The new iPhone has been officially outed and details of the next phone from Apple have been shared by Steve Jobs at the WWDC. The phone is pretty much the same as the prototype that walked into a bar recently (but failed to walk out). Jobs shared all the details about the iPhone 4, and made a case for this being the best iPhone ever. He’s right about that, but having just purchased the Sprint EVO 4G I am now even happier about my purchase than before the iPhone 4 announcement. Here’s how the two phones stack up against one another.
Hardware
Software
It may seem like I’ve stacked the deck against the iPhone, and perhaps so. I do believe the iPhone 4 is a sweet smartphone, and it has the full Apple ecosystem behind it, which is powerful stuff. I also believe that the Sprint EVO 4G is the most advanced smartphone hardware available — that high-res iPhone screen aside –and it can certainly hold its own in this head-to-head comparison.
Related research on GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Will Metered Mobile Data Slow the App Market’s Growth?
In Cloud Market, Arming David May Be the Way to Take Down Goliath http://bit.ly/9dXDAF
Since the beginning, a big question about cloud computing is how the ecosystem will evolve. Will there be only a handful of superpowers (e.g, Amazon, Google and Microsoft) that possess the knowledge and money to operate at a large scale, or, will there be dozens of providers in the mix, specializing in dozens of different infrastructural areas and vertical markets? Finally, as mainstream providers have begun segregating into the IaaS and PaaS camps, it seems we’re getting close to an answer.
Engine Yard provides a prime example of how the market might play out. The company already hosted its Ruby on Rails PaaS offering, AppCloud, on Amazon Web Services, but last week it partnered with Terremark to roll out its enterprise-grade xCloud offering. The benefits it gets from each provider are passed on to customers, along with prices to match. Of course, Engine Yard isn’t the first specialty cloud provider to rely on the big boys for infrastructure.
As I discuss in my weekly column at GigaOM Pro, this seems to be the direction the market is moving; large IaaS providers — such as Amazon and Terremark — could end up serving as arms dealers for cloud specialists like Engine Yard. As IT consumers begin demanding increased automation of PaaS, and as demand for SaaS applications spreads, providers of these services will need infrastructure to house them, and large providers have plenty to sell.
I’ve been adamant recently that AWS, in particular, needs to offer its own PaaS to compete with growing cloud competition from IT goliaths like Google, Microsoft and, to a lesser degree, Salesforce.com, but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the case. If Amazon can undermine those companies by arming their competitors — not to mention any and every other flavor of cloud service — with infrastructure, maybe that’s profit enough.
When all is said and done, Google, Microsoft and Salesforce.com might be battling it out for PaaS (and SaaS) dollars against a whole slew of smaller providers operating within the infrastructural confines of AWS, Rackspace, Terremark and Savvis. I’m not making a prediction, but this does seem like a possibility.
Read the GigaOM Pro post here. Also, plan to attend Structure 2010 or watch the live stream to hear a lot more about the cloud market from thought leaders at the vendor, provider and user levels.
In the last two months, a controversy has broken out between the startup of the moment, Twitter, and its ecosystem. Some of its actions — such as acquiring Tweetie (a mobile client that has since been rebranded as Twitter for the iPhone), coupled with its recent decision to impose limitations on companies building ad-related businesses on Twitter — have thrown everyone into a tizzy.
Dozens of tiny startups that formed specifically to leverage the Twitter platform are now wondering if they’ll be able to get anyone to fund their dreams. Chris Dixon, a New York-based angel investor and founder of VC fund Founder Collective, has been among the most outspoken about Twitter’s actions. “Twitter is like a drunk guy with an uzi killing partners left and right,” he recently tweeted. “Expect investment in ecosystem to drop significantly.”
“A bunch of investors have told me recently there is no way they’d invest in Twitter ecosystem now,” he later added. To which Twitter COO Dick Costolo responded by saying, “I’m hearing precisely the opposite. Fortunately, time will soon tell which of us is getting bad information.”
Hot or Not?
Upon seeing this exchange, I emailed a dozen top investors — angels, super angels and early-stage venture capital investors — to get their take. Understandably, they agreed to respond on the condition that they remain anonymous. Interestingly, their perspectives all fell somewhere between Costolo’s and that of Dixon.
Many of them, who had themselves invested in Twitter-related startups, said they were stepping back from the Twitter ecosystem, even if only momentarily. They said that while they understood some of the onetime shifts that Twitter has made, and the necessity for the company to make money, its recent moves had given them reason to pause.
Most said they were no longer interested in talking to pure-play Twitter startups. (Fred Wilson, an investor in Twitter itself, made clear in one of his recent blog posts that you can’t just develop stop-gap products for the company’s service because Twitter will end up filling those holes.) However, there is still interest in startups that are using Twitter as a broad distribution platform and as part of an overall growth strategy.
Here are some of their other comments:
There may well be opportunities in the current Twitter ecosystem, but investors will need to be even more vigilant about filtering deals.
Twitter is a small company that can’t do much on its own, so there’s still room for developers.
Twitter doesn’t have much of a business ecosystem to support venture returns (in the near term.)
Twitter is more of a broad distribution platform for customer acquisition than an investment platform.
One needs to wait until Twitter becomes profitable before investing in its ecosystem since that’s the point at which the company will likely embrace it.
The House Always Wins
I’ve remained fairly ambivalent through this whole controversy — mostly because the gray in my hair tells me that the economic interests of platform owners and the people who develop for them are almost never in sync. So from my perspective, those who invest in single-platform companies deserve their fate. I was equally hard on those that focused their investments solely on the Facebook platform, too.
Whether it’s Google, Apple, Intel, Microsoft or even Sony (Playstation), platform owners almost always end up going home with 60-70 percent of the total profits. From that perspective, what Twitter is doing isn’t so out of step — even though Twitter and its ecosystem are nowhere close to being a profit machine.
Historically, developers have had much less control over their destiny than platform owners. Take Facebook. It’s played the developer community like a fiddle with its recent actions (and ad-hoc changes). And platform owners always play favorites. eBay picked PayPal, Intel had Dell, Facebook chose Zynga — that’s just how the dice rolls.
When 140 Characters Aren’t Enough
If there’s one criticism I have about Twitter, it’s that it’s failed to be clear in its communications with the developer community. The company doesn’t have a business ecosystem yet, so until it does, it needs to nurture its developer ecosystem. In particular, it needs a way to encourage developers to embed Twitter into their products.
In order to do so, Twitter needs to acknowledge that it’s not a media company and instead see itself as the activity stream for the web, one that is inherently open, portable and malleable. Its uniqueness lies in its ability to become the messaging bus for the new, almost real-time Internet.
If it can do that, then it will be able to take on Facebook in a far more meaningful manner than it is currently. Facebook is working hard to spread its social tentacles across the web — the only way Twitter can counter that effort is by using the best weapons in its arsenal, namely a healthy and happy developer ecosystem.
Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d):
Lessons from Twitter: How to Play Nice With Ecosystem Partners
As Twitter Develops, Developers Quiver in Fear
Android Could Get Audible App Before iPhone http://bit.ly/9paPTP
Amazon's audio book provider Audible.com is testing an app for the Android platform. With a target date of "Summer 2010" the company will likely land its popular service on Android before it does on the iPhone. The app will allow subscribers to participate in the Audible ecosystem beyond simply listening to the audio files; a lightweight social network, accomplishment badges, analytics concerning your listening habits and text content all appear to be supported. It might seem unnecessary for the company to build a dedicated Audible app - but there's actually some very good reasons to.
Breon Nagy gained beta tester access to the app and posted screenshots today on his site DroidDog.
Sponsor
Amazon acquired Audible.com for $300 million in 2008. The service charges a monthly subscription fee, sells DRM-protected audio books and provides substantial financial support for the larger community of free podcasts on the web through advertising.
Audible files are published using the RSuite Content Management System, which allows the company to append more than 100 different fields of metadata to each file. That much metadata offers opportunities for cross referencing various fields and other data sets, such as social activity, meaning that an Audible app could offer incredibly rich functionality. In other words, there is reason for a dedicated app to be built.
Android screenshots below from DroidDog, where there are more posted as well.
The Federal Trade Commission has been nosing around how to save journalism and in its just-posted “staff discussion draft” on “potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism,” it makes its bias clear: The FTC defines journalism as what newspapers do and aligns itself with protecting the old power structure of media.
If the FTC truly wanted to reinvent journalism, the agency would instead align itself with journalism’s disruptors. But there’s none of that here. The clearest evidence: the word “blog” is used but once in 35 pages of text and then only parenthetically as an example of buying ads on topical sites (“e.g., a soccer blog…”); otherwise, it’s only a footnote. The only mention of investing in technology — the agent of disruption — comes on the 35th page (suggesting R&D for tools such as “improved electronic note-taking”). There’s not a hint of seeing a new ecosystem of news emerge – the ecosystem we study and support at CUNY — except as the entry of nonprofit entities that, by their existence, give up on the hope the market will sustain news.
If the FTC truly wanted to rethink journalism and its new opportunities and new value in our democracy, it would have written this document from the perspective of the people it is supposed to represent: the citizens, examining how we can benefit from news that is newly opened to the opportunity of collaboration and greater relevance. Instead, the document is written wholly from the perspective of the companies and institutions of the industry.
The document, like good government work, does a superb job of trying very hard to say very little. From its hearings and research, the staff outlines proposals I find frightening, but many of them as politically absurd as they are impossible — e.g., what I’ll dub the iPad tax to put a 5% surcharge on consumer electronics to raise $4 billion for public funding of news — and the document doesn’t endorse them.
Still, it’s the document’s perspective that I find essentially corrupt: one old power structure circling its wagons around another. Change? That’s something to be resisted or thwarted, not embraced and enabled. The FTC’s mission in this administration of change — its justification for holding these hearings and doing this work — is to foster competition. Well, the internet is creating new competition in news for the first time since 1950 and the introduction of TV. But the commission focuses solely on newspapers, apologizing that it ignores broadcast — but not even apologizing for ignoring the new ecosystem of news that blogs and technology represent.
“This document will use the perspective of newspapers to exemplify the issues facing journalism as a whole,” the FTC says. And later: “[N]ewspapers have not yet found a new, sustainable business model, and there is reason for concern that such a business model may not emerge. Therefore, it is not too soon to start considering policiies that might encourage innovations to help support journalism into the future.” That is, to support newspapers’ survival. There’s the problem.
Among the ideas the FTC presents:
* “Additional intellectual property rights to support claims against news aggregators.” The document even takes on the language of Rupert Murdoch and company describing aggregators as “parasitic.” It espouses their perspective, that search engines and aggregators “use” content when, from my perspective, such use promotes and adds value to that content (and we’ll soon see how Murdoch’s properties do without it). The FTC doesn’t broach the concept of the link economy and the value and distribution created by aggregators — not to mention (and they don’t) that created by recommendations from readers via Twitter and Facebook (neither word appears).
The FTC looks at extending copyright and corralling fair use and also outlines the dangers, ending up with no recommendation, thank goodness. It also looks at proposals to extend the “hot news” doctrine of a 1918 court case by the Associated Press but doesn’t begin to grapple with the definition of hot (Tom Glocer of Reuters says his news has its highest value in its first three miliseconds) and it does acknowledge that news organizations “routinely borrow from each other.” Rip ‘n’ read, it’s called.
What disturbs me most in this section is that the FTC frets about “difficult line-drawing being proprietary facts and those in the public domain.” Proprietary facts? Is it starting down a road of trying to enable someone to own a fact the way the patent office lets someone own a method or our DNA? Good God, that’s dangerous.
* Antitrust exemptions. The FTC looks at allowing news organizations to collude to set prices to consumers and with aggregators. Isn’t that the precise opposite of what an agency charged with protecting competition for the benefit of customers should be considering? Shouldn’t the FTC recoil in horror at such sanctioned antitrust to protect incumbents’ price advantages? Not here.
* Government subsidies. After saluting the history of government subsidies for the press — namely, postal discounts, legal notice publication, assorted tax breaks, and funds for public broadcasting — the agency looks at other ideas: a journalism AmeriCorps paying journalists; increased funding for public broadcasting; a national fund for local news suggested in Columbia’s report on journalism; a tax credit for employing journalists; citizen news vouchers (a la campaign checkoff); grants to universities for reporting. It also looks at increasing the present postal subsidy (which would only further bankrupt the dying postal service in the service of dying publications); using Voice of America and Radio Free Europe content (aka propaganda) in the U.S.; and enabling the SBA to help nonprofits.
* Taxes. At least the FTC acknowledges that somebody’d have to pay for all this. In one section, the FTC looks at licensing the news: having ISPs levy a fee on us that the government then dolls out to its selected news purveyors — call that the internet tax. It’snothing but a tax and it would support incumbents surely. In another section, it examines the aforementioned iPad tax; a tax on the broadcast spectrum; a spectrum auction tax; a tax on ISPs and cell phones; and a tax on advertising (brilliant: taking a cut of the last support of news in America).
* New tax status. The document spends much space looking at ways to make journalism a tax-exempt activity and suggests the IRS should change its regulations to enable that. It also looks at changing tax law to enable hybrid corporations (“benefit” and “flexible purpose” corporations that can judge success on serving a mission and not just maximizing profits) as well as L3Cs.
* Finally, the document looks at the one thing that should be in its purview as a government agency: getting government to make its information open and accessible to view and analyze. Well, amen to that.
I’m quoted in the document from my testimony saying that I am “optimistic to a fault about the future of news and journalism. The barrier to entry into media has never been lower…. But what we do need is a level playing field.” And in a footnote: “If you’re talking about surviving, you’re talking about the perspective of the old, legacy players who had a decade and a half to get their act together, and they didn’t The future of journalism is not institutional, we now know, it is entrepreneurial.”
But this document does nothing to enable that entrepreneurial future. If you want to give somebody tax breaks — and I wouldn’t — give them to those who invest in innovation — whether as disruptors from the outside or as visionaries from the inside. I certainly would not change laws to favor incumbents over those innovators. I see no reason to provide tax subsidies to support an activity that is now a hundredfold more efficient than it used to be. Rather than restricting the flow of information by making it proprietary, I’d argue that it is in the interest of democracy to make it yet freer.
The real problem I see here, again, is the alignment of the legacy institutions of media and government. Here, the internet is not the salvation of news, journalism, and democracy. It’s the other side.
The real advice I gave the FTC is not quoted in the document. It’s this: Get off our lawn.
This post is reprinted from Jeff Jarvis's blog, BuzzMachine.
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The Federal Trade Commission has been nosing around how to save journalism and in its just-posted “staff discussion draft” on “potential policy recommendations to support the reinvention of journalism,” it makes its bias clear: The FTC defines journalism as what newspapers do and aligns itself with protecting the old power structure of media.
If the FTC truly wanted to reinvent journalism, the agency would instead align itself with journalism’s disruptors. But there’s none of that here. The clearest evidence: the word “blog” is used but once in 35 pages of text and then only parenthetically as an example of buying ads on topical sites (“e.g., a soccer blog…”); otherwise, it’s only a footnote. The only mention of investing in technology — the agent of disruption — comes on the 35th page (suggesting R&D for tools such as “improved electronic note-taking”). There’s not a hint of seeing a new ecosystem of news emerge – the ecosystem we study and support at CUNY — except as the entry of nonprofit entities that, by their existence, give up on the hope the market will sustain news.
If the FTC truly wanted to rethink journalism and its new opportunities and new value in our democracy, it would have written this document from the perspective of the people it is supposed to represent: the citizens, examining how we can benefit from news that is newly opened to the opportunity of collaboration and greater relevance. Instead, the document is written wholly from the perspective of the companies and institutions of the industry.
The document, like good government work, does a superb job of trying very hard to say very little. From its hearings and research, the staff outlines proposals I find frightening, but many of them as politically absurd as they are impossible — e.g., what I’ll dub the iPad tax to put a 5% surcharge on consumer electronics to raise $4 billion for public funding of news — and the document doesn’t endorse them.
Still, it’s the document’s perspective that I find essentially corrupt: one old power structure circling its wagons around another. Change? That’s something to be resisted or thwarted, not embraced and enabled. The FTC’s mission in this administration of change — its justification for holding these hearings and doing this work — is to foster competition. Well, the internet is creating new competition in news for the first time since 1950 and the introduction of TV. But the commission focuses solely on newspapers, apologizing that it ignores broadcast — but not even apologizing for ignoring the new ecosystem of news that blogs and technology represent.
“This document will use the perspective of newspapers to exemplify the issues facing journalism as a whole,” the FTC says. And later: “[N]ewspapers have not yet found a new, sustainable business model, and there is reason for concern that such a business model may not emerge. Therefore, it is not too soon to start considering policiies that might encourage innovations to help support journalism into the future.” That is, to support newspapers’ survival. There’s the problem.
Among the ideas the FTC presents:
* “Additional intellectual property rights to support claims against news aggregators.” The document even takes on the language of Rupert Murdoch and company describing aggregators as “parasitic.” It espouses their perspective, that search engines and aggregators “use” content when, from my perspective, such use promotes and adds value to that content (and we’ll soon see how Murdoch’s properties do without it). The FTC doesn’t broach the concept of the link economy and the value and distribution created by aggregators — not to mention (and they don’t) that created by recommendations from readers via Twitter and Facebook (neither word appears).
The FTC looks at extending copyright and corralling fair use and also outlines the dangers, ending up with no recommendation, thank goodness. It also looks at proposals to extend the “hot news” doctrine of a 1918 court case by the Associated Press but doesn’t begin to grapple with the definition of hot (Tom Glocer of Reuters says his news has its highest value in its first three miliseconds) and it does acknowledge that news organizations “routinely borrow from each other.” Rip ‘n’ read, it’s called.
What disturbs me most in this section is that the FTC frets about “difficult line-drawing being proprietary facts and those in the public domain.” Proprietary facts? Is it starting down a road of trying to enable someone to own a fact the way the patent office lets someone own a method or our DNA? Good God, that’s dangerous.
* Antitrust exemptions. The FTC looks at allowing news organizations to collude to set prices to consumers and with aggregators. Isn’t that the precise opposite of what an agency charged with protecting competition for the benefit of customers should be considering? Shouldn’t the FTC recoil in horror at such sanctioned antitrust to protect incumbents’ price advantages? Not here.
* Government subsidies. After saluting the history of government subsidies for the press — namely, postal discounts, legal notice publication, assorted tax breaks, and funds for public broadcasting — the agency looks at other ideas: a journalism AmeriCorps paying journalists; increased funding for public broadcasting; a national fund for local news suggested in Columbia’s report on journalism; a tax credit for employing journalists; citizen news vouchers (a la campaign checkoff); grants to universities for reporting. It also looks at increasing the present postal subsidy (which would only further bankrupt the dying postal service in the service of dying publications); using Voice of America and Radio Free Europe content (aka propaganda) in the U.S.; and enabling the SBA to help nonprofits.
* Taxes. At least the FTC acknowledges that somebody’d have to pay for all this. In one section, the FTC looks at licensing the news: having ISPs levy a fee on us that the government then dolls out to its selected news purveyors — call that the internet tax. It’snothing but a tax and it would support incumbents surely. In another section, it examines the aforementioned iPad tax; a tax on the broadcast spectrum; a spectrum auction tax; a tax on ISPs and cell phones; and a tax on advertising (brilliant: taking a cut of the last support of news in America).
* New tax status. The document spends much space looking at ways to make journalism a tax-exempt activity and suggests the IRS should change its regulations to enable that. It also looks at changing tax law to enable hybrid corporations (“benefit” and “flexible purpose” corporations that can judge success on serving a mission and not just maximizing profits) as well as L3Cs.
* Finally, the document looks at the one thing that should be in its purview as a government agency: getting government to make its information open and accessible to view and analyze. Well, amen to that.
I’m quoted in the document from my testimony saying that I am “optimistic to a fault about the future of news and journalism. The barrier to entry into media has never been lower…. But what we do need is a level playing field.” And in a footnote: “If you’re talking about surviving, you’re talking about the perspective of the old, legacy players who had a decade and a half to get their act together, and they didn’t The future of journalism is not institutional, we now know, it is entrepreneurial.”
But this document does nothing to enable that entrepreneurial future. If you want to give somebody tax breaks — and I wouldn’t — give them to those who invest in innovation — whether as disruptors from the outside or as visionaries from the inside. I certainly would not change laws to favor incumbents over those innovators. I see no reason to provide tax subsidies to support an activity that is now a hundredfold more efficient than it used to be. Rather than restricting the flow of information by making it proprietary, I’d argue that it is in the interest of democracy to make it yet freer.
The real problem I see here, again, is the alignment of the legacy institutions of media and government. Here, the internet is not the salvation of news, journalism, and democracy. It’s the other side.
The real advice I gave the FTC is not quoted in the document. It’s this: Get off our lawn.
In an interesting nugget of Friday afternoon news, Michael Arrington of TechCrunch has posted an article featuring a preview of the upcoming fourth version of the social news site Digg. Founder Kevin Rose has published a glorious 1080p video to YouTube aimed at explaining the new features to publishers. Among the most interesting features is the inclusion of social network contacts into the Digg ecosystem, as well as the ability for publishers to auto-publish stories to Digg via an RSS feed.
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Just like when joining most Web services these days, users will be asked to search their Facebook and Twitter accounts (among others) to follow friends and contacts via Digg. The Digg homepage will then default to a page consisting entirely of stories dugg by the users they choose to follow. When browsing articles either on the social "My News" section, or on the more traditional "Top News" tab, users will be able to see which stories their friends have dugg, as well as view their friends' comments directly in-line with the story.
Rose says these new features play into the hands of publishers because the viral aspect of sharing stories with friends will help stories achieve higher digg counts. If one person diggs a story, it shows up on the homepages of their followers, and if they digg it, the process continues. To make the process of getting articles online even simpler, publishers can now claim their RSS feeds and automatically publish their content on Digg without having to visit the site.
These changes and additions may be just what the doctor ordered for Digg which has had to continually delay these updates. Personally the preview looks pretty slick, and may actually bring me back to using Digg on a more regular basis. Check our Rose's video below and let us know what you think in the comments.
Discuss
iPhone Dropped in Toilet? There's an App for That http://bit.ly/cGnRaV
Starting June 6th, iPhone purchasers will be able to insure their precious devices through AT&T for just $13.99 a month, according to documents leaked to Boy Genius Report today. The insurance, which is purchased through the AppStore, intends to counter-act the pain and suffering caused by those "whoopsie", butterfingers-induced moments that send iPhones to an early grave on hard pavement or, even worse, in a toilet. The documents, which are either real or extremely high quality fabrications, also back up the assumption that Steve Jobs will be introducing the fourth generation iPhone June 7th at the WWDC keynote.
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For just under $170 a year, iPhone users can save themselves the trouble of paying several hundred dollars to replace their phone if they irrevocably damage it. However, the insurance plan also comes with a deductible that ranges from $99 to $199 depending on which iPhone you have. So if you buy a 32GB 3GS and break it a year later, the cost of a new one would be roughly $370, which is far better than the full price of $699, but still expensive.
The insurance plan apparently only applies to new purchases after June 6th, and must be activated within 30 days of purchase. To make the process simple, the insurance can be purchased through the phone via the AppStore, which will bill the credit card on file with Apple. AT&T was careful not to spill the beans on the upcoming fourth generation iPhone, and left out what the cost of the insurance plan might be for a new device.
So why is AT&T insuring the iPhone all of a sudden? According to the leaked documents, 16% of low scores from customer feed back are "attributable to customer dissatisfaction with insurance/warranty replacement options." While they certainly want to fight back against unsatisfied customers, AT&T is also likely offering this plan to help maintain customers in their ecosystem.
By making it cheaper to replace an iPhone, it's more likely that bereaved users will buy another iPhone, and more importantly, stay with AT&T. Just last week, AT&T hiked up their early termination fees for all smartphones all the way up to $325 dollars. Break your iPhone and think it's a great opportunity to leave the network at join Team Android on another network? Either pay AT&T $325 plus the costs of a new phone and contact elsewhere to leave, or slightly less (depending on how long you've had your phone) to replace your iPhone thanks to the new insurance policy.
What do you think of AT&T's new iPhone insurance? Will you buy it with your next iPhone purchase? Let us know what you think in the comments.
Photo by Flickr user magerleagues.
Discuss
Microsoft, in a move to bolster the sales and prestige of the Zune brand may dramatically cut the price of music that the service offers. As it stands Microsoft offers the ‘Zune Pass’ for $14.99 a month, a price point that is possibly too high.
Recognizing the weak position that Microsoft finds itself in, the company understands that it has to do something dramatic to boost its market share. Currently Microsoft controls 2% of the portable music player market. The company calls the market “challenging.”
Zune has never had an easy path, with a rough launch due to oddly colored players and a tooth and nail fight with iTunes over content supremacy, it has never been a hit with consumers. That has not stopped Microsoft from releasing excellent hardware and software for the brand. The Zune HD and the Zune music player are strong product offerings.
But that is not enough; Apple also offers a strong ecosystem and already has the users it wants, and that Microsoft lusts after. To attract them over to Zune Microsoft needs to do something that is more than matching Apple. Redmond needs to beat Cupertino at their own game. Enter the possible music price drop.
If Microsoft lowers the price of the Zune Pass or even individual tracks it might provide a different enough experience to attract new users.
Just how much of a price drop will be required is anyone’s guess. In terms of direct competition Apple has no answer to the Zune Pass, but other companies do. Rhapsody which offers a similar service recently cut their price to $10 from $15 a month. These cuts become problematic as a large percentage of the dollar value is earmarked for the labels, leaving skinny if non-existant profit margins behind.
Microsoft could decide to take the hit and lose money on the subscription price to boost device sales, but that is a risky game. Whatever Microsoft’s upcoming move, the company needs to make some noise or step aside. The time for experimentation is over.
At the Gluecon just now, Twitter’s Ryan Sarver announced that since their Chirp conference in mid April, the number of Twitter apps has increased from 100,000 to 140,000.
So since it’s been roughly 8 weeks since Chirp, that means that the Twitter app ecosystem is growing at about 5,000 apps per week. So much for the idea that developers might be getting turned off by Twitter’s acquisition of Tweetie and other moves.
Sarver made a few other interesting announcements, including that Twitter now has over 200 employees, and that “they don’t have any plans on making an app directory,” while specifically mentioning the third-party Twitter app store oneforty.
He also said that,”we hope that promoted tweets and other advertising models can help developers get paid too.” On search, he said, “discovery and search are big and complex enough that many companies can compete there, even if twitter works on it.” Regarding Twitter’s API, Sarver said, “”the APIs used to be very simple; now they are getting more complicated and we need to support them better.”
Regarding privacy, he said,”we were lucky; we stumbled onto ‘public be default’” and that Twitter has “a no resyndication” policy that supports privacy.
h/t Kevin Marks for his live tweeting at Gluecon.
Google made a number of announcements in the past week that are of interest to educators: opening Google Wave to the public and extending Google Voice accounts to students. But one announcement that didn't receive much press was its release of CloudCourse, the new internal learning platform.
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Built on Google's App Engine, CloudCourse is a course-scheduling tool, fully integrated with Google Calendar. CloudCourse also features approval processes, wait list management, as well as room and user profile information and can be further customized to sync the data with other internal systems.
Google hopes that by releasing this under an open-source license that it can "help developers who want to port or build enterprise applications on App Engine."
According to Irwin Boutoul, a software engineer at Google, "We actually didn't design this system with universities in mind - we designed it as a course scheduling tool for enterprises. Nevertheless, CloudCourse can certainly help school administrators, who most likely don't have the time or resources to worry about hardware hosting and dealing with traffic bursts like the ones that occur during class enrollment periods. We'd love to see universities pick up this platform and code additional features on top of it to make it more relevant to the higher education ecosystem. "
While course management is part of what makes a learning tool appealing, CloudCourse does not yet contain all the functionality that would make it an alternative to the other learning management systems available But as Katie Christo, an instructional technologist at the American International School in Chennai, India says - echoing the frustrations that many teachers have with these alternatives - "I would love something from Google. Moodle is still very basic, Blackboard is worse. It'd be nice to have something that is free, cleanly designed, and integrated with other solid programs."
And as the source code is open, and as more and more schools explore and embrace Google's Apps for Education, CloudCourse may become another part of the ed-tech arsenal.
Google Releases CloudCourse, an Open Source Learning Platform
- Rubin Sfadj
In an update about the state of the Twitter platform on their blog today, Twitter has slipped in a section devoted to the demise of paid tweet services. These include the likes of Ad.ly, Magpie, Sponsored Tweets, and others. Many Twitter users are probably rejoicing at this announcement as paid tweets have been a point of contention for quite some time. Other users, including myself, are anticipating the end of an income stream. Who is most concerned with this announcement? The companies that have built themselves on this concept of paid tweets. What will they do to survive?
As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user experience. It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem. For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly.
Why are we prohibiting these kinds of ads? First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. For example, a third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction.
Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. Twitter is uniquely dependent on and responsible for the long-term health and value of the platform. Accordingly, a necessary focus of Promoted Tweets is to explore ways to create value for our users. Third party ad networks may be optimized for near-term monetization at the expense of innovating or creating the best user experience. We believe it is our responsibility to encourage creative product development and to curb practices that compromise innovation.
To summarize, Twitter believes that the current crop of paid tweet services are short-sighted. They are not innovative and don’t really offer value to Twitter users. It’s easy to see why they may think so as most of these services are working off of the most obvious monetization strategy, charging advertisers to rent a user’s Twitter followers. Twitter also points out that these services are not necessarily concerned with the success of Twitter itself. They are simply focused on making a quick buck off of the popular microblogging service.
To be clear, Twitter is not simply placing a ban on any third-party making money from it, but are specifically concerned with the paid tweets model. They are not targeting applications or services that simply place ads around Twitter content. It will be interesting to see which services will be able to shift gears and innovate their way out of this. While it seems like all is lost, there is still room for success. For example, MyLikes already allows you to share sponsored likes via an embed code that you can place on any website.
Were you making money from paid tweets? How does this announcement effect you?
Editor’s Note: We consulted our staff writer/IP lawyer Latoicha Givens for a more in depth analysis of the situation and her conclusion was as follows:
“Basically Twitter can change any term or condition of the API rules/terms of service agreement as they see fit. When the developer becomes a Twitter API developer/user and they acknowledge they have read the Terms of Service Agreement, they are subject to the agreement.
The short and skinny. Twitter is going to roll out their Promoted Tweets Ad program very soon and they do not want to compete with third party ads. They need to gain some control over the advertising because they have to start making money. I am sure they want all the advertising to go through their program so they can become profitable.”
If you want to check out Twitter API Terms of Service Agreement check out the following link: http://dev.twitter.com/pages/api_terms
In a lengthy post, Twitter has just announced it will ban all third party ad platforms. This technically means the end of Ad.ly and the just launched (as in today at TechCrunch’s Disrupt) Tweetup.
Bear with us while we update this post with further info, the significant part of Twitter’s post is below:
As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user experience. It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem. For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly.
Why are we prohibiting these kinds of ads? First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. For example, a third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction.
Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. Twitter is uniquely dependent on and responsible for the long-term health and value of the platform. Accordingly, a necessary focus of Promoted Tweets is to explore ways to create value for our users. Third party ad networks may be optimized for near-term monetization at the expense of innovating or creating the best user experience. We believe it is our responsibility to encourage creative product development and to curb practices that compromise innovation.
This is clearly going to be devastating news to many a twitter ad platform. To address the concerns, twitter says:
We understand that for a few of these companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which they’ve invested time and money. We will continue to move as quickly as we can to deliver the Annotations capability to the market so that developers everywhere can create innovative new business solutions on the growing Twitter platform.
Remember twitter’s vision is to share ad revenues with its developer community. Clearly for companies like Ad.ly (who just sealed $5 million in funding) and Tweetup, they have their own ideas.
Tweetup’s concept of an “adsense for twitter” is actually a rather impressive one (in comparison to many other twiter ad ideas we’ve seen that is). It’s something which could potentially benefit users, publishers and twiter alike and if they haven’t already, twitter should be taking notice. Whether it decides to implement it themselves or possibly acquire the company from idealab, we shall see.
What is clear is that twitter is rapidly transforming the way people see its ‘platform’. While at one point twitter’s api was seen as something you could build anything on, since its acquisition of tweetie and now today’s announcement, its a very different place to be.
So how does twitter plan on maintaining innovation within its platform? The company notes three guiding principles:
1. We don’t seek to control what users tweet. And users own their own tweets.
2. We believe there are opportunities to sell ads, build vertical applications, provide breakthrough analytics, and more. Companies are selling real-time display ads or other kinds of mobile ads around the timelines on many Twitter clients, and we derive no explicit value from those ads. That’s fine. We imagine there will be all sorts of other third-party monetization engines that crop up in the vicinity of the timeline.
3. We don’t believe we always need to participate in the myriad ways in which other companies monetize the network.
Bear with us, we’re updating.
Enduring Value
When we discuss the future of Twitter, we focus on the mechanisms through which we can build a platform of enduring value. The three mechanisms most important to building such a platform are architecting for extensibility, providing a robust API to the platform’s functionality, and ensuring the long-term health and value of the user experience.
The purpose of this post is to explain what we are building, how we will sustain the company and ecosystem, and where we believe there will be great opportunities for the vast ecosystem of partners.
Twitter is an open, real-time introduction and information service. On a daily basis we introduce millions to interesting people, trends, content, URLs, organizations, lists, companies, products and services. These introductions result in the formation of a dynamic real-time interest graph. At any given moment, the vast network of connections on Twitter paints a picture of a universe of interests. We follow those people, organizations, services, and other users that interest us, and in turn, others follow us.
To foster this real-time open information platform, we provide a short-format publish/subscribe network and access points to that network such as www.twitter.com, m.twitter.com and several Twitter-branded mobile clients for iPhone, BlackBerry, and Android devices. We also provide a complete API into the functions of the network so that others may create access points. We manage the integrity and relevance of the content in the network in the form of the timeline and we will continue to spend a great deal of time and money fostering user delight and satisfaction. Finally, we are responsible for the extensibility of the network to enable innovations that range from Annotations and Geo-Location to headers that can route support tickets for companies. There are over 100,000 applications leveraging the Twitter API, and we expect that to grow significantly with the expansion of the platform via Annotations in the coming months.
Our responsibilities extend from there. Twitter is responsible for the health, reliability, and scale of the network, Twitter-branded endpoints (SMS, a twitter client on the web and other most popular platforms, Twitter-branded widgets), a consistent user experience, and a sustaining revenue model for the platform. We will provide the best possible experience for each of these.
Ecosystem Clarity
We heard loud and clear at our Chirp Developer Conference last month that developers desire clarity—clarity about what we believe Twitter must provide, what Twitter looks to the ecosystem to provide, and where the lines, if any, are drawn. We have outlined above the services and responsibilities we will provide in the context of the platform. In order to provide further clarity to the ecosystem, we will also be specific about the boundaries we will draw in order to preserve the integrity, health, and value of the network.
We now employ over 200 people, and we plan to grow this investment as the opportunity demands. To sustain this investment, we have announced Promoted Tweets. These tweets will exist primarily in search and then in the timeline, but in a manner that preserves the integrity and relevance of the timeline. As we have announced, we will use innovative metrics like Resonance so that Promoted Tweets are only shown when they make sense for users and enhance the user experience.
As our primary concern is the long-term health and value of the network, we have and will continue to forgo near-term revenue opportunities in the service of carefully metering the impact of Promoted Tweets on the user experience. It is critical that the core experience of real-time introductions and information is protected for the user and with an eye toward long-term success for all advertisers, users and the Twitter ecosystem. For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly.
Why are we prohibiting these kinds of ads? First, third party ad networks are not necessarily looking to preserve the unique user experience Twitter has created. They may optimize for either market share or short-term revenue at the expense of the long-term health of the Twitter platform. For example, a third party ad network may seek to maximize ad impressions and click through rates even if it leads to a net decrease in Twitter use due to user dissatisfaction.
Secondly, the basis for building a lasting advertising network that benefits users should be innovation, not near-term monetization. Twitter is uniquely dependent on and responsible for the long-term health and value of the platform. Accordingly, a necessary focus of Promoted Tweets is to explore ways to create value for our users. Third party ad networks may be optimized for near-term monetization at the expense of innovating or creating the best user experience. We believe it is our responsibility to encourage creative product development and to curb practices that compromise innovation.
It is important to keep in mind that Twitter bears all the costs of maintaining the network, protecting the Tweet stream against spam, supporting user requests, and scaling the service. Indeed, Twitter will bear many of the support costs associated with any third-party paid Tweets, as Twitter receives support emails related to anything a user sees in a tweet stream. The third-party bears few of these costs by comparison.
Fostering Innovation
There has never been more opportunity for innovation on the Twitter platform than there is now. In order to continue to provide clarity, our guiding principles include:
1. We don't seek to control what users tweet. And users own their own tweets.
2. We believe there are opportunities to sell ads, build vertical applications, provide breakthrough analytics, and more. Companies are selling real-time display ads or other kinds of mobile ads around the timelines on many Twitter clients, and we derive no explicit value from those ads. That’s fine. We imagine there will be all sorts of other third-party monetization engines that crop up in the vicinity of the timeline.
3. We don’t believe we always need to participate in the myriad ways in which other companies monetize the network.
Platforms evolve. When Annotations ship, there are going to be many new business opportunities on the Twitter platform in addition to those currently available. We know that companies and entrepreneurs will create things with Annotations that we couldn’t have imagined. Companies will emerge that provide all manner of rich data and meta-data services around and in Tweets. Twitter clients could begin to differentiate on their ability to service different data-rich verticals like Finance or Entertainment. Media companies in the ecosystem can begin to incorporate rich tagging capabilities. Much has been written about the opportunities afforded by Annotations because those that understand the benefits of extensible architectures understand their power and potential.
We understand that for a few of these companies, the new Terms of Service prohibit activities in which they’ve invested time and money. We will continue to move as quickly as we can to deliver the Annotations capability to the market so that developers everywhere can create innovative new business solutions on the growing Twitter platform.
We hope that this clarity of purpose, focus, and roadmap helps point a clear way forward for the thousands of companies in the Twitter ecosystem.
Curious to see what this means for Ad.ly and MyLikes, others.
- Louis GrayThe Twitter Platform
- Gary Burd"For this reason, aside from Promoted Tweets, we will not allow any third party to inject paid tweets into a timeline on any service that leverages the Twitter API. We are updating our Terms of Service to articulate clearly what we mean by this statement, and we encourage you to read the updated API Terms of Service to be released shortly."
- Gary BurdTwitter bans 3rd party ad-platforms: http://bit.ly/azilHc
- Vincent van WylickThe Twitter Platform
- Sarah PerezBuried in this pleasant-sounding Twitter blog post is something huge... they're banning 3rd party advertising services! http://bit.ly/aXG8Ef
- Alister Cameron
At this week’s Google I/O Conference, the company carefully articulated its vision of the world. There’s Apple in one corner, carefully controlling its ecosystem, rejecting Flash, and conjuring images of an Orwellian Big Brother. As the “one man, one company, one device” (Vic Gundotra’s words) becomes more powerful, Google is trying to posit itself as the other choice. The more “open” choice. Whether or not you agree with Google’s goggles, it’s a very smart and well defined message, creating an us vs. them environment and reinforcing the mantra “Don’t be evil.”
This point of “openness” was driven home on Thursday, during the I/O keynote, when Gundotra and Co. unveiled the highly anticipated Google TV project. Unexpectedly (and to great effect), Schmidt took to the stage at the end to introduce Google TV partners, a panel of high power CEOs (Best Buy, Sony, Intel, Dish Network, Logitech, Adobe). Together, those companies represent a market capitalization of roughly $200 billion ($350 B when you add Google). Their attendance wasn’t really necessary— there was plenty of flash in the presentation (no pun intended)— but it punctuated Google’s message: Google is open, inclusive and powerful and we are definitely not an army of one. Let’s just say, I don’t think it was a coincidence that Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen was seated next to Schmidt.
Obviously, not every Google TV partner relishes the product’s rivalry with Apple TV, or the larger Google vs. Apple battle. Some of the CEOs seem simply convinced that Google TV will revolutionize the way consumers define “TV” and are excited by what it could mean for their bottom line. Regardles, here’s a closer look at the Google TV team and how it operates.
Sony will produce “Sony Internet TVs” and a set top box with a Blu-ray Disc drive. These products will have Google software and Intel technology built-in. The Sony Internet TV is part of the company’s new “Evolving TV” line— internet TVs that can “evolve” with new downloadable applications. This initiative could be the first of many Google-friendly Sony products, the company says they are looking into creating other Android-based “products for the home, mobile and personal product categories.” Release: USA Fall 2010.
Sony and Apple have been rivals for several years (i.e. Connect music store, e-reader, Vaio laptops). The company hopes to compete more aggressively against the iPad maker this year, with plans to expand its online media platform and mobile product line. CEO Howard Stringer sees open technology (like Google TV) as key to its success, in an interview with Nikkei Electronics Asia, he said “If we had gone with open technology from the start, I think we probably would have beaten Apple” (in music). (For more on Stringer, see our quick interview with Sony’s chief. Above.)
Adobe- Google TV will use the Android 2.1 operating system, Chrome browser, and yes, Flash 10.1 (which will be integrated into the Chrome browser). “Flash Player 10.1 will support hardware-accelerated video playback and deliver smooth, HD (1080p) quality video on Google TV devices,” Adobe’s Aditya Bansod said on the company’s official blog. Google TV provides the technical capability to run flash on sites, but it is up to the site to determine whether to enable content.
Adobe’s incentive to work with Google is clear. If you’ve been living in a hole for the last year, try this, or this, or this, or this.
Logitech will make set-top boxes, for user who want to use Google TV with other televisions. The Logitech’s set-top boxes will connect your TV through an HDMI port and a controller (which includes keyboard capabilities). According to reports, it will include 4 GB memory and Dolby 5.1 surround sound. “We’ll be making a variety of options available right away, including video calling and a variety of controllers – even a Logitech smart-phone app — and even more stuff we can’t talk about,” Logitech says on its site. To make the product work, you’ll need a TV with an HDMI input and a broadband internet connection. And “To take full advantage of the content search, you’ll need a satellite or cable set-top box with an HDMI output as well,” according to Logitech. At some point down the line, Logitech also plans to roll out a companion HDTV camera to enable video chat. Release: USA Fall 2010.
DISH Networks – According to DISH and Google TV, the DISH subscription will provide the most optimized experience for Google TV (in regards to content management). Some of the features on the Google TV home screen can only be unlocked with DISH. “Only DISH Network Google TV customers will be able to enjoy a unified search across TV, DVR and web; easily find related content; and manage their entire TV viewing experience,” Dish Network CEO Charlie Ergen said in a release. Release: USA Fall 2010, prices not yet announced.
DISH and Google have been working on this project for quite awhile. More than a year ago, the companies launched a beta trial with some 400 DISH subscribers.
Intel’s Atom CE4100 processor will be used in the Logitech and Sony products, to power Google TV. The chip promises “home theater quality A/V performance.”
Intel’s relationship with Apple is a bit complicated. Intel has been a major chip provider but the relationship has cooled somewhat, amid reports that Apple is flirting with rival AMD for future products. Apple seems to be slowly moving away from Intel (for example, introducing its own chip in the iPad), giving Intel extra reason to build on its relationship with Google.
Best Buy is the first, exclusive retailer for Google-TV devices in 2010. The Sony and Logitech devices will be available at Best Buy, starting in fall 2010.
As expected, Google TV was announced at this morning’s I/O keynote (here’s the video site). There’s so much to think about in this initiative. One strikes me as especially intriguing: This is a big boost for micro-niche video.
Clearly, a ton of development has gone into the overall notion. Some of the platform pieces are quite clever, including basing it on Android, the open-source operating system that is now running dozens of phones and other small devices. And what Google brings to the ecosystem in other ways will be a powerful incentive for many other participants.
Google seems to be focusing mostly on the value it sees in combining Hollywood with Google. Semi-ugh. To the extent that Google gets in bed with the copyright cartel, it becomes a partner to an industry that wants to impede progress, not make it.
So when Eric Schmidt was joined on stage by Sony CEO Howard Stringer at I/O, and when “content providers” like the NBA showed off what they want to do with this new system, I mostly shuddered at the prospect of DRM-laden crapola invading my life in new, annoying and ultimately dangerous ways. (DRM stands for “digital rights management,” but really means “digital restrictions management.”)
What I prefer to focus on, however, is another of the ecosystem’s more intriguing (for me) possibilities: microchannels of content that will be simple to create and watch — and much easier than in the past to monetize.
Micro-niche video has been around for a long time now. I can remember back in the late 1990s when sites like the now-defunct Pseudo offered a variety of narrowly tailored programming, and how much I relished the idea of combining the then-new DVR with the Internet and my personal tastes.
What Google is doing now is putting together a jigsaw puzzle that, if I understand what’s happening, could be one of the breakthroughs we’ve been waiting for. Here are the key pieces:
First, this is a serious and useful linking of the Web and TV. Google is working to create a reasonably seamless experience where we can use both to their best effect, with integrated search and more. It’s not the first thing of its kind, but it does seem to stretch the genre.
Second, Google brings with it an advertising marketplace. I can’t overstate how important this is. Niche content will have an instant way to find not just an audience but the advertising to help support it. (Now I see how Google really plans to make YouTube pay for itself, and then some.) The more niche the topic, the more the ads can be considered useful content as opposed to irrelevant annoyances.
Third, niches are sociable experiences if we want them to be. We love to talk about what we really know, or care about, with others who feel the same way.
The possibilities are almost infinite. I’d tune in to the Alpine Skiing Channel or the Acoustic Folk Music from the 1960s Channel or Civil War Channel or My Hometown Neighborhood Channel if they existed. And I’d participate in a social media conversation inside of them.
What could go wrong? Lots of things. Not least of those is a victory by the telecommunications carriers in their fight against what folks call network neutrality, the idea that we users of the Internet should decide what we want to see and do, rather than having the carriers decide what bits of information we get, if we get them.
Even worse with the wireless piece: Building great stuff into an operating system doesn’t guarantee you can use it if the carriers decide to limit your bandwidth, or any number of other control-freakish stuff they may try (in fairness, sometimes, to keep the networks running for people who want to, um, make phone calls or send low-bandwidth text messages).
But let’s focus on the potential: TV may be about to get a lot more interesting…
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Joi Ito.
Dan Gillmor is the director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. He’s also the author of the book We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, and previously was a columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. Gillmor blogs at Mediactive.com.
Guide to Google TV’s Ecosystem [Video] http://tcrn.ch/bn3Kej
[Direct Link]Five Services That Leverage Google Wave http://bit.ly/9wIQoz
Google Wave went public yesterday and became a part of the Google Apps ecosystem. With the news comes a number of companies that are using the API to develop integrations that bring new scope and capabilities for enterprise grade collaboration.
Salesforce.com and SAP are the latest companies to integrate Google Wave. But there are many more organizations using Google Wave as a platform shows that the real-time co-editing service has a recognized value to the enterprise world. Real-time is the name of the game these days. Google Wave provides a new window for companies looking to capitalize on the Google Apps platform.
Here are five services that we think are of interest.
Unawave builds task management and project management into Google Wave, providing a level of functionality to manage work and project teams. It has crowdsourcing elements that allows people to add videos or images, for instance, to give projects and tasks more context. A real-time dashboards gives insights into how work is progressing.
Process Wave comes out of the research done at the Hasso Plattner Institute. Plattner is the chairman of SAP and so it's of interest to see the institute develop a business process service that leverages Google Wave's co-editing capabilities. Process Wave is a collaborative diagram editor for Google Wave. It is designed to make the creation of diagrams a collaborative process.
Caseish is a Wave organizer, the premise being that with multiple Waves, people need a gadget to keep track of managing multiple business processes. This one also has ties to SAP. The developer created the service in light of the complexities in integrating SAP applications to monitor business processes. The result is a tool that uses a form to assign business value and other criteria. The gadget tracks the Waves so bug reports, for instance, can be monitored.
Process One has developed a server called WaveOne. The server sits on top of the the Process One instant messaging service. It is designed as a servive that allows people to collaborate in real-time on email or documents. It is an extension to the Proces One XMPP server.
Twilio uses the Google Wave API to build a robot extension called twiliobot that enables users to make and receive phone calls from inside Google Wave. Calls are recorded, transcribed, and posted back to the wave. Twilio is one of the veterans of the Google Wave platform, launching the service last year.
Sponsor
Five Services That Leverage Google Wave
- Ted Louie5 Services That Leverage Google Wave
- Eric Johnson5 Services That Leverage Google Wave
- Sarah Perez5 Services That Leverage Google Wave
- ryanShared by Bud
So, Google's plan is to offer things like SQL on apparently engine; it's just going to cost you. I think that's smart. It hits a developer pain point and gives them an on ramp. They'll still have scaling issues, but at the enterprise level, these issues often aren't as apparent
In case you weren’t paying attention, Google announced a few things yesterday. You have to admit, Google knows how to make announcements and they made a bunch. That link has a nice summary of most of the releases, and you can go to many of the major tech blogs to get a good feeling for how much of the Google ecosystem has changed.
My focus is on the developer related items, specifically my post regarding Google Apps Script and the updates for Google App Engine for Business. In my post, I talked about how Google was trying to win business customers that need small departmental applications:
You can connect to MySQL and build a custom user interface if you have the Premier Edition. There is also more integration with Google Docs. Does anyone remember how many applications were written using VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and Microsoft Access? What Google is trying to do is take that model and put it on the web.
With the new App Engine for Business, Google has now made the barrier of deploying to the web disappear. Two days ago you heard about the Apps Script changes, but you still had to get someone to publish the website. Yesterday you learned that Google wanted to be your new application host:
Just in case enterprise hosting was not enough, they decided to go after startups too. In a separate post that describes some basic updates to App Engine, they sneak in this nugget:
We’re also demoing a few upcoming features of App Engine at I/O as part of our sessions:
- Mapper API – A simple library for executing work in parallel over a large dataset, such as all your datastore entities or line-based data in a Blobstore blob.
- Channel API – The Channel API lets you build applications that can push content directly to your user’s browser (aka “Comet”). No more polling for updates!
Basically, the Channel API is adding push capabilities to your App Engine application without a huge amount of work. The Mapper API is a little different, and you would have to follow Google’s technology to understand what this means. Basically, a library that allows you to execute work in parallel over a large dataset is the high-level description of the MapReduce framework. So, it looks like everyone will be able to crunch data like Google in the near future.
These two posts really point to Google going after developers and the enterprise. Ad revenue may not grow forever, and Google seems to have learned from Microsoft that developers can be king-makers. If people build enough applications on App Engine, Google can slowly grow a massive revenue stream. They also give you a nice taste of the future with their App Engine roadmap. Take a look at the other features they are planning in the next six months:
If you look at this list, it screams enterprise support. SSL, background servers or daemons, backup and restore, server and application monitoring, and authentication. These are all the pieces that an enterprise would need. Do we need any more proof that Google is going after enterprise applications? Or do we need Ballmer to defect to Google just so he can yell “developers, developers, developers!”
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Facebook’s recent announcement of its Open Graph (an effort to map the Web’s content in social terms) and the manner in which it impacts privacy have been the subject of pointed debate for the past few weeks. While these developments will certainly raise questions among Facebook users, they’re also cause for concern for the other major stakeholders in this graph of the Web: content publishers.
More than 100,000 sites have signed up for at least a basic version of Facebook’s Open Graph — the “Like” button, which ties a user’s affinity for a given Web page to his or her profile on Facebook. The Open Graph is Facebook’s bold attempt to step beyond its own website and structure the Web by organizing both content and users’ behavior on third-party sites.
On the face of it, Facebook’s move is a welcome attempt to bring a sense of order to the chaotic manner in which the Web has expanded. For news organizations already grappling with a decline in their traditional business and a slowdown in online advertising, the lure of becoming Facebook-friendly is indeed high. But, does that mean publishers have no other option but to welcome Facebook with open arms? Already, Facebook is serving more ads than Yahoo. Are publishers in danger of becoming commoditized in a situation where Facebook builds a much stronger and larger advertising ecosystem than their traditional enemy, Google? These and many more questions should be top of mind for publishers.
Traditional publishers have been under significant pressure for a while, given the declining state of print. So most have been attempting to build a strong online presence that encourages engagement and the viral spread of their content. Meanwhile, online advertising has evolved beyond the display advertising offered in the Web’s early days, when content was mostly static. Going forward, advertising is set to shift so that it ties into conversations people are having (think product recommendations). It is precisely these conversations that Facebook has in its crosshairs. The opportunity to build a strong database of real human interactions around third-party-generated content is what Facebook is aiming for with its Open Graph.
To be fair to publishers, most of them have long realized the importance of a social web around their content and have over the years tried to add social elements. They started off by letting users email links to friends and add comments, then they added sharing features, and then they warmed up to using systems like Facebook or Twitter to encourage users to log in to their sites. Some content players, such as Bloomberg Businessweek and the New York Times, have gone one step ahead and even attempted to create a complete social service (Business Exchange & TimesPeople) on top of their content — but found it difficult to compete with established social networks not tied to a single website.
So there’s the dilemma: to Facebook or not to Facebook? Publishers feel a lot of pressure to embrace the next big thing. But as with every business decision, there are pros and cons.
Pros:
* Traffic. An obvious benefit: Facebook’s 400 million-plus users are an audience ready to consume, share, and possibly pay for content. (Facebook’s new Credits, while designed for use on Facebook.com, could easily be expanded to third-party websites.) For smaller publishers, adding a Like button is a highly cost-effective way of tapping into the social web.
* Revenue. Facebook is widely expected to launch an advertising network that will sell ads on partners using elements of its Open Graph.
* Engagement. Publishers already know users are far more likely to click on a link emailed to them by a friend. By instantly seeing which articles are popular among their Facebook friends, users are more likely to spend time with content — and time spent on websites is increasingly valued by advertisers over simpler metrics like pageviews.
Cons:
* Commoditization. Facebook’s Like button moves the conversation off the publisher’s site and sets up Facebook as an intermediary. Facebook offers only limited data about how users interact with a third-party site’s content on Facebook.com.
* Distraction. Publishers understand the content business. Learning the dynamics of the social web is a challenge outside their core competence and can distract from more important business.
* Dependence. Facebook’s infrastructure is a single point of failure. Look at the recent outage of Facebook’s search API, which Facebook representatives dismissed as a minor glitch. Such outages could have far more serious consequences as publishers intertwine their sites more closely with Facebook.
Facebook’s clearly doing something that appeals to publishers — otherwise, it wouldn’t have signed up 100,000 websites so quickly. But publishers — especially larger ones — need to be a bit more contemplative about embracing Facebook’s vision. Remember how thrilled they were when Google’s search engine started sending users their way? That enthusiasm faded as they realized how dependent they were becoming on Google-generated search traffic. With its Like button, Facebook aims to displace Google’s PageRank as the way content gets discovered on the Web. Publishers just need to make sure the graph doesn’t disconnect their businesses.
Tags: Like, Social Graph
Companies: Facebook
History (read: Twitter) has taught us that combining a great service with a stable, open API usually makes for a healthy ecosystem that has the ability to improve said service, both for its users and the company powering it.
New features and functionalities that are left out of the provider’s roadmap – for whatever reason – get implemented by creative third-party developers, leaving end users with more choice and experiences catered to their needs.
In the case of Gowalla, the location-based social network that rivals companies like Foursquare, Rummble, Where and plenty of others for world domination in the geolocation space, the foundations of that ecosystem appear to be shaky at best. The situation has gotten to a point where even the startup’s most rabid fans are freezing third-party development projects and call for the company to get its act together urgently – to become more like Foursquare, in many ways.
Leading the movement is London-based developer Ben Dodson, who has dedicated a lot of his time and resources on Gowalla Tools, a set of utilities for avid users (including an iPhone, Web, Twitter and desktop app). The man has penned an extensive, solid open letter directed at Gowalla management, in which he calls for the company to change its ways.
He’s not alone in his quest; several third-party developers have co-signed the letter, which is mostly a request for Gowalla to be more upfront about the changes it makes to the public API it debuted back in February, and to be more communicative in general.
I’ll let you read the whole thing (and quietly get a vicious headache from all the colors on that page) but here’s the vital part:
The major problem with the API is its fluid and changeable nature. Whilst we accept that any application will inevitably have bug fixes and changes, an API is supposed to provide a stable endpoint on which third party services can rely on.
This is not the case with the Gowalla API which seems to change on a whim fairly frequently. Worse than a changing API, the developers of any applications relying on the API are rarely informed of changes (and when they are, they usually appear a day or so after the event has happened and the community have worked out fixes for themselves).
Dodson, for one, is putting Gowalla Tools on hiatus until the startup fixes some of the problems he mentions in the letter, which goes into detail about the issues at hand and also proactively suggests a number of solutions (again, which is basically to be more like Foursquare in the way that the Gowalla competitor reaches out to third-party developers and manages its API).
I contacted Gowalla CEO and co-founder Josh Williams about the whole ordeal, but as he was currently in the middle of a long email he’ll only be able to formulate a proper response later today. We’ll update this post when we learn more about how Gowalla views things.
If APIs are “crack cocaine for developers,” as Mashery CEO Oren Michels said to us, then Michels is a dealer. His company specializes in creating and managing APIs for companies from Netflix and MTV Networks to Etsy and Cafe Press, and has recently published a survey on how developers use APIs.
Whether for pleasure as a side project or for serious profit as an entrepreneurial endeavor, developers love to use APIs.
At Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, we chatted with Michaels about best practices for monetization, strategies for building on someone else’s platform, how to survive in a rollercoaster-like ecosystem of third-party apps, and other topics of concern to API-happy developers.
In polling more than 550 mobile and web app developers at SXSW Interactive two months ago, Mashery unearthed a wealth of information about how we use APIs. Google, Twitter and Amazon were said to have the best offerings for third-party devs, and many devs told Mashery what they wanted most was more clarity on API terms of use and code samples.
For those of you curious about coding languages, PHP and JavaScript accounted for 48% of developers’ work, while only 6% said they used Objective C (used in creating iPhone apps). And interestingly, most devs who work with APIs aren’t in it for the cash:
Developers, take a second to watch Michels in the video, and let us know what you think of his insights. Do you agree with his statements about being able to build a business from APIs?
Tags: APIs, business, developers, javascript, mashery, Objective C, php
Facebook has consistently pushed its users to make more personal information public over the last several years. It believes doing so will allow it to offer better products to users, and the marketers and developers who want to reach them.
But some users, privacy groups and politicians have matched its moves with vocal protests, lawsuits and more recently, official investigations. The controversy only appears to be intensifying.
Below, we’ll closely examine the Facebook privacy issues being debated, from social plugins to Instant Personalization, to the terms of service changes, and many others besides. We’ll provide a straightforward description of what each change was, followed by our analysis of how serious the issues are around each change.
We’ll follow up in a separate article with our broader conclusions about the changes, the issues and what they mean for Facebook, its users, and everyone else. Before we delve into the specifics, here’s a quick overview of the new risks, and some background.
Some criticism of certain aspects of these launches seems fair, like the way that Facebook directed users to make profile interests public. But some people also seem bewildered by the sheer number and complexity of the changes, and are assuming the worst about all of them as a result.
Fairly or not, critics are advocating for regulations or other forms of restrictions on how Facebook handles user privacy, and are even recommending that users leave the site.
The issues are creating new risks not just for Facebook users, but for the company and its ecosystem of developers and marketers.
One risk is that a significant number of people actually do stop using Facebook completely, possibly out of fear of how their data might be used, but also because they are fatigued by the constant changes. This hasn’t happened yet, despite many critics predicting that it would over the years. But there could still be a tipping point, where the build-up of issues finally convinces people to leave en masse.
The other risk is that agencies from national governments, particularly the United States’ Federal Trade Commission, impose stiff new regulations on what product changes that Facebook can make going forward, thereby limiting its ability to improve its products.
This round of Facebook changes is arguably not any more significant than past privacy-related ones — like the launch of its news feed, Connect, the application platform, Beacon, the altered publisher tool, and the regularly edited terms of service, to name a few. But the stakes have risen.
Facebook has grown to be the largest social web sevice in the world, with nearly 500 million monthly active users by our most recent estimate. It has turned a profit, and now it appears to gradually be moving towards an initial public offering.
The company is typically aggressive about how it is trying to become more open. Sometimes it moves hastily, or provides an unclear interface, or pushes users to do things that some of them don’t want to do. It has had these sorts of problems before and it has gotten a lot of criticism as a result — Facebook’s critics of today have had years to hone their techniques.
The news feed was met with user outrage when it launched years ago, because Facebook aggregated data about users’ activities in an easy to view way. Even though the data it used was available already, users felt betrayed because that availability became far more obvious. But everyone got used to it, and the news feed has become Facebook’s main avenue for sharing information; in fact, it has been so successful that many other companies have built similar products to help users process information more easily. Facebook overcame users’ gripes, and that success seems to have given it the confidence to keep pushing regardless of criticism.
But Facebook has not been entirely successful in blowing through criticism. Its doomed Beacon advertising system, for example, tracked users’ activity across the web and shared it with their friends without asking permission to do so. The idea sounded promising — but the product itself violated user privacy. Facebook dropped the service eventually, after damaging months of public attacks and multiple ongoing lawsuits (some frivolous, of course).
The company has not been immune to governmental pressure over the years, either. It was forced to accommodate changes from the Canadian privacy commissioner last year. The changes to privacy features in December and the streamlined permissions dialogue introduced last month were, in part, efforts by the company to comply with the commissioner’s requirements.
Facebook’s moves in December set the stage for the current controversies. The main issue was that it required users to go through a transition tool that set them up with new privacy settings. The process was confusing to many, and it directed users to make more information public in ways they might not have understood.
Privacy groups had a field day at that point — issues like these allow them to show themselves as fighting for the public good against powerful, selfish interests. Following waves of press coverage, ten of them filed a complaint with the FTC against Facebook. The FTC said it was looking at the situation, but it hasn’t said much since. Meanwhile, other governmental bodies, like the European Commission, have begun investigating on their own.
But these issues, like all the ones before them, have yet to hurt Facebook’s traffic. The most recent measurements from March and April show it booming in the US and around the world, as we’ve covered here and here.
So far, none of the late April changes have had significantly bad results, either. There are no reports of users being harmed as a result of them, and Facebook itself tells us that traffic is up by nearly every measure following the launch.
We examine what the specific changes were below. Then we look at how people have responded, and whether their complaints are well-supported or not. In a follow-up article, we conclude with our view of how all the issues add up to impact Facebook — or don’t.
The changes: On April 19, two days before major product launches at its f8 developer conference, Facebook introduced a significant update to how people can express interests in their profile.
Some users have extensively filled out their profiles with a wide variety of personal information, including their work and education history, and interests like music, movies and books. The company suggested that users automatically re-categorize their interests (though not other private personal information) into publicly-available Pages, so that a user from San Francisco, for example, would display that city’s Page.
If users didn’t want to do this, their other option was to delete the information completely or re-add it in the “Bio” field — neither of which were clearly pointed out.
Users were presented with a transition tool that asked them to add these Pages to their profiles. It featured two big buttons on the lower right: “Link All to My Profile” and “Ask Me Later.” The third option, “Choose Pages Individually,” was relatively de-emphasized. It was a link without a button, in smaller text than the other two, and over on the lower left part of the window. Explanatory text at the top of the tool said that the information would be public.
Adding a layer of complexity to this change were two more that Facebook pushed out at the same time. It re-arranged user privacy settings, a move based on the terms of service change it introduced at the beginning of April (we’ll look at the terms further down). Facebook made what it calls “General Information” public, with no option to hide it, as part of that terms change. This includes your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy settings. The only other option is to not provide this information in the first place, or delete it if you already had.
What Facebook did decide to keep private for users is key personal information — everything not defined as General Information — which it moved to a new category in its privacy settings, called Personal Information and Posts. This includes users’ biographies, birthdays, sexual preference, religious and political views, photo albums, your own posts, the ability for friends to post to your wall, the visibility of friends’ posts on your wall, and comments on posts on your wall.
The other category in privacy settings includes what Facebook has newly defined as “Friends, Tags and Connections.” This information can be private in nature, but it includes a social element; your friends also can decide whether or not to reveal the fact that you’re friends with them. They can decide to tag you in a photo or video, and so forth — you can decide to untag the photo, but you can’t delete the photo itself because it belongs to them. The complete list of information in this section includes: friends, family, relationships, photos and videos of yourself, current city, hometown, education and work, activities, interests and things you like.
Facebook makes this information public by default. You can hide it on your profile from anyone who visits, but you can’t hide it on the Page you’re connected to.
Finally, Facebook created a new category of Pages called Community Pages. These are non-commercial Pages for things like causes, ideas or internet memes, and they are more limited in nature. They don’t have owners and do not include some options, such as publishing to fans’ news feeds. Users who had items in their personal information section that did not match with existing Pages had those items converted to new Community Pages.
The point of all of this is to make it easier for users to find and share their interests with each other — which is what Facebook exists to do in the first place.
The issues: The three changes — the profile transition, the privacy settings switch and Community Pages — resulted in what appears to be a high level of user confusion, and criticism from privacy groups and politicians, including four US senators.
From some users’ perspectives, it was not clear why lists of personal interests and other details should suddenly turn in to Pages. Facebook users have already had the option to become fans of Pages, but that process was purely opt-in because you had to go to a Page and select the option yourself.
Facebook purposefully minimized the option for users to individually edit the Pages within the new transition tool. Instead it directed them to convert everything. If users did not read the tool carefully — which is a reality of how most people use the web — they clicked through and then discovered what had happened.
The company does not provide flexibility for them to do anything besides make the information public in its transition tool and privacy settings, or remove the information altogether, or re-add it in the user “Bio” section (which can be kept completely private).
“We recognize there has been confusion on this point and are creating more material on the site to explain all of the options people have,” Facebook tells us.
The other catch here is that some users had previously selected some of this information to be private. The transition tool did clearly warn them that the information was going to be public, but it did not state that their privacy settings would be automatically altered to reflect this fact, an issue we noted at the time.
The addition of Community Pages further confused the situation. Some users, for example, said they had previously listed their own businesses as interests, only to discover that they inadvertently created a Community Page for their business that they now have no control over. They can’t delete it and they need to go through an appeal process to make it an official Page they can control.
When we asked Facebook about the transition process, the company says that less than 20% of its users had filled out the profile information, while more than 70% had already connected to Pages about their interests. It says this is one of the main reasons it made the changes. It also notes that users who had filled out interests before had not had the option to add them as Pages, instead.
The changes do not amount to outright deceptions, but they are misleading to the portion of users who have filled out their interests assuming everything would stay private. Facebook’s rationale is understandable but so are the negative reactions.
The changes: Facebook introduced new ways for other web sites to integrate site features through a set of five widgets, each with specific functionality. If you’re logged in to Facebook, you can immediately see information about your friends and what they’re up to on other sites. You can go to many news sites today, like CNN, to see the widgets in action — or “plugins” as Facebook calls them — and then see what news articles your friends are sharing.
Facebook’s intent is to allow users to get more value out of other web sites by seeing what their friends are sharing, and by sharing more information with their friends — and in doing so, it is also trying to make the sites themselves more valuable.
The plugins also allow you to share information back to Facebook. The main one is called the Like Button. It takes Facebook’s Like feature and allows developers to provide it on any web site. So you can be reading a news article, click on the “Like” button above the article, and immediately share a link to it on your wall and in your news feed.
Facebook does not provide user data to sites that use the Plugin. It keeps everything on its own servers, similar to how embeddable YouTube widgets show videos that are hosted on YouTube.
It also launched what it calls the Graph API. This allows developers to access a wide range of user data. General Information and other data that users have disclosed is readily available, and developers can request more through special permissions.
Developers can also get additional access to users through the Open Graph Protocol. They can publish updates to any user who has Liked an item. And they can create their own version of the Like button that doubles as a way to have users become fans of their Page.
The issues: Seeing a friend’s profile picture and shared stories appear in a widget on another site might surprise some people. Much of the controversy over this issue revolves around what data is being shared with third party sites.
However, the plugins are designed so that no data is shared with third party sites by default. Some people have misunderstood how the plugins work, though, and claim that data is being widely shared.
Facebook does tracks users who visit sites that have its widgets, but it has had various widgets available for years, and it has not done anything differently with the new plugins, at least in their simplest implementations.
The company, along with Google, Yahoo and many other market leaders, tracks users through browser cookies and a range of other legal methods. Some other web companies have provided more transparency around this process, but only after governmental pressure — most of the industry is still opaque about its practices. However, proposed congressional legislation could more broadly impact how web companies use and share data.
So, Facebook is not doing anything especially controversial here, with some caveats.
All General Information (remember, your friends list, your gender, etc.) is available to third parties through the Graph API, for services like search. This includes anything that users have inadvertently made public. The privacy issue here is not about the Graph API — it’s about how Facebook requires or leads users to make information public in the first place. There’s no way to make General Information private. Users just have to delete it.
Facebook has been making more data available through altering its privacy settings, which it has given itself permission to do through changes in its terms of service. As we covered above, the transition tools in December and in April didn’t always clearly inform users of what they were making available. The term changes have been somewhat clear, as we’ll get into below, but it’s likely that many users didn’t pay attention.
The last point about how the Graph API works is also a cause for concern. Developers can get access to publishing to a user’s stream, for example, even though users are not told about this.
In sum, Facebook should not be criticized for the fact that it offers these new social plugins. But it does deserve criticism for not clearly explaining to users how the features can be used by developers.
The fact that “Like” has more than one meaning is also a real issue here.
The Meaning of Like
The changes: Facebook first introduced the “Like” feature as a way to show your appreciation for things like a friend’s smart status update, last year. However, it broadened the meaning of “Like” along with its other changes. Instead of a button on Pages that invites users to “Become a Fan,” it asks them to Like Pages.
This means that users are not just sharing links to the Page on their wall and news feed — the actions that clicking “Like” has generated up until this point. Instead, users are becoming fans of the Page. Anyone can view all of a Page’s fans. The result is that some users might see a Page and click Like because they think they are simply sharing the Page with their friends, when it reality they are becoming fans of the Page. Users’ other option is to end their connection to the Page.
The point of the change is to make “Like” a universal term for expressing interest and sharing information, cueing users to do so more often.
The issues: There has been limited concern about this redefinition among those critical of other changes. However, it is not clear if users understand or appreciate the difference. Along with the confusion about Community Pages, users may be reacting by actively “Unliking” Pages, as we recently covered.
The confusion is compounded by the fact that using the Like Button to like a page can also give third parties access to user data, without informing users first.
The changes: Facebook is also testing a way of pre-approving third parties to get access to user information, something it calls “Instant Personalization.” You can see the service live on Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft’s new Docs online word processor service; it is set to expand to other parties.
The point is to make sites valuable to users through providing relevant social context, without asking them to do anything first.
The default for Instant Personalization is that Facebook automatically shares users’ General Information with partner sites. When they go to one of these sites for the first time, they’ll see a blue bar at the top of the site that includes links explaining how the service works, and a button that lets them opt out, which requires a few steps. Unless they go through the process of opting out, they’ll also see each site populated with their General Information, including views of information their friends are sharing on the site.
Opting out isn’t easy. You first need to go to Privacy Settings, then Applications and Websites and the Instant Personalization Pilot Program link. Once there, you need to unclick the box at the bottom that says “Allow select partners to instantly personalize their features with my public information when I first arrive on their websites.” When you do this a pop-up will ask you to confirm your decision. The other option is to visit each of these sites and opt-out individually by clicking “No Thanks” on the blue bar.
The issues: A number of privacy groups and politicians have come out against the move. This is hardly surprising because Facebook is clearly sharing some data without user permission. And, since launching the feature, Facebook has made the process for opting out more complicated, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation details.
However, the company carefully manages the data-sharing process, and it has made serious efforts to tell users exactly what is going on and what they can do about it. The move is bold on Facebook’s part. But it prepared itself legally through publicly altering its terms of service around the concept, earlier in April (see below). And, the user interface does clearly explain what users are seeing.
It also says it has no plans to expand this test at present.
The changes: Facebook previously required that developers not store user data for more than 24 hours. It has now changed its policies to allow them to store data indefinitely. If users want developers to remove the data, they are required to do so — except for anything that is public by default, like General Information.
The issues: This is another hot one for privacy groups and politicians. The concept of unlimited data storage sounds scary — who knows what those developers are doing with that data?
But the reality is that Facebook users already decide to share data with third parties when they do things like install social games or other applications, or sign in to a web site using their Facebook identity. The new policy might sound scary, but it’s not much different than how the platform has worked for years.
The change is more of a technical decision to make development easier. Many companies lack the resources to constantly ping Facebook servers for data; some, without intending to do anything wrong, have already stored data for longer than 24 hours.
The bigger issue, as we’ve mentioned before, is that there are increasing reports of rogue applications and others who scrape and store Facebook user information then resell it on the black market for any number of purposes, from online lead generation to phishing and other scams. The extent of the problem is not well-understood, but Facebook appears to lack means to control third party redistribution of its data beyond doing things like suing companies or kicking them off of its platform.
The changes: Along with other launches at f8, Facebook added a simplified user interface for developers to request private information from users. Before, users had to click through a series of dialog boxes to approve data-sharing. Now, developers can list all of the data they’re requesting in one box, and have users approve it with a single click. If the developer asks for their email, users can edit which to provide in the interface.
The idea is help users more easily see and approve data sharing.
The issues: By simplifying the user interface, Facebook has removed some of the barriers to users rushing through and sharing information they might decide not to if the process were more deliberate. We’ve heard some developers bring this issue up, although generally a cleaner, centralized interface is seen as a superior form of web design.
The changes: Facebook has steadily altered its terms of service over the years to be more open. In 2006, for example, the fledgling social network said that “No personal information that you submit to Thefacebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.”
Facebook has also evolved its methods of communicating about the changes with users. After a controversial change in early 2009, the company began a new way of introducing changes: It announced proposed changes to users in very obvious ways, like messages at the top of users’ news feeds, and asked for their input. It has since added features that users requested, such as red-lined versions that showed exact edits between drafts.
We’ve covered the recent changes in more detail already. The most relevant one was proposed in late March and finalized in early April. While Facebook had not yet fully launched its social plugins, instant personalization and other privacy-related features, the changes then were meant to reflect them. It said it would share what it calls “General Information” — “your and your friends’ names, profile pictures, gender, connections, and any content shared using the Everyone privacy setting” – with “pre-approved” third parties without asking for user permission first.
The issues: The changes have come under attack from privacy groups and politicians for being a bait-and-switch, considering that the site started out entirely closed and has since gone in the opposite direction.
This is true in a very conceptual sense, but the argument implies Facebook should never be able to change how privacy works on its site, even if it thinks its changes are in the best interest of the users. Many users appear to be fine with terms of service changes that make their data more public if it means they get a better product to use, judging by the results so far.
On the other hand, Facebook’s changes have made some information open that users likely assumed would stay private, such as General Information. Some users don’t want to share who their friends are, their other connections (including which Pages they’re a fan of), or other items on this list.
Changing the terms of service, then, is a paradox in a way that is reflected in Facebook’s product launches. Some portion of users will rightly be upset, yet the changes are necessary if Facebook is going to be able to create products that best serve users. One’s perspective on the matter comes down to whether one thinks the company should prioritize privacy or innovation.
We believe that the company should choose innovation, as we’ll discuss in our follow up article, even though we recognize the inherent issues in doing so.
Also, given the complex trade-offs, Facebook should get credit for its efforts to communicate the changes it does push through. Most companies do not try to explain such changes to their users. While not everyone is going to agree with the specific changes themselves, it is going out of its way to give users the chance to look for themselves, including notices on users’ home pages. This means users can provide comments, or protest, or even quit Facebook before the changes take effect, if that’s what they conclude is best.
Facebook has had a number of bugs pop up over the last several weeks. This is the reality of the company rapidly developing and pushing new products, and something that often happens at growing web companies. While innocent, they reveal some user data, hurting user trust in the company’s ability to preserve their privacy. However, no bugs that we know have have been widespread.
Here’s a quick look at each.
Facebook chat reveals too much: A bug popped up in the company’s instant message service that accidentally allowed users to view the live chats of their Facebook friends, as TechCrunch Europe spotted. They could also see friends’ pending friend requests, and which friends you have in common with the pending friends. We don’t know how many users were exposed, but Facebook took the entire Chat service offline for an hour or so as it fixed the problem. Everything is now working as normal.
Facebook secretly installing apps (or did it?): Macworld discovered that applications were appearing within the “Recently Used” section of Facebook’s application settings without users first installing them. But the applications were only unauthorized in the sense that they were not supposed to appear in this part of the privacy settings. The “apps” were actually instances of users logging in to third party sites via Facebook Connect. The way the platform is structured, each Connect integration is considered an app, even if there’s no actual app on Facebook’s platform. Facebook did not make any change here, no data was shared with the applications that hadn’t been already, and no data was exposed, it said. The bug was so minor that it can not really be considered a privacy or security issue. Social Hacking has an in-depth look at what happened — and didn’t happen.
Yelp security hole reveals Facebook user data: Local review site Yelp is one of the three companies using Instant Personalization, and today it had a security hole that helped make the concept look more dangerous. A web security consultant discovered a way that a malicious site could harvest some personal Facebook user information that Facebook shares with Yelp by default, including name, email and data shared with “everyone” on Facebook. As with every other security issue having to do with third parties accessing Facebook data, it makes the entire concept look dangerous.
We’ll be analyzing the significance the changes and the issues around them in a follow-up article, providing our view of where Facebook and its ecosystem may be headed.
iPhone 4 and Sprint EVO 4G, Head-to-Head
- Stephen B