Privacy Is Not Dead, But…
Today marks the start of Privacy Week. It’s timely, given the reaction to Facebook’s Open Graph announcement a couple weeks ago.
As we become more dependent on digital interconnectedness to stay in the know, it’s important to consider the data trail we leave behind — and not just on social networks. Earlier this year, President Obama signed signed a one-year extension of the Patriot Act, a law that was written in response to the Sept. 11 attacks, but which critics say gives the federal government unprecedented surveillance authority over private citizens.
“Having information about other individuals is a very important way of having leverage over them,” says University of Chicago law professor Geoffrey R. Stone.
Watch the short film above. If you’re concerned about your privacy and want to take action, sign the Privacy Week petition to congress, and read the latest information from the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC). If you’re specifically concerned about Facebook, follow these instructions to opt-out of instant personalization or these instructions to permanently delete your account.
The Thing About Facebook’s FriendFeed Acquisition
Poynter Online news editor Steve Myers pointed to a Big Money article that smartly and — despite broad strokes — for the most part correctly evaluates the potential value of Facebook’s purchase of FriendFeed.
I’m going to guess you’re intimately familiar with Facebook. FriendFeed, on the other hand, is an aggregation/interaction site that allows users to easily import RSS feeds, collect them in one place, present them anywhere, and comment and vote on posts in others’ feeds.
While Facebook has these features too, the FriendFeed interface makes it very simple to drop in all your social network accounts. And hey, who doesn’t like easy, right?
In the article, “Now Facebook Really Owns You,” Chadwick Matlin writes:
…[I]magine a social aggregator with the size and sway of Facebook. Users would love it because it would make their lives simpler and more streamlined. The other social media sites stand to gain as well, since Facebook would be pointing more users to content offsite. News sites will get more traffic because people will be clicking through on more links. Facebook, of course, would be the biggest victor: It would be able to get people to check in more often and stay longer. Ad rates can then go up, which helps the company’s bottom line.
He doesn’t explicitly mention one thing: user data. Facebook has a lot of information about you, your friends and your acquaintances: birthdays, addresses, phone numbers, relationships, things you like, games you play, who you pay attention to and who pays attention to you, and — if you didn’t delete your cookies before logging in — other sites you’ve visited.
This is valuable not just to Facebook, but to third-party developers and those who use FacebookConnect. It means companies can get a more accurate picture of who you are and who the people you’re connected to are, in other words, more accurate user targeting.
Businesses are interested in making sure you take a specific action. The more they know about you, your behaviors, and what influences you, the better they can tailor their message to get you to do something.
Yes, Facebook got some very sharp engineers, and yes, real-time search will probably make Facebook a bigger player amongst those who need to know what people are saying now, but for profitability, the game has always been about understanding the user through data. In my opinion, the technologies FriendFeed was built on will allow Facebook to fill in gaps.
Journalists: Share What’s New With You
One of the most popular posts of 2008 was “What Comes After a Career at a Newspaper?” If you’ve found a new role or started a new business after taking a buyout or being laid off last year, leave a comment to let people know what you’re up to. We’ll also add you to the list.
In other housekeeping news, you can now keep up with Ricochet on Facebook. We’re looking for ways to start and integrate discussion in two places at once. If you’ve got some ideas, please share.
And finally, where do you and other local journalists hang out before, between and after hours? Last March, Marketwatch ran a fun video about the closure of famous watering holes for scribblers that, ironically, has itself disappeared.
In today’s age of being socially connected all of the time, is there any value in having a local hangout? If so, where do you and your cohort gather?
Photo: ChrisMRichards/Flickr
Stake Your Claim, Protect Your Brand, or Be Sorry Later
Web users are facing an identity crisis. As the public – readers, potential employers, coworkers – continue Googling each other to learn more about who they’re reading, there’s more potential for spoofing.
Daniel Schawbel on Social Media Today wrote a post with some solid advice about claiming your name on popular social networking and blog sites, including Facebook, LinkedIn and WordPress.com.
Though the idea of staking a claim on myriad plots of Web territory seems daunting, we journalists are in a business where credibility, trust and reputation do matter.
It’s worth thinking about. And if this sounds familiar, it’s cause this subject has come up before.
Joe Grimm: Context – Not Content – is King as Book Publishers’ Conference Opens
Joe Grimm, Poynter.org columnist and the Freep’s recruiting and development editor, guest blogs from the Tools of Change conference in New York, where members of the book publishing industry are discussing their future. — Chrys
Book publishing’s tectonic plates shifted a little more Monday as HarperCollins said it would publish books for free on the Web and Random House said it would test selling books by the chapter.
As their world shifted, hundreds of book publishers, librarians and authors tried to learn how to keep their footing at the O’Reilly Tools of Change Conference in New York.
Stephen Abram, vice president for innovation at SirsiDynix, opened the conference by kicking holes in near folkloric arguments that people don’t read anymore and that the young don’t know anything. He pushed publishers to move beyond Web 2.0, in which anyone can contribute, to Web 3.0, where networks reign.
Content king? No, said Abrams. Context is.
He described a phenomenon that is the opposite of continental drift in which Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and a host of social networks are hooking together. Smart publishers will thrive in an online social world.
Second Life, for example, has 5,000 visits a night to its library, which is staffed 80 hours a week.
Abram urged publishers to get into the networks and follow the lead of its customers, asking for their opinions.
“Are you still threatened by Google? You should be threatened by Facebook,” Abram said. He predicted that most of today’s Web 2.0 companies will fall by the wayside and that focusing on just one or a couple of them distracts from the real change.
The change is already happening, Abram said, with 300,000 people joining MySpace every day and 35 percent of its users posting content every day.
Devices are changing just as rapidly. He put up a slide that showed that a device the size of an iPod will be able to hold a year’s worth of video by 2012, all commercial music ever created by 2015, or all content ever created by all media by 2020. And the United States is woefully behind other parts of the world in its use of mobile devices.
But the solutions and the answers won’t be in any particular Web site or device, but in understanding audiences and letting them in on the fun. Abram said, “If you’re still trying to create a destination site, you’re messing up.”
Abram blogs at Beyond the Job.
The Tools of Change conference is at New York’s Marriott Marquis Feb. 11-13.
