Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg penned a public statement about Facebook privacy issues and what's being done about that issue by way of an article published in today's Washington Post. In the brief, carefully crafted mea culpa, Zuckerberg addresses the ongoing privacy backlash the site is now facing: "We just missed the mark," he wrote, referring to the overly complex, granular privacy settings and controls that offer toggles for everything from search engine visibility to whether or not your photo albums can be seen by your boss.
What wasn't addressed, however, was why the need for clearer, easier-to-use privacy settings became such an urgent matter in the first place. And that is at the core of Facebook's steamroller approach to forcing people into public sharing, a corporate philosophy that seems less about impact to its bottom line and more about fulfilling Zuckerberg's personal vision for a more social Web: "If people share more, the world will become more open and connected," he writes in the article. "And a world that's more open and connected is a better world."
Earlier this month I presented the keynote at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit, on the topic of Mobile trends in 2010 and beyond. The presentation, delivered at the beautiful Computer History Museum in Mountain View, aimed to stimulate discussion about the business and technology of Mobile.
Frederic Lardinois wrote a good overview of the presentation on the day. In this post, we publish the slides along with the richly colored photographs that RWW's Chris Cameron took.
Today we are announcing our third event and our first on the East Coast: the ReadWriteWeb Real-Time Web Summit, on June 11th at the Metropolitan Pavilion in New York City.
As you all know, last Friday we held the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit, in Mountain View, California. The Real-Time Web Summit in NYC will follow the same unconference format, which we have gotten a lot of great feedback on. To see the power of the unconference format, check out the video below showing the session pitching at the Mobile Summit:
Facebook just shook the tech world by announcing several major initiatives that collectively constitute an aggressive move to weave the social net on top of the existing Web.The rumors were that the leading social network would launch a "Like" button for the entire Web. Instead, Zuckerberg & Co. unveiled a bold and visionary new platform that cannot be ignored.
The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook's vision is both minimalistic and encompassing - but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web.
At Facebook's f8 conference, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the company was removing restrictions on user data retention within Facebook applications. Previously, the company had a policy where developers couldn't "store and cache any data for more than 24 hours," Zuckerberg said while speaking to the audience of Facebook developers crowded into the San Francisco Design Center on Wednesday. "We're going to go ahead and...get rid of that policy," he said. The audience cheered.
But should Facebook end users cheer this news, too?
In preparation for the upcoming ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit, we're outlining the 10 leading trends of the Mobile Web in a 3-part series of posts. In Part 1 we explored 3 important design and development issues for the Mobile Web. Now in Part 2, we look at 4 classes of mobile applications that have become popular in 2010: geo-location, Internet of Things, Augmented Reality, and mobile social networking.
We'll explore these and other trends with you at the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit, a 1-day event we're running on Friday 7 May, in Mountain View, California. That's the day after Web 2.0 Expo (2-6 May), so we hope you'll extend your trip to the West Coast to help us define the future of mobile! To be certain of getting a ticket, we invite you to register now.
Facebook is hosting its annual f8 developer conference in San Francisco today. We expect quite a few announcements around new features and products today, including more information about the availability of a firehose of user data, geotagging, payments and the rumored off-site "like" button that publishers will soon be able to embed in their pages.
Read on to find our live blog of Mark Zuckerberg's keynote. The keynote is scheduled to start at 10 a.m. PST (GMT -7:00).
In a little under 3 weeks time, we will host our second unconference: the ReadWriteWeb Mobile Summit. It's a 1-day event at the lovely Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California.
In preparation for the RWW Mobile Summit, we're going to outline the 10 leading trends of the Mobile Web in a 3-part series of posts. We'll delve more into these trends with you at the Summit, because our unconferences are all about audience participation. In this, the first post, we'll outline 3 important design and development issues for the Mobile Web.
Register now to discuss these and other topics at our unconference. The RWW Mobile Summit is being held on Friday 7 May, directly after the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco (2-6 May).
Think a tweet is just 140 characters of text? Think again. To developers building tools on top of the Twitter platform, they know tweets contain far more information than just whatever brief, passing thought you felt the urge to share with your friends via the microblogging network. A tweet is filled with metadata - information about when it was sent, by who, using what Twitter application and so on.
Now, thanks to Raffi Krikorian, a developer on Twitter's API/Platform team, you can see what a tweet looks like, in all its data-rich detail.
A consortium of companies including Google, Yahoo, MySpace, Meebo and more announced tonight that it will launch a new system on Monday that will let website owners discover which social networks a site visitor uses and prompt them automatically to log-in and share with friends on those network. The system is called XAuth and serves to facilitate cross-site authentication (logging in) for sharing and potentially many other uses.
Facebook and Twitter, the dominant ways people share links with friends outside of email, are not participating.
