Facebook’s Online Identity War quotes me and labels IIW an advocacy group. IT IS AN INDUSTRY FORUM. Douglas MacMillan.
Sorry but I am still learning “how” to talk to reporters. They don’t like to quote me as “the identity woman” and link to my blog.
I “do” run the Identity Workshop with Phil and Doc but that doesn’t make it an “advocacy group”
Identity Commons & IIW have a purpose and principles believing in user/centric identity. The power of individuals to manage and control their own identities online. We don’t “advocate” for them – we create a convening space for people who want to work on this ideal.
Facebook does on some level “agree” with the idea of user-centric identity – Luke Shepard has participated in the community for quite a while & they hired David Recordon. They sponsor IIW.
I am clear that the opening up of previously controlled information with no warning “jives” with my understanding of user-centric control. It was more from my own point of view I was commenting. That is with my “identity woman” hat on… and the values I carry from Planetwork and the ASN… but the press hates that. Uggg. Chris Messina gets to be an “open web advocate”… that is what I do to but just about identity “open Identity advocate” (mmm…) but then that sounds like “just” OpenID and it isn’t just about that one particular protocol. sigh.
I am still wondering – How does one “belong” and have “titles” in a way the media can GROK when one does not have a formal position in a formal organization.
sigh – identity issues.
Industry Players
Facebook Privacy Changes leave us "Socially Nude"
Read Write Web published a guest post by me about how the changes at facebook last week leave us Socially Nude.
Facebook’s Privacy Move Violates Contract With Users
Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable.
This represents just the latest instance of Facebook violating the contract it holds with its users. This is no small matter, either. Lots of people will have very real and valid objections to this arbitrary change to what’s public and what’s private on Facebook.
….an articulation of the nature of the social contract sites with social features have with users….
I wonder how many more times they will get strip us down, leaving our familiar social clothes and underware on the floor, and leaving us socially nude.
I think it is unethical and I agree with the concern that Jason Calacanis raises about how this will affect other Internet companies. “Facebook’s reckless behavior is… simultaneously making users distrust the Internet and bringing the attention of regulators.” This change will affect all of us working on building the new techno-social architecture of our society via the web.
Facebook Changing Privacy Settings
This past month has been interesting for Facebook – they hired Timothy Sparapani as their lobbyist in Washington:
As a prominent privacy advocate, Timothy Sparapani, former senior legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, argued that Internet companies have too much control over consumers’ data. The self-described “privacy zealot” didn’t join Facebook until seven months ago because he was uneasy about revealing personal information on the site.
He joins 24-year-old Adam Coner for the last year who has had as his main job “educat[ing] members of Congress and Capitol Hill staffers about leveraging Facebook to reach constituents.”
The current Chief Privacy officer Chris Kelly will be going on a leave of absence in September to focus on running for Attorney General of California.
EPIC has a very detailed page about Facebook Privacy. It is an impressive page that will give you pause. It outlines all the major features of the service it has concerns about. It has a list of all the EPIC Actions related to Facebook too.
This week Facebook is taking some steps to improve privacy from its website:
The power to share is the cornerstone of Facebook. Privacy and the tools for tailoring what information is shared with whom are at the heart of trust. Over the past five years, Facebook has learned that effective privacy is grounded in three basic principles:
- Control. When people can easily control the audience for their information and content, they share more and they’re able to better connect with the people who matter in their lives.
- Simplicity. When tools are simple, people are more likely to use them and understand them.
- Connection. With effective tools, people can successfully balance their desire to control access to information with their desire to connect – to discover and be discovered by those they care about.
That’s why in the coming days, we’ll be improving privacy on Facebook by launching a series of tests that guide people to new, simpler tools of control and connection.
I wrote about some of the issues I have with Facebook when I heard Dave Morin talk at SXSW “Am I to “old” to get Facebook – or do they not get it?”. I highlighted 3 different issues:
- What Blane Cook describes as “being in a room with everyone you ever met all the time”: all my friends from different contexts of my life get all the same ‘status’ updates and I don’t use them cause I feel like it is social spam to speak to them with the same voice and same frequency. I also don’t like that it broadcasts everything I “do” in the network to everyone.
- “Real Names” vs. handles online – their belief they have “everyone’s real name in facebook”
- The difference that women experience in online space and how they manage and protect their identity and what information is online.
Here is what they are saying about how to address this issue:
They are introducing a Publisher Privacy Control so that on a per-post basis users can control who sees each post. Friends, Friends and Family etc. On the other end of the spectrum, you can also share with “everyone” now.
They are simplifying their privacy settings. Hopefully this will make it more usable.
They are figuring out how to gracefully help people transition between the old settings and the new way.
They are asking everyone to revisit their settings…because:
We think Facebook is most useful when people can find and connect with each other, which is why this tool will enable you to make available those parts of your profile that you feel comfortable sharing in order to facilitate better connection. You will have the choice of being as open or as limited in the sharing of this information as you want.
The byline on the post is cute:
Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, is glad to be offering you more control.
Read Write Web goes into their understanding of the announcement and user experience. This is a long, good piece.
FU – The Monday After, Facebook Usernames and Your Domain on the Web
Last week it was announced that on on Friday Night at 9pm Pacific Facebook had a name space land rush. Everyone was free to pick for themselves their username that would appear in their URL. facebook.com/username
I actually found this a bit surprising – remember the big debate on the Social Web TV I had with Josh Elman about “real names.” He was against handles completely and felt that the big value facebook brought was “real names”. I argued for handles and the freedom to choose one’s “identity” on the web. I made the point that free society – having the ability freedom to have the option to have and use handles on the web NOT linked to our given/ in real life names. Another thing is that handles help us navigate namespace clash from regular names. Max from MySpace is 8bitkid not some other Max in a sea of Max’s.
I ran into Josh Elman at the Building43 party and we agreed I kinda won the debate with this latest development. It seems that having peoples pages rank higher in google is helped by having readable URL’s.
They of course “strongly encouraged” people to just pick a URL with one’s real name and did so by “suggesting” names that were derivatives of one’s name. You could override this and type in your own name choice (however defaults matter so most people will end up with names similar to their real name – rather then being asked to think up one). They give users an addressable identity.
Max Engel of MySpace became /8BitKid – his handle “everywhere”
David Recordon surprisingly didn’t go with DaveMan692 – his handle most places – he is /DavidRecordon
My friend Jennifer became /dangerangel as she had originally signed up for in Facebook but they disallowed her to have it.
I just became /Kaliya (I am hoping I can get enough fans to claim /identitywoman for that persona)
What is particularly interesting is the layers of identity in Facebook.
With a Facebook URLFacebook has the one’s username is not one’s e-mail address as it is with Google profiles and one also has a common name (or as they say “real name”) that is presented to throughout the system.
Google ironically enough they ask if you want a “contact” me button on your page that does not give away your e-mail address when the profile URL gives away your e-mail address.
Twitter has /usernames AND another display name of your choosing that is changeable (the /usernames are not). However most twitter clients display one or the other. If you are used to seeing the display name and then are on your phone that is only showing @handle /username then you don’t know who is talking.
Facebook usernames is another example Twitter feature adoption by Facebook others being activity streams becoming much more like twitter streams.
I said when I first “got” twitter about 18 months ago – a big part of the value it provided was its namespace. It gave me a cool anchor on the web that allowed communication between me and others via the web.
So how is it going so far? Inside facebook reports that over the weekend 6 million folks – 3% of their userbase gut URLs. 500,000 in the first 15 min, 1,000,000 in the first hour and 3 million in the first 14 hours.
There were several examples of FaceSquating. Mike Pence took Obiefernadez’s name.
Anil Dash has the funniest post ever about the whole thing. Highlight the point that users don’t need facebook URL’s they can just get their own domain name. He repeats this throughout the post about what these services are not telling you:
None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.
I completely agree with him – he also misses a key point the usability of facebook is vastly higher then the usability of domain name registration, cpanel management and other things involved in getting ones own personal web presence going. DiSo isn’t hear yet so we can’t link to our friends without linking capability that a facebook provides. I suppose Chi.mp was trying to
He links to a post of his from December 2002 called privacy and identity control.
I own my name. I am the first, and definitive, source of information on me.
One of the biggest benefits of that reality is that I now have control. The information I choose to reveal on my site sets the biggest boundaries for my privacy on the web. Granted, I’ll never have total control. But look at most people, especially novice Internet users, who are concerned with privacy. They’re fighting a losing battle, trying to prevent their personal information from being available on the web at all. If you recognize that it’s going to happen, your best bet is to choose how, when, and where it shows up.
That’s the future. Own your name. Buy the domain name, get yourself linked to, and put up a page. Make it a blank page, if you want. Fill it with disinformation or gibberish. Plug in other random people’s names into Googlism and paste their realities into your own. Or, just reveal the parts of your life that you feel represent you most effectively on the web. Publish things that advance your career or your love life or that document your travels around the world. But if you care about your privacy, and you care about your identity, take the steps to control it now.
In a few years, it won’t be as critical. There will be a reasonably trustworthy system of identity and authorship verification. Finding a person’s words and thoughts across different media and time periods will be relatively easy.
What people don’t quite get is that if they anchor their whole online life around someone else’s domain they are locked in. When I first started paying attention to user-centric identity online this was one of the meta-long term issues that the first identity commons folks (Drummond Reed, Fen Lebalm, Owen Davis, Andrew Nelson, Eugene Kim, Jim Fournier, Marc Le Maitre, Bill Barnhill, Nikolaj Nyholm, etc).
A few of them wrote a paper about it all – THE SOCIAL WEB – Creating an Open Social Network with XDI.
They liked the XRI/i-names architecture because it addressed the URL recycling problem with a layer of abstraction. All i-names also have linked to them a conical identifier – an i-number. This number is never reassigned in the global registry. However one could “sell” one’s i-name (mine is =kaliya) and that new person could use it but it would have a different i-number assigned to it for that person.
This past week at the Online Community Unconference we were talking about the issue of conversation tracking around blog conversations. How an one watch/track the conversation about one’s work if it is cross posted on 10 different sites OR if it is just posted in one place and one is distributing a link through 10 different channels? We never did get to an answer – I chimed in that the web was missing an abstraction layer – that if one could have a canonical identifier for a post that was up in 10 different places this would make it easier to track/see conversations about that post. What we do have now that we didn’t have 3 years ago for helping track conversations across multiple contexts is OpenID at least so you can see if someone commenting in one place is the same as someone commenting in another.
There is an additional layer of abstraction in the XRI architecture that supports several things are key to helping people integrate themselves and information about themselves on thew web.
One is cross referencing – so I could have have two different (URI) addresses for the same information (in the identifier – not just mapped over one another leaving me with one address OR the other) and also have one version of my profile be the one I controlled and a different be a version that appeared in a certain social context.
There is also a concept of much finer grained data addressability and control – so I could have my home address in one place and instead of entering this into each website/services/company portal that I want to have this information – just hand them a link to the canonical copy I manage and then I don’t have to change it everywhere. This is of course where the VRM folks are going with their architectures and services.
We shall see how it all evolves. That is what we do at the Internet Identity Workshop is keeping on working on figuring this all out.
SXSW – Hula Hut edition of Social Web TV
Lots has happened here at SXSW – The previous post is what i put up on my blog was what we posted on the screen during the OpenID – Oauth and the Enterprise session. hash tag #sxswid
The next session that afternoon in the same room on Open Spec development was very entertaining and I will be writing about it more this week. Hash tag #sxswos
Yesterday after the She’s Geeky Lunch I headed out to the Hula Hut for the OpenID lunch – I couldn’t help but noticing when I arrived that i was the only woman at the table 🙂 – it is one of the reasons I gave my blog its name – because in 2005 after working in the user-centric identity field for a year of going to meetings with the guys working on it I was the only woman I ever saw at a meeting about the topic.
Following that I hung out on the deck of the Hula Hut and talked with Dave Morin, David Recordon, Chris Messina, Josh Elman, Joseph Smarr, John McCrae the Gowally guy and others who were in and out.
While there Josh and I started talking about one of the things I blogged about the Facebook post I did from Day one of SXSW.
I am not sure if Facebook understands that having people use their “Real Names” is not actually what creates authenticity – the issue has been on the web is not “who you are in real life” but the inability to have online persona’s that are persistent over time and context. The investment into these and the ability to have them be useful has not been solved until recently.
It was decided this would be a good topic for Social Web TV so we recorded it on the spot.
I also got to invite folks to the Internet Identity Workshop happening May 18-20th in Mountain View.
Am I to "old" to get Facebook? – or do they not get it?
I am at SXSW this morning. I just came from the session “Is Privacy Dead or Just Very Confused?” about the difference between private and public spheres and how they are contextual and social contract dependent. They talked about how strange facebook was for merging all ones contexts together (this is my own critique of it). This post was written while listening to Dave Morin talk about the future of the facebook platform “The Search for a More Social Web” (it was really a product plug) – As he oppened the talk he gave us a history of human communication that had the personal computer preceding the ARPA Net (clearly he would benefit from a visit to the Computer History Museum where we hold the Internet Identity Workshop twice a year). While listening I can’t help but keep wondering if I am just to “old”.
When I was in my first year of university at UC Berkeley the web was just beginning to diffuse to widespread use in that context. We had LAND LINES then. I spent $300 a month on long distance to talk to friends back home in canada. I was not “socially” connected via electronic media back then. Some people from my “old lives” have found me in facebook but I don’t feel “socially connected” to them in that I really don’t think they care about what I am “doing now on the web” and I don’t really have an ongoing social relationship with them so that i want to know “all” about what they are doing. They are NOT my “friends” but in facebook they “are”. I don’t want to be rude and unfriend them I am “interested” in their lives – like would be interested in hearing from them once every couple months but they are not in my social world.
I notice a real gap between myself and those 10 years younger then me who had facebook IN highschool and college – they love it cause it keeps them connected to their “friends”. I wonder about this cultural social time divide.
Today I am hearing facebook talk again about how they have people’s “real identities” with their “real names” and how important this is for authenticity. Dave Morin is going around convincing people to switch from their online personal handles in twitter to their “real” names. I thought about just being “Kaliya” in twitter but decided that my online twitter persona and voice would be that of my “professional” self – “IDENTITY WOMAN” I do talk about some personal things I do and mention opinions outside of “just my professional self” but it is not “me” there are ideas and opinions and things i do on the web that are not for everyone to see and I don’t share them in twitter. What I don’t like about facebook and the idea of facebook connect is that it feeds “everything you do” by default to “everyone you know” (within that system – they call these people “friends”). I want to present different selves to different audiences not because I want to “hide” but because I am connected to very diverse communities/friends and they all don’t want to hear about everything I am going everywhere it is to much “social noise.”
I am not sure if Facebook understands that having people use their “Real Names” is not actually what creates authenticity – the issue has been on the web is not “who you are in real life” but the inability to have online persona’s that are persistent over time and context. The investment into these and the ability to have them be useful has not been solved until recently. Bob (his blog is Cesi n’est pas un Bob – a reference to the Rene Magritte painting Ceni n’est pas une pipe/This is not a pipe) and the folks at the Burton Group have been talking about the possibility of people creating Limited Liability Persona’s to create persona’s on the web that are linked to “you” if something goes wrong but is not linked.
The audience of mostly young men in their 20’s and 30’s many of them “developers” on the facebook platform cheered all that was announced today by Dave Morin. I was left wondering and wrote this post as a response.
I am a member of the bridge generation – between the hyper connected young “digital natives” and the digital immigrants. (I was on BBS’s in Highschool (the local school board set one up just for kids within the city school system – that is where I hung out). My child hood home had a rotary telephone). while on vacation in Canada this summer I was struck by the conversations that I overheard by people older then me dabbling in facebook and being kind of freaked out by it. (In Canada Facebook has much higher penetration into the “general” population). The conversations I was having with highlevel leaders in the nonprofit and social business world at a retreat I was at about the dangers of building on closed silo’s like facebook was just beginning to dawn on them – they now understood. I am also a woman and the conversation we had at She’s Geeky regarding women and their presentation of self and identity online was really good. WE ARE DIFFERENT then dudes in their 20’s in San Francisco.
So I wonder… Am I to “old” to get Facebook? – or do they not get it? “it” being the needs of older people and the ability to control in more fine grained ways what people see about me. “it” being the needs of women in social space online.
We shall see.
Google Doc's "Privacy Blunder"
his is from Tech Crunch today …it only affects .05% of documents…
…and as they say it is a
privacy error that underscores some of the biggest problems surrounding cloud-based services,
At least it didn’t open all documents up to everyone…
According to the notice, this sharing was limited to people “with whom you, or a collaborator with sharing rights, had previously shared a document”
Facebook joins OpenID Board
Facebook joins OpenID board – with commitment to improved user experience.
It is our hope that we can take the success of Facebook Connect and work together with the community to build easy-to-use, safe, open and secure distributed identity frameworks for use across the Web. As a next step in that effort, we will be hosting an OpenID Design Summit next week here at Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto.
I am not sure what to think about this. I had a post in the works called “facebook must be stopped” because if the NakedJen incident last week and the kicking off a developer who had to many friends. I am not convinced that Facebook isn’t the borg.
User expericne is a good thing to improve – however the containers in which people are using the technology – the companies that have the power over the networks, their policies and practices – their power to ‘be god’ in the spaces the host online that needs to be looked at too.
The power and potential of OpenID was that ANYONE with a domain name could use it – now it seems more and more like just the big “brands” silo’s are making it work for them and well maybe if you are a super hacker you could do your own (but we won’t “trust” you). I am worried that the movement seems to be moving away from empowering everyone with a blog or even those without “blogs” establishing their own node in the the network.
People need the power to have their OWN nodes on the network and link them together sharing information – on their terms (See bob Blakley’s relationship layer paper). If we are locked into proprietary silo’s they have to much control. I think a big vision needs to be painted and built to much faster a truly open social network framework. I hope we can have a way for developers to commit to a values based choice about how they will conduct themselves in terms of users having power and control over their own online lives – in relationship with other.
I have several critiques of facebook the ability to organize communities and groups is really aweful – (I just tried doing She’s Geeky with it – ended up messaging people up to 4 times – In She’s Geeky FB group, In event specific group, in my last years attendee e-mail list, in my signed up for this year e-mail list). The ability for me to manage my public yet different persona’s for different audiences is completely lacking (my kindergarten friends don’t care about my identity work, my identity friends don’t care that much about my facilitator work, my water polo friends might want an occasional personal update).
Maybe I am wrong – my fears will be unfounded. I am glad they are joining the conversation more explicitly.
From Naked Jen’s Blog:
Facebook obliterated Nakedjen.
Obliterated. Deleted. Made me disappear.
And they did it without any warning or even a simple email telling me that I had done something wrong.
My email to them asking what I might have done to cause such a brutal outcome was just met with an automatic reply telling me that I must be in violation of the TOS and to read it carefully.
Which I did. Every single word. Carefully. There is absolutely no term or stipulation that I even came close to violating other than that my name is Nakedjen. However, as I mentioned, that is MY name. And it has been my name on Facebook since day one. The email that I used for the service is even nakedjen@nakedjen.com Could I be more clear or obvious? I don’t think so.
What I also learned, while reading each and every word carefully, is that my account on Facebook is at will and can be terminated by Facebook at any time for any reason they deem “reasonable.” Basically, our accounts are being hosted for free on their servers. So this actually does make sense. If someone in their offices wakes up today and decides that the word Naked is pornographic or even just decides that my photo of Buddha wearing a ski cap is offensive, that person can just hit the delete button and bye bye Nakedjen.
OK, I’m on the phone with Joel Comm right now. He’s been doing business online since 1995. He’s the co-creator of Yahoo Games. He wrote the Adsense Code, which got onto New York Times best selling list. He hosted and produced the first Internet reality show called the Next Internet Millionaire. He was the guy who came up with iFart, which got to be the #1 iPhone app on the iTunes store for three weeks. He also has “Twitter Power,” a book about Twitter coming out next month. You can find Joel on Twitter here.
Translation: he’s not a “nobody” on the Internet who is a spammer.
But, Facebook had a problem with him and kicked him off. Just like Facebook did to me just about a year ago. Why did this happen?
Well, he like me, has 4,999 friends which is the maximum allowed by Facebook. That’s not what got him in trouble. “So, Scoble, why you writing about him?”
Here’s why: he has 900 people who want to be his friend on Facebook. So, since he can’t add them to his social graph he sends them an a nice individual note, customized each time. He would look at each person’s profile and send them a nice note. What did the notes say? Something like “nice seeing you at XYZ conference, I can’t add you as a friend because Facebook doesn’t let me add more than 4,999 friends so could you please join me over on my fan page?” Sometimes also he’d send them over to his book page, or his Twitter page. Again, he customized each message to the person who was asking. Nothing automatic.
But yesterday Facebook disabled his account and removed his account from the public social graph. “I am the invisible man.” Facebook did exactly the same thing to me a year ago.
You still can get to his fan page, but he can’t administer it any longer (he has 734 fans). He also has a group on Facebook, which has more than 2,000 members. Fifty people have already joined a group to petition to have Joel added back to Facebook.
The Facebook Borg are coming.
In case you are wondering about the Facebook’s intentions just read this from their developer blog:
Our goal is to help people share information and connect with the people they know all over the Web. Our strategy is to become the most effective way for every developer or publisher to spread their site and create engagement. Right now there are already more than a thousand sites using Connect, and by the end of the year that number should approach the number of Platform applications.
I think we have to think about how these things that people want with open standards across platforms.
* to connect to friends.
* to have relevant context (which facebook doesn’t have)
* to support community organizers (a post is coming on this soon how lame the whole situation with different people on different lists and duplicated all over the place – e-mails lists from this year, last year and facebook RSVP’s).
* to share things with others.
I do worry though – about the long term. ALL college kids are in this platform – to not be in it is social suicide. From the Daily Californian August 21-24, 2008 Everything you wanted to know about berkeley but were afraid to ask freshman issue.
So is an open mind the only thing you need for a good time at Cal? Nope. You need Facebook or else you’re a looser. Perhaps the best thing to ever happen to college, Facebook is the panacea for all social problems at Cal. Berkeley students are only as valuable as the number of Facebook friends and wall posts. People might dismiss Facebook as a petty distraction, but you can do some serious bonding over wall posts, tagged photos and profiles. I’m sure we’ve all had a friend ask “Oh my God! Did you see what she wrote on my wall?” I can honestly say Facebook has mad Cal more dynamic and exciting. So use Facebook…and use it a lot.
On the Fast Company List of Influential Women in Tech
This morning I got a ping via facebook from Bernard Moon:
hey, congrats on making the Fast Company list. you didn’t even post about it on your blog. don’t be humble! 🙂
It is an amazing list. It was sparked in part by the “heated conversation” that erupted after they posted The Most Influential Women in Web 2.0. They divide the list into these 7 categories and resisted the temptation to “number” us from “most influential to less influential” – thank goodness cause that would have been a very alpha-dog thing to do.
- The Executives
- The Entrepreneurs
- The Gamers
- The Evangelists
- The Activists
- The Bloggers
- The Brainiacs
I am in the list of evangelists that includes, Mitchell Baker, danah boyd, Red Burns, Susan Crawford, Esther Dyson, Tara Hunt, Charlene Li and Mary Meeker.
This is a quote from their introduction and reflects the same reasons why I helped get She’s Geeky started. That is the unconference for women in tech that is happening for the third time next weekend
women in tech remain at a distinct disadvantage by any metric: average salary, top-management representation, board memberships. Silicon Valley, in particular, remains largely a boys’ club. In May 2007, Women in Technology International published a survey of 2,000 working women, about half of whom reported gender-based workplace inequality or said their opinions were less respected or sought out than those of male counterparts.
Several of the women who are on the list wrote blog posts for Fast company. Later today they are publishing a post that I did about the other women who work in digital identity.
The only tech sector that I know of that has gender parity is the non-profit technology sector. Beth Kanter who I met at the first BlogHer – has a great post about other amazing women in her sector.
Rashmi Sinha from Slide Share has a post up listing A Daily Dose of Blogs for the Tech Entrepreneur.
Tara Hunt co-founder of Citizen Agency has a post on 7 ways to increase your Whuffie Factor.
The Day of Connects – review of blog posts
So today Google Friend Connect and then Facebook Connect opened up their services today . Techcrunch is framing about dominance of internet identity.
The three horse race between Facebook, Google, and MySpace to achieve dominance in the internet identity space doesn’t appear to be letting up any.
What seems to be missing is the fact that Google and MySpace are implementing standards that are being developed in community and are open – meaning other players can play too.
Marc – long, long, long time advocate for open identity tools and systems on the web for people (he was talking about this at meetings I happen to run into him at in 2002-2003) does a good job of articulating the issues with facebook.
It’s all about about ‘Facebook across the Web’. Not about the Open Web.
ReadWriteWeb says this and
Open Source vs. Proprietary technology isn’t just about desktop software anymore – now it’s about our identities and social connections, all around the web.
has a nice little Mind Map comparing the two:
They invite people to edit it too.
This is interesting – Facbook is the “MAC” and Google is the “PC”
He likes Facebook because it has
* DEEP INTEGRATION
* REAL IDENTITY
* SOCIAL DISTRIBUTION
I find it strange the people like it cause it has “real identity” I don’t want to use it because FACEBOOK mushes me all together – I do have different communities of friends and interests. I don’t think they all care or want to know everything I do on the web.
This blog user found installing Google Friend connect a lot easier.
This is an interesting frame from MySpaceFaceTube
If there were an OpenID for Dummies book, its publisher would be Facebook Connect….
The remaining advantage for OpenID is that it doesn’t tether users to one service – since so many companies are now identity providers, just about everyone already has an account somewhere they can use on sites that accept OpenID logins….
And, according to Facebook, early testing of Connect shows a 50 percent increase in engagement on websites that have implemented it.
John McCrae had a good post about the announcements calling it the Birthday of the Social Web.
He links to this CNET post –
Sites will adopt Facebook Connect for two reasons. First, their users are already actively using it; millions of users have OpenID log-ins and don’t even know it. And second, because it’s not just a registration system, it’s that marketing channel.
I think this quote makes the point that it is TIME for all the major OpenID to educate the user-bases they have that have an OpenID and don’t know it that they have one and and how they can use it. Perhaps they can hire Common Craft to explain it In Plain English 🙂
One of the sessions at IIW that didn’t actually have notes submitted was about Activity feeds (in Session 8) – I think getting an open standard for these and enabling users with this functionality is part of what will make a viable open alternative to Facebook Connect.
XRD – which is a key component of the open stack made a lot of progress at IIW.
I am quite hopeful that openness will succeed and purpose of Identity Commons to support, facilitate, and promote the creation of an open identity layer for the Internet — one that maximizes control, convenience, and privacy for the individual while encouraging the development of healthy, interoperable communities, will be fulfilled.
Is Zivity Porn or not?
So, This summer there was some what of an controversy about the sponsorship of Bay Area Girl Geek Dinner by Zivity (a porn + social networking site where the men pay and get points to divvy up to women who’s “pin-up” photos are posted – and they can also “friend them”). I noticed this sponsorship when the organizer tweeted about it. I went to the site only to find out that on top of sponsoring they would be sending Photographers to the event to “shoot” us. I saw Zivity taking photos at the Crunchie Awards – (you can see the photos posted on Flickr with the Zivity tag.) This type of party photography just seemed totally inappropriate for a professional networking event.
I tweeted back “I find it ODD that you have a porn site sponsoring your next event and ‘shooting’ the women at the event. why sexualize us?”
Let me state the issue arising about BAGGD and Zivity sponsoring it:
The issue is about a porn company sponsoring a women in technology professional networking event AND having the porn company sponsor the photographers – who would be at the event taking pictures.
Those of us who were upset by the sponsorship and photographing objected to actually having this happen to us – to have our images be taken and tagged by a porn company and therefore implicitly endorsing them.
I had a lot going on this summer and didn’t have the energy to dive into the conversation on the blogs at the time. I did try to reach out to Angie Chang the organizer to meet with her face to face and talk before the dinner. She was unable to meet. Mary Hodder did a great job summarizing our attempted engagement with the organizers about the issue.
Recently Susan Mernitt attempted to write about the difference between, different generations of women and how the uproar about this event was an sample of the divide and a need for a bridge. Both Mary Hodder (comment 1,9) and I (comment 5,10) responded with a long comments about the nature of the issues that the BAGGD, Zivity sponsorship and her article raised for women in technology.
This is not about is porn good or bad? The issue is about where is its presence appropriate and where is it completely not appropriate. We have generally accepted social norms and now have legal regulation that it is not ok to have pornographic pictures posted in the workplace. I just don’t get how the BAGGD organizers thought it was appropriate to have a porn company sponsor and take photos at an event for women who work in technology. (They get that the Spock snafoo at Web 2.0 expo 2 years ago was not ok.) I don’t care if one of the 5 people who founded the company is a woman. It is porn and I don’t want to have to deal with the company taking my photo in the context of my professional work life and making women feel that they have to “be ultra-beautiful” to attend a networking event for women related to their day jobs in tech.
Several women spoke with Mary Hodder (who blogged about the issue before the event) directly saying that they “didn’t feel/look good enough to go.”
So some argue that the Zivity site is not actually porn (including the company – the have a motto “It’s not Porn it’s Pinups”). So this question is it or is it not porn is another layer of the debate. So yesterday when Jonathan Eunice tweeted this –
So, Zivity? Attractive girls taking their clothes off? How’s that gonna wo… Oh… Wait… I see. Getting it now.
I just had to ask him what he “got” about it – because of this ongoing is or is it not porn question.
@jonathaneunice what are you getting about Zivity? that it is actually porn even thought it says that it isn’t?
The conversation continued with side comments from Kevin Marks and Sillicon Calley……
BTW for those of you wondering about “why twitter” this is one of the reasons I like it — interesting conversations happen. For those of you not familiar with norms of twitter conversation @person’sName is a way in the medium to indicate who you are talking to. This whole conversation is public on twitter – you could go search for it and stich it all together – I also asked Jonathan if I could blog it before posting this.
JonathanEunice: @IdentityWoman Zivity is clearly porn–tho’ of soft, “artfully photographed” variety. Of course, so are many photos in mainstream mags.
JonathanEunice: Porn = images intended to stimulate desire. So Zivity, yes, but also much of Travel & Leisure, Maxim, Vogue, Architectural Digest, etc.
IdentityWoman: @jonathaneunice – that frame “Porn = images intended to stimulate desire.” is a good one to consider. What about “beauty without context”
JonathanEunice: Food porn, furniture porn, travel porn, fashion porn–we are awash in it. It all screams: Buy this! Be that! Want that!
JonathanEunice: @IdentityWoman Is SuicideGirls or Zivity different from W, Vogue, or GQ? More nudity yes, but worse self-esteem? I’d wager better. YMMV.
SiliconCalley: @identitywoman i hate the word porn, its too subjective. some people think that paintings of nude women are porn, some think its art
SiliconCalley: @identitywoman i don’t think zivity is porn, if it was the business model wouldn’t work. who wants to pay to connect to a model in porn?
IdentityWoman: @siliconCalley – I would ask it the other way – who DOESN’T want to pay to connect to a model in porn? seems like an obvious evolution
kevinmarks: @IdentityWoman isn’t porn in the eye of the beholder, not the intent of publisher? Some people get excited by pictures of feet on Flickr
SiliconCalley: @kevinmarks re: zivity touché! you are so wise.
SiliconCalley: @identitywoman porn for most people is a very private thing, and i don’t think that people usually want to be “social” with porn.
SiliconCalley: speaking of zivity…would anyone like an invite?
JonathanEunice: @jonathaneunice so what is the issue? @siliconcalley thinks that Zivity isn’t porn cause it is “social” and porn is private.
JonathanEunice: Just with client in my “CTO on demand” capacity. So back to the porn discussion…
JonathanEunice: @IdentityWoman I don’t think beauty needs any further context. But beauty (or Beauty, if you’re a Platonist) isn’t the issue here.
JonathanEunice: @IdentityWoman The issue here: 1. images and 2. asymmetry.
IdentityWoman: @jonathaneunice issues being 1) the images are about sexual desire 2)the guys linking to women are not also posing with their cloths off?
JonathanEunice: Images add distance, objectify. Thus beauty without interaction. Leading to asymmetry.
JonathanEunice: She is publically naked, I am not. She is identifiable, I am anonymous. That imbalance, I think, gets to heart of porn-iness.
JonathanEunice: In the spirit of oversharing: I prefer au naturel beaches. But much more symmetric. I am equally naked, exposed. Also, present, not distant.
IdentityWoman: @jonathaneunice – thanks for that (over)sharing. It makes the point about presence and embodiment rather then distance and
JonathanEunice: There’s a vast difference between looking at pictures of selected, carefully made up, airbrushed women (= porn) and…
JonathanEunice: …being with genuine, come-as-you-are nude women when you’re also nude. Isn’t that the diff btwn ‘nude’ and ‘naked’ (or ‘nekkid’)?
JonathanEunice: Today’s irony: Despite the porn diacussion, yet again asked to have drinks “with the girls” after work.
JonathanEunice: A simple Zivity joke turned into serious discussion. Pity the poor jokster!
JonathanEunice: I did. Very classy high quality photography. But at root still pics of naked chicks. High end porn still porn IMO.
what about Flickr?
I don’t want to get to emotional about this
But this is how I feel about the Microsoft letter and flickr. I am not even that big a flickr user but I like it – I joined when all my friends in the tech world were signing up and sharing photos and I wanted to to. It was at the time an independent company and was subsequently acquired by Yahoo! Now with this hostile take over situation with MSFT it could be owned by THEM. It is really devastating to think that all the energy I and others put into this space would be owned by THEM. BTW this also applies to Delicious – I don’t use it that much but I like it.
The thing I wonder about is – could the fans of flickr (and delicious) raise enough money to buy them from Yahoo! to prevent them being owned by MSFT. I bet you there would be enough community support (read money) that would come forward to prevent the sale. I really could care less about Yahoo!’s home page or its search or even its mail services – MSFT can have them for all I care. I do care about the products and services I use and have an emotional resonance with me cause I LIKE THEM. How can community space be owned by communities – could flickr become the first consumer cooperative on the web? I know I am dreaming big and this is not likely but I just had to put it out there.
Update: I am making a strong distinction between the acquisition of Yahoo! the internet portal/services company and the identity efforts that MSFT is an active participant.
So let me be totally clear I completely respect all the people that I have met at MSFT working on user-centric digital identity.
Every promise Kim Cameron has made to the community about openness and disclosure has happened. There has been real collaboration between the OpenID community and MSFT culminating with their joining the board. At RSA last week MSFT was a very active participant and supporter of the OSIS interop. Mike Jones is doing amazing work to weave all the efforts together so a real identity meta-system with plurality can emerge.
All the MSFT participants have been more then good community actors since the identity gang began over three years ago now.
I distinguish between their work in the field of identity AND the potential aquision/takeover of the same company one of the major internet portals – that I happen to have a strong personal relationship with. Last time I checked it wasn’t the “great” identity guys that would be in charge of the new Yahoo! acquisition – I am happy to be proven wrong though.
I don’t feel it is right to ask me to be silent about my discomfort regarding this impending acquisition.
Google + Skype rumors
Tech Crunch is suing Facebook (But it is an April Fools Joke)
Mike Arrington outlines the details of the suite against FaceBook for $25 million in Statutory Damages
He has his own brand:
I am a very important person. Forbes recently named me No. 2 on their list of web celebrities, for example, and Business Week says I’m one of the 25 most influential people on the web.
His image is being used to endorse things:
that allow advertisers to post ads using my picture and name to endorse their products without my explicit permission. I’ve received literally dozens of emails from readers asking me if I’m associated with Blockbuster’s Movie Clique application, or the new Jackass movie (no to both).
The Law they are suing under:
The key factor in determining whether a use is permitted or not in California (where I live) is Civil Code Section 3344, which was first enacted in 1971. California is perhaps more aggressive than any other state in protecting publicity rights because of the number of people engaged in the entertainment business. The law allows for recuperation of damages, attorney’s fees and injunctive relief, as well as unspecified punitive damages and statutory damages of $750/incident in the event a person’s “name, voice, signature, photograph, or likeness” is used “in any manner on or in products, merchandise, or goods, or for purposes of advertising or selling, or soliciting purchases of products, merchandise, goods or services, without such person’s prior consent.” There are additional common law remedies available to us as well.
They didn’t want to do this but…
I am sad that this had to blow up to the point where we are publicly suing Facebook over the matter. We’ll be filing the lawsuit tomorrow along with a related civil case for assault and battery and infliction of emotional distress. In a round of negotiations over the lawsuit with Facebook led by Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly, things got out of hand. When our team of lawyers offered to settle for a mere $50 million, Kelly told me Facebook would “bury you and bury your crappy blog” if we filed the suit. He then threw his steaming hot triple soy latte espresso at me, which caused extensive second degree burns over the top half of my body. Later on, he also unfriended me.
This lawsuit could be a major step forward for having clearer End User Licence Agreements along with establishing norms of use for people’s personal data on sites.
Are adds with your name on them coming?
This is in the NYTimes:
To get one reading of this, I asked four Web giants – AOL, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo – a simple question: can they show you an advertisement with your name in it?
Porn Spam App infects Facebook and "no one" cares?
Mary Hodder has a post up titled: Trashing Our Social Relationships (with Porn) to Get Your Numbers Up. It is quite insightful about the issues that aries when investment is based on ‘numbers’ rather then qualities of relationship.
This situation expresses clearly the social ‘issues’ that arise with the ‘open identity layer’ or ‘social layer’ or meta-systems. The kinds of behavior enabled via the social graph being ‘traversable’. I hope that some reason can prevail and the acceptable norms can emerge soon.
I wonder how open standards for portable social network information will deal with these problems.
The Porn picture app this is what happens:
Nothing “happens.” Except that the message was forwarded to the one person I left checked. In other words. It’s trick porn spam, features courtesy of Facebook and Slide.
So I sent in complaints to both companies (neither have contacted me back after a month — guys, it’s a social network, you know how to reach me.. give it a try!!)
After a while, I called people in each company that I knew through the tech comany. And was appalled at the responses I got. Now, these are people I know socially, and they gave me the real answers, but with the expectation that I would not attribute to them. However, I am confident that their answers reflect the culture and real value sets within these companies.
Facebook pointed the finger at Slide (the app maker in this case), and said, “There is nothing we can do. We have no control over the apps people make or the stuff they send.” Oh, and if I wanted Facebook to change the rules for apps makers? I’d have to get say, 80k of my closest Facebook friends to sign on a petition or group, and then they might look at the way they have allowed porn spam to trick people into forwarding, but until then, there would be no feature review.
Slide said that they thought Facebook was the problem, because as the “governing” body, Facebook makes the rules and “Slide wouldn’t be competitive if they changed what they do, and their competitors weren’t forced to as well.” In other words, Slides competitors use the same features to get more users (or trick more users as the case may be) and Slide didn’t want to lose out on getting more users with similar features, regardless of the effect the features have on us and our relationships.
Also both companies told me that blogging doesn’t affect them, because they don’t read blogs. The only thing they pay attention to are Facebook groups. Because they don’t look at problems that a single person discovers.
So in other words, a person with a legitimate complaint needs to have massive agreement and numbers in a Facebook group before these companies will even discuss a problem.
And, Slide and Facebook are willing to trash our relationships (real relationships) in order to get more numbers.
Now, note that many of the folks who sent the various porn spam (not just the ones in the photos above) sent very apologetic notes, because they were mortified that they had send their contacts porn spam.
Think about that. Your social networking / application software tricks you into doing something terribly socially embarrassing and you have to apologize? Wo. That’s really messed up.
In other words, your social networking software / applications are, gasp, anti-social.
So I have to ask, if these young boys (Zuckerberg, the app makers in the class at Stanford, etc) are so clueless about relationships and social protocols, that they would build apps and a system that promotes bad behavior like this, where are their mentors? Where are their funders (who presumably have some input and sway into what’s going on)? Why aren’t Peter Thiel and Dave McClure or even Jeff Clavier (who sounded like he was trying to or has invested in some of the guys from the apps class at Stanford) advising these people that while they are experimenting, that these are real established relationships, and Facebook is now mainstream, and therefore the apps can’t do this to people? I mean, it seems logical (and has happened in cultures around the world for millennia) that older, wiser men would advise young, clueless hormone driven boys how to act in the community. And what of Max Levechin? I mean, he’s kind of in the middle, age wise, but shouldn’t he know better than this?
Is the desperation for fame and money so great, that people would simply eschew social concerns in favor of ratings which then equal higher company valuations, and more billions on paper? Or do you want your claim to fame to be: “At least 15 million minutes wasted” from your experiments on Facebook (as I would imagine the Stanford student described above could claim)?
I guess the answer is yes, and so my response is, I can’t trust Slide, or Facebook. Nor do I have respect for their founders if this is the way they handle themselves and their companies.
COMMENT FROM ROBBIE:
Well, I remember having a conversation … Facebook as a whole, and a lot of people in general, were persuaded by the argument that You don’t want to get into legislating moral behavior. And really, it’s bad enough in government, but its more than just odd to put that kind of responsibility in the hands of programmers, its a horrible nuisance for those people that just want to build web applications.
But now they are on the long slope after achieving market dominance … they have to go back and tune all this stuff. Since they didn’t sell the company, they might not have a conflict of interest in restricting and redesigning the ACLs.
thanks,
Robbie
Yahoo whole heartedly supporting OpenID
Here is the Press Release. The announcement triples the number of OpenID accounts.
It should do a lot to encourage relying party adoption of OpenID.
It also means mainstream user education has just begun.
It is also interesting to see the narrative in the ‘media’ that get the story wrong
Clint Boulton on Google Watch has this quote “OpenID creator JanRain.” The story of community collaboration to get to OpenID2.0 to happen is quite remarkable (bringing together 4 different “competing” efforts) and I hope that some media outlet investigating what this all means actually gets it right.
He also goes on to say this
Okay (grumble, grumble) but I’m going to go back to standby that if humans can design something, humans can break it. It’s only a matter of time before folks find a way to break OpenID. If that happens, stick a fork in the emerging protocol. Until then, enjoy the digital convenience OpenID has to offer.
I thought the protocol had already been broken but the community is working very hard to address these problems.
The funny part for me is that my Yahoo! ID kinda sucks – it is ‘earthwaters’ from WAY back in college – I wanted a handle – and that was what I came up with. I don’t really want to use it as a handle around the web. I wonder if thy will have other users with this challenge and how they will address it.
COMMENT FROM SHREYAS:
I am the product manager for Yahoo!’s OpenID effort. One of the nice things about our implementation is that you don’t HAVE to use your Yahoo! ID (eg: johnsmith) in your OpenID URL. Also, if you are a Flickr user, you will be able to use the URL for your Flickr photos page (eg: http://www.flickr.com/photos/johnsmith) as your OpenID URL. We are launching the service pretty soon and your feedback will be highly appreciated!
Also, if it helps other readers of your blog, I can post this comment there once the issue is fixed.
Exciting times ahead!
Face Book and the Creepy Ex-CoWorker + Yahoo and PDF Adds!!!
Columnist Cory Doctorow describes how Facebook and other social networks have built-in self-destructs: They make it easy for you to be found by the people you’re looking to avoid.
…..ON Information Week
From SlashDot
A new channel (is being) opening up between advertisers and our eyeballs: PDFs with context-sensitive text ads. The service is called “Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo” and it goes into public beta today. The “ad-enabled” PDFs are served off of Adobe’s servers. The article mentions viewing them in Acrobat or Reader but doesn’t mention what happens when a non-Adobe PDF reader is used.
To both of you I say…
SAY NO TO MENTAL POLLUTION.
JUST GIVE US VRM!!
Facebook SocialAd's & Privacy
“Facebook recently announced a new advertising scheme called ‘Social Ads.’ Instead of using celebrities to hawk products, it will use pictures of Facebook users. Facebook might be entering into another privacy debacle. The site assumes that if people rate products highly or write good things about a product then they consent to being used in an advertisement for it. Facebook doesn’t understand that privacy amounts to much more than keeping secrets — it involves controlling accessibility to personal data. ‘The use of a person’s name or image in an advertisement without that person’s consent might constitute a violation of the appropriation of name or likeness tort. According to the Restatement (Second) of Torts 652C: “One who appropriates to his own use or benefit the name or likeness of another is subject to liability to the other for invasion of his privacy.”‘”
Why I don't trust telco's
This Horror story is why I don’t trust telco’s AT ALL. ($3000 bill for the iPhone) I am very willing to pay reasonable price for reasonable service. I am not sure why this is hard for them to GRASP but being raked over the coals.
THANK GOD FOR GOOGLE getting into the spectrum auction and forcing it to be for open usage.
From CNET:
The company is pushing the FCC to adopt rules in the upcoming 700-megahertz auction set to ensure that winners of certain spectrum licenses will have to adhere to four openness principles. These include guaranteeing that consumers can use any device or software on the network, as well as forcing winning bidders to offer spectrum at reasonable wholesale prices to ensure that small companies can get access to wireless capacity to build competitive wireless services.