Results tagged “facebook”

Scoble wants us to link to this

He's got a point, this is potentially very worrying (and is also something I just wouldn't have guessed would happen):

This is a fight for the Web. We all just crawled inside a box that locks Google out.
Don’t believe me?
Go to Google and do a search for “Le Web 08.�
Do you see a Facebook entry there? Nope. Google is locked out of the Web.
This has created HUGE value for Microsoft and has handed Steve Ballmer an Internet strategy which brings Microsoft from last place to first in less than a week.
Boom!

Scary stuff indeed...

Well, I've been following Scoble's tweets today and it would appear his Facebook account was shut down (disabled). facereviews makes the point that this is a good thing in the sense that we do want FB to monitor it's pages for scraping.

One of the many posters in this hale of twittiblogging (I think it was Ian Betteridge but I've lost the link) gives the following example: just because you post your email on your blog doesn't mean you'd allow others using it or adding it to their address book or doing something commercial with it (I'm paraphrasing from memory).

I have to say I disagree with this, if information is to be shared publicly then all uses of the public domain should be equally allowed or restricted. If I post my email on my blog (or indeed my phone number) it is primarily intended for those that have a genuine need for it. Nonetheless I also accept that I will have to shoulder the burden of added spam, lack of privacy, identity theft or whatever else might come of its existing in the public domain. In other words, I accept both good and evil uses of my publicly posted data.

In Scoble's example, while he is legitimately trying to recover his social data, as a side effect of this scrapping he will also grab data from those he has shared with. This data is in the public domain and its posting forms the expectation of a social contract. That is, those that post information to Facebook (myself included) are building a sort of social creative commons and we need to accept that sharing this data effectively means placing it in the public domain.

Like most things, this contract only works if the benefits of having the data flow both in and out of the social utility.

This has gotta be my quote for the day:-)

Last year, Facebook turned down a $1bn offer from Yahoo.

Thanks Tom

One of the things I'm enjoying about facebook is the complete lack of rounded corners in the interface:-)

So we've all been using the logo-in-the-top-left-corner as a link to the start or "home" page for years. Perhaps as a nod to the brand guidelines, it's always seemed like best practise not to tamper with the logo in any way. I'd sort of parked this issue in the never think about it again department until I noticed this:

So simple, so effective... Not a big deal, but nice work:-)