Privacy - a problem for Facebook and web 2.0?

In my last post, I talked about people clicking on ads when it is relevant to them. Achieving this relevance is difficult, especially as you have to do so whilst still respecting an individual’s privacy. Facebook realised what can happen when you do not respect an individual’s privacy when it launched the Facebook Beacon. It allowed purchasing habits from Facebook’s partners to be given to Facebook and publicised to their friends and family through the newsfeed. They backtracked (see previous post), but not completely. It is interesting to see that based on the reduction in outcry over Facebook Beacon following the changes, the individual is willing to allow Facebook to have knowledge about their purchase habits as long as they do not tell their friends and colleagues.

I do not think this will stand the test of time, Facebook will surely end up having to allow users to remove this info if they wish. In the UK at least, an individual can request that a company ceases to use information for the purpose of direct marketing.

The question then becomes whether banners and search ads are direct marketing..

and whether Facebook is liable under UK law.

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In a previous post I said: over time things are slowly being removed from my blog and into facebook. Personal photo albums have gone, and it cant be long before video, books and last.fm disappear leaving my blog much more focussed on what it does best - delivering personal (or other’s) commentary. It’s slowly becoming less and less of a black hole for information about the author.

A couple of friends asked me why I didn’t move all content creation entirely into facebook?

I initially thought this was an easy one to answer - I import my posts into facebook as there is an audience there but that it was a closed environment. For it to be suitable, I needed to be able to deliver the content back out into aggregators using RSS. Except it turned out Facebook had this capability. You can see it here.

So why not use Facebook?

It came down to not feeling like the correct place - Facebook feels like a more personal arena - not really a place for business orientated content. I wonder if Facebook can make that perception change? Would I move then? Well they would need to be searchable on the open web - and I would want to be able to control layout more. Wouldn’t Facebook just turn into a proprietary version of the web if all that happened? That wouldn’t make sense to do, right? We already have one of those..

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I wonder how many people in the UK are aware of the Facebook beacon launched recently. It tracks your usage on partner websites (say a retailer) and when you buy something from them it places a story in your news feed. As far as I can tell there aren’t any partners in the UK yet. The problem with this scenario was that you couldn’t stop it happening - ie you couldnt opt out, it just happened automatically.

Thankfully (and unsurprisingly) Facebook have changed the system - now it will only appear if you give express permission for it to do so. Good news indeed. But I wonder if they solved the other issue I heard about - if you have multiple people using a single computer, it added the news to the first person who logged into their facebook account. So if Person A buys a book and person B logs into Facebook first. The action appeared on person B’s newsfeed.

At least you can now say no to the info being public (Facebook still has the data about you in their systems mind)

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Shame about the facebook image uploader in flock - it’s not clear enough. I thought I was uploading one photo and ended up uploading them all. It wasn’t obvious how to move around the images either. Why can’t I just select, upload and tag like facebook?

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I’m a regular reader of a vc and in a recent post he talked about one of his investments in a company called tumblr. To use his words “It’s the next logical step in the blogging phenomenon. It allows you to blog quickly, easily, from your phone or your computer, it encourages reblogging and pulling content in from twitter, typepad, wordpress, blogger, flickr, delicious, last.fm, etc, etc”

Sounds interesting..

But do I really need another aggregator of information? I already have my blog, facebook and to a very limited extent Linkedin. Broadly speaking, I use facebook to track my personal stuff, Linkedin for my work stuff and my blog for writing about things that interest me. None of it is perfect and thats what made me look at tumblr.

The problem with the other aggregators.

Facebook - it just doesn’t do a good job of letting me decide who can see what. But for public stuff using addons I will over time be able to aggragate all this info there. The downside - I have little control over the layout today. But it’s easy to use.

My blog - over time things are slowly being removed from my blog and into facebook. Personal photo albums have gone, and it cant be long before video, books and last.fm disappear leaving my blog much more focussed on what it does best - delivering personal (or other’s) commentary. It’s slowly becoming less and less of a black hole for information about the author.

LinkedIn - the orginal place for all my work contacts - it does nothing more - I wonder whether this will shift into a group within facebook because of this - what if it did allow you to aggregate work related content? Would I use it more?

So again I wonder why use tumblr. Fred Wilson’s tumblr page reminds me of the news feed inside facebook. There is no context so flickr photos are mixed with twitter posts which in turn is mixed with blog posts. Sure I get to see everything Fred Wilson - is that useful?

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