Among other things, the commissioner, who reports to Parliament and can force companies to make changes to their privacy practices, asked Facebook to change the default privacy settings of photo albums to "Your Networks and Friends" instead of "Everybody," and to make sure that user profiles are inaccessible to search engines by default. Facebook is working on implementing these changes and with the per-object privacy settings that were recently introduced, most of these issues had been resolved already anyway.

Third-Party Apps

The area the commissioner focused on most, though, was third-party application and the amount of private information developers can access through these, and as of now, Facebook has not agreed to make any of the recommended changes. The commissioner recommends that Facebook should limit developers' access to only those pieces of information that are necessary to run an application, and that the company should also implement measures to prohibit the disclosure of personal information of users who aren't actually using an application themselves.

Deleting Accounts Will Remain Difficult

As for the retention of user information, Facebook apparently does not agree with the commission's recommendation to add information about account deletion to its privacy policy. For the time being, actually deleting a Facebook account will remain difficult. Under Canadian law, Facebook would have to have "appropriate purposes" to keep this information.

Facebook was also asked to add a section to its privacy policy about what happens to the accounts of deceased users (they are currently kept active), but here, too, Facebook refuses to make any changes because it considers "them unnecessary under the law."

Some Good News for Facebook

It's important to note that the original complaint that set off this investigation also alleged that Facebook should not ask users for their date of birth, name, and email address when registering for a Facebook account. Stoddard, however, argues that this is a reasonable request, even if Facebook didn't make the reasons for why it asks for this information very clear.

You can find more details about all the different allegations and the commissioner's recommendations, as well as Facebook's reaction, in the full report, as well as in this press release.

Overall, most of these recommendations seem quite reasonable, though especially with regards to third-party applications, it's a bit puzzling why Facebook doesn't want to do more to ensure its users' privacy.

As Facebook expands, its privacy settings have gotten more and more complicated, to the point where most users probably are just baffled by the number of choices and decide to just leave everything in the default setting.

Perhaps most successful is University of Ottawa professor, Michael Geist's, outspoken stance against the introduction of the Canadian DMCA (Digital Millennium Copyright Act). A little over a year ago, Geist launched his Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook Group in the hopes of educating the public about a bill he saw as a "sell out to American pressure". Geist believed that Bill C-60 would have effectively duplicated American copyright legislation and created an unfair imbalance between copyright holders and general consumers. Thousands of Canadians agreed and the Fair Copyright Facebook group gained widespread popularity.

On the day the DMCA was to be voted upon, the Facebook group had more than 25,000 members and Federal Industry Minister Jim Prentice dissolved the legislation in favor of further analysis. While there was no admittance from the Minister that online resistance was the reason, Industry opposition Charlie Angus exclaimed, "They tabled the bill this morning, now 3 hours later he tells me they've got cold feet? Did they just discover Facebook this morning?"

Whether Canadians like it or not, Facebook has changed the landscape of Canadian politics. Geist's Fair Copyright for Canada group currently has more than 89,000 members, and he was named the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer of 2008. Meanwhile, the Conservative government has promised to reintroduce the DMCA, but no date has been set in legislature. For more on the Geist and the Facebook group, check out the coverage on CBC's The Hour.

Canpages.ca, the Canadian business directory listing service similar to the Yellow Pages in the U.S., is home to the new mapping service where it's accessed by performing a search on their homepage. After your search results appear, they are accompanied by a traditional map of the business location. At the top of the map, you'll see an option to select "Street View" from the menu bar when it's available. You can also click on any of the blue highlighted streets to delve directly into Street View at that particular spot. As with Google's Street View, you can click on arrows to move forward and backward and there's even a small cartoon figure that appears on the map for reference.

Although the CanPages' Street View maps offer many similarities to Google's, what's most notable about this launch are the many differences between the two services. For example, all of the CanPages maps have been created using high resolution photography. Google, on the other hand, has only used high-res imagery in a select handful of international cities including San Francisco, Paris, and Seattle.

CanPages's maps also offer a fullscreen view which you can use to fully immerse yourself into the city scene. However, don't try to tilt the camera up to the sky - that's one feature the CanPages maps don't have - they're limited when it comes to panning vertically.

Another feature of the new Street View maps is a configuration menu which allows you to customize settings like image sharpness, brightness, quality, and projection or the curved effect. You can also choose to turn on or off additional visual aids, the blue navigation dots, or the grid.

Perhaps the nicest feature, though, is the pedestrian maps. Captured by a team of photographers who traveled on foot with shoulder-mounted cameras, the CanPages maps let you explore parts of cities where cars can't go. For now, this allows you to travel down pedestrian walkways, but the company hopes to use their unique camera set up in the future to film hotel lobbies, retail stores, shopping malls, and parks.

CanPages also made privacy a priority from the start. When Google launched their service, faces and license plates were plainly visible. Only recently have they responded to people's concerns and began to blur these images. On the CanPages maps, however, not only are these items blurred, there's also a link at the bottom-right corner of the map that lets anyone submit concerns about that particular image.

A Better Street View

Considering that Google's Street View technology has still not made its way to Canada, the CanPages maps provide a good alternative - actually, given the features offered, we could even say they provide a better one. For now, CanPages Street View maps encompass the cities of Vancouver, Whistler, and Squamish (all in British Columbia). The company plans to expand to Toronto and Montreal next, followed then by as much of Canada as possible.

Image credits: krisabel.ctv.ca

The next time you find your desire to write lacking, Plinky may be just the inspiration you need.

Shellen doesn't just know blogging, he's lived it. Now he's hoping to inspire others.

Where Does the Inspiration Come From?

Plinky is simple and straightforward. Every day, the service delivers writing prompts in hopes of eliciting short introspective answers. If Twitter is "What are you doing?", Plinky is "What do you think about this?"

Current prompts range from making a mixtape of favorite songs to defending your vice. Users compose responses within Plinky using text, images, maps, or other objects that help them craft an answer. Then, those answers can be easily repurposed to other microblogging and blogging services.

But Plinky also manages to provide a venue for social interaction of its own. Users have a stream of responses that are publicly viewable, they can follow other users, and they can favorite responses. Plinky also provides immediate access to other answers to the question you're considering - providing even more sources of inspriration. For a seemingly simple service, there is quite a bit going on.

Louis Gray got an early preview of the service. So if you're interested in more details on all Plinky has to offer, his thorough walkthrough of Plinky provides a solid overview.

In our testing, Plinky proved to be entertaining. The initial prompts are fun, inspiring good crosstalk among Plinky's early adopters. Reading others' responses proved equally compelling.

Whether that interest is sustainable remains to be seen. Facebook has found some of its success by prompting users with an endless barrage of surveys. There's no reason that Plinky can't do the same.

In the long-term, it will be interesting to see what types of users gravitate to the site and continue to return on a daily basis. In the short-term, however, one thing is for certain: with a known entity like Shellen involved, Plinky is sure to develop a rapid following.

Jinni says that its video content is automatically indexed, using a mixture of metadata and reviews. It has a strong semantic technologies component, as it uses a proprietary Natural Language Processing solution to assign semantic tags to content and users. The company claims that this allows Jinni to "rapidly index more titles, becoming the universal catalog for professional video." When it launched in December, Jinni had 10,000 movie, TV and video titles. It also offers APIs for Internet and TV content providers.

In terms of its recommendations philosophy, Jinni believes that a mix of algorithms and human selection is the best solution. Although the initial data set comes from humans entering movie information into a computer, the actual recommendations come from its algorithm - which "can deeply analyze the type of content you like" and hence learn about your tastes in movies. Jinni gives you recommendations by "comparing your Taste Types and the genes of all the titles in our catalog".

Does it Work?

I took Jinni for a test drive, with a search on 'mood'. I quite like an "offbeat" movie on a Friday night, so it was an appropriate place to start. Also 'offbeat' movies like Napoleon Dynamite are the type of films that have caused the Netflix Prize contestants a lot of problems. So I clicked on that mood to see what came up.

The default video selections included ones like Twin Peaks, Donnie Darko, Hot Fuzz, Monty Python, and so on. It was a fairly predictable selection, but where Jinni promises to come into its own is when you filter down. There is a 'Story Tuner', which presented some interesting filter options.

I filtered based on the story tuners (little known, light, realistic, fast-ish) and got recommended a 1990 movie called 'Mr Destiny' starring James Belushi. I can't recall ever seeing it (little known? check!) and while I'm not really a James Belushi fan, it'd be worth a try. I tweaked the light/serious meter up to 'serious' and that gave me a neat selection of 9 films, few of which I'd seen - but they all looked interesting. This is what you want from a recommendation engine - to be told about products you didn't know about before. So Jinni appears to work quite well. There are many other filters other than mood; rating, date, length, plot, genres, and more.

In his review, Chris Gampat concluded that Jinni isn't quite Pandora for movies. That may be true, but we think Jinni is worth a try if you're a movie or tv show buff. It's also similar to ClerkDogs, which we reviewed recently. So if you've tried either or both, let us know in the comments what you thought.

ReadWriteWeb Resources for Recommendation Technologies

We will be profiling other recommendation companies in upcoming posts. We also invite you to explore using our custom ReadWriteWeb Resources:

• RWW Recommendation Industry Feed Favorites OPML file (save link)
• RWW Recommendation Industry Feeds - Best of Feed (copy and paste to your reader)
• Click to preview the above feeds before subscribing (pop-up window)
• RWW Recommendation Site Search (Visit and Bookmark)

That's a real shame because there's already some very interesting looking content there. This is a solvable problem, though.

Half for fun and half for work, we created an RSS feed for the new Craigslist blog that you can subscribe to below. That blog should be interesting, but if it ends up half as interesting as the Best of Craigslist section of the site - then look out Technorati 100.

The New Craigslist Blog

Full feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/craigslistblog2

The body of the posts won't be delivered in this feed, as we struggled to scrape a feed at all using Feed43. When I say we, in this case, I mean my dashingly handsome and brilliant co-blogger Josh Catone.

Unfortunately, you can't take for granted that anything you build on top of Craigslist is going to survive, even if it solves a problem over there. The beautiful multi-city search tool Crgslst got shut down days after we wrote about it here. Luckily the wonderful Image preview extension for Firefox still works - check that one out.

The Best of Craigslist

The feed URL below will deliver the items on the Best of Craigslist page - warning lots of naughty words - very funny stuff. Even the Best of Craigslist's own native RSS feed is broken, so we scraped that too. Anybody who said you couldn't build a huge company online without giving RSS its due was obviously wrong.

Feed URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/BestofCraigslist2

As was pointed out by one of our fantastic commenters, it turns out there is a full feed available for Best of Craigslist at feed://www.craigslist.org/about/best/all/index.rss. Though for some reason the page itself doesn't have the URL right.

We hope you enjoy these feeds. Isn't RSS a wonderful thing? We sure think so here at RWW.

First, MySpace is taking the unorthodox move of giving applications some access to their PR department. MySpace announced on Monday that it is looking for a few good apps with whom to put out joint press releases. This is undoubtedly a good move for MySpace PR because it allows them to create a more continuous buzz about the platform. But like the platform itself, sharing the stage with app developers is a surprising shift from old policies for the News Corporation-owned social network.

This is, after all, the same News Corp. whose President and COO Peter Chernin said in 2006, by way of introducing plans for MySpace to compete with many of the companies that had helped it grow, "If you look at virtually any Web 2.0 application, whether its YouTube, whether it’s Flicker, whether it’s Photobucket or any of the next-generation Web applications, almost all of them are really driven off the back of MySpace."

It's the same Fox Interactive Media (the arm of News Corp. that controls MySpace) whose Chief Revenue Officer Michael Barrett said last year, "We probably should have stopped YouTube. YouTube wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for MySpace. We’ve created companies on our back."

And it's the same MySpace that famously blocked widgets (such as YouTube and Photobucket -- the latter of whom it eventually bought) that competed with products of its own.

But a lot has changed in the past year. Not only has MySpace embraced the idea of an application ecosystem and launched a developer platform, but they also announced plans in January to create a startup incubator. Is it too little, too late, though? Will MySpace's platform be as successful as Facebook's has been?

Apps in the News Feed ... Er, Friend Subscriptions

Yesterday, MySpace also announced that it would begin pushing notifications of app installations to its Friend Subscriptions -- their equivalent of the Facebook News Feed.

Interestingly, while MySpace is just rolling out this feature, Facebook has recently begun to impose restrictions on how applications interact with the News Feed in an effort to combat information overload and growing noise. It will be interesting to see if MySpace repeats the same mistakes Facebook has made, or learns from them and implements tighter restrictions on it Friend Subscriptions from the start.

The company announced today that it's closed a round of funding from Waterloo, Ontario early stage investors Tech Capital Partners and a collection of Canadian Angel investors.

The basic functionality of AideRSS is remarkably simple but powerfully useful. It's the kind of thing everyone I talk to about it says "wow, that's cool and useful looking." Getting a little money in the bank should help AideRSS make its product more robust as well. To be honest, I have experienced frustrating performance issues since I discovered this service - but its functionality has been so compelling and unique that I find myself coming back to it regularly anyway.

ReadWriteWeb first covered AideRSS prelaunch in July, when Josh Catone gave it an in-depth review.

Information Overload

The company is positioning themselves as a solution to the growing problem of information overload. That's a big statement and implementation of that idea can take many forms.

I used AideRSS, for example, in building the ReadWriteWeb Toolkit for 2008. In that post I made available a collection of the top RSS feeds in each of five fields I believe are going to be hot in 2008 (Data Portability, Semantic Web, Mobile, etc). Each of those topics ended up having quite a lot of feeds in them and for the sake of efficiency there was no better way to offer our readers a feed of just the most popular items in these top feeds than to use AideRSS. I spliced each topic's feeds into one feed, ran than feed through AideRSS and then ran the AideRSS feed through FeedBurner - but you don't have to do anything nearly so complicated to use this very useful service. You can do a lot of very cool things with AideRSS, though. Try putting in del.icio.us feeds and search feeds, for example.

A simpler example is this. You might feel overwhelmed with the number of posts that ReadWriteWeb makes each day and want a feed of just the most popular items. You can visit or subscribe to this URL to do that: http://www.aiderss.com/best/readwriteweb.com

Limitations of AideRSS

There's lots of different ways to try and determine what the best items in feed are. AideRSS uses explicit Attention Gestures on 3rd party networks to track global popularity. Just because things are popular doesn't mean they are good, though, nor does it guarantee that they are the right items for you to read.

AideRSS is clearly taking a different approach than other systems based on your personal Attention Data, like FeedHub (our coverage) and some of the Newsgator products that rank news according to your reading habits. Other apps can filter news according to what's hot among a particular group of users you belong to (Attensa in the enterprise and to some degree Google Reader).

Everyone wants to tackle these issues and AideRSS has a particular approach to doing so.

Reaching Out

AideRSS has a freely available, public API that other apps can leverage internally as well. The showcase example so far is the super-search tool Lijit, which uses the AideRSS API in addition to various other cool tricks it can do.

This little Canadian company could have a bright future ahead of it. It does a great job of serving both a core need for all users and satisfying the need for magic that RSS power users have. Check it out, it's worth at the very least a few minutes of your time. You might find yourself coming back to it regularly like I have.