ReadWriteWeb

With the announcements of Facebook's "frictionless sharing" and Amazon's Fire color Kindle, my colleagues Joe Brockmeier and Richard MacManus have both weighed in on their thoughts about where the modern Web is going. I think both opinion pieces hold some worthy points, but I have my own fears and thoughts. It comes down to whom do you trust more to own your data: Facebook, Google or Amazon. And while there are other choices (notably Microsoft and Apple, plus numerous smaller entities), my conclusion is that none of Big Three has the ideal set of circumstances here.

The answer is to moderate our use of and dependence on social media, especially Facebook.

Frictionless sharing, the act of passively notifying social media of all manner of activity, scares the hell out of me. Not just because of the obvious privacy implications. Frictionless sharing turns up the volume on useless information and simultaneously threatens user privacy and control of online identity. Not only is Facebook becoming too central to our online discourse – it's becoming too crapified to even be useful. We have a social media problem, and the time to turn back is now. And the answer isn't regulating Facebook.

When was the last time your food tweeted you? In the case of many well-known food brands, an embarrassingly long time ago, as Chris Brogan found out in a post today. He researched food-related Twitter accounts and commented on those that were more suitable for the dumpster along with those that belong squarely front and center on the dinner table. Let's take a closer look at his analysis and also talk about some takeaways for you to, ahem, beef up your own Twitter customer service and make your social media engagement tastier.

"We're not a social network, we're an information network." That's what Twitter's vice president of engineering, Michael Abbott, told the crowd at Mobilize 2011 this week. That isn't new branding, Twitter has been denying it's a social network since at least a year ago. It all dates back to November 2009, when Twitter changed the question it asked users for status updates from "What are you doing?" to "What's happening?".

The trouble is, Twitter's main rivals Facebook and Google+ are not sticking to their knitting like Twitter is. Last week, Facebook widely expanded the range of information it tracks: read, listen, watch, 5 types of "life events" and more. Meanwhile Google+ has become known as a place for people to discuss common interests. This is all bad news for Twitter.

The folks at Veracode put together this infographic that describes some of the more notable Twitter hacks, or "twacks," over the recent past. With the news that even venerable USAToday's account wasn't safe, it is interesting to see that Twitter has banned the most popular or obvious password combinations (including the evergreen '123456') from use. And yes, you can get even, as Justin Bieber did after his account was compromised, sending 26,000 texts to his tormentor. Shakira and Taylor Swift better watch their own passwords too!

In August, Twitter acquired BackType, a social media analytics company. One of the things that Twitter picked up in that acquisition was Storm, the "Hadoop of realtime processing.

At the time, Twitter said that it would open source Storm in September at the Strange Loop conference in St. Louis. Guess what? They did. As of this week, Storm is on GitHub under the Eclipse Public License (EPL).

Overwhelmed by new features? Tickers? Open Graphs? What about Hangouts and Circles? Well, Twitter doesn't have those things. Twitter still exists because it's not going bananas with new features all the time. There's no room. Hell, it only got photo albums a month ago. Everyone's always worried about how Twitter has only 140 characters. Well, Facebook allows 5,000 now. Isn't that a little worrisome, too? Facebook keeps track of your whole life now. Tweets fall off a cliff after a couple days. Doesn't that sound nice at this point?

Today is Friday, and on Twitter that means it's #FollowFriday. It's a hashtag holiday that's all about sharing people. There are no algorithms, no "People You May Know" (well, those are in the sidebar, but ignore them). It's just a real social gathering on the Web at the end of every week. #FollowFriday is a much maligned phenomenon, but it's just misunderstood. Read on to find out how #FollowFriday really works.

Julpan, a New York-based social search startup founded by former Google scientist Ori Allon, announced today that it has been acquired by Twitter. Julpan algorithmically analyzes social Web activity to make search results personally relevant.

With hundreds of millions of tweets per day, Twitter needs smart personalization algorithms to make sure its search results are relevant far beyond simple keyword matches. This acquisition will help Twitter keep the value of search inside its own properties.

Twitter just announced that users can now post photos by attaching them to simple SMS messages. The feature is available on many popular carriers, and the post says they're working to bring on more.

SMS has always been an important part of Twitter's platform, especially in places with low smartphone penetration. It's possible to follow, tweet and view account info using only SMS. Adding photo sharing via SMS lets mobile-only users in on another part of the full Twitter experience.

Twitter, then known as twttr, was born just over 5 years ago - but in Twitter-time that's ancient history. What did it look like when it launched? I'd never seen a screenshot of the original Twttr home page until old school megablogger Jason Kottke posted one tonight, along with links to a few other oldies.

As you can see below, Twitter didn't have a hard time explaining itself at first. "If you have a cell and you can txt," the home page said, "you'll never be bored again...E V E R!" I guess when you've raised mountain upon mountain of venture capital and changed the world in multiple major ways, you've got to take yourself more seriously than that. (?) None the less, I like this old version of Twitter!