Facebook, Google in a social-networking PR scramble?
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Facebook has scheduled a high-profile advertising announcement for Nov. 6. Google has reportedly changed its social-networking announcement from Nov. 5 to later in the week. Coincidence?
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Belatedly recognizing the importance of social networking as an online service and advertising vehicle, Google this week will unleash its strongest response yet to the rising threat and skyrocketing popularity of MySpace and Facebook.On Thursday, Google will announce OpenSocial, an initiative with a set of APIs (application programming interfaces) at its core that is designed &quot;to spread social applications across the Web,&quot; the company said.These common APIs have been designed to let developers create social networking applications that will run on multiple Web sites, simplifying the making and distribution of these programs.Partners supporting OpenSocial include various well-known software developers and social networking sites: Oracle, Salesforce.com, Hi5, iLike, LinkedIn, Slide, Ning, Friendster, and Plaxo. Neither Facebook nor MySpace is on the list of partners at press time.The move is also no doubt intended to dilute the massive&#160;success Facebook has had in attracting external developers&#160;since it opened up its Web site platform to third-party applications in May.About 7,000 such applications have been built for Facebook so far, helping to make the social networking site more attractive to people and thus boosting its usage.&#160;MySpace recently announced it would follow Facebook&#39;s example.By allowing developers to write an application once and have it work in multiple social networking sites, the OpenSocial initiative could, in theory, water down the appeal of Facebook&#39;s ballooning applications catalogue.Once considered a fad of interest mostly to teens and young adults, social networks have significantly broadened their demographic appeal, attracting many people in their 30s, 40s, 50s and beyond.Along the way, social networking sites have been created for other purposes beyond entertainment and staying in touch with friends. For example, there are social networks tailored for specific occupations, such as doctors, and interests, such as sports.Google has had a social networking site named Orkut for several years, but it doesn&#39;t seem to have merited much attention from the company until recently, and only after the popularity and potential of this type of site became evident.Google was reportedly locked in a battle with Microsoft&#160;over which one would be chosen by Facebook to buy a stake in the social networking company and earn a deal to provide advertising to it.Microsoft eventually won, buying a 1.6 percent stake that values Facebook at an eye-popping $15 billion, although the social networking company reportedly will have revenue of just $150 million this year.With about 300 employees now, Facebook expects to have about 700 a year from now, its CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg recently said. About 250,000 new users register every day at Facebook, which was founded in 2004.In June, MySpace had 114.1 million unique visitors worldwide, ranking first among social networking sites, followed by Facebook with 52.2 million, according to comScore. Hi5 ranked third with 28.2 million, while Friendster was fourth with 24.7 million. Orkut rounded out the top 5 with 24.1 million.More information about OpenSocial and resources for developers will be available in this Web site later this week. There will also be a developer sandbox.
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Gullible time-rich polyglot? Facebook wants you! Facebook is headed for a problem. In the wacky innovation-lite and revenue-poor world of web 2.0, you have to be able to show your investors and the hordes of "I want to believe" journalists some sort of growth.â¦
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TMZ.com usually traffics in salacious celebrity gossip. So its readers may have been confused when the site posted an item on the creator of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg.
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Following a deal last August in which Microsoft agreed to handle all ad sales for popular social networking site Facebook, the Redmond company has signed a similar agreement with social news site Digg. Microsoft is working hard to establish itself in the ad industry, but faces stiff competition from Google.
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For some reason (settling bar bets?), Google searchers have had one question on their minds.
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Rumors that Microsoft is negotiating a stake in social networking site Facebook could mean another bubble in Internet company values.
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Flagging social network introduces new way for bands, celebrities, organizations to create profiles on the site. Unfortunately, it probably won't ameliorate its problems.
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When a popular blogger revealed that Facebook had banned his account, the Web erupted in speculative chatter. But where should they really be pointing fingers?
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Gets international advertising rights It was the worst-kept secret in the internet industry, but today Microsoft proved all the rumor-mongers right by confirming that it is taking a stake in Facebook, and shutting Google out of the social networking website.â¦
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Social networking site, Facebook, believed to be in negotiations with Microsoft.
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The launch of Facebook&#39;s Beacon advertising system in November put the social networking site in the middle of a controversy over privacy, as&#160;Beacon was criticized for being too aggressive and stealthy in collecting and broadcasting information about users&#39; activities online. For that reason, few people right now would probably envy the job of Chris Kelly, Facebook&#39;s chief privacy officer and the person most responsible for explaining the site&#39;s policies to the public.IDG News Service recently caught up with Kelly for a telephone interview. He answered questions about Beacon, saying the company is happy with it now after some revisions but acknowledging that the work isn&#39;t over, so we may yet see further modifications that address remaining privacy concerns.He also tackled other hot topics, such as the company&#39;s efforts to protect minors from sexual predators as well as&#160;data portability, or the ability for users to move their data between different social networking services. Kelly said Facebook is in favor of data portability in principle but wary of it in part because of concerns about user privacy. That might surprise the critics who raised red flags over Beacon, but Kelly said there are legitimate concerns about privacy --&#160;and security as well --&#160;with data portability.The following is an edited transcript of the conversation:IDGNS: There has been a lot of talk recently about data portability, specifically about letting users of social networks export their data to other sites and applications. What&#39;s your take on data portability?Chris Kelly: We&#39;ve made it clear that we don&#39;t have a philosophical problem with data portability. The problem comes in because there are all sorts of privacy and security worries [related to it], and there are a whole bunch of people out there who would gladly attempt to exploit somebody else&#39;s personal information if they could get one point of entry into a network, for instance, and try to export as much data as possible.So we want to make sure there are rules and controls around that to minimize the possibility of something going off. That is a critical part of all of the discussions, and it&#39;s something that, in a rush to call for data portability, most proponents haven&#39;t effectively considered. We&#39;re trying to make sure that everyone considers that. We joined the Data Portability Workgroup because we want to show that we&#39;re serious about having that conversation. But to just say that you can have a completely open system ignores that there are serious privacy and security challenges about that.IDGNS: So given the privacy, security, and legal considerations that need to be taken into account, is a satisfying solution to data portability even possible?Kelly: Any system needs to reflect the actual preferences of the end-user of the data, and the end possessor of the data is the data subject. At Facebook, we&#39;ve obviously invested a great deal in building a preference-capturing system around that, and any portability scheme needs to reflect that type of information. We&#39;ll press for any data portability scheme to reflect the preferences of data subjects. That&#39;s a very important part of building an effective data portability setup.IDGNS: What&#39;s your current position regarding Beacon, which has been such a big source of controversy?Kelly: We&#39;ve gotten Beacon to a point where it gives users control over the information they&#39;re bringing into Facebook from third-party Web sites and sharing with their friends. The users are coming to understand the technology better. As Mark [Zuckerberg, Facebook&#39;s founder and CEO] has said, we made some mistakes in the launch, but we think we&#39;ve gotten Beacon to a very good point. We think users will have a great deal of comfort with how they share or don&#39;t share -- based on their own preferences -- actions on third-party Web sites off Facebook.IDGNS: Mark Zuckerberg has indicated in recent interviews that Facebook continues to work on and refine Beacon to further address lingering privacy concerns. Is that your understanding?Kelly: Yes, we learn a lot from user feedback and are constantly working to make the site more effective for our users.IDGNS: Could you articulate the importance of the bill that&#160;New York&#39;s Attorney General Andrew Cuomo and state legislative leaders are pushing and that Facebook, among others, is backing?Kelly: It&#39;s very important because it allows us to have unique identifiers that focus on sex offenders that we want to exclude from our site. We&#39;ve been asking for this type of help from Attorney General Cuomo and some of the other attorneys general. State legislatures are listening right now and trying to make it required that when people register as sex offenders, they record any Internet and online IDs [they have] and to make it a crime to access the Internet using anything besides those identifiers. This is a big assistance to us because it lets us easily check if anybody is trying to sign up with those addresses.IDGNS: How effective is that, considering you can get an e-mail address anytime without any verification as to who you are? Isn&#39;t this a cat-and-mouse game?Kelly: This is where the social factor of Facebook&#39;s real-name culture comes in and the privacy controls that we have. Those are very effective in protecting people from those who might attempt to misrepresent themselves. But we also want to make sure that anyone who would do our users harm is easily excluded, and this bill will help with that quite a bit.IDGNS: How feasible is it to come up with a tool or technology that lets social-networking site operators verify people&#39;s ages, in particular to identify -- and thus more closely protect -- underage users?Kelly: You can have effective indicators of whether or not someone is actually a member of a community, like a high school. Facebook has always had technology to try to determine whether someone is a member of a network or not and has restricted access to their information based on that. That has a great effect in pushing towards a type of proxy age verification. It&#39;s not perfect, though, and a lot of the discussions of age verification have focused on attempting perfection in determining whether or not someone is of a certain age, and that type of perfection can&#39;t be legislated effectively.IDGNS: A couple of weeks ago, MySpace and almost all state attorneys general announced an initiative outlining safety guidelines for social networking sites. Is that something Facebook plans to sign on to?Kelly: That agreement substantially reflected an agreement we had previously reached with Attorney General Cuomo, and we&#39;re very glad that MySpace has stepped up in this effort. We think that going forward, there will be a variety of principles agreed upon among certain leading Internet sites.IDGNS: Is it fair to say that the relationship between U.S. state attorneys general and social networking companies has significantly improved in recent months? It used to be quite adversarial and contentious.Kelly: At Facebook, we&#39;ve always tried to maintain a very open and honest dialogue with all the attorneys general and law enforcement agencies, and I think we&#39;re getting to a very good point with these law enforcement agencies and the industry in a broader way.IDGNS: How realistic is it to expect a site like Facebook, which has about 60 million active users, to properly monitor what so many people are doing to prevent inappropriate or illegal behavior?Kelly: We use very sophisticated social designs in terms of limiting access to people&#39;s information based on networks that they share in their real-world lives, and further, we use technology to look for anomalous behavior, things that may be concerning. It helps to keep our users safer and also to prevent spam and to create a more comfortable environment for our users. We have a pretty large customer service team that deals with both reports and with the potentially anomalous behavior highlighted by the technology.IDGNS: Have you improved your response times when members report complaints about content or actions on the site? That seemed to be a big complaint Attorney General Cuomo&#39;s office had with Facebook at some point.Kelly: Yes, absolutely.IDGNS: Does Facebook do enough to make sure its average member understands how to manage the very granular privacy settings you offer?Kelly: I think the average Facebook user understands very well that we take privacy extraordinarily seriously. There&#39;s always a balance to be struck between the ease of use and completeness in providing privacy control. We try to strike that balance very well, but we always listen to user feedback about that in terms of how we give them more control over what information they share and with whom.IDGNS: How much monitoring do you do of, say, photos or videos uploaded to the site? Do those go through automated screening, or do you depend more on members manually flagging stuff they see?Kelly: Most of the automated tools we&#39;ve tested in terms of recognizing inappropriate images and things like that are ineffective. We&#39;ve found that users are some of the best reporters on that, and our reporting infrastructure is extraordinarily effective in removing inappropriate content quickly and in holding those users who attempt to post them responsible by cutting off their account.IDGNS: As chief privacy officer, what are some of your goals for this year?Kelly: As the site and the Internet as a whole evolve, we want to continue giving people a great deal of control over what personal information they share and with whom. We want to continue to reflect the social graph very accurately, and privacy is a critical part of that, so we&#39;ll continue to bake it into the design of the site and provide people with the most effective privacy controls on the Internet.
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Hitwise&#8217;s Bill Tancer recently posted about the distribution of Google&#8217;s traffic across its many properties. As you might expect and has been historically true, that distribution is dominated by search.  Right now, Google owns the &#8220;brand&#8221; in search. But Yahoo and Microsoft have more &#8220;diversified&#8221; traffic across multiple properties. Without some more effort and &#8212; dare I [...]
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To be, or not to be: Now Facebook users can decide.
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Rumors are floating that the Viacom-owned brand has a standalone social networking property in the works. But it's murky. Really murky.
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There's a fascinating debate today going on about Scoble and his Facebook data. Here's the story so far. Plaxo, on behalf of Scoble, ran a screen scraper on his Facebook account to download information about at least some of his Facebook friends. Facebook detected the scraper and turned off his account, with an email explaining that he had violated their terms of service. The debate: Who is right -- Scoble or Facebook? While there are certainly arguments that Facebook has some rightness, most of it, imho, is with Scoble. Sure, some of the data may "belong" to his friends, like their birthday and mail address. Technically of course the data doesn't belong to anyone, it's data about them, and many organizations have this data. Are bloggers really saying that organizations have more rights than people? Isn't blogging all about a level playing field? My bank knows my birthday and my email address. Why shouldn't Scoble? (Maybe he shouldn't.) Scoble called a few minutes ago. I asked what the consensus was. He said it was about 70 percent in his favor, 30 percent in Facebook's. I think we can win over the 30 percent by saying that there should be a system whereby people can decide how much information they want to share with Scoble, or people like Scoble, or me, or people like me, or BofA or the DEA, KGB or CIA. Further, that system is not Facebook, unless they change.  Now, I think there's a pretty good chance that Facebook will change and give Scoble his data and turn his account back on. I think Facebook wants to give us access to our data, but if they just turned the feature on, there would be a shitstorm, kind of like the one that's raging right now. Except this time Facebook has defenders, which they must find refreshing, because every time there's been a shitstorm around Facebook they've always been seen as 100 percent evil by most people. (Not by me, btw.) Maybe they're getting smart there over at Facebook. Maybe they will relent, kind of admit they were wrong, and secretly be happy that they got to open their network up some more.  However, if Facebook doesn't open up and allow people a system to say who can access what information, we still have to create that system somehow. Google could have done it, but they didn't. Same with Yahoo or Microsoft. These companies don't want to empower the users, but if they studied history, they'd see that the evolution of computers always comes in fits and starts. A period when the technology is new and people are snowed by the companies and let them have full control. Gradually people understand what's going on, and figure out they're being screwed but they accept it. And then explosively the whole thing disintegrates in a new layer of technology.  It's a big effin loop we're in. One of these times around one of the companies that feels (incorrectly) that they have a lock on their users, will voluntarily give it up and be a leader in Generation N+1. I've never seen it happen, but in theory I think it could.  In other words, Apple and Microsoft could have invented the web instead of TBL. DEC and Data General could have invented the personal computer instead of Apple and Microsoft (I know this is a simplification, there were lots of individuals and small companies that did it.) And IBM could have invented the minicomputer instead of DEC and Data General. And btw, the NY Times and CNN could have invented blogging and RSS.  So Facebook has the opportunity to be a crossover company, part of the next generation -- or a last gasp of the generation that's about to run out of gas. It's their choice. And it's fitting somehow that Scoble is the poster child for users in this cycle.
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Another set-to over social networking is centered on Google this week, as users testing the "share" feature in Google Reader find they're sharing a lot more widely than they might have wished to do. Atlas-like, Google shrugged, but says it may make minor tweaks at some point.