Negative Publicity for Facebook Mushrooming

The Wall Street Journal reported yesterday that Facebook has been delivering non-aggregated user profile data to its advertisers when users click on an ad. The mechanism is the so-called referrer page. Advertisers have been free to collect this information to build a sophisticated consumer profile to target in the future. However, the WSJ's report does not include instances of this behavior, but it is not the kind of thing advertisers would like generally known. This is usually covered as "proprietary methods," that one advertiser uses to gain an advantage over another. The WSJ's report is here. (Read it before Rupert Murdoch takes it down.)


To see the power of Facebook's internal API's that allow direct querying of user information, check this
graphic.
If I remember correctly, this graphic was generated by a single individual who used the documented APIs to query Facebook's database. It generated some discussion at the time because a lot of people thought it was an abuse of privacy, including the lords at Facebook who asked him to destroy his project and data.

Also yesterday, NPR's Science Friday joined the fray in nipping at Facebook's jugular. Science Friday has been an early adopter of every online community- at least, second life, facebook, and twitter. I really like the program and the podcast, but all of that "joining" has never been for me.

...Get a free T-shirt for your avatar in Second Life on Science Friday Island. I'm Ira Flatow in New York.

Note: The above includes some textual revisions from the original.

Big Love...

This week's Doonesbury includes a shout out to Mormon polygamy.

comic

Usenet...dying the death of a thousand cuts

First, the minor ISP dropped the Usenet service due to space limitations, then major the ISPs dropped it due to pressure from the US Justice Department under the banner of eliminating pornography. Don't be confused by that ruse; it's a sure bet that the RIAA and the MPAA are mostly behind that decision. Now, as shown in this Slashdot headline, the universities are beginning to drop servers,
here

It will be too bad if Usenet goes away because no matter the uses for bad, tremendous potential for good remains. It is a bastion of free speech and a vast knowledge store of the world's working knowledge on many subjects. For example, it has helped me many times when learning about GNU/Linux.

Some shout outs to Facebook

Betty White hosted SNL last night, thanks mostly to a Facebook based petition. She thanked them, but went on to rip them, too.

I really have to thank Facebook. I didn’t know what Facebook was, and now that I do know what it is, I have to say, it sounds like a huge waste of time. I would never say the people on it are losers, but that’s only because I’m polite. People say ‘But Betty, Facebook is a great way to connect with old friends.’ Well at my age, if I wanna connect with old friends, I need a Ouija Board. Needless to say, we didn’t have Facebook when I was growing up. We had phonebook, but you wouldn’t waste an afternoon with it.

Much was made of her being the oldest host. The only other octogenarian host that I can think of is Ruth Gordon who hosted in 1977 at the age of 81. Last night, much was made of Betty White's age, but nobody mentioned that the announcer was oldest of all-- Don Pardo is 92. The show also had a lot of role reprisals from former cast members: Rachel Dratch, Tina Fey, Ana Gasteyer, Amy Poehler, Maya Rudolph, Molly Shannon.

Meanwhile, people are starting to notice Facebook may not be all it is cracked up to be- just like myspace, second life, aol/yahoo communities, etc. etc. before it. This article appeared on Slashdot and notes the problems that crop up when people have different expectations of what a service will do for them and require of them.
.

As for me, the social community I still like the best is simple Usenet. Boy! that is old school.

Update: The NY Times has a story about the coding group at NYU creating Diaspora. Wired mentions them here.

Second Update: 2010-05-21 xkcd

is promoting Diaspora.

Life will find a way...even if it is a weed.

Check out the NY Times article, Invasion of the Super Weeds.

Most especially, Michael Pollan's response.

The NY Times graphic shows the resistant weed, Palmer's Amaranth, aka, common redroot. Yeah, they're out in the yard. We had a close relative, an ornamental amaranthis, in the yard one year. I can't remember exactly what I did, but I think I moved them early in their early development. They fell over sick and nearly died. The funny thing is they came back later in the year with different morphology. The neighbors thought they were more like trees, than annuals. Of course, Janice's ornamental plume poppy is the champ in the annual vertical growth- maybe from zero to ten feet tall in a single season. The amaranthis was nowhere near that, but still provided some significant challenges to the chipper. The NY Times notes that the mature amaranthis can damage cultivating equipment. Just got to get 'em while they're small.