LSQHA Blog Reviews

Facebook today announced that application developers will be allowed to store user data for more than 24 hours, removing a major restriction that the company had imposed on its ecosystem for years. Competitors like Twitter and MySpace had no such restrictions and now Facebook is in the same boat. Founder Mark Zukerberg used to say that the rule against storing data was essential to protect users and their privacy. Where are those now? Privacy, Zuckerberg told me in a March 2008 interview, "is the vector around which Facebook operates." Two years later, not so much. In a December 2009 interview , Zuckerberg said that Facebook's new public-by-default privacy settings reflected how he would build the site if he were to do it again from scratch today. Compare below what Zuckerberg said in 2008 and what today's new Developer Terms of Service say about holding on to user data now. Sponsor I believe that the Facebook policy change on storing user data is a net win for the web: it will enable all kinds of new innovation. It was that kind of innovation that I was asking about two years ago when I got the following answer about privacy that just doesn't sound right anymore today. Zuckerberg on Data Portability, March 10th 2008 interview with ReadWriteWeb : "If you export your friends list, does their contact information come with that? What if they change their privacy settings later? Right now if you take an action that gets published to your friends' news feeds, but then if you change your privacy settings later to be more restrictive - then those events disappear from the news feeds. If that data is published off-site, then there's no longer any control over the data for users. " (emphasis added) And today, on the new Developers' Terms of Service : You must give users control over their data by posting a privacy policy that explains what data you collect, and how you will use, store, and/or transfer their data....You may cache data you receive from the Facebook API in order to improve your application's user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date ...You will delete all data you receive from us concerning a user if the user asks you to do so, and will provide a mechanism for users to make such a request. (emphasis added) One thing that remains the same? "You cannot use a user's friend list outside of your application, even if a user consents to such use." Facebook doesn't want you taking your data out of the Facebook ecosystem, to other competing services, but it doesn't insist that 3rd parties under its shadow check in with you daily anymore, either. It's hard not to feel a little cynical about that. Discuss

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Facebook Data & Privacy: So Much Has Changed in Two Years

At its annual F8 conference today, Facebook announced its new Facebook for Web Sites platform. Besides the new Graph API and all the plugins and new features Facebook developed on top of this, the company will also offer a new version of its Facebook Insights analytics service. Currently, Insights provides users data about their Facebook fan pages and social ads. Now, however, Facebook is taking this a step further and will also give users who implement Facebook's new features on their sites data about the people who share content from these sites, "no matter where those shares originated." Sponsor Note : Facebook will share more information about these new analytics features during an F8 breakout session at 3:30pm PT and we will update this post once we learn more. The new Insights page is already live and getting it to work involves nothing more than adding a short meta tag to your site. Taking Web Analytics to the Next Level This new service, according to Facebook , will give developers "detailed analytics about the demographics of [their] users." Today's web analytics systems like Google Analytics can give publishers detailed information about how many people come to a given site and where they came from. A developer who uses Facebook for Web Sites will be able to gather more detailed demographic information about these users. With this update, Facebook Insights isn't just about Fan pages and Social Ads anymore (where Facebook already gives publishers very detailed demographic data), but it also allows publishers to track what happens to a link once it is shared. Partly, this also connects to Facebook's new caching policy , which now allows developers to store their users' Facebook data permanently. Until today, developers who used Facebook Connect had to delete this data after 24 hours. Now, however, when users grant an application permission to store their profile data, they give these developers their age, location, gender, number of friends and a number of other data points about them. Privacy Implications? This update will surely have some interesting privacy implications. Thanks to the new permissions dialog, however, it should now be easier for users to see which information they will share with a third-party application. Discuss

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Facebook Insights: Taking Web Analytics to the Next Level

Facebook blew peoples' minds today at its F8 developer conference but one sentiment that keeps coming up is: this is scary. The company unveiled simple, powerful plans to offer instant personalization on sites all over the web, it kicked off meaningful adoption of the Semantic Web with the snap of the fingers, it revolutionized the relationship between the cookie and the log-in, it probably knocked a whole class of recommendation technology startups that don't offer built-in distribution to 400 million people right out of the market. It popularized social bookmarking and made subscribing to feeds around the web easier than ever before. And it may have created the biggest disruption to web traffic analytics in years: demographically verified visitor stats tied to peoples' real identities . There was so much big news that the analytics part didn't even come up in the keynote. This is so much new technology and it's tied in so closely with one very powerful company that there is big reason to stop and consider the possible implications. There are reasons to be scared. The bargain Facebook offers is very, very compelling - but it's not a clear win for the web. Sponsor We won't go into all the details in this post. You can read our blow-by-blow in our live blog , other coverage on Techmeme and discussion of particular developments here on ReadWriteWeb throughout the day. I just want to talk about one overriding concern. This is why Facebook did a 180 degree shift on privacy last December : because it wanted to use that formerly private user data to make the web social. Privacy remains a major concern in the new scenario, but it also got a couple of nods in the use of iFrames on 3rd party sites and the big support for the OAuth password-free log-in system. Semantic web developers are liable to be concerned that decades of their work is being ignored, but Facebook's Open Graph Protocol sure seems intended to be respectful of prior art. Shelley Powers calls it "a bit of a rough start, but it's a start." Centralization is a dangerous thing and Facebook is a young company that's proven willing to break its contract with users in the past. Data portability advocates will find it difficult to argue with the fact that Facebook users can now export their data to an off-site developer's cache and thus potentially to another social network. That said, Gnip 's Eric Marcoullier has begun the conversation with Tweets today like "By 'Open,' Zuck means he is open to taking all your data and not giving anything back." At first blush, it's hard from a user's perspective to find anything to criticize Facebook for in today's announcements. Those criticisms will no doubt start to form once people wrap their heads around all the particulars. On principal, though, there's going to be so much more Facebook around the internet that it feels like a real cause for concern. Centralization is a dangerous thing and Facebook is a young company that's proven willing to break its contract with users in the past (see Facebook's Privacy Move Violates Contract With Users ). For hundreds of millions of people, Facebook already was the internet . That's liable to be even more true in the future, thanks to the changes announced today. For all intents and purposes, when it comes to social networks, there is no other option for most people. That's a very vulnerable place for the web to be. Discuss

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Is the New Facebook a Deal With the Devil?

During today's F8 keynote, Mark Zuckerberg announced a number of new products and features for Facebook, including a new collaboration with Microsoft. With Docs.com , Microsoft's FUSE labs just launched an online document editor and viewer that connects directly to Facebook and uses all of the new social features for third-party sites that Facebook announced today. Docs, for example, allows users to share documents with their Facebook friends, edit them collaboratively and discover documents that their friends have uploaded to their profiles. Sponsor Creating Documents in the Cloud and Sharing them With Your Facebook Friends With Docs, you can create new documents right in the web application or upload them from your desktop. Docs gives you the option to share documents privately or you can allow a select group of your Facebook friends to edit the document with you. A button next to every document allows you to add additional editors at any point. In our tests, the editor wasn't working properly yet (though the document viewer works just fine). We will take a closer look at Docs editing features once it is fully up and running. In addition to being able to create and view documents, Docs.com's Facebook integration will also allow your friends to discover these documents (if you choose to share them). You can also add a new tab to your profile page that shows all the documents you have shared with your friends. This also means that you can use Facebook to discuss these documents in public, just like you would discuss any other status update on the site. Attacking Google There can be little doubt that this is a direct attack against Google Docs . Even though Google Docs only offers relatively basic editing features, the service's collaboration tools allow it to stand out from Microsoft's products. Until now, collaborating on Microsoft Office documents was always a rather difficult task for Office users and generally involved using third-party software. It remains to be seen how many people in an office environment will really want to connect their documents to Facebook. For students and other Facebook users who aren't using this tool in a corporate environment and just want to share documents with each other, however, this looks like a great solution. Discuss

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Docs.com: Facebook and Microsoft Go After Google Docs

Just imagine - you walk down the hallway, past your co-workers, past your bosses, past the HR department and on to the company keg. You pull a handy little RFID-enabled card out of your pocket, hold it up to a reader, and immediately everyone knows that you're helping yourself to a 2 p.m. Newcastle on a Wednesday. If you're a Facebook employee, then you're well aware of this reality and today, at Facebook's F8 developer conference , the company is testing out broader uses for this type of technology. Sponsor The company is calling this technology Facebook Presence , based on the " Keg Presence Hack " which is described as a way to "give employees a way to share when they were having a beer. Employees would tap their badge, get their photo taken, and generate a feed story whilst grabbing a beer with friends." [Image via All Facebook ] According to All Facebook's Nick O'Neill , the new technology is being tested today, with all F8 attendees "receiving special RFID tags that enable them to check-in to various locations throughout the conference venue." O'Neill says that there is a visualization of people's checkins being displayed at the conference, but that it only shows in terms of places and doesn't show a real-time tracking of people as they physically move about the conference center. This sort of technology would be a different take on location-based checkin systems, wherein the user has the onus of owning the proper technology. Giving users RFID chips and having the venues bear the burden of expensive technology (in the form of RFID readers in this case), as long as the incentive to purchase this technology is there, approaches location-based services from the opposite direction and could potentially bring location to a large number of users. To find out where Facebook plans to go with this technology and more, you can watch live with us or read along on our live blog of the F8 conference . Discuss

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Facebook Tests "Presence", RFID Location at F8 Conference