Facebook recently instituted a new program that makes it easy for 3rd party websites and services to automatically post links about your activity elsewhere back into Facebook and the newsfeeds of your friends. It's called Seamless Sharing (a.k.a. frictionless sharing) and there's a big backlash growing about it, reminiscent of the best-known time Facebook tried to do something like this with a program called Beacon. The company has done things like this time and time again.
Critics say that Seamless Sharing is causing over-sharing, violations of privacy, self-censorship with regard to what people read, dilution of value in the Facebook experience and more. CNet's Molly Wood says it is ruining sharing. I think there's something more fundamental going on than this - I think this is a violation of the relationship between the web and its users. Facebook is acting like malware.
Folio Magazine, the trade journal of print magazine editorial and publishing managers, put out an interesting list of the pubs with the greatest number of Twitter followers, and how their follower lists have changed since the beginning of the year. Not surprisingly Time and People lead the list, both with more than two million followers apiece. The top 11 magazines all have more than one million followers. Eight magazines posted growth of more than 100 percent since January, with Seventeen leading the way, close to 150 percent growth at 282,000 followers.
5 Days of Gimme Bar is what they're calling it: the extended roll-out of a beautiful new service for saving links of interest from around the web. After nearly two years of development, starting today and for the next five days, San Francisco design firm Fictive Kin is letting new users create accounts on Gimme Bar.
What is it? It's a visual bookmarking, text snipping, whole web page archiving, public/private link saving and sharing service with Dropbox integration, a (submitted) iPhone app and a developer platform for integrating Gimme Bar features into other applications. It's pretty remarkable - but is it good enough? The web is full of social bookmarking apps, a lot of people love social bookmarking apps - but not enough of them seem to love it for startups like this to thrive.
Some people get their news from TV, some from radio. Some folks still catch up with the world by reading the morning paper with their coffee. Me? I tap into Google Reader and Twitter before even getting out from under the blankets. Everybody has a morning routine, and most of us in the tech industry have a morning routine of getting in touch with the rest of the world.
I can't remember when I last used an alarm clock, or staggered out of bed to check the computer first thing. These days, my iPhone is my alarm clock and first form of contact with the rest of the world. After turning off the alarm, I start skimming Google Reader to see if there's any news afoot.
Whether you think the protestors camping out in various city parks around the world is justified or not, it is interesting to see this analysis published in Technology Review today. They used a tool from SocialFlow that examined a pile of Twitter data. Did you know the first use of their hashtag was in a July 13 Adbusters blog post?
We posted last year about the prevalence of cyberbullying on social networks. The longer-term consequences of that are just now finding their way into our legal system, and this week the US Supreme Court refused to hear the case of Doninger v. Niehoff, which was the case involving a high school junior girl named Avery Doninger. Back in 2007, she criticized school officials for not allowing a student concert, and said on her LiveJournal blog that the "douchebags in central office" had cancelled the event. Niehoff was the principal, and was granted "qualified immunity" from Doninger's suit. This is the part of the law that shield's public officials from legal liability when there is no clear case law. By not hearing the appeal, this decision of qualified immunity stands.
OK, this isn't working anymore. Too many people either don't have a job or the ones that do are predominantly dissatisfied. We've been talking about networked organisations and distributed work for decades, but productivity gains have been dim the past ten years. Everything worked just well enough to not think about structural changes. We tried to apply collaboration and fancy search platforms like new paint on a crumbling house that could be fixed.
But because neither renovation nor innovation did catch up at the speed of our economic development, we crashed. And that's, like with every disrupting event, a tremendous opportunity. It forces us to rethink, because it pushes us beyond the tipping point we tried to avoid for so long.
The recent three-day service outage of Research In Motion's Blackberry email service caused a chill felt across the world. And I'm not just talking about the affected customers. The chill was also felt by practically every IT network service professional watching the headlines in mid October, who know that if this could happen to a company with as many resources as RIM, it can happen in their department too.
As we close down 2011, we can reflect on (and learn from) the numerous, high-profile outages that occurred: Bank of America in March; Amazon EC2, Verizon LTE and Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft in April; and then Apple and Microsoft in August. In analyzing these disasters, I've come up with four lessons to be learned - they'll help protect your company's reputation, technical integrity and customer satisfaction during technical crises.
Anything that can be measured can be optimized, and sometimes that optimization can lead to competitive advantage in inefficient markets. That's the lesson of the book and popular new movie Moneyball, about the Oakland A's baseball team and its use of statistics to overcome the limitations of its budget. It's a seductive proposition.
What if everything were run like that, though? What if measurement and optimization were the fundamental strategic approach brought to bear on all kinds of endeavors? That may be exactly what's happening with the rise of what's called The Internet of Things, the emerging network of web connected streets, buildings, sensors, objects and devices expected to dominate the Internet in coming decades. But the same approach is also being taken with regard to some of our most fundamental human activities: growing up, healing our bodies and spending time alone. Three examples in particular help shed some light on the good sides and the bad sides of a Web that would make all things measurable and subject to optimization.
Android made a jump today that signals the future of the platform. Anybody familiar with Android will take a look at its new Ice Cream Sandwich platform and know that Google has truly morphed its tablet version of the platform, Honeycomb, and the previous smartphone versions into an entirely new user interface. Whether or not users will respond favorably to it remains to be seen, but Android 4.0 is a dynamic update to the leading smartphone operating system.
What is new with Ice Cream Sandwich? Well, Google is playing to Android's strengths with ICS by creating new multi-tasking capabilities, resizable widgets, improved voice controls and quicker communication controls. Android has also tied its browser to the cloud, which will drastically improve how it renders and saves pages. Check out what is new with Android 4.0 below and how Android now stacks up against its competition.
