Facebook Founder on Privacy: Public is the New “Social Norm”

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg claims that if Facebook was starting out now, sharing with everybody would be the starting point, rather than with a small group of friends. Is this more about reflecting social norms or changing them to help Facebook compete with Twitter?

The statement, made during a livestream of the Crunchies awards, hits on a hot button issue for Facebook: it recently notified users of privacy changes via a pop-up notification. While the message claimed that Facebook was displaying the message to give users more privacy controls, blindly clicking “next” was a way to make much of your data public. And in fact, some data like the Friends List has become more public without any settings changes by users.

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Zuckerberg: Sharing is the “Social Norm”

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Zuckerberg’s statement to interviewer Michael Arrington avoids any major “gotcha” quotes, subtly implying that Facebook’s move is a reaction to societal changes but carefully avoiding any mention of Twitter’s () role in those changes. The full quote, picked up in a very well-written post by Marshall Kirkpatrick this weekend, emphasizes “social norms” and “evolution”:

When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’

And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

Change was Inevitable

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Critics of Facebook’s move will probably find support: Facebook’s user base is notoriously resistive to change, and yet nearly every major change, with the exception of the failed Beacon project, has seen a huge surge in popularity for the company. Facebook users were certainly opposed to its expansion beyond colleges, but it’s hard to argue that the service has become less useful as a result.

So now Facebook () is becoming a catalyst of social change, a transition that’s likely to be somewhat painful for all of us. Twitter dramatically lowered the barriers to content creation, and thus sharing our day-to-day lives became effortless. But it was Facebook that took the trend mainstream, affecting 300 million+ people worldwide.

My take: Zuck is right, the change was inevitable. If Facebook hadn’t pushed this forward, Google () would have inevitably made our lives more public in its quest to make all the world’s information accessible (yes, that includes information about individuals). And if not Google, then Twitter … the trend started there and Twitter’s growth would have gradually defined the standard in sharing.

Public sharing as the default was unavoidable, but Facebook has pushed the trend forward faster than any of us might have expected. It’s a concept that will take some getting used to.

source: http://mashable.com/2010/01/10/facebook-founder-on-privacy/

Google To Introduce Click-to-Call (Billing) in Ads on Mobile Devices

Google sent out notification to its AdWords advertisers that this month “your location-specific business phone number will display alongside your destination url in ads that appear on high-end mobile devices. Users will be able to click-to-call your business just as easily as they click to visit your website. You’ll be charged for clicks to call, same as you are for clicks to visit your website.”

On most smartphones, phone numbers typically can be touched (or “clicked”) to initiate a telephone call. This “click to call” scenario already exists for Google organic local listings on smartphones. What Google is saying, simply, is that it will allow phone numbers to display in ads and will charge advertisers when calls are initiated accordingly.

This is a version, effectively, of “pay-per-phone call” but the cost per call is the same as a click — a bargain (generally speaking) for the advertisers to receive a “warm lead.”

source: http://searchengineland.com

Yahoo Southeast Asia Seals Deal With Friendster

Late yesterday, Yahoo Southeast Asia got what may be a big leg up in the social networking arena. Yahoo Southeast Asia established a partnership with Friendster that will see the two entities doing a great deal of cross-promotion in the near future.

Friendster has over 90 million registered users, and about 90 percent of its daily traffic comes from Southeast Asia, so the arrangement is a rather significant deal. Yahoo stands to benefit as Friendster is putting ads for Yahoo services all over users' homepages and profile pages. Then Yahoo will receive some additional exposure when Friendster incorporates its search results.

As for what Friendster gets out of the equation, a Friendster application has already been granted a spot on the Yahoo homepages in Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Singapore. Plus, Friendster users are supposed to obtain the option to link a Friendster account to a Yahoo account.




Both sides seem more than pleased about the arrangement. Ken Mandel, the vice president and managing director of Yahoo Southeast Asia, said in a statement, "Working together with Friendster ensures Yahoo! remains relevant to people by offering the best online content and experiences."

He then added, "This is a major milestone in the Yahoo! Open Strategy, our combined services will enrich the online environment allowing people to get more done faster and in a single place."

YouTube On Verge Of Supporting 1080p Video

YouTube will soon put even more distance between itself and its old reputation for being a repository of crummy-looking, user-generated content. Support for watching 1080p HD videos in full resolution is due to be introduced on Monday.

1080p is, in case you didn't know, the picture type associated with Blu-ray. It makes very minute details visible (hair and makeup teams were none too happy about its creation), and on YouTube, should simply allow for larger images, too.

Unfortunately, creating and displaying 1080p clips requires enough stuff that not everyone will be able to take part. Content creators who don't have fairly new cameras will be left out. Then, viewers who don't have fast Internet connections, fast computers, and large monitors should probably just stick to what was already available for the sake of not having clips stutter.

Still, YouTube's trying to make the switch easy on people. A post on the YouTube Blog stated, "[T]hose of you who have already uploaded in 1080p, don't worry. We're in the process of re-encoding your videos so we can show them the way you intended."

And the introduction of support for 1080p is important. In the long run, it'll provide an attractive option to professional content creators and advertisers, along with the obvious eye candy benefits for YouTube users.

Google Introduces New Drawing and Form Features for Docs

Google has launched some new features for Google Docs. They have made a couple improvements to drawings and added several new features to Forms.

As far as drawings, Google has made it easier for users to build flowcharts, by adding 20 new shapes for standard flowchart components. In addition, users now have more control over drawing text layout by supporting explicit line breaks in text boxes and text within shapes. The features can be accessed, by simply inserting a drawing into any document, spreadsheet, or presentation.

As far as forms, you can now gather responses for a group of similar questions in a new, compact grid format. The Grid question type lets users label several columns and create a limitless number of new rows. Row results appear in their own spreadsheet columns with their own summary charts.

The summary charts themselves actually have new formatting as well:

The form editor supports right-to-left text input now. “When you enter RTL text in the form editor, it will automatically switch the directionality of the form editor and rendered forms (similar to Gmail and other Google Apps),” explains User Interface Software Engineer Eric Bogs on the Google Docs blog. “This means your text and questions will flip directionality, making it easier for RTL users to create and use forms.”

Google Apps customers have two options for using forms within their organizations now. They can automatically collect respondents’ usernames as usual, and they can also now require sign-in to view a form.

Google Shares New Privacy Policy for Books

Google has introduced a new privacy policy for Google Books, to try and appease the critics of Google's enormous book indexing project. The company has also been in communication with the Federal Trade Commission, and has discussed both the new policy and a letter to the FTC on the Google Public Policy Blog.


Google is still waiting approval from the court on its settlement agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, so some services discussed in the privacy policy don't even exist yet.

"Our privacy policies are usually based on detailed review of a final product -- and on weeks, months or years of careful work engineering the product itself to protect privacy," says Google Global Privacy Counsel Jane Horvath. "In this case, we've planned in advance for the protections that will later be built, and we've described some of those in the Google Books policy."

The privacy policy can be read here.