Facebook: Now sharing your home address with developers | Technology | guardian.co.uk

A pretty ominous perspective of recent Facebook API upgrades allowing developers access to more of your private information.

Facebook's future – if it is to meet the increasingly inflated aspirations of its 'incentivised' investors – is to use a combination of its scale and the acres of intimate information it holds about all of us to find the real money in targeted advertising. The strategy is to gradually open our personal data more and more, making open information the norm, desensitising us to any uncomfortable feelings we might have had about our personal data being released into the wild. In a few years, we'll have no qualms at all about getting our home address out there. Perhaps.

This makes Eric Schmidt's comments about being responsible for what we share more prescient. The moral of the story: if Facebook does a crappy job of enforcing access control then bad for Facebook in the long run, but it's more about our minimizing how much we share; basically the providers aren't going to make things private on your behalf. Then again I don't assume that my home address and mobile phone are not private, I'm sure they are on some public directory someplace. It's what my friend Peter O'Kelly calls social media literacy and that we are the IT department of our lives.


Facebook: Now sharing your home address with developers | Technology | guardian.co.uk

Why can't we all just get along?

I shouldn't be surprised by this comment coming from someone who considers communication in a broadcasting framework but I have to react to the comments that e-mail is "not great for communication" bit. It's not great for broadcast communication or even short messaging (like IM), but it is a perfectly wonderful tool for secure communication of rich content (i.e., more than 140 characters) that is more directed to the needs of the recipients.

Email, Dorsey explained, '[is] not great for communication because it's not focused on the most important thing. The subject is the message, and that's the message. The subject is in the message in the IM. It's bringing the content to you right away.

Sometimes the subject is not the most important thing - except maybe when it has NSFW in it - but subjects like "Talking Points for Today's Meeting" don't communicate the important stuff and I'd really hate to get that info in via IM.

I'm still amazed by the denizens of Web 2.0's urge to kill e-mail. Why? It makes no sense. All information and communication is not meant to be broadcast and shared with the world (this blog post is not one of those cases). Even IM is directed to specific individuals and tends to be pretty private. So why can't we have it all?

Twitter Co-Founder Jack Dorsey On The Power Of Tweets

Burning Question: Why Do Emails Contain Legal Warnings? | Magazine

Ever wonder how binding those legal disclaimers are at the bottom of corporate e-mails? Not very binding but they may demonstrate intention, which is a stickier wicket.

So why do companies bother? The sad answer is that the verbiage relieves managers’ anxieties about how easily secrets can slip through the digital firewall, even though it does nothing to stop such leaks. But since everyone’s doing it, everyone will continue doing it.

Burning Question: Why Do Emails Contain Legal Warnings? | Magazine

IBM Is (Still) the Patent King in the U.S. [Video] | Fast Company

Kinda of a fluffy piece about patent trends. Of course anyone who's been employed at IBM knows IBM has always made patents serious business. I wish the article went more into trends in patenting especially with the rise of patent trolling. A couple tid-bits:

In second place in patent growth was Samsung, with 4,551--up 26% on 2009. And while Apple's patent tally only jumped up by 563 new patents, this represents a growth of 94% over the previous year...

IBM's figure last year is 20% higher than in 2009. While that's less than the overall growth of the patent archive--there were 31% more patents added in 2010 versus 2009--it isn't a bad sign for IBM at all, since the 31% growth in patent awards is the largest on record for the USPTO.

IBM Is (Still) the Patent King in the U.S. [Video] | Fast Company

Online impersonation banned starting in New Year - Santa Cruz Sentinel

An interesting California precedent. Let's see how it ultimately plays out...

Falsely sourced e-mails, tweets and Web posts have become ubiquitous online, and it's not uncommon for someone to create a Facebook or MySpace account in someone else's name. If this is done to 'harm, intimidate, threaten or defraud,' according to Senate Bill 1411, it will be a misdemeanor punishable by up to a $1,000 fine and a year in jail.

Online impersonation banned starting in New Year - Santa Cruz Sentinel