broadstuff

From Gawker:

According to an excerpt from Fortune columnist David Kirkpatrick's The Facebook Effect. Hey, everyone's got hobbies, right? From the excerpt published on All Facebook:

As the service's engineers built more and more tools that could uncover such insights, Zuckerberg sometimes amused himself by conducting experiments. For instance, he concluded that by examining friend relationships and communications patterns he could determine with about 33 percent accuracy who a user was going to be in a relationship with a week from now. To deduce this he studied who was looking which profiles, who your friends were friends with, and who was newly single, among other indicators.

This kind of predictive capacity could be used for some pretty creepy targeted advertising opportunities: flower delivery, restaurant reservations, advice books, sexual products of various sorts.

Just so you know what can be done with a little light scraping. I wonder what one can tell from Twitter

Hat tip to commenter pseudorocket for the blog post title idea.

Who would have believed it - Facebook -- and, to be fair, many of les autre Social Nets - has been up to yet another trick in the Big Book of Privacy Abuse - its selling your PII (Private IDs) to advertisers - WSJ:

Across the Web, it's common for advertisers to receive the address of the page from which a user clicked on an ad. Usually, they receive nothing more about the user than an unintelligible string of letters and numbers that can't be traced back to an individual. With social networking sites, however, those addresses typically include user names that could direct advertisers back to a profile page full of personal information. In some cases, user names are people's real names.

Most social networks haven't bothered to obscure user names or ID numbers from their Web addresses, said Craig Wills, a professor of computer science at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, who has studied the issue.

The sites may have been breaching their own privacy policies as well as industry standards, which say sites shouldn't share and advertisers shouldn't collect personally identifiable information without users' permission. Those policies have been put forward by advertising and Internet companies in arguments against the need for government regulation.

More amusingly, ReadWriteWeb sort of misunderstood what they were up to and lambasted the WSJ for its "unbelievable" tech naivete, but I think this comment on the site says it all:

Unbelievable? they're sharing PII (profile IDs, etc.) with advertisers, despite specifically saying that they don't do so. from facebook's privacy policy regarding advertisers: "We don’t share your information with advertisers without your consent. (An example of consent would be if you asked us to provide your shipping address to an advertiser to receive a free sample.)...For example, we might use your interest in soccer to show you ads for soccer equipment, but we do not tell the soccer equipment company who you are."

http://www.facebook.com/policy.php

it's not a matter of being a "pioneer" as one commenter suggested. it's not a matter of "a browser functionality" as another commenter suggested. if a company issues a privacy statement claiming that they do not provide PII to an advertiser, then i figure they have a responsibility to not provide PII to advertisers. they could ensure that this information is not passed along, OR they could change their privacy policy so that it accurately reflects that advertisers can (in some cases, apparently) identify the user that clicked on an ad.

I see RWW is now trying to worm out of its own unbelievable naivete

Update: Vascellaro has responded by email, emphasizing an apparently now-resolved if legitimate issue discussed vaguely as "in some cases" in the original story. Conflating that and the simple matter of referring URLs seems odd, to say the least. That said, it does appear that there was some grounds for debate around what was being communicated in some URLs. I've added some more thoughts, along with the text of Vascellaro's more clear explanation by email, to the footer of this post. I don't think the situation is as crazy now as I did when I first read it and wrote this post.

Sorry RWW, but the situation was pretty clear just from the WSJ article. Its just that the automatic position of the Silicon Valley A-List blogs seems to be to leap to Facebook's defence these days. Quite why this is we can't imagine

Hat tip Alex Van Elsas for pointing out the story

An "iPhone" like value chain has been in most digital media consultants' slide decks for quite a few years now. The technology is actually not that hard (see our lab lashups of MyPCTV here), what is more the issue is that putting together the whole value chain is hard. People were expecting Apple to do it, but Google has come out the gate first:

Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.

The Google TV value chain (now, and predictably to come) is shown in the media supply chain diagram above. We expect a lot of acquisitions by Google to bolster their positions across the value chain. Google will alsouse it as a major new channel for its Advertising engines

But we also expect a lot of competition. A lot of players from the Media, ICT and Consumer Electronics area are going to try and ensure hey are not outmanouvered or left out by this play. This marks the start, not the end, of the Web TV war.

Of course its anything but a slam-dunk as Google (and any other player) has to persuade people to take on Yet Another Set Top Box or a Smart TV, and there are many Good Enoughs (eg IPTV, existing WebTV and the MyPCTV approach that I noted above) that can run as over the top services.

One just wishes Google was more trustworthy as a company, they are not my first choice of someone to run such an end to end value chain.

We also expect to see an increasing PR assault on the BBC, as it has a business model that can counter the Google approach fairly successfully.

From Venturebeat - Dave McClure says "Open is for Losers":

I do believe some open standards foundations generate network effects & benefits for all… HOWEVER, all things equal I believe the default case is that proprietary IP is useful to preserve some value for the IP creator, and thereby provide sustainability the company.

Open standards are great once you get there, but the initial climb to get there can be long & expensive (for the climber), and when you get to the summit the benefits are usually for everyone. While that’s good for most everyone, the costs of climbing are usually borne by the climber alone…

Couldn't put it better myself...so I didn't . Question is - this was true 10, 5, 2 years ago - so why was it anathema for Web 2.0 gurus to say this then?

Google's Sergey Brin at a press conference, as reported by Search Engine Land

At a press briefing at the Google I/O developers conference today, Google cofounder Sergey Brin didn’t mince words about his company’s accidental collection of wifi data. “We screwed up,” he said.

He was asked about the incident, where last week Google admitted it accidentally gathered data from private wifi networks around the world over the past three years.

“We screwed up, and I’m not making excuses about it,” Brin said.

He went on to say that while Google did have internal contols in place, the mistake “obviously” meant more needed to be done, and that more tools would be put in place.

“Trust is very important to us, and we’re going to do everything we can to preserve it,” he said.

"Accidentally" gathering data for 3 years? These are not dumb people, one assumes that after a few weeks it was clear what was happening and they could have decided to stop. Or even not have had WiFi sniffers in the cars in the first place. Or turned them off so they didn't pull data off people's WiFi. Or told people when they knew and immediately deleted that data. Thats's the sort of thing a "don't be Evil" company would do, you'd of thought.

No, we have to wait 3 years before the news comes out, by accident, it is initially denied, and then only when the various regulatory agencies get involved do they promise to delete it. I think that should be prevented, as I'd be fascinated to see what they were up to.

Article in The Economist on two interesting properties of social networks that taken together allow early prediction of epidemics.

Firstly, your friends on a social network are more likely to be popular than you:

Consider both an avid cocktail party hostess with hundreds of acquaintances and a grumpy misanthrope, who may have one or two friends. Statistically speaking, the average person is much more likely to know the hostess simply because she has so many more friends. This, in essence, is what is called the “friendship paradox”: the friends of any random individual are likely to be more central to the social web than the individual himself.

Secondly, the interesting property of these popular people is that they are more likely to meet sick people before you do:

By studying the friends of a randomly selected group of individuals, epidemiologists can isolate those people who are more connected to one another and are therefore more likely to catch diseases like the flu early. This could allow health authorities to spot outbreaks weeks in advance of current surveillance methods.

With the result that:

Dr Christakis and Dr Fowler selected a random group of 319 undergraduates and asked each to nominate up to three friends. Using these names, they collected another group of 425 friends. As the friend paradox predicts, the second group were both more popular (named more times by the random group) and more central to the connections among Harvard students. Flu infections were monitored from September 1st 2009 to the end of December by identifying those diagnosed by the university’s health services and by e-mail responses to a twice-weekly health survey. Overall, 8% of the students were formally diagnosed with the flu and 32% were self-diagnosed. But the infection rate peaked two weeks earlier among the group of more-connected friends. Their social links were indeed causing them to get infected sooner......

.....

As this result came with the benefit of hindsight, the researchers tried to come up with a real-time measure that could potentially provide an early warning sign of an outbreak as it began to spread. To do this they went back to the beginning and compared diagnoses between the two groups on a daily basis for each of the 122 days of the study. A significant difference between the two groups was first detectable a full 46 days before visits to health services peaked for the random group. For those with self-reported symptoms, there was a noticeable difference 83 days before the peak in self-reported symptoms.

So there you have it - next Swine Flu Pandemic, start watching your Twitterfriends with loads of followers with ghoulish iattention.

I may even start following Twitterslebs as a rational of Canary in the Mine strategy

Speaking of people with sick friends more popular than oneself, I hear that BBC Backstage's Ian Forrester (@cubicgarden) is very ill. This post is for him, we wish him a very speedy recovery.

From the YouTube blog:

From now on when users in South Africa visit the localized site they will see, for example, the Most Popular and Most Viewed videos in South Africa along with local content that closely matches their interests.

In conjunction with launching our South African domain, we are teaming up with local broadcasters to ensure that YouTube users, wherever they may be, have access to some of the best locally produced content from leading local broadcasters. These include the South African Broadcasting Corporation and e.tv, who have uploaded news content including content about all the soccer fever building up in the country!

In addition, South African journalism schools, such as Rhodes Journalism School and Wits Journalism School, are also using YouTube to showcase aspiring journalists’ talent and highlight news items that are frequently under-reported:

Interesting as SA's broadband infrastructure is still, ahem, developing though the country punches well above its weight in digital media. But I'm biassed natch, as not only is it my homeland but they are picking up the journo feeds from my Alma Mater.

Today I was in Berlin for the first time since the September 2008 O'Reilly Web 2.0 Congress, and it was interesting to reflect on the changes. That was the Autumn, both in Berlin and for the Web 2.0 movement. I went there in 2008 to give my paper on why Freeconomics would fail, and predicted that the next few years would see a rape of customer data the like of which had not been imagined before, as the venture backed funding (which some pundits mistook for sustainable revenue) dried up.

(This was my Berlin paper for the record)

That rape has come to pass, with social networking sites like Facebook, search engines such as Google, and various other players playing fast a nd loose with user data.

However, as I went down Unter Den Linden yesterday, in the clear air of the Berlin spring, with the new leaves shining against the sun, I reflected that there has been a spring of sorts in the sorry saga of Web 2.0 as well - in that the backlash against the datamining and privacy abuse that I warned of in 2008 is well and truly underway (this chart from teh New York Times on the Saga of Facebook privacy control avoidance is excellent).

Incidentally, I see a post doing the rounds saying that Facebook is due to announce 500 million users (up from c 250million a year before) and that all this hoo-hah about privacy is overblown. I think this misunderstands the issue - as I pointed out last week, this is the beginning of the end, not at the end. What we are seeing now is akin to the dotcom market a year before it tanked - the smart money is bailing out while the suckers are pouring in. I drew the diagram above some years ago to explain this fairly common phenomenon in social nets.

Facebook is cranking up for its IPO, and doing everything which it has to do before the wheels fall off (and they will - it is the way of all social nets). In this it follows the time honoured tradition of all the previous social nets (well, any dotcom IPO really) of pumping before dumping. In order to do this, it has to be, ahem - optimistic - on its growth figures, so how many of those 500 million are real bona fide users would be an interesting question. The comments page to the original Facebook article on All Facebook above is quite sceptical, which given that blog is a Fanboi one is telling in itself

Caveat Emptor, as they say.....

First GigaOm, now TechCrunch - the big Silicon Valley blogs are lining up to apologise for Facebook:

Friday is Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s 26th birthday. My guess is he’s won’t be enjoying it as much as he should, given that the top tech story of the day is a look at a private instant message exchange he supposedly had six or seven years ago at Harvard. The messages show a callous disregard for personal information added by early Facebook users. Given that Facebook is in one of its regularly scheduled privacy scuffles right now, the connection is just too juicy. The press has gone wild.

It’s completely out of hand, and it’s just another example of an online mob getting out of control. I’m embarrassed to see people I respect stopping one step short of calling for physical violence against Zuckerberg.

And I'm embarrassed to see Tech blogs I respect coming out in defence of systemic privacy abuse. As, it would appear, are a lot of their readers - 170 comments and rising, most pretty anti TC for defending FB.

Question is why........is this a new revenue stream for TechCrunch and GigaOm, we wonder?

Update - Henry Blodgett over at Silicon Alley Insider is also on the Facebook Friend Gig, arguing that going for mass public expouse is the only way:

Given this reality, Facebook could take one of two approaches:

- It could always ask permission first -- methodically testing changes, asking users what they want, and not doing anything users haven't explicitly approved of in advance.

- It could keep doing what it has always done: Make changes first and then see what happens.

The first approach would unquestionably produce smoother peaks and valleys for Facebook's PR. It would also likely be vastly worse for the company's business.

But then I was around in Web 1.0, and the best thing to do - in my opinion - when Mr Blodgett starts to promote something, is to keep your hands tightly around your wallet and run for the hills!

By the way, I see Stowe Boyd has done a similar exercise in calling out the apologists and Dana Boyd reaches a similar conclusion to what we did re regulation if it doesn't change..

There has been a lot of hand wringing in the UK press about a Conservative (US: Republican) party with 47% of the seats getting together with a Liberal Democratic party (US: Democrat-ish) with 9%, but as the above chart shows the game theory of the situation shows there is only one situation which has a good outcome.

In essence this coalition means that c 60% of the seats and c 60% of the voters are in its camp. A Liberal/Labour coalition would have been 52% of the vote and 48% of teh seats, which means a minority government. A Tory-on--its own (largest single party) minority government would have c 1/3rd of the voters and c 48% of seats - again an unsustainable minority.

There is a question about the Liberal Democrats being better off going it alone, but its hard to see how they could have carried on in that position as the press would have hounded them to form an alliance, as they have done over the last few days