update - nice rebuttal by Bruce Schneier - here is the start:

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

Read the rest too, its very well articulated.

Facebook is followed the time honoured path of Reputation Management for Naughty Companies - having burned much of the social capital it had in the User Protection stakes via Beacon et al, is it now trying to rebrand via borrowing others'? It's forming a Worthy Board:

As the latest step in its commitment to improve safety on Facebook and across the Web, today the company announced the formation of the Facebook Safety Advisory Board, a group of five leading Internet safety organizations from North America and Europe that will serve in a consultative capacity to the company on issues related to online safety. The five organizations on the board are Common Sense Media, ConnectSafely, WiredSafety, Childnet International and The Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI).

Facebook plans to regularly meet with board members to review the existing safety resources it provides its users, develop new materials, and seek advice on general safety best practices on an ongoing basis. The first task of the board will be to oversee an overhaul of the safety content located in Facebook’s Help Center.

Just don't tell the Board about those post-Beacon datamining plans before the IPO happens, eh

I would love to believe that this particular leopard is changing its spots, and there are some other swallows coming in that may indicate a new approach, but the overall Facebook theme of prising users and their privacy apart (within the Facebook Walled Paradise) has been fairly consistent over the last 2 years to hail a sea change in attitude just yet. And all these swallows are still building up that nice, safe walled garden at the same time. Doing well by doing good .

PS - Maybe I'm getting old, but I'm sure AOL went through a similar phase when the 'Net was starting to eat at its content?

Amazon is rumoured to be looking at opening real bricks and mortar shops in the UK:

Property landlords said that the American company, which has a market value of $59.1 billion (£35.6 billion), had launched a secret search for bricks-and-mortar stores to support its rapidly growing website. It is understood to be scouring the country for high-profile sites just as the Borders book chain is shutting up shop.

Heck, if they'd been a bit quicker off the mark they could've bought Woolworths. Question is, why would an internet retailer, with all those lovely online economics, go for the cut throat world of high street retail, especially as the sector is having a tough time right now? Apparently:

Amazon wants to cash in on rising customer demand for click and collect services where shoppers buy online and then pick up their goods from a nearby store. Consumers who are fed up with waiting at home for deliveries are increasingly choosing to buy online and collecting goods at a time that suits them

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One source familiar with Amazon’s proposals said:"When Amazon was just selling books and CDs that fitted easily through the letterbox it was fine to be a web-only business, but now it has branched out into everything from children’s bikes to electricals it believes it could boost sales by having stores that offer a collection point for shoppers. It will probably be an Argos-style operation.”

I hate Argos's system! Besides, getting a whole bricks-and-mortar retail network is a heck of a price to pay when all you may need is someone who can run a decent delivery service to step in, or the Royal Mail to sort itself out from its civil war. Maybe they should get into distribution instead?

There is a fascinating little article in today's (UK) Sunday Times, tracing how the Climate Change Sceptics have been deliberately excluded from the mainstream media and political argument for the last 5 years or so, but have managed to use blogs and other social media to reach their audience.

That this has been so is not really arguable anymore, the recent ClimateGate emails also point to a deliberate attempt to squash debate - and potentially even to falsify data, though hopefully the inquiry will get to the truth of that.

(An aside - I note with interest by the way that all the Pro Climate Change articles in the Sunday Times are online, all the sceptical ones are not (so I can't point to the one that interested me). Is this the way news will go - you have to pay for the stuff you don't want to hear? )

Anyhow, the point that really interested me is the role of blogging in getting a message out around what amounts to censorship. Yet again, the 'umble blog is emerging as the organ of free speech while the mainstream media yet again emerges as the chief sales organ of the Official Line. As it has with The Crunch and various other unpopular things wot White People don't like such as resistance to immigration etc etc. But of all the Secular Religions, the Climate Change one has taken the strongest hold.

It also strikes me that many who most deeply believe in it have the flimsiest grasp on the actual science, it seems to me that those who do know something about physics, maths or even - god forbid - actual thermodynamics, are those that are the more doubtful Thomasses. Not that many totally disagree you understand, just that scientifically trained people seem more aware of how unclear the underlying data is within the big picture of the Earth's warming and cooling cycles, especially regarding Man-Made global warming.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all in favour of reducing fossil fuel usage, pollution, wasted resources making tat etc etc, but I think there is a huge risk in drinking all the the Climate Change Cult Kool Aid, as much of it has more to do with money and power than ecology and will lead to the wrong decisions if not challenged - a view I note that the original Climate Change scientists are also now airing. I think it is entirely possible to be Green and not to take man made Global Warming seriously.

This especially scares me looking at the hoo-ha around Copenhagen, which seems - to me, anyway - to be moving further and further away from a rational debate about mitigating the impacts of an increasingly resource hungry world, and more and more towards a politico-industrial summit to bed down the huge amounts of money at stake in promoting techniques like Carbon Trading (which is based largely on such sensible ideas as trading CDO's - a technique which did so well for our Financial industries in 2008. Nuff said)

So whether you agree with Climate Change or not, whether you agree its man made or not, it is a very scary thing when half the debate is stifled by those who have access to power, whatever side they are on.

And for that reason, I think we have to fight for the rights of Social Media tools liek blogs tohave proper freedom of speech, to free our data, and to be logged on all search engines (never mind Net Neutrality, I want Link Neutrality)

I say this partly to provoke, of course - but it does occur to me that many in the Social Media Set just love blogs etc when they espouse the right causes but are often the first to cry for curbs to freedom of speech when they don't.

I originally wrote this article for yesterday (Friday), it was a send-up of Google CEO Eric Schmidt's writing in the WSJ about how Google can - ahem - "help" Newspapers. I decided at the time not to publish as I wondered if it was too outre (hence no post on Friday), but an article today from GigaOm has made me decide to push the button as its clear I'm not the only one seeing an underlying game here.

This was the original article - it takes what Eric Schmidt said and "translates" it:

The thing is, what Google is saying and what they are doing do not quite match - we translate for your benefit:

"It's the year 2015. The compact device in my hand delivers me the world, one news story at a time. I flip through my favorite papers and magazines, the images as crisp as in print, without a maddening wait for each page to load."

Translation - The device is called Android and is like, totally, controlled by the aggregator. Thats us. You, the newspaper, no longer have direct links to your customers, nor control of distribution or customer experience. Your tail is being wagged by our big dogs now. We do the billing, you do our bidding - and if you're good boys we pass you a tiny % of the money to you.

"Even better, the device knows who I am, what I like, and what I have already read. So while I get all the news and comment, I also see stories tailored for my interests. I zip through a health story in The Wall Street Journal and a piece about Iraq from Egypt's Al Gomhuria, translated automatically from Arabic to English. I tap my finger on the screen, telling the computer brains underneath it got this suggestion right."

Translation - Of course it knows who you are - We don't yet, but this way We Will! And I mean, why would you want to have your worldview rocked by horrible, upsetting stuff you don't like to hear? Hello! We want you to Have a Nice Day and look at Ads in a good mood, not throw boots through the screen.

Some of these stories are part of a monthly subscription package. Some, where the free preview sucks me in, cost a few pennies billed to my account. Others are available at no charge, paid for by advertising. But these ads are not static pitches for products I'd never use. Like the news I am reading, the ads are tailored just for me. Advertisers are willing to shell out a lot of money for this targeting.

Translation - Here's the Targeted Ads bait, lets see if you bite - but really, if you b*ggers at the Newspapers think you're gonna see any of that data, you're even dumber than you seem to be - you got another think coming! And hey, people may think Targeted Ads are creepy but tough sh*t by then we'll be the media.

"With dwindling revenue and diminished resources, frustrated newspaper executives are looking for someone to blame. Much of their anger is currently directed at Google, whom many executives view as getting all the benefit from the business relationship without giving much in return. The facts, I believe, suggest otherwise."

Translation - We're going to keep on telling you that the fact that we jump between your content and your reader and shove our Ads in front of them so their pockets are well shaken out by you get 'em is a total chimera, that you just don't get the 'Net. and we're gonna spend a lot of time and PR money telling you and the authorities and the market that all the time. You can fool all of......

"Google is a great source of promotion. We send online news publishers a billion clicks a month from Google News and more than three billion extra visits from our other services, such as Web Search and iGoogle. That is 100,000 opportunities a minute to win loyal readers and generate revenue—for free. In terms of copyright, another bone of contention, we only show a headline and a couple of lines from each story. If readers want to read on they have to click through to the newspaper's Web site. (The exception are stories we host through a licensing agreement with news services.) And if they wish, publishers can remove their content from our search index, or from Google News."

Translation - And you still gotta pay for receiving all those clicks and we've already shaken the punters down - ain't it wonderful! And if you want to take 'em off Google, hey there is so much other stuff there that people can hit for free, so make our day! And if you collaborate with each other we'll yell Cartel from the rafters with a megaphone!

"The claim that we're making big profits on the back of newspapers also misrepresents the reality. In search, we make our money primarily from advertisements for products. Someone types in digital camera and gets ads for digital cameras. A typical news search—for Afghanistan, say—may generate few if any ads. The revenue generated from the ads shown alongside news search queries is a tiny fraction of our search revenue".

Translation - It hurts us when you say we're just parasites on your hard work, and it makes our hearts bleed to do all this very, very unprofitable stuff just so we can bring you guys to your knees, it really does.

"It's understandable to look to find someone else to blame. But as Rupert Murdoch has said, it is complacency caused by past monopolies, not technology, that has been the real threat to the news industry".

Translation - Ya weren't looking when we built our castle upstream of you lot, now its time to pay our ferryman.

"We recognize, however, that a crisis for news-gathering is not just a crisis for the newspaper industry. The flow of accurate information, diverse views and proper analysis is critical for a functioning democracy. We also acknowledge that it has been difficult for newspapers to make money from their online content. But just as there is no single cause of the industry's current problems, there is no single solution. We want to work with publishers to help them build bigger audiences, better engage readers, and make more money."

Translation - when we say "work with" we mean in the sense that you dance on the ends of our rope and we chuck you few pennies after every performance.....

And don't go looking for legal aid, we've bamboozled the buggers on Capitol Hill far better than you ever will. They don't understand what we do but they think they do understand you, and with the dosh we're spending on FUD, its gonna take 'em years to tumble to it all and you guys'll be deadpool by then. Hell, they still don't even realise we've got a far bigger monopoly on the industry than Microsoft ever did.

This is what Kevin Kelleher at GigaOm wrote today, clearly seeing the same issues:

Serving readers news based on what they’ve read can lead to a kind of tunnel vision where they’re insulated from the dissenting views and unpleasant truths. Newspapers emerged to serve communities, and communities are inherently hotpots of dissent. Targeting news stories as if they were advertisements runs counter to that important service. I want a news gadget bringing me stories that make me uncomfortable.

Schmidt’s op-ed also ignores the reality that search engines are by design very helpful at finding ways past news paywalls. Most everyone knows that Journal stories have long been available for free by typing the headline in Google (although Google appears willing to close that loophole). Even without free access via Google, news will leak through paywalls as blogs and rival newsrooms dutifully excerpt or summarize the most important stories.

Another thing Schmidt blithely overlooks is how conversational the web has become through social media. No one is going to mention on Twitter or Facebook a story cloistered behind a paywall. The evolution of the web is pushing users away from paid content, not toward it. And it’s generally not Google’s practice to hinder the technology as it evolves.

Finally, the very notion that search engines offer news for free is flat-out wrong. Google doesn’t charge its users money, but takes its payments in a currency just as precious — user data — that helps advertisers target ads at readers, whether they want them or not. As Schmidt himself noted, “Advertisers are willing to shell out a lot of money for this targeting.”

If Google really wanted to help newspapers, it wouldn’t just share revenue -– as its promising to do with its ungainly Fast Flip -– but would share its real treasure trove: unrestricted access to the data of its users.

Update - its been pointed out to me that Kara Swisher from Boomtown did a similar skit on Friday.

This is an article we should have written, but Business Week got theirs in first so we will cut and flatter it profusely, as below:

Over the past five years, an entire industry of consultants has arisen to help companies navigate the world of social networks, blogs, and wikis. The self-proclaimed experts range from legions of wannabes, many of them refugees from the real estate bust, to industry superstars such as Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk. They produce best-selling books and dole out advice or lead workshops at companies for thousands of dollars a day. The consultants evangelize the transformative power of social media and often cast themselves as triumphant case studies of successful networking and self-branding.

The problem, according to a growing chorus of critics, is that many would-be guides are leading clients astray. Consultants often use buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube (GOOG) hits than by traditional measures, such as return on investment. This approach could sour companies on social media and the rich opportunities it represents. "It's a bit of a Wild West scenario," blogs David Armano, a consultant with the Dachis Group of Austin, Tex. Without naming names, he compares some consultants to "snake oil salesmen."

Actually I'm glad they've written it as sometimes I feel we are the only guys questioning the Orthodoxy of Enterprise 2.0. Many have popped up in the last 2 years from (seemingly) nowhere but with a lot of PR push. My frustration is that many of these people have never worked in an enterprise, put in systems or done change management within an enterprise, and certainly very few have ever run anything. These would probably - in my old fashioned book anyway - be important criteria for selecting Enterprise 2.0 consultants or advisors, but hey ho..... (OK, OK being old salts in the game we would say that, but I really don't see how this is so radically different from other radical innovations that have come before like MRP, Just In Time/Lean Ops, etc). The other sure fire sign that an expert is not business or experience led is that too many solutions are based on dogma (whereas most companies are fairly unique to some extent), and are often trying to avoid proper business metrics and ROI with "new economics" calls - Dotcom 1.0 should make most CEOs very wary of that pitch.:

Critics complain that many of the new experts have adopted an orthodoxy that provides little flexibility for differing situations—or outcomes. Their pronouncements follow a rigid gospel: Be transparent, engage with your customers, break down silos. Yet these strictures don't always make business sense.

As the Business Week chart shown above notes, one has to be a bit more careful than that. Also, in our experience social networks in structured hierarchies that have to deliver to real deadlines work differently to consumer ones that don't. Most importantly, Social Media does not exist in a vacuum and to get real value it has to tie into other systems, as well as requiring restructuring to new ways of working to maximise its impact. To do this is non trivial and requires more than enthusiasm. (It does worry me slightly that a lot f the Social Media advice is coming from marketing companies rather than business ones, I think this risks driving too far down the Marcomms route without fundamentally attacking the end to end business processes.

The issue for those in the industry who actually do know what they are doing is there are so many noisy people who don't, which leads to the risk of an "Akerlof Law" effect - ie because the buyer can't tell good from bad they assume the worst and price accordingly, and even look at the wrong things (speaking circuit profile vs implementation track record for example). As the article notes:

The best way to avoid a similar backlash today is for social media's practitioners, including thousands of consultants, to shift the focus from promises to results. It may be the only way to convert the skeptics—and flush out the snake oil.

In the UK news today is the hullabaloo that RBS, a failed bank propped up by UK taxpayers money, wants to pay its bankers large market related bonuses to "retain the talent" (talent to do what, one may ask, given that the total value creation of the entire banking industry over the last 10 years is so massively negative that it nearly ruined the global financial system). If they do not get paid, the Board of Directors will resign ("Go on, make my day" is probably the average UK taxpayer's - and thus bank owner's - response). There has been a concerted behind the scenes PR campaign of breathtaking cheek to persuade newspapers to run items like "pay them even though it stinks", etc etc. That these bonuses are only possible because public money saved them and because they cey can only trade at current profits due to public money's de-risking effects seems to have eluded them.

Beyond this spat however is a far bigger issue, of which this is just another point of evidence - despite the bailouts of masses ($15 trillion and counting) of public money the banking leopard has clearly still not changed it spots ( like the French nobility of the 100 years war, the banks have learned nothing and forgotten nothing ), and now that it's risks are bailed out today, and in future will clearly be underpinned by public money, there is an extremely high probability that the banking system will hand over the same problem again in a few years, only far far bigger (due to said public money underpinning).

(I suppose it solves the Climate Change problem though - making every global citizen into the equivalent of medieval serfs and making them work unto the 5th generation to pay back the debt will sure reduce carbon emission )

So what to do to prevent incipient forelock tugging villeiny? Graeme Pieterz has written a fairly concise blog post on how to fix the Banking system (you may recall his excellent "how to fix the economy" post a few weeks back), and I quote it in part below:

Too big to fail is too big to exist

Big banks create too much systemic risk, and are far too much of a strain on government finances when they need to be bailed out. The British government is going the right way by breaking up big-banks that have been part-nationalised. Why not go further and prevent any bank of having too much market share in the first place? No bank would be allowed to take more than a set percentage of deposits within a country.

Given that most big banks have are formed through mergers it would not even need much legislative change to block this: a slight tightening of competition law or an extension of the bank regulator’s power would be enough. It would be better to break up all the existing big banks as well.

The main economies of scale that would be lost would be the need to maintain the over-lapping branch networks, but, given outcry that often greets the closure of bank branches, there are obviously many people who think there is a public benefit to maintaining the networks.

Let banks go bust, then nationalise the assets and deposits

The way in which the British authorities deal with Northern Rock left the shareholders with nothing. This is the best approach to bailouts as it avoids creating moral hazard.Shareholders will know what they will suffer as much of the consequences of bank failure as possible and will have a greater to restrain management who are taking excessive risks.

This should be accompanied by better corporate governance so that the management cannot take risk regardless of the shareholders. This requires the break up of big banks as the economic disruption caused by the failure of a big bank is not acceptable: RBS and Lloyds could not have been dealt with in the same [way] as Northern Rock.

Force banks to issue more bonds

It looks likely that the crisis is likely to lead to higher capital adequacy requirements, so banks will need more equity funding. Banks should also be required to issue more bonds, and it should be made absolutely clear that bond-holders will not benefit from any government bailouts.

The market price of the bonds will adjust to reflect the level of risk of default, providing a market driven measure of risk. A high yield on the bonds would be a clear signal that the market expects problems.

If the banks are required to fix maturity dates so that a fair amount of debt needs to be raised each year to replaced year year, excessive risk taking will be quickly translated into high interest paid, penalising it fairly quickly.

It will also provide another layer of capital to pay depositors out of.


Separate investment banks from commercial banks

This ought to be a no-brainer, but banks lobby furiously every time the idea is raised. It insulates the big deposit takers from the risks of investment banking. There is not real reason to allow the two types of bank to be combined [This was of course the basis of the US Glass Steagal act after the Great Depression, yet no one is trying seriously to do it today even though it kept the system roughly stable until it was repealed (by bthe anks' lobbying) in the 1990's - Ed]: its main advantage is that it allows investment banks to fund their risky activities with the cheap money available to a commercial bank.

The point of the separation is to prevent the government underwriting risky activities, the profits of which go to shareholders (and in bonuses!). This amounts to a governments subsidising investment banking.

What about bonuses?

Politicians are very fond of talking about taking action on the huge bonuses paid to bankers. They are not that effective at actually doing anything about it. The problem with direct government intervention is that is not obvious what the “correct” pay for bankers (or any one else) actually is.

I regard the high remuneration of bankers as a symptom, not a cause. Lack of control by shareholders, implicit government guarantees that under-write high risk businesses, and too many (profitable to investment banks) large takeovers and mergers (most of which ought to be blocked because they undermine competition) are the root causes.

Rather than capping bankers pay, we need to ask what has changed. Banking was not so spectacularly well paid a few decades ago [True - 20 years ago Management Consulting, Banking and senior positions in business were similarly paid] and if we look at the reasons for the changes we can make a more sensible assessment of which are bad.

.......

If you think that the pay is excessive, find where the market failure is and directly address that.

Keep it simple, stupid regulator

One of the big mistakes that contributed to the crisis was a regulatory change, and, as before the regulators are proposing changes that could make things worse.

The Basel 2 accord was intended to provide a more accurate measure of the risks that banks had taken. One of the problems with its predecessor was that there were ways in which banks could manipulate it: for example by doing more lending at the riskier end of each “risk bucket”. Part of the solution to the banks manipulating the system was to allow them to use their own internal risk models for regulatory purposes, giving them a lot more discretion. Could no one really see a problem with that at the time?

Basel 2 also relied on credit ratings: those ratings issued by agencies that were paid by the people they were rating?

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Regulators are still not being very sensible about capital adequacy. One popular proposal is to weaken mark to market rules, so that banks balance sheets will not all weaken at once when markets fall. In other words, we will all feel more confident because we will not know how how much the banks had lost.

.........

Keep it simple (no complex risk models), use the market (which will only work if you avoid moral hazard), and rely on caution rather than perfect measurements.

And bring back Glass-Steagal!

So, installed the latest edition of Tweetdeck yesterday, and soon after shot off a RT (re-twt) on some matter, with my usual < comment attached here. The RT pops up with my comment lots. TRy again - same effect. Ah - clearly, Tweetdeck has implemented the "helpful" new Twitter facility where only the pristine original can be passed on.

I really, really, really don't like this - my role in the Twitterverse is not just a bot to pass on the witterings of others, slave like - I like to comment on things, in fact sometimes I don'r RT because I adore the comment., but because I think its BS and want to add my 2p worth of scorn. Or just add my 2p worth.

I see Paul Clarke is similarly grumpy:

Yes, another play on cleaning up your stream – as with #fixreplies. But what’s all this stuff about ‘dictating’ etiquette? What happened to the evolutionary adoption of things that worked? Surely if a long stream of identical tweets was annoying, client applications would evolve that could suppress these at the client. Even I could code that… And if they weren’t identical? Well, that would be because people put in little personal comments along the way with their RTs. So you’d lose those, obviously. (Or have to throw them away depending on how you tuned your duplicate tweet suppression on the client.)

So perhaps this is all a bit of misdirection. Instead of focusing on just how helpful the new RT format is, try working out for yourself what’s really behind new RTs. It shouldn’t take long.

And the fact that hooey like that post from @ev gets bandied about, instead of the honest answer about Twitter’s move into content shaping (and it won’t be the last one), is why I felt strongly about #fixtweetie*, and why this has become a blog post.

So, did you get there? Hear the jingling dollars? And as Dan Moon wisely points out – we can’t overlook that Twitter is a business. Of course they can impose content parameters and design controls if they want. If we don’t like it we can all go back to, erm, Facebook and MSN. Or the Next Big Thing (am working on that…he he).

Certainly another Twitter client - I want my ability to add comments back on Tweetdeck, and I want it now. This one is a biggie for my user experience.

Update - as some helpful people have pointed out in the comments, one can actually adjust Tweetdeck to allow commenting, but it is certainly not the default. So do I feel sorry for my grumpiness above - well, a bit, but not really, because the Tweetdeck upgrade removed a facility I had already and valued, with no warning, and didn't tell me how to recover from it. Now you could argue that I'm being boorish, churlish and damn foolish, but I can tell you this - its the first time since starting to use Tweetdeck that I started to look at other clients. And that, ultimately, is the lesson.

Update to my update - But the ultimate issue is this - Twitter has unilaterally changed a function, that the community evolved, for its own ends, this is where things start to get "interesting" as they say.

Google blinked - they have changed the system so that content publishers will be able to limit the number of articles viewers can access pages free through Google - NMA:

Josh Cohen, senior business product manager, said that previously each click from a user “would be treated as free”, but the update restricts access to “no more than five pages per day without registering or subscribing”.

“We think this approach still protects the typical user from cloaking, while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis,” he says.

Interesting times. One in the eye for all the Link Economy pundits who never thought that what Google would do was that