Is it Time for Facebook to Make Opt-In the Default?
Facebook’s Open Graph API is getting some negative attention in Washington today. Four democratic U.S. senators, Charles Schumer, Michael Bennet, Mark Begich and Al Franken, sent a letter to Facebook’s founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg earlier this morning, asking for clarification about the privacy implications of Facebook’s latest initiatives. Specifically, these senators complain about the company’s new policy to allow third-party developers to store data for more than 24 hours, Facebook’s Instant Personalization feature and the social network’s new initiatives that make more of its users’ personal information public by default. Sponsor Washington and Facebook Privacy The discussion in Washington mostly centers around the fact that Facebook’s new Instant Personalization service is opt-out . Facebook’s current partners – Microsoft’s Docs.com , Pandora and Yelp – automatically get access to a subset of your personal data whenever you visit their sites while you are logged in to Facebook. According to the senators, Facebook now shares “significant and personal data points that should be kept private unless the user chooses to share them.” U.S. senators : “Significant and personal data points that should be kept private unless the user chooses to share them.” In his response to the senators’ concerns, Facebook’s VP of global communications Elliot Schrage argues that these new products are “designed to enhance personalization and promote social activity across the Internet while continuing to give users unprecedented control over what information they share, when they want to share it, and with whom.” Facebook : We “give users unprecedented control over what information they share, when they want to share it, and with whom.” This discussion comes down to Facebook’s decision to make many of its latest features opt-out instead of opt-in. Currently, Facebook is only testing Instant Personalization with a small number of hand-selected partners. Facebook’s ambition , however, is to turn itself into the hub for personalization on virtually every site on the Internet, so this small group of partners could soon grow exponentially. This – combined with the end of the company’s 24-hour limit on storing data by third-party developers – could potentially pose a serious threat to its users’ privacy. Opt-In vs. Opt-Out There is a reason why Facebook is currently using opt-out as its default. After all, this guarantees Facebook the largest possible user base for these features and the best possible user experience for those who want to use them. Making new features opt-in exposes Facebook to the (very real) possibility that not enough users sign up and that the reach of its current and future initiatives will be very limited. On the other hand, if its users really wanted to these features, wouldn’t they just opt-in if asked? And if these features turn out to be really useful, wouldn’t word about them spread across Facebook like a wildfire? Should Facebook Make Opt-Out Its Default? Given the Beacon fiasco from 2007 – and the recent discussion around how Google handled the launch of Buzz – however, we have to wonder if Facebook simply didn’t learn its own lessons. Facebook already hosts more private information about its users than any other site on the Internet. Given the company’s current trajectory of exposing more and more personal data, it’s probably time for the company to establish a consistent policy for how it plans to handle personal data in the future and make it very easy for users to opt out of any new initiatives that will expose more of a user’s data to third parties in the future. If you want to make sure that Facebook developers can’t access your personal data, here are Sarah Perez’s excellent instructions for how to opt-out . Discuss
GetGlue Adds New Releases to Recommendations Made by Human & Machine
It’s hard to keep up with all the newly released movies and music these days, but a lightweight social network with a whole lot of smarts under the hood says it can now offer you personalized recommendations of new releases that suit your very particular interests. GetGlue is a semantic web browser plug-in that has, for years, been smart enough to recognize when you’re looking at the same musical group across different websites, be that on Last.fm, MySpace or elsewhere. The service recently added a stream of recommendations of music, movies, books, magazines, wikipedia articles and other things you might like. How can it tell what you’ll like when something is brand new, though? Today the service has launched a “new releases” section, where human editors rush to classify brand-new media. Then the semantic robots can serve it up to the right users, still hot out of the oven. It’s pretty cool. Sponsor GetGlue founder Alex Iskold says he’s learned a lesson similar to what formerly automated tech news aggregator Techmeme has learned: algorithms and user generated content can take you a long way, but there comes a point when it’s good to hire some dedicated editors. The service asks you to like or unlike a wide variety of things. It then uses that feedback to build a taste profile to compare against things it finds put into its database and find the stuff it thinks you’ll like. That’s harder with new releases, though. “When something new is coming out, we don’t know what it’s like, so you need to have proffessionals tag it,” Iskold told us. “We have two editors on staff who look across the spectrum of new releases each week. They draw the similarities between things in a deep way – the tagging system we use will be unvieled later. We use really eclectic tags to characterize what kind of zombie or vampire movie something is. We also use tags brought in from other systems and our users find cool new things really fast.” The end result is a nicely displayed stream of big icons for personally recommended newly released movies, music and books. You think you’re hip to your scene now? Wait until you’ve got a network of contacts, a semantic robot and real human editors all working together to bring you the freshest content in your weird little niche. To be honest, I’ve been testing it out today by switching from new album recommendations on Glue over to Apple’s Lala.com , where it’s easy to listen to full albums once for free. That’s not the way Glue wants you to use it, but that’s the way I like to use it so far. The Down Side It’s an incredible system, when it works. GetGlue knows though that there are some challenges in this kind of game though. First, it’s not easy to present this kind of flow of data to users without either overwhelming them or boring them. Many of GetGlue’s latest changes are focused on making the user experience more pleasant: bigger images, collapsed bundles of shared items, etc. Can the service find a balance between giving you strong-enough recommendations on one hand and regularly offering up new recommendations on the other? In past versions of the product, I’ve received too few recommendations to keep me coming back. Hopefully new releases will scratch that itch. Iskold also says that after “liking” only 15 musical artists, I’m actually much less active than most of the 400,000 registered users of the service. Personally, I’m more drawn to the Wikipedia recommendations on GetGlue than anything else. The new releases in music might be roughly in the same sub-genres I usually listen to, but that doesn’t mean they are any good. Finally, all this “liking” obviously begs the Facebook question. Writing as an ostensible Facebook competitor about that giant network’s radical innovations unveiled last week, Iskold wrote the following in a widely-read article here at ReadWriteWeb about Facebook’s Open Graph: “Time will tell where we land, but my gut is that positive things will come out of this. If nothing else, let’s give Facebook credit for innovation and re-imagination the Web.” Today he emphasized in speaking with me that Facebook is new to what it’s just begun to do, but his company has been doing it for years. There’s no guarantee that Facebook will get it right, he said. It’s hard to say for sure that GetGlue has got it right, either. But as a work in progress, it’s pretty darned good and today’s new additions are very interesting. Discuss
Facebook Open Graph: The Definitive Guide For Publishers, Users and Competitors
Facebook just shook the tech world by announcing several major initiatives that collectively constitute an aggressive move to weave the social net on top of the existing Web.The rumors were that the leading social network would launch a “Like” button for the entire Web. Instead, Zuckerberg & Co. unveiled a bold and visionary new platform that cannot be ignored. The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook’s vision is both minimalistic and encompassing – but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web. Sponsor Whether we like it (pun intended) or not, we have to understand what this move means. It impacts users, publishers, competitors and, of course, Facebook itself. In this post, we summarize what Facebook announced and ponder the impact this will have on everyone. Facebook Open Graph: Publisher Plugins The Open Graph is a set combination of publisher plugins, semantic markup and a developer API. “This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of user’s tastes.” Login with Faces & Facepile : The simpler publisher plugins enhance Facebook Connect. They makes it easy and compelling to sign in by leveraging Facebook cookies and showing faces of Facebook friends who are already members of the service. Like Button and Like Box : These plugins add the liking feature to any content, typically the whole page. Both can be enhanced with semantic markup, described below. But the very basic intent for these is to get users to Like on the site and post a link to Facebook, which is then permanently stored on a user’s profile and points back to the original site. Activity Feed and Live Stream : These plugins show static and dynamic activity on the site. Activity Feed lists recent likes and comments from the site, while Live Stream shows a real-time view of activity on the site and is intended for interactive events. Recommendations : This plugin surfaces personalized recommendations for the user based on what friends and everyone else is liking on the site. It is intended to drive the users to other pages on the site. Facebook Open Graph: Semantic Markup Facebook announced simple, RDF-based markup to make the plugins smarter. In a nutshell, the markup enables publishers to say what object is on the page – a movie, a book, a recording artist, an event, a sports team, etc. This automatically enables semantics, that is, an understanding that the user is not just interacting with a webpage, but that he or she is liking a specific kind of thing. Semantics then leads to bucketing of the objects into categories like books, movies, music, etc., and gives rise to all sort of applications, including personalized recommendations. Perhaps even more importantly, the markup helps Facebook connect the users across common interests across different websites. For example, if both Pandora and Last.fm annotate a page about The Beatles using Facebook’s markup, then users will be able to see their friends, who like the Beatles across different sites. This is very significant, because the data around friends is sparse and scattered around the sites. Previously, Facebook would surface this data in the stream without persisting it. Now, the information about a friend’s likes of movies, music, books, recording artists, events, sports team, etc. will be permanent on Facebook profiles and readily available in context around the Web. Facebook Open Graph: New API The new Facebook API is elegant and streamlined. It makes it easy to access user information (with permission of course) such as profile, friends, etc. All of the calls are REST based and return JSON objects. For example, my profile information can be fetched like this: http://graph.facebook.com/alexiskold. The authentication is based on OAuth 2.0 protocol and makes it simple not only to connect, but to also prompt for permissions to access user information. This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of users’ tastes. And not just one user – all Facebook users . Implications for the Users With this release, Facebook asks users if they are willing to trade off privacy for personalization. To be clear, no personalization is ever possible without users telling a system about their tastes. What Facebook is asking for is necessary in order to then create personalized Web experience. Whether users want this sort of thing is a different question, but assuming that you want to know more about your friends you will. Friends’ interests around entertainment, sports, travel, etc. will be categorized and available. It will be easy to figure out what your friends are into both on Facebook and around the Web. In addition, Facebook is going to be using its own engine to bring you recommendations for related content. This will further accelerate the discovery and cross linking between friends. This will likely further impact the amount of search people do around the Web. As Fred Wilson pointed out – passed links replace search. Yet, the crux of user implications is neither of the above, but one single issue: privacy . It is unclear at this point that this issue is a concern for actual Facebook users, but it is clear that tech world is raising its eyebrows: Marshall Kirkpatrick , Dave Winer , Jeff Jarvis and many others expressed their concerns. People are saying that not only Facebook will know too much about us (because Google is already there today), but that it will be able to control too much. Personally, I am skeptical that the average Facebook user is going to care all that much. People are notoriously naive about being watched on the Web, and this is likely to be no exception. More likely than not, Facebook users will enjoy the personalization aspects of the new platform and won’t think much about it – until Facebook starts openly targeting them. This was not been part of f8 of course, but Facebook is likely to use the information for targeting. After all, advertising is a major part of its monetization already so why won’t it make it even better? If this targeting is too spot on, lots of users will probably get annoyed. Facebook is likely to sooth them via Facebook credits and heavy discounts, negotiated because of their massive volume. How exactly users react remains to be seen, but they will probably like the new Facebook more because of increased relevancy and interaction with friends around the Web. Next page: Implications for Publishers Implications for Publishers On the surface, this Facebook offering is a no-brainer for publishers. Who does not want more social activity on their site? However, in reality this is far from a slam dunk. To understand why, consider two types of sites: sites that are either social networks or have social networking integrated, and the sites that have their own commenting and ratings systems. In the first camp you will find Last.fm, Flixster, Goodreads, etc. None of these sites were a launch partner, understandably so. Social connections around music, movies and books are their bread and butter as are the ratings, reviews and recommendations. If they switch to Facebook for all of this, what do they have left? So any site that already has social networking built in has to decide to abandon that before jumping into the Facebook Open Graph. The even worse problem is the ownership of ratings and comments. Are publishers really ready to give that up? Nobody seriously thinks that users are going to be rating through Facebook and then through the site again. So how is this going to work? It is unclear at this point, but it’s likely publishers will ask for ways to replicate or export comments and likes that users sent to Facebook via their site. Perhaps an open API that allows publishers to manipulate the data is the answer, but it is easy to see how some publishers would be very concerned. “You don’t need to look too closely to see that Facebook is creating a feedback loop, which includes it, users and the rest of the Web and excludes its competitors.” However, if you run a website like eCommerce or a blog or a service like Pandora that currently does not have a lot of social built-in, this offering is a no-brainer as it will instantly start recycling your pages through the massive Facebook power of passed links. Implications for Competitors This is aggressive and brilliant move by Facebook – and Twitter, Google, Yahoo, MySpace, AOL, eBay, Amazon and others, except for Microsoft, should be really worried. It appears that Microsoft is content with just partnering with Facebook, perhaps rightly so. Possibly a Bing deal is in the works, which would make a lot of sense. For all other players on the Web, the worry is that Facebook is trying to close the loop in exclusively owning user eyeballs. Apparently Facebook is not content with just connecting people; it wants to connect people and things. And not only that, it wants to do it around the Web. And not just any people – friends. You don’t need to look too closely to see that Facebook is creating a feedback loop, which includes it, users and the rest of the Web and excludes its competitors. There are several things that other big players might try to do, the worst of which is to try to mimic Facebook. The “me too” that we’ve seen way too many times recently has not worked, and will not work now. The second best choice is to try to block it. As strange as it sounds it might just work. Between publisher and user issues there are a lot of concerns, and a carefully orchestrated and coordinated campaign may seriously hurt this initiative. Remember, Beacon was brought down fairly quickly by a combination of user backlash and derogatory press. The third option – to embrace and extend this platform, to innovate on top of it – is likely to be the best move. Innovation has always trumped stagnation on the Web. The problem is that it might not be that easy to embrace this initiative. After all, it does not look like Facebook asked everyone to gather around the table and cooperate on this. It might not be open to cooperation, but if it is then this is the way forward. Technically speaking, what Facebook has done is elegant and correct. From markup, to plugins, to API, all of it is modern and awesome. The missing bit is that Facebook appears to be the only repository of data in this equation – and that makes the whole offering seriously closed. Publishers and users don’t have a choice as to where to store the data. It is going to Facebook and Facebook alone. Perhaps there is a way to rework the system in a way that fixes that. We will look forward to see how this unfolds. Implications for Facebook Clearly this announcement is yet another turning point for Facebook. Before the conference Facebook was the biggest social network on the planet. If its vision actually happens, Facebook will be the biggest network of people and things on the planet- or to put it differently, it will be the taste graph of the planet. Obviously there is a different technology that Facebook will need to be building. It already perfected the social networking part, but semantic analysis, recommendation systems, vertical categories like movies and books, as well as having completely open read/write storage of tastes is completely new to the team. The biggest challenge that Facebook will face is to inject, re-deliver and most importantly make use of the data that is flowing into it. Facebook will be doing some serious number crunching and UI revamps to prepare for this next phase of its life. But perhaps the biggest experiment and test will be delivering relevancy. Google succeed with this in search; Facebook will now have the challenge to bring relevancy to the recommendations and taste-based advertising arena. Next page: Implications For the Semantic Web Implications For the Semantic Web One of the most exciting parts of the Facebook announcement to me personally is the possible breakthrough in semanticizing the Web. We’ve written previously about the Semantic Web here , and it has been a personal passion of mine. What Facebook has done has a chance to make vast parts of the consumer Web including movies, books, music, events, sports, and news semantically tagged. Publishers and websites finally have a strong incentive to mark things up and get return traffic from Facebook. “This is a great chance for the Semantic Web to finally hit consumer verticals and become real.” The actual protocol that Facebook suggested is very simple. To describe the object on the page, the site owner needs to specify the title, type of the object, image, url and the name of the site using simple meta tags. The format is extensible and additional tags can be added. For example, for a book a site can add an isbn number. This format leaves room for ambiguity. The goal of classic semantic markups traditionally has been to refer to entities precisely; for example adding the director to a movie, or a year to remakes. The Facebook protocol does not seem to have this. There were lots of previous efforts to markup the Web. To name a few, RDF , microformats , Google Rich Snippets , Yahoo’s Search Monkey (based on RDF and microformats), and lastly, abmeta , which was developed by me with help from Peter Mika at Yahoo. Of all these formats, Facebook’s is most similar to abmeta because the markup is placed into meta tags, and is simple and human readable. This simplicity is the key to broad adoption. So all around, this is a great chance for the Semantic Web to finally hit consumer verticals and become real. Implications for Developers Every new rich platform that has been rolled out in the past couple of years presented a big opportunity for developers and this one will be no exception. While we do not know exactly what sort of applications will be build on top of new Facebook, we know that they will be very powerful. This platform has the potential to give rise to to new kind of personalization and attention economy that people have been talking about for years. It has of course, a chance to majorly backfire, but I am optimistic. This will be a gold rush for application that is likely to last for at least a year, like the last one did. It’s too early to tell whether this will be a platform that survives and does not hurt is participants. However, it is very likely that the best applications built on this platform will be owned by Facebook. Still, there is a huge new opportunity here for developers and the sky is the limit. Checkmate? Facebook made a major chess move. It might have checkmated its competitors, or perhaps it might have to lose another piece like it lost Beacon. Whichever is the case, right now there are deep implications for Facebook and its competitors, publishers, users and the Web at large. What Facebook has announced cannot be ignored and can not be undone. Everyone needs to figure out the next steps and understand what to do. Time will tell where we land, but my gut is that positive things will come out of this. If nothing else, let’s give Facebook credit for innovation and re-imagination the Web. Discuss
Facebook Data & Privacy: So Much Has Changed in Two Years
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
Is Apple Booting iAd’s Competition from the iPhone?
At the most recent Apple keynote , Steve Jobs announced Apple’s upcoming advertising platform called iAd . Included as a part of the OS 4.0 update, the mobile operating system upgrade due out for iPhone this summer and iPad later this fall, the iAd system aims, in its very Apple-ly way, to make mobile advertisements “delightful,” meaning ads worth clicking on, engaging with and viewing. What Jobs didn’t mention, though, is how Apple plans to give iAd its head start: by kicking out the competing analytics and advertising platforms now thriving in nearly every iPhone app today. Or so it seems. Sponsor Developer Reports App Store Rejection Due to Analytics Inclusion Last week, technology news blog VentureBeat caught wind of a story where Apple had rejected an iPhone application because it, according to the email sent to the developer, “is not appropriate for applications to gather user analytics.” Not appropriate, you may ask? Since when? Apparently since Apple released their updated iPhone Developer Agreement. Alongside the SDK 4 beta , made available shortly after the announcement in early April, the developer contract was updated, too. Specifically, the clause in question, section 3.3.9, reads, in part (more here ): Notwithstanding anything else in this Agreement, Device Data may not be provided or disclosed to a third party without Apple’s prior written consent. Accordingly, the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited. To date, the changes detailed in this clause have been overshadowed by the one preceding it – in Section 3.3.1, Apple banned the use of cross-compiler tools for building iPhone applications, like the one Adobe was just about to ship , for example. But in the long run, it’s Section 3.3.9 that may have more impact on the industry as a whole. “FEAR” You may have not heard too much about this change because no one actually knows what’s going on thanks to Apple’s par-for-the-course policy of refusing to clarify its meaning. Plus, the companies who may be the most heavily affected by an analytics ban – services like Flurry , MediaLets , Motally , Localytics , and SimpleGeo , to name a few – don’t want to talk about it. On record that is. But after a dozen or so phone calls and emails, we’re starting to see a picture forming and it can be summed up in one word: FEAR . “Nobody wants to be the canary in the coal mine,” one source told us, referring to the radio silence we’re getting from these companies when you would have otherwise expected to hear outcry, or perhaps even anti-competitive claims. Some companies, off-record, say they are afraid to complain . If they do, they could be the next to be banned. Another source reported that a number of their company’s clients weren’t submitting updates to the iTunes Application Store because they were worried that the updates, with the analytics included of course, would be rejected. Instead, the clients are leaving their older applications in place since it doesn’t appear that Apple is going back through all the current apps and booting out those that already include analytics within them. “Maybe the older apps are grandfathered in?” they wondered aloud. The fact that no one knows, not even the big name, big box retailer that sits at the top of the latter’s client list, is a testament to how Apple likes to do business. Here’s the agreement, read it and sign it…and that’s the extent of the communication. As to those who did manage to get someone from Apple to talk about it? The answer was simply: “read the agreement.” But if Apple holds true to what’s written there, it sounds like it could spell doom for mobile analytics and ad firms, especially the small-time players beloved by independent developers. iAd, Anti-Competitive? What no one will say – again, on record, that is – is that the changes have a whiff of anti-competitive behavior to them. The issue at hand: Apple is preparing to launch iAd, an advertising platform based on the newly-acquired Quattro Wireless, a second choice for Apple after the Admob deal fell through. “We tried to buy AdMob, but Google snatched them up because they didn’t want us to have them,” Steve Jobs said during the April keynote. “So we bought another smaller company, Quattro. But we’re babes in the woods.” Some say that the added language to section 3.3.9 is a direct shot at AdMob in the same way that the changes in 3.3.1 were a shot at Adobe. That is, instead of allowing Google to get its mobile advertisements onto the iPhone, Apple can keep them out via the new analytics/ad ban. Whether or not that’s the case is certainly up for debate. But considering that the Google/AdMob deal is still being researched by U.S. antitrust enforcers, regulators aware of the issue. Word has it that Google even pointed it out to the FTC, just in case. Continue Reading: Next page, “A Second Opinion” A Second Opinion: Privacy Concerns Others, however, say these changes aren’t really about analytics, ads and anti-competitive behavior as much as they are about privacy concerns. In speaking with Alan Chapell, chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association Privacy Committee and whose firm advises companies on privacy and data strategy, the changes to Apple’s agreement have to do more with consumer privacy than anything else. With language that refers to “geo-location” and targeted advertising, a good bit of Section 3.3.9 is about how location-based applications should behave. With the rise of location-based services especially and location-based social tools like Loopt, Foursquare, Gowalla, and others, privacy is at the forefront of everyone’s minds these days. ( Including ours ). There are no standards for location based data yet, Chapell explains. No rules about how such data should be used, retained, shared and so on. In addition, Apple is under heavy pressure from regulators to protect the privacy of its customers. And if the third-party analytics providers do something which comprises that privacy, it will be Apple that gets in trouble. “This debate is about privacy and innovation,” Chapell notes, “and finding a balance between the two.” Unfortunately, even if Apple chooses never to enforce the new rules, explains Chapell, the changes will have an indirect impact on innovation in this area. The next round of ad networks, analytics providers and other in-app data-sharing tools will be less likely to be funded. Not Just Funding at Risk… These changes won’t just affect the funding of services like those noted above, though, they could affect how services are developed for the iPhone. Take for example, Xtify , a location-triggered geo-messaging system now available for Android ( previous coverage ).