Dan's New Blog

Interesting convergence of  a couple of articles about: (a) compulsive Type-A Gen XYZers vying with each other on Foursquare to be mayor of, among other things, an alley, a bridge, and someone else’s townhouse, and (b) how I gotta update my Facebook privacy settings yet again to opt-out of their new Places service.

Keeping up with social networking is a lot of work. It’s almost as hard as being mayor of my house, what with the mowing and cleaning and fixing and painting and shoveling and, well, you get the idea.

This chart says it all: AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo aren’t capturing eyeballs the way they used to. AOL’s share of people’s online time is down 6% over the past 4 years, Yahoo has lost 4% and Microsoft is at -2%. Over the same time period, Google is up 8% and Facebook 9%.

AOL knows what it wants to become when it grows up, but it’s still failing. Yahoo? It doesn’t appear to have a clue.

Yesterday was Quit Facebook Day, and there are, as I write this, 34,275 brave souls who have declared their intention to live without status updates and wall posts. God bless ‘em. Depending on whoever you believe, they account for anywhere from .007% to .009% of all registered FB users. Certainly not a groundswell, despite all the hoohah in the press. (And I guess I have to include myself in that category.)

In response to the anti-Facebook lynch mob, they’re making privacy controls simpler. (Again.) The changes, in a nutshell, are:

• “One simple control to set who can see the content you post.”

• Friends and pages you’re a fan of are no longer required to be public

• Easy opt-out of applications and/or personalization

All this will roll out over the next few weeks. Here’s the blog post with the announcement. A live-blog with more info is here.

I’m not a big fan of Jason Calacanis. But he’s written an interesting piece on how he believes Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, whom he calls “an amoral, Asperger’s-like entrepreneur” has overplayed his hand:

“Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand. Facebook is officially ‘out,’ as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realization that Zuckerberg and his company are — simply put — not trustworthy.”

In my house, I’m very wary of FB. My wife, even more so. She’s opted out entirely. (She’d rather obsess about her own blog instead. Ask her how many people from Croatia visited it last week. Go ahead. Seriously.) But my 2 kids are addicted. They don’t care about trustworthiness.

Calacanis provides us with handy lists of (a) the people Zuckerberg has back-stabbed over the past 5 years in his march to world domination, and (b) a dozen articles from last week about how Facebook is the devil. (Or the antichrist. Whatever.) Anyway my favorite quote is this:

“The more we feed the monster that is Facebook, the more we lose.”

Now I’ve heard the same thing said about Google. But it never rang true for Google like it does for Facebook. And as I keep saying to anyone who’ll listen:

“I know Google collects just as much personal data from me — maybe more. At least with Google it’s a quid pro quo. They give me something I value — information — in return for my data. Facebook gives me nothing I care about — hey, if I want to know that you just came in from walking the dog, I’ll call you — in return for personal data that they’re soooo hot to monetize.”

Calacanis mentions that gdgt’s “Peter Rojas and [Google's] Matt Cutts have turned off their Facebook pages, and more intelligent people everywhere are talking about doing so.” I’m not Matt Cutts. Nor am I “more intelligent” — whatever that means. But I’m thinking I’m gonna go that route as well.

We’ll see.

From Wired:

NY Times reporter Nick Bilton: How does [Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg] feel about privacy?
Unnamed Facebook employee: [laughter] He doesn’t believe in it.

I hope this quote is apocryphal.

But it rings so true …

VentureBeat reports that Blippy, the social networking site that lets you compare your credit card purchases with other, equally self-absorbed users, inadvertently revealed some credit card numbers via a Google search. One hundred and twenty-seven, to be exact.

Blippy says in response that “it’s a lot less bad than it looks” — only 4 numbers were actually outed — and blames it on a Google cache issue. I tried the query just now; Google blocked it with the following response:

“We’re sorry… but your computer or network may be sending automated queries. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.”

To reiterate: “Why, oh why?“

Back in the Seventies, life was pretty homogeneous. We all watched the same TV shows on the same 3 channels. We all saw the same movies. We all read the same newspapers. (In Philadelphia, The Evening Bulletin actually claimed that “Nearly Everybody Reads the Bulletin”, which sounded real ironic when the paper folded in 1982. I still miss it.) And we all listened to the same music. The soundtrack to my senior year in high school was Saturday Night Fever. It was all over the radio. It played at every graduation party I ever went to.

I hated Saturday Night Fever.

What I didn’t realize at the time was that Saturday Night Fever was the next-to-last gasp of terminal homogeneity. (Michael Jackson’s Thriller was the last rattling wheeze.) The Seventies ended with Disco Demolition Night. The Eighties and Nineties gave us cable TV (57 Channels and Nothing On) and the Internet (Where do you want to go today?) We became lots of fragmented groups, and our choices for listening/watching/reading/consuming multiplied. We could all inhabit our own special niches.

But Facebook wants to drag me back to high school with this new “like” button thingie they introduced yesterday. Now, if I go to CNN, for example, I can read the same stories that my Facebook friends like. Or I can recommend some to them. On Pandora I can listen to the songs they like. And so on.

The problem is that I’ve never liked the same things as my friends and family. Not music. Not books. And certainly not movies. (When I stick one of my DVDs in the player, you should see the family scatter like cockroaches. What’s wrong with The Seventh Seal?) I don’t want or need to see which media my real-world friends are consuming. How much less my digital ones?

Facebook is attempting to become the nexus through which the Web passes. I get that. It’s the only way they can monetize all the personal info that people willingly give them. But as I’ve said previously:

“I know Google collects just as much personal data from me — maybe more. At least with Google it’s a quid pro quo. They give me something I value — information — in return for my data. Facebook gives me nothing I care about.”

And now they’ve given me a filter problem. I’m gonna have to deal with it, or I’ll have Stayin’ Alive stuck in my head forever.

Hey … You got Outlook all over my Facebook! Two great tastes that taste great together.

Huh?

Office 2010, due out in June, will feature the Outlook Social Connector, which will integrate Facebook status updates from your family and friends into your mailbox. MySpace — if it’s still around — and LinkedIn, too. (You can play with a beta version of LinkedIn for Outlook today if you want. Facebook and MySpace will launch in June.)

Let us hope that Microsoft does a better job of protecting users’ privacy than another (cough) well-known tech company did last week.

If I was in IT, I’m nososure I’d think this was a marriage made in heaven. It has the potential to be a huge time-waster. Internet access is a given in most workplaces, so you’re gonna have a certain amount of Facebook-checking throughout the day. It’s inevitable. Some companies block Facebook, but most just turn a blind eye to it. That’s passively tolerating social networking. But plugging Facebook into Outlook? That means you’re actively encouraging social networking. That won’t fly in most places.

And it’s not Facebook. It’s Google’s new Google Buzz, which is a Facebook/Twitter hybrid product. It’s supposed to be plug-and-play: you set up your profile and Google determines your social circle based upon whom you Gmail the most. But it’s got some privacy issues, viz.:

(1) Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider is one (of many) who takes Google to task for revealing Buzz users’ closest contacts to the world:

“But we have a message for the brilliant people behind Google Buzz (and the rest of Google’s products): the rest of the world is NOT like you. These privacy concerns aren’t for the incredibly computer savvy, the patient beta testers, or Twitter and Facebook power users. Our concerns are for the people who, when encountering a new service, click ‘save and continue’ until it is completely set-up and functional, reading as little text in various dialogue boxes as they can. These people are the people we call the ‘normals’. Some of these ‘normals’ are physicians or mental health professionals who have patients they email with. Some of these people are journalists (ahem!) dealing with anonymous sources. Some of these people are spouses who are finding a safe way out of bad marriages with the help of someone their spouse doesn’t know about. Some of them are junior staffers, secretly arranging to get a 50% raise going to a new company to become a manager for the first time.”

Google has made some changes to Buzz to address these issues, but again, “normals” probably won’t take advantage of them.

UPDATE, February 14: Google has made further changes. Buzz now suggests people to follow instead of auto-following your closest contacts. You can also opt-out of publicly displaying your contacts.

(2) Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch says that Buzz inadvertantly exposes private email addresses:

“Google Buzz borrows the @reply convention from Twitter so that if you want to reply to someone or direct a comment to them you simply put the @ sign in front of their name. Google autosuggests names from your contact list as you start typing. Normally, this doesn’t cause any problems if you select the Gmail account or chat name associated with that person’s public profile. It ends up posting their name, and not their email address. But if you select a name or account that is not public, Buzz will fill in with their private email. For example, I wanted to direct a comment at TechCrunch writer MG Siegler, so I typed in ‘@mg’ and up came three of his different emails. I picked his TechCrunch email, not realizing that his public profile is linked to a different Gmail account. What this means is that the 231 people following me on Buzz can all see MG’s private email address in my comment even if they had no direct connection to him before.”

Google says that it will be “very obvious that the email address is publicly visible, and you can always edit and/or delete that post.” Schonfeld says that’s expecting too much from the average user, and I agree.

UPDATE, February 14: Google now shows asterisks instead of private email addresses.

The common thread through these 2 problems is that Google puts the burden on the basic user of figuring out the privacy implications of everything they do on Buzz. It’s like they’ve never heard of people accidentally CCing the whole company on a private email.