Graph

A post to Facebook by Ryan Merket (former Facebook employee, founder of Ping.fm, and now founder of Appbistro) inspired me to check out a new Facebook App by Zach Allia that lets you “dislike” any website on the internet.  The app is simple – you add a little bookmarklet to your browser and connect it with Facebook.  Now any website you visit you can “dislike”, and your dislike appears on your Facebook Wall for all your friends to see.

Merket and I had a little fun with the app.  He would dislike one political figure’s Facebook Page, and I would then go and dislike the opposite political figure.  Or, he would dislike something and I would go “like” his recent dislike.  I even went to one of his dislikes, clicked the permalink for the dislike, and disliked his dislike!  (Have a headache yet?)

The app doesn’t just work on Facebook.  You can go to any website on the internet and click the little “Dislike” bookmarklet and your dislike will appear.  In addition, you can go to http://likebutton.me and get a similar like bookmarklet to like things on the internet in a similar manner.

This is a totally cool idea, and great example of the simplicity of Facebook Graph API.  I predict it will be very popular due to Facebook and other sites’ lack of a “dislike” button for the network.  I hope he can find a good way to monetize the concept.  In a recent environment of negativity on the internet, this app could just provide a little level of fun and positivity to Facebook.  ”dislike” is the new “poke”.

Check out, and “like” the app at http://dislikebutton.me/

Do you “like” the concept?

Shared by Jesse Stay
This is well deserved. I can't think of a better person to fill this position than Bret - congrats!

Facebook has a new chief technology officer, Bret Taylor. The FriendFeed co-founder and initial product manager of Google Maps came to Facebook with the $50 million acquisition of FreindFeed last year. He took on the role of director of platform at Facebook, and led the recent rollout of Facebook’s Open Graph and Open Graph API, which attempts to make social connections on the Web as important as hyperlinks. He played a key role in making the Facebook platform much simpler to build on.

Increasingly, Facebook is looking more and more like FriendFeed, with like buttons sprouting everywhere and a stronger emphasis on the central stream. Taylor brought a lot of the engineering and design sensibilities from FreindFeed and started to instill them in Facebook. Now he is being promoted to the vacant CTO role, where he will oversee other projects beyond the Facebook platform.

Below is the email Mark Zuckerberg sent out to all Facebook employees moments ago announcing Taylor’s promotion, which Facebook provided to TechCrunch:

=======================
Internal Email from Mark Zuckerberg
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Hey everyone,

I have some good news to share with all of you. I’ve created a new role and have asked Bret Taylor to become our CTO.

Bret joined us almost a year ago as our director of platform products. Since then, he has played a key role in building many parts of our new platform, including social plugins, our new graph API and the Open Graph. Since f8, already more than 100,000 sites use social plugins and our new API has received lots of praise for its elegance and simplicity. In addition, Bret has helped shape my thinking on products, engineering and strategy in many ways.

Today, Bret has just a couple of direct reports and gets things done by being a helpful source of advice and positively influencing decisions on a number of products. I’ve been talking with him recently about how he could play a similar role working with a few other areas to help shape our direction as well. Since Bret engages both in technical and product issues, I decided that creating a new CTO position outside of both engineering and product was the best way to formalize this new role.

In this role, Bret will report to me and will not manage anyone else. The CTO role is not a management role. The roles of building and running the product, engineering and operations organizations aren’t changing at all here. If you would have gone to Schrep, Chris Cox or Heiliger for something in the past, you should still go to them now. (Although, to be honest, Schrep, Cox, Bret and I all sit in the same pod so you can pretty much grab any of us at the same time.)

Bret will stay focused on Platform, but this new role sets him up to help out more in other areas as well. The platform product management work Bret has been doing will continue to report to Cox and the product organization as he does this. One of the reasons we can make this change is because of the great work Mike Vernal has been doing to lead the engineering team. I’m highly confident in him to continue building out this organization.

When I look around product and engineering, there are so many unique things we’re building with very leveraged small teams right now. Platform is the foundation for an entire industry, and our team has about 30 engineers. News Feed is the home page for more than 250 million people every day, and our team has fewer than 15 engineers. Our search type ahead serves the same order of magnitude of queries as Google, and our team has fewer than 15 engineers. These are examples of transformative products that we’re going to build out over the next few years and I’m focused on making sure we build them out the right way.

If you have a moment, please join me in congratulating Bret on his new role. If you have questions about this or anything else, feel free to shoot me a note or come ask it at our next Open Q&A.

Mark

A new clickjacking worm is spreading through Facebook via the ‘Like’ feature. The attack, which is said to have hit hundreds of thousands of users, uses a combination of social engineering and clickjacking exploit makes it appear as if a user has “liked” a link.

The messages that are being used in the link text include, “LOL This girl gets OWNED after a POLICE OFFICER reads her STATUS MESSAGE,” “This man takes a picture of himself EVERYDAY for 8 YEARS!!,” “The Prom Dress That Got This Girl Suspended From School” and “This Girl Has An Interesting Way Of Eating A Banana, Check It Out!”

When a user clicks on the text that appears to be “liked” he is taken to a blank page that just has the text, “Click here to continue.” Clicking anywhere on that page will then publish the same message to that users Facebook page.

This vector is extremely similar to the Fbhole worm that spread across Facebook ten days ago. Because users unwittingly end up recommending the offending page to their social graph, this is the type of worm that can spread extremely quickly.

Security firm Sophos has identified the linked pages as being infected with the Troj/iframe-ET worm. It doesn’t appear as if the worm does anything other than add likes to your feed, but if you’ve been infected, you’ll still want to take action.

Sophos recommends deleting any entries in your news feed related to the links and check your profile and info pages to make sure that no links or pages related to those sites have been added to your profile.

[Img: Sophos]

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, Antagain

Tags: facebook, security, worms

If You Like Moustaches on Men - You'll Love These Restaurants —

Cross reference a person's Twitter friendships with their Foursquare favorites with their Hunch.com articulated "taste graph" and what do you get? Interesting personalized restaurant recommendations, for one thing.

Taste-gathering startup Hunch is experimenting with a recommendation service that cross references social graph connections on other services with the large set of unusual questions its users have answered. Questions like "do you like facial hair on men? Yes? Well, 48% of our users have said that." The end result is a simple prototype website where you enter a city and your Twitter username and Hunch will show you Foursquare venues it thinks you'll like. Or at least it thinks that people on Hunch who are like your friends on Twitter tend to like those places, on Foursquare. Crazy? Maybe not.

Sponsor

Above: Hunch has reason to believe that my friend Rick Turoczy would like the high-end restaurant Toro Bravo, but believes that I would not. Perhaps Hunch is calling Rick a snob.

Restaurant recommendations are just the beginning. Hunch knows a lot about a lot of people. The company recently said that the average Hunch user has answered 152 personal questions about themselves. Now that data and our corresponding friend connections are going to be the basis for personalized recommendations. Want to see how well the company thinks it understands you? Check out the recently launched Hunch Twitter predictor game. It's downright eerie.

Hunch co-founder Chris Dixon explained (vaguely) what's going on by email.

We developed the technology to project and propagate our taste data using graph-like connections via public APIs. In this case we propagate our taste profiles to Twitter by projecting the subset of Hunch users connected with twitter onto all Twitter
users. Then we propagate this taste data to Foursquare by projecting the subset of Twitter users checking in on foursquare onto all Foursquare venues. With our collection of taste profiles, in real time we can calculate affinities between any Hunch user, Twitter user, and Foursquare venue. As we project and propagate across all the web's entities, we will enable crazy data mashups. It's going to be cool!

In other words, if Hunch doesn't know about you well enough to make Foursquare recommendations via a Twitter account that's tied to both Foursquare and Hunch, then it will assume you are like those Twitter friends of yours who are on Hunch, and Foursquare.

That's the kind of data-driven value that making all these connections explicit will allow. The future will look like a big algorithm and interface war between companies battling it out to better serve you based on commonly, publicly available user data. Or data you selectively expose in return for recommendations.

Discuss

Today, Facebook is releasing its first official SDK for Android, offering developers on Google’s mobile OS an easy way to tie their Android native apps to Facebook Platform. As AllFacebook noted last week, this SDK is actually more advanced than the iPhone SDK because it features Facebook’s Graph API, which was unveiled at its f8 developer conference last month.

According to the post on Facebook’s Developer blog, the SDK also uses OAuth 2.0 for authentication and the ability to publish stories to Facebook using Feed forms.

I spoke with Facebook’s Steven Soneff about the SDK at Google I/O last week, where Facebook was offering a developer preview. Soneff said that there have been ways to integrate Facebook into Android applications before now, but that these have really been hacked together from the iPhone SDK, and weren’t officially supported by Facebook.

Hopefully this is a sign that Facebook is taking Android a bit more seriously. Facebook’s iPhone SDK launched over a year ago. And the official Facebook application for Android has always felt inferior to the iPhone version — it has been improving, but it still has a ways to go.

When you find interesting content in your social streams, it's very common for you to want to share that content to your own social graph - letting more people be exposed to what you found interesting. This need to reshare has led to Twitter's integrated Retweet functionality, and the ability to reshare items on FriendFeed and Facebook. Today, Google Buzz joins the resharing party, letting users of the nascent social network share content from any Buzz user to their own followers, while still providing attribution to the original source. The feature enhancement is said to be among the most popular user requests, and meets the team's objective of adding a new feature a week to Buzz.

Now, Buzz users, myself included, will have four options to spread the love for any individual item. You can still comment on the item and like it, or send it via e-mail, but a new "Reshare" button is included.


Unlike Twitter's new Retweet functionality, which does not allow for any modification on forwarding updates, Buzz opted for a "two-click" process, where you can click reshare, add a comment to say why you found the content interesting ,and then hit post to add it to your stream. And yes, the Google team thought ahead, so if a bunch of your friends reshare the same content, similar posts will be collapsed, so you only see each item once. Similarly, downstream reshares of reshares give attribution to the first poster.


The official blog post introducing the feature talks about how resharing the post "forks" the conversation, essentially setting up two places in two different social graphs, to discuss the same content. This distributed comments debate has been fodder for much of its own discussion for a few years, but looks to finally be closing down, especially with the rollout of public comments on Google Reader announced just this Monday.

The downstream benefit of the Reshare feature will depend on the diversity of one's network, and if you cross multiple sharing circles. If your network is closed, it will simply add noise, but if you have a network of connections that extends beyond a small group, the feature could increase eyeballs to interesting content from all sources.

You can reshare anything I post to http://www.google.com/profiles/louisgray.

A few weeks ago, Facebook announced an Open Graph initiative -- a move considered to be a turning point not just for the social networking giant, but for the web at large. The company's new vision is no longer to just connect people. Facebook now wants to connect people around and across the web through concepts they are interested in.

This vision of the web isn't really new. Its origins go back the the person who invented the web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. This vision has been passionately shared and debated by the tech community over the last decade. What Facebook has announced as Open Graph has been envisioned by many as semantic web.

The web of people and things

At the heart of this vision is the idea that different web pages contain the same objects. Whether someone is reading about a book on Barnes and Noble, on O'Reilly or on a book review blog doesn't matter. What matters is that the reader is interested in this particular book. And so it makes sense to connect her to friends and other readers who are interested in the same book -- regardless of when and where they encountered it.

The same is true about many everyday entities that we find on the web -- movies, albums, stars, restaurants, wine, musicians, events, articles, politicians, etc -- the same entity is referenced in many different pages. Our brains draw the connections instantly and effortlessly, but computers can't deduce that an "Avatar" review on Cinematical.com is talking about the movie also described on a page on IMDB.com.

The reason it is important for things to be linked is so that people can be connected around their interests and not around websites they visit. It does not matter to me where my friends are reading about "Avatar", what matters is which of my friends liked the movie and what they had to say. Without interlinking objects across different sites, the global taste graph is too sparse and uninteresting. By re-imagining the web as the graph of things we are interested in, a new dimension, a new set of connections gets unlocked -- everything and everyone connects in a whole new way.

A brief history of semantic markups

The problem of building the web of people and things boils down to describing what is on the page and linking it to other pages. In Tim Berners-Lee's original vision, the entities and relationships between them would be described using RDF. This mathematical language was designed to capture the essence of objects and relationships in a precise way. While it's true that RDF annotation would be the most complete, it also turns out to be quite complicated.

It is this complexity that the community has attempted to address over the years. A simpler approach called Microformats was developed by Tantek Celik, Chris Messina and others. Unlike RDF, Microformats rely on existing XHTML standards and leverage CSS classes to markup the content. Critically, Microformats don't add any additional information to the page, but just annotate the data that is already on the page.

Microformats enjoyed support and wider adoption because of their relative simplicity and focus on marking up the existing content. But there are still issues. First, the number of supported entities is limited, the focus has been on marking organizations, people and events, and then reviews, but there is no way to markup, for example, a movie or a book or a song. Second, Microformats are somewhat cryptic and hard to read. There is cleverness involved in figuring out how to do the markup, which isn't necessarily a good thing.

In 2005, inspired by Microformats, Ian Davis, now CTO of Talis, developed eRDF -- a syntax within HTML for expressing a simplified version of RDF. His approach married the canonical concepts of RDF and the idea from Microformats that the data is already on the page. An iteration of Ian's work, called RDFa, has been adopted as a W3C standard. All the signs point in the direction of RDFa being the solution of choice for describing entities inside HTML pages.

Until recently, despite the progress in the markups, adoption was hindered by the fact that publishers lacked the incentive to annotate the pages. What is the point if there are no applications that can take advantage of it? Luckily, in 2009 both Yahoo and Google put their muscle behind marking up pages.

First Yahoo developed an elegant search application called Search Monkey. This app encouraged and enabled sites to take control over how Yahoo's search engine presented the results. The solution was based on both markup on the page and a developer plugin, which gave the publishers control over presenting the results to the user. Later, Google announced rich snippets. This supported both Microformats and RDFa markup and enabled webmasters to control how their search results are presented.

Still missing from all this work was a simple common vocabulary for describing everyday things. In 2008-2009, with help from Peter Mika from Yahoo research, I developed a markup called abmeta. This extensible, RDFa-based markup provided a vocabulary for describing everyday entities like movies, albums, books, restaurants, wines, etc. Designed with simplicity in mind, abmeta supports declaring single and multiple entities on the page, using both meta headers and also using RDFa markup inside the page.

Facebook Open Graph protocol

The markup announced by Facebook can be thought of as a subset of abmeta because it supports the declaration
of entities using meta tags. The great thing about this format is simplicity. It is literally readable in English.

The markup defines several essential attributes -- type, title, URL, image and description. The protocol comes with a reasonably rich taxonomy of types, supporting entertainment, news, location, articles
and general web pages. Facebook hopes that publishers will use the protocol to describe the entities on pages.
When users press the LIKE button, Facebook will get not just a link, but a specific object of the specific type.

If all of this computes correctly, Facebook should be able to display a rich collection of entities on user profiles,
and, should be able to show you friends who liked the same thing around the web, regardless of the site. So by
publishing this protocol and asking websites to embrace it, Facebook clearly declares its foray
into the web of people and things -- aka, the semantic web.

Technical issues with Facebook's protocol

As I've previously pointed out on my post on ReadWriteWeb, there are several issues with the markup that Facebook proposed.

1. There is no way to disambiguate things. This is quite a miss on Facebook's part, which is already resulting in bogus data on user profiles. The ambiguity is because the protocol is lacking secondary attributes for some data types. For example, it is not possible to distinguish the movie from its remake. Typically, such disambiguation would be done by using either a director or a year property, but Facebook's protocol does not define these attributes. This leads to duplicates and dirty data.

2. There is no way to define multiple objects on the page. This is another rather surprising limitation, since previous markups, like Microformats and abmeta, support this use case. Of course if Facebook only cares about getting people to LIKE pages so that they can do better ad targeting, then having multiple objects inside the page is not necessary. But Facebook claimed and marketed this offering as semantic web, so it is surprising that there is no way to declare multiple entities on a single page. Surely a comprehensive solution ought to do that.

3. Open protocol can't be closed. Finally, Facebook has done this without collaborating with anyone. For something to be rightfully called an Open Graph Protocol, it should be developed in an open collaboration with the web. Surely, Google, Yahoo!, W3C and even small startups playing in the semantic web space would have good things to contribute here.

It sadly appears that getting the semantic web elements correct was not the highest priority for Facebook. Instead, the announcement seems to be a competitive move against Twitter, Google and others with the goal to lock-in publishers by giving them a simple way to recycle traffic.

Where to next?

Despite the drawbacks, there is no doubt that Facebook's announcement is a net positive for the web at large. When one of the top companies takes a 180-degree turn and embraces a vision that's been discussed for a decade, everyone stops and listens. The web of people and things is now both very important and a step closer. The questions are: What is the right way? And how do we get there?

For starters, it would be good to fill in some holes in Facebook Open Graph. Whether it is the right way overall or not, at least we need to make it complete. It is important to add support for secondary attributes necessary for disambiguation and also, important to add support for multiple entities inside the page (even if there is only one LIKE button on the whole page). Both of these are already addressed by Microformats and abmeta, so it should be easy to fix.

Beyond technical issues, Facebook should open up this protocol and make it owned by the community, instead of being driven by one company's business agenda. A true roundtable with major web companies, publishers, and small startups would result in a correct, comprehensive and open protocol. We want to believe that Facebook will do the right thing and will collaborate with the rest the web on what has been an important work spanning years for many of us. The prospects are exciting, because we just made a giant leap. We just need to make sure we land in the right place.

GetGlue to Debut OpenLike V2 at Disrupt —

Alex Iskold announced on the OpenLike Google group that GetGlue would introduce OpenLike V2 to the public at TechCrunch Disrupt.

OpenLike V2 will allow the user to leverage Facebook Open Graph Protocol to customize which buttons will appear for different type of content, including news, movies, books and music.

Sponsor

The flow, according to Iskold, would propagate across different sites for the same content.

The user sees default buttons on each vertical. The defaults are based on XAuth - services that you use are there automatically. The user is also able to manually edit which buttons would appear for each type of content. Once edited, the choices persist across different web sites. This is done using iframe and local storage.

The widget can optionally leverage Facebook Open Graph markup to determine the type of content on the page Or the publisher can specify it manually.

The engineers are asking for help determining whether this is "directionally correct," feedback and QA once it's up and "suggestions for buttons for each vertical."

Read more on XAuth and more on Open Graph on ReadWriteWeb.

Discuss

I’m looking for concrete examples of businesses, large and small, that have seen firm success by integrating Facebook either as an application, a Page, or on their own website via Facebook Connect or Facebook Graph API.  If you have analytics and statistics to back up your claim, I’d like to get quotes from you on how Facebook’s API has helped your business.  The best ones I’ll be including in Facebook Application Development for Dummies.

This is a great opportunity for your business or website, as your brand will be promoted, pushed, and shared with an audience of thousands (wouldn’t it be cool if it were millions?) of readers worldwide, in a brand that is recognized in bookstores everywhere.  So if you, or someone you know has a great story to tell about how the Facebook API has helped your business, I’d like to share those case studies with my readers.  The best ones I’d like to also try and share on this blog if you’re okay with it.  Feel free to share them in the comments if you want everyone to see, or send them to jesse@staynalive.com.

Oh, and and not to show preference, but if anyone has any good contacts at Digg – I really want to see if their integration of Facebook Connect has helped.  I think that would be a great example to share – send them my way if you think they might be interested.

This book is a group effort – I hope to include you in many more opportunities like this, so keep reading and subscribing!

Leo Laporte is now claiming that Facebook is deleting and banning a radio station’s Facebook identity to allegedly remove comments about Facebook’s privacy stance.

This worries me a LOT more than whether or not you’ve taken private details like our social graph and forced them to be public.

This is about a loss of trust and goes WAY deeper than privacy.

I can’t trust that you care about my content or my business.

We have a problem.

When will you come and talk to us about this problem we are all having with you?

And I get a new email from someone who has gotten removed from Facebook every week like this one. I’m tired of this, when will you build a system to handle these kinds of complaints and handle them fairly?

All of these items remove our trust in your service. What are you going to do to regain our trust?

Facebook recently introduced the world to its Open Graph vision and with it came the Facebook ‘Like’ button.

Prior to the Like button, Facebook had its own retweet, like Share button which gave users the ability to share content they came across into their Facebook stream.

Both the ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ Buttons did very similar things except the Share Button would permit images and other content to be imported whereas ‘likes’ would simply show a comment like format in your personal Facebook feed showing that you had liked something (shown below).

At some point in the last 24 hours, Facebook seems to have sensibly combined the two and in effect made the original Share Button negligible. As a publisher, this is welcome news, with the masses of buttons and limited space, being able to remove one button shouldn’t feel this satisfying.

We’ve contacted Facebook for confirmation and will update this post with further details as soon as we hear back from them.

Update: If you’re wondering why this post isn’t showing identical likes and shares. I’m pretty certain it’s merely a delay on the Share button’s part.

There’s a new Chatroulette spinoff in town: meet ChatVille. It’s a Facebook app that combines the basic video chat elements of Chatroulette with the game mechanics, badges and leveling up of casual games like FarmVille.

Just like in Chatroulette, you have the opportunity to get paired up with a total stranger — but since the app can also take advantage of your Facebook social graph, you can also invite specific friends to chat with you as well. Plus, in chatting with either strangers or friends, you have the opportunity to earn badges for specific actions, like taking your first screenshot or getting a “compliment” from another user.

The app also features some other extra features like a built-in screenshot function; the screengrabs you take can then be optionally posted on your Facebook wall. Another extra feature quickly turns your webcam into an ad hoc photobooth, with the results also postable to your Facebook wall.

Built by the same team that made the popular instant messaging desktop client Digsby, many are already calling ChatVille “Chatroulette done right.” It’s certainly not the first Chatroulette clone we’ve seen, but it is unique for tapping into Facebook as an underlying social platform. Considering it stands to benefit greatly from the built-in virality of encouraging everyone to share their badges and accomplishments within the app, it will be interesting to see if or how fast this spreads as a much less “awkwardly adult oriented” version of Chatroulette.

Have you had a chance to check out ChatVille yet? If so, what do you think of the app — how does it compare to experiences you may have had on Chatroulette?

[via VentureBeat]

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For more social media coverage, follow Mashable Social Media on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook

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Reviews: Digsby, Facebook, Twitter

Tags: badges, chatville, digsby, facebook, facebook apps, farmville, game mechanics, games, video chat

Earlier today at Google I/O, the company announced that its web browser, Chrome, was now 70 million users strong. That’s a big number, and up more than 100% in the past year. But wait a second, let’s get some perspective. Enter, Mozilla’s Asa Dotzler.

As he points out on his blog this evening, while Chrome may be at 70 million active users, Firefox is at nearly 370 million active users. And while Chrome grew by 40 million users in the past year, Firefox gained over 100 million new users in the same span — yes, more users than Chrome has total. He also made a nice chart to underscore his point.

This also ties into the news from yesterday that Firefox co-founder Blake Ross thinks Firefox may be headed towards a massive decline over the next 3 to 5 years. His reasoning behind this is that Mozilla is too timid and beauracratic in handling the browser. Meanwhile, upstarts like Chrome are surging quickly. As Dotzler’s graph shows, Firefox is also still surging quick quickly itself.

The problem for Firefox is that pretty much all of those users are coming from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. That browser just dipped below 60% market share for the first time, but Microsoft seems committed to improving it with the IE9 release and beyond. Even if it’s still not perfect, it’s likely that the rate at which Firefox will be able to pull users from Internet Explorer will decrease. Firefox doesn’t appear to be pulling users from the other browsers (as they’re not declining), so their only other hope would be to get new people to start using the web (with Firefox, of course).

One big question over the next few years will be if Chrome is able to pull users from Firefox and IE faster than Firefox can pull new users from IE alone? The other big question will be how quickly the browsers on mobile platforms (including tablets) grow? As we’ve seen first-hand, the growth is already happening fast. Others are seeing it too.

Something else interesting in Dotzler’s graph: apparently, 10 million or so active Firefox users just stop using the browser during the holidays. Dotzler says this is normal given the time of year, but Chrome has no such dip.

Shared by Francine
Another great post.

The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

All eyes are on Facebook. Ever since Facebook revealed Facebook Open Graph, the world’s largest social network has been getting hammered by tech pundits, mainstream media, and its users.

Facebook’s used to this type of uproar after it changes something, but in my time tracking Facebook, I’ve never seen anything like this. Not even the Facebook News Feed fiasco of 2006 had U.S. Senate scrutiny. Facebook Open Graph has clearly struck a nerve with a lot of people.

Is Facebook betraying its users, though? Has Facebook compromised user privacy? After taking a lot of time to absorb the arguments and the big picture, I’m weighing in, and I doubt that my conclusion is going to be popular.

The central problem is that people believe that Facebook and the web in general should be able to protect the information we post online. I argue that this is untrue, because it goes against the fundamental design of Facebook, social media, and the web itself. We should be relying on ourselves for our privacy, and not turning Facebook into our convenient scapegoat.

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True: Facebook Should Have Communicated Better

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On April 21st, Facebook announced Open Graph, a platform for personalizing the web browsing experience on third-party websites and without logging into Facebook. It makes sense: Open Graph is spreading the tentacles of the social network across the web, making its presence and power known through the social plugins and “Like” buttons now plastered across the web.

The media and some of Facebook’s users haven’t fallen in line, though. Some technology pundits have deleted their accounts, all in the name of privacy. Mainstream media is hammering Facebook. There are even Quit Facebook Days being planned, although it’s unclear how many people will actually bite the bullet.

While I’ve seen Facebook’s users exude more anger than this in past incidents, this is the first time I’ve seen the media pile up so much on the world’s largest social network.

Clearly Facebook screwed up. Critics have a legitimate point saying that Facebook’s privacy options are too complicated. More importantly, Facebook hasn’t been communicating with its 425+ million users like it should: a Q&A with Facebook VP Elliot Schrage on the New York Times blog just doesn’t cut it.

I’m especially critical about Facebook’s lack of communication on the situation. I expected Mark Zuckerberg to write a blog post letting users know that Facebook is listening, despite previously stating that privacy is dead. He has done this before, and it went a long way to appeasing the angry masses.

Mark, better late than never. You need to personally respond in an open letter on the Facebook blog.

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The Truth About the Web

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In 2006, while I was still a junior at Northwestern University, I started a group called Students Against Facebook News Feed. It was the largest protest group against News Feed, which had recently launched at the time. My concern was privacy: I thought that Facebook was violating my privacy and not giving me enough options to control it. 750,000+ other Facebook users agreed — nearly 10% of the user base at the time.

Facebook appeased us with more privacy controls, but they didn’t take down News Feed. It has turned out to be the right decision. News Feed has become a central pillar of Facebook and indeed of all social media. Here’s what I said about News Feed, two years after the controversy:

“Here’s the major change in the last two years: We are more comfortable sharing our lives and thoughts instantly to thousands of people, close friends and strangers alike. The development of new technology and the rocking of the boat by Zuckerberg has led to this change.”

I actually agree with Mark: Privacy is dead, and social media is holding the smoking gun. Facebook, social media, and even the web itself are designed to share information. While you can be (justifiably) angry about Facebook’s lack of communication over the privacy issue, to believe that information on Facebook or other social networks is inherently private or “yours” is just wrong.

I don’t care if you have taken every precaution to keep your information private to just a few people: all it takes is one friend copying and pasting that information and posting it somewhere else to “breach” the privacy wall.

The truth is that the privacy wall didn’t exist in the first place. The web makes the transmission of information easier than ever. Social media makes spreading that information an even simpler task. An embarrassing picture can go from Facebook upload to public blog post in a matter of minutes. Even if you don’t participate in any type of social media, someone can still take what they know about you and put it online.

The web is a network of information, and information has no walls.

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Protecting Our Privacy Is Up to Us, Not Facebook

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The web is now the world’s social platform, and expecting any privacy controls or security settings to protect us is just irresponsible. Facebook’s not the enemy: it’s just the latest scapegoat for our fears and concerns surrounding the new world in which we live.

Before the web, if you wanted to keep something private, you didn’t talk about it. It was easier to track whether or not someone was spilling your secrets because you didn’t have as many suspects. That’s not true if you post information online, though. What was once gossip is now a “privacy leak.”

Why do we still expect anything to stay private in the YouTube and Facebook world? More and more, our habit is to share the pictures we take on our camera phones on Facebook, to share what we say over Twitter, and to upload the videos we record on our Flips. Almost everything is being caught by some form of social media these days.

Protecting our privacy starts with us, not Facebook. While the company should have more clearly communicated its recent privacy changes, if you didn’t want your pictures shared with the rest of the world, you shouldn’t upload them in the first place.

Actually, in the social media world, you shouldn’t be placing yourself in positions where people can take embarrassing photos of you. Yes, it’s unfortunate that the dumb mistakes teenagers make are getting posted online for the world to see, but that’s how the world works now.

Facebook isn’t to blame for how the web has changed our world. They are just embracing emerging trends and making the web more efficient in their wake. Being able to broadcast what I like on the web to all of my friends is smart, and making it easy for me to do that (via “Like” buttons) is brilliant.

I defend Facebook’s ambitious Open Graph project, because it does make the browsing experience better: syncing the interests I’ve posted to the website I visit is a natural extension of the Facebook platform, not a coldly-calculated invasion of my privacy. It will prove to be an innovation that makes the web more useful and more social.

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Facebook Is the Wrong Target for Our Anger

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I think what I said a year ago about social media, Facebook News Feed, and privacy still sums up my feelings best, so I want to quote my past self one more time:

“The thing we’ve realized is that we still have control over our privacy. It’s called choice. If you’re uncomfortable with speaking to people digitally, you can decline to sign up for those social media websites. Or you update them differently than others. I can either block relationship updates from News Feed or, in my case, I just never update about it.

News Feed truly launched a revolution that requires us to stand back to appreciate. Privacy has not disappeared, but become even easier to control – what I want to share, I can share with everyone. What I want to keep private stays in my head.

All of this in just two years. Just imagine how social media will change our society in two more.

I look forward to sharing my life and my experience with even more people. I’m not afraid of losing my privacy anymore. You shouldn’t be, either.”

I defend Facebook because it is the wrong target for our anger. It has done more to bring people together than any technology of the last five years, and the good it has brought far outweighs the bad. We made the decision to turn our personal information over to a private company, and for the most part Facebook made good use of it.

Quitting Facebook won’t solve the privacy conundrum: common sense and better education about how privacy has changed will. This debate has once again exposed the gap between how the world has changed and our assumptions about how the world works or should work. Attacking Facebook won’t help us come to terms with our society’s struggle over the changing nature of privacy.

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Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, YouTube

Tags: Column, facebook, mark zuckerberg, Opinion, privacy, The Social Analyst, trending

Privacy Reboot Needed —

I’m sitting in a talk listening to Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare (that’s a photo of Dennis during the talk above). I’m sure you’ve heard of Foursquare, but with it we check in.

In the building there are 101 other people checked in. Keep in mind this is NOT New York. It is NOT London. It is NOT San Francisco. It is freaking Omaha, Nebraska!

On stage Crowley is explaining where Foursquare came from. One slide he has is when he took a trip to Denmark he posted a map of where he’d be going onto Flickr. Within minutes he had dozens of comments from his friends giving advice of where he should go.

People ask me why I friend everyone on Foursquare (I have more than 7,000 friends, all added manaually). That is exactly why: my life has gotten much richer since everyone shares where they are located with me. Many even share their phone numbers, Twitter accounts, Facebook accounts.

This sounds like the worst thing for privacy ever, right?

It is.

But I find that we’re also finding out a new construct of what privacy means.

I really love danah boyd’s thoughts on radical transparency. She says that most people don’t want to be radically transparent like me.

But yesterday Gary Vaynerchuk said you will check in if you get free beer. Damn straight!

People are already checking in before the free beer has arrived.

And that gets to the heart of our new privacy construct: we will share our privacy +if+ we get something in return.

Most of the compelling arguments I’m hearing about Facebook is that Mark Zuckerberg has forced us to share something private WITHOUT giving us the “free beer” in return. Or, at least, Zuckerberg hasn’t explained what we are getting in return for his throwing our privacy under the bus. Let me explain.

Facebook used to have a privacy setting that would let you hide your social graph (geek talk for who your friends are) from me. Today you can no longer hide your friend graph and some other profile details, like what kind of music you like.

See, this is why people think I’m on the wrong side of the privacy problems Facebook is having. I see that there are real benefits to being radically transparent and so do many people (more than you would think).

But on the other hand, I think Zuckerberg is wrong to rip away something we thought was private and give that over to the world without properly explaining the “free beer” we’re getting in return (or, even, giving us a choice in it).

That said, Facebook is a free service that I don’t control. Neither do you. The only control we have is whether we use it or not. I’ve decided to use it, but have already gotten ahead of Zuckerberg: I’ve turned every privacy setting to “as public as possible.” If Zuckerberg wants to make Facebook as public as Twitter or as public as Foursquare, I’m cool with that, but will not use it to store anything private.

I think we need a reboot on what privacy is in this new world and when we need privacy.

And, as radically transparent as I am with tools like Foursquare and Twitter I still need privacy. I still need to know that Google won’t take my email into public. Some people have called me a hypocrite because I won’t share my Gmail password. They are right. There are some things that we need to keep private.

I interviewed Maryam (I’m her husband) the other day about how she approaches privacy on Facebook. She has a nuanced view of it. If Zuckerberg throws her privacy under the bus (she hasn’t perceived that he has, yet, you should listen to what she says about Facebook — her views match more what I’m hearing from most people, not the pundits) she’ll change her behavior.

She is clearly willing to give away some of her privacy (she doesn’t care, for instance, that you know what restaurants she’s liked on Yelp — she sees that as different than photos of our kids or discussions of our life).

The thing that Zuckerberg needs to explain is why we should believe that Facebook won’t take even more privacy away in the future. I believe Facebook HAS lost a lot of trust here and has overstepped the line. It took me a couple of weeks to get there because I live such a public life and I don’t use Facebook to store anything private (I really do wish Facebook had an even more public setting than it already has for the same reason I use Foursquare — I see that by being public my life gets better). But Zuckerberg did overstep the line by not giving us the choice and, worse yet, not giving us the free beer in exchange for throwing our privacy under the bus.

So, where do we go now? It’s clear Facebook is something different today than it was six months ago. Something a lot closer to Twitter or Google Buzz. Let it all hang out baby! And that’s cool, I’m still going to use Facebook and so is Maryam. It still is a very valuable service. But it is clear that Facebook can’t be trusted with really private data in the future. It’s not Gmail or Hotmail.

What is the reboot we all need?

1. We need to realize that putting anything onto a computer COULD become public. Even private emails COULD be dragged into public view. Jason Calacanis had an email dragged into public view that I’m sure he didn’t want put into public view. At Microsoft I learned that anything I put on a computer could end up on the front page of the New York Times (several executives had that happen). So you are always safe if you never put anything on a computer you aren’t willing to see in the New York Times.
2. We need to get over our “privacy.” Services like Foursquare show that there’s a lot of benefits over sharing your previously private info. Even Facebook now is showing me music on Pandora from my friends. That’s freaking awesome and a major side benefit of Zuckerberg throwing your privacy under the bus.
3. We need more skills to understand the impacts of sharing online. Early adopters need to explain the pros and cons of sharing better. I’ll try to do more of that in the next few weeks.
4. If Facebook wants to be trusted it must make a privacy contract with its users that will have real consequences if Zuckerberg throws it under the bus. I don’t know what that looks like. This is why the alternatives to Facebook just don’t matter either. They all could break their privacy contract with us. Even Google or Microsoft could and we all know it. So, we’re just going to have to live in this new world where privacy is a myth.

How do we have that privacy reboot?

Now, excuse me, I need to check in on Foursquare, join me there as I throw my own privacy under the bus.

Facebook Finally Calls Meeting on Privacy Strategy —

Facebook has finally decided to directly address the privacy concerns of the media, it’s users, and it’s ex-users. The meeting is scheduled for 4pm today, May 13th. While Facebook has attempted to downplay the outrage from users, as it has done with previous changes in the past, this latest situation is just too much too ignore. According to sources inside the company, the meeting is to discuss and possibly change the companies privacy strategy.

Over the many redesigns, feature additions, and privacy changes that have come across just recently, Facebook has been able to pretty much ignore user complaints. While everyone would complain about the changes, nobody ever did anything about it beyond creating a Facebook group or blogging about it. Now, prominent tech figures and many previous fans have actually closed their accounts due to Facebook’s latest changes.

First, they changed the language on the site to increase engagement round fan pages and groups. This ensured users would end up associating themselves with things unintentionally. The next step was launching the Graph API and implementing Instant Personalization. This made it simple for publishers to implement a Like button on their sites and associate visitors with their content. It also made your personal info freely available to a few 3rd party sites with plans to expand that number in the future.

If this were not enough of a shake up, we then saw a security hole where any of your friends could get a glimpse of your chat history and pending friend requests. Shortly after that, we find out that Yelp, one of the chosen 3rd parties given access to your personal data via Instant Personalization, had a security hole that allowed any third party to get access to all of your Facebook data without you ever visiting Yelp or doing anything out of the ordinary. You didn’t even need to be logged into Facebook.

It’s easy to see how many users are outraged and turned off by the social networking giant. Many so much so that they’ve totally given up and deleted their accounts. One of the primary issues with the changes Facebook makes is that they are all opt-out instead of opt-in. This means you are automatically tossed into the fire and are expected to a) know what has happened and b) know how to opt-out. Most Facebook users haven’t a clue about this stuff and others even doubt if this opt-out policy is even legal.

It’s debatable whether Facebook will be able to turn this thing around or even if they are looking to do so. While they have lost a few users, they are still #1 and this may just be a play to simply cool things down a bit.

via Facebook Calls All Hands Meeting On Privacy

Despite the controversy surrounding Instant Personalization, the social plugins offered by Facebook seem to do rather well on the Internet, at least according to the data published on their blog. It’s fairly easy to add social data and interaction on a blog, but, as I discovered, some of the options have interesting side effects. Let’s see what are the main steps to transform a blog into a ‘social object’:

Add Open Graph protocol markup to the blog

Probably the most open part of the new Facebook initiative, the Open Graph protocol “enables any web page to become a rich object in a social graph”. It’s always good to have a little more structure and this metadata could potentially be used by search engines as well. To add the properties defined in the Open Graph protocol to a Blogger blog, there are a few lines of code you should add to the HTML template:

• Before the <head> tag a line to specify you are using the Open Graph protocol on the site:

  xmlns:og='http://opengraphprotocol.org/schema/'

• After the <head> tag the metadata defining the blog and each page or article:

  <meta property='og:title' expr:content='data:blog.pageTitle' />
  <meta property='og:site_name' expr:content='data:blog.title' />
  <meta property='og:url' expr:content='data:blog.url' />
  <meta content='URL for image file, e.g. site logo' property='og:image' />
  <meta content='blog' property='og:type' />
  <meta content='Free text' property='og:description' />

This is probably the simplest way to dynamically specify page titles and URLs, by referencing the corresponding Blogger variables. There are other properties related to location and contact information for example, but they can be added as simple text, since they will be the same for all the pages on a site.

After making these changes to my own blog, I noticed that posting a link to my blog on a Facebook wall behaves differently. Normally, it detects images on the page and a small text snippet like an excerpt of the page content. Now, instead of that, it offers only the image and description specified by the Open Graph metadata. That can be useful when every page has it’s own Open Graph image and description, because the users will see the same information on every link shared on Facebook, leading to a more consistent image for the site. But for a blog it’s difficult, if not impossible, to maintain a description and specify an image on a per-post basis, because it would involve a lot of manual work in the template code. Personally, I removed the ‘description’ property, because it’s optional anyway. The automatic snippet is more informative to someone discovering the link on Facebook than the title with a standard description. 

A few days ago, I read an article on ReadWriteWeb about the Open Graph Protocol and how even the launch partners didn’t implement the markup correctly. It’s probably not that surprising considering it doesn’t offer an immediate benefit for the the required effort.

Add a ‘Like’ button

This topic has been already covered by other blogs, including how to customize the original code from Facebook to point the ‘like’ at individual articles instead of a fixed URL:

• for the iframe variant, this code generates a button with a like count similar to the TweetMeme button for Twitter retweets:

  <iframe allowTransparency='true' expr:src='&quot;http://www.facebook.com/plugins/like.php?href=&quot; + data:post.url + &quot;&amp;layout=button_count&amp;show_faces=false&amp;width=50&amp;action=like&amp;font=trebuchet&amp;colorscheme=light&quot;' frameborder='0' scrolling='no' style='border:none; overflow:hidden; width:50px; height:40px;'/>

• and the more flexible, XFBML version:

  <fb:like action='like' colorscheme='light' expr:href='data:post.url' font='trebuchet ms' layout='button_count' show_faces='false' width='50'/>

The second choice can generate more audience for the ‘liked’ link, because the user gets the option to post it to his wall for all his friends (or ‘Everyone’) to see, while the first only shows up on the profile as an ‘one line story’. On the other hand, using XFBML requires another script on your blog that can slow it down. I tested this version for a while, but I switched to iframe now, because it loads much faster. According to the recommendations in the documentation, the Facebook should be loaded after all other elements on the page, making the ‘Like’ button the last to appear.

Measure the interaction on Facebook

After implementing social plugins on a site, it’s only natural to want a way to track how users are interacting with your content. Facebook offers Insights for this purpose. It’s similarly easy to setup, by adding another meta tag to the site to verify you are the owner, like you do with other webmaster suites. The “Insights” page will even generate the code when you click on the green button labeled “Insights for your Domain”.

But there’s a catch! After you link your Facebook profile with a site with this method, the next time you ‘like’ one of your own articles Facebook will set up a page for your blog! It gets even more interesting if the ‘like’ buttons are customized for each separate article, with the code presented above, because liking several articles will generate another Facebook page for each of them. This is meant as a security feature to prevent people from claiming sites they do not own, but it doesn’t work well together with the new ‘like’ button.

I didn’t really intend to create a Facebook page for my blog, but now I have one, after testing these social plugins, not to mention the couple I accidentally created and deleted later. I was a little disappointed to see it doesn’t pick up new articles from the blog, that must me configured separately. Facebook doesn’t have very good tools to import a blog feed, there is only the Notes feature. I currently use RSS Graffiti to update the page instantly when I publish something new, but there are other third-party options available, like TwitterFeed or NetworkedBlogs.

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