Social networking is the hot buzz these days, with Facebook being the latest Web 2.0 site to offer connections amongst people. The virtue of these online applications, and especially Facebook, is in creating a new way of keeping in touch which wouldn’t have been possible before the internet. I can now play Scrabble with friends and family on the other side of the world, maintain contact with friends from high school who I haven’t spoken to in years, and poke Yogi in Vancouver where he can’t get me back (well he can poke me back). Where Facebook differs from MySpace, SecondLife and the plethora of other sites is the ideas of authenticity, privacy and trust. To quote Facebook’s about page:

At Facebook, we believe that people should have control over how they share their information and who can see it. People can only see the profiles of confirmed friends and the people in their networks. You can use our privacy settings at any time to control who can see what on Facebook.¹

And more importantly on their privacy policy page:

Facebook follows two core principles:

1. You should have control over your personal information.
Facebook helps you share information with your friends and people around you. You choose what information you put in your profile, including contact and personal information, pictures, interests and groups you join. And you control the users with whom you share that information through the privacy settings on the My Privacy page.

2. You should have access to the information others want [my emphasis] to share.
There is an increasing amount of information available out there, and you may want to know what relates to you, your friends, and people around you. We want to help you easily get that information.²

Recently a furor has arisen over a new service called Beacon. It allows third party websites to send alerts to your Facebook profile. “How does it do this?” you might ask. Facebook stores your login id on your computer using a cookie and then shares this information with the participating third party websites. “By default, we use a persistent cookie that stores your login ID”.³ When this service was first set up, it was ‘opt out’ only. This is online jargon for you are automatically signed up for this service unless you take the time and effort to de-register yourself. Unfortunately this meant a lot of people had nasty surprises when doing their Christmas shopping only to find that the presents they bought were unwittingly added to their Facebook alerts. It also turns out then even if you opt out of the service and are logged off the website, Facebook still collects information regarding what actions you perform on these third party sites.

This is not the first time that Facebook has courted controversy. Earlier this year it announced it was to release user information to Google search which users again have to opt out of (you can do it here). A New York State investigation into false safety claims prompted it to post sterner warnings and speed up dealing with complaints. Unbelievably on their privacy page I found the following line referring to recommending a friend to Facebook:

Your friend may contact us at info@facebook.com to request that we remove this information from our database. ((http://www.facebook.com/policy.php)

Not only is this sort of unsolicited information gathering an online marketing no-no and illegal in New Zealand, but I am personally sorry to everyone I have sent a prompt through Facebook who has not subsequently signed up. Oh and by the way, Facebook has your email address and won’t remove it unless you specifically ask them. The British Goverment didn’t just lose 25 million records of far more sensitive information did they? If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear right? Identity fraud doesn’t exist does it?

Which brings me to the title of this post: ‘do no evil’. This unofficial motto of Google may lead it open to criticsm but so far its simplicity of message and attempt to adhere to it has meant that it has remained relatively untarnished during its eight year reign as the search king. In comparison as soon as Facebook’s service exploded in use earlier this year, it has been surrounded by privacy controversy. This is not surprising given that 23 year old founder Mark Zuckerburg has global domination ambitions, and the whole history of Facebook has murky beginnings where he appears to have stolen the concept from people he was working with. Basically this little punk is not to be trusted with the level of personal detail that we are giving him.

Unfortunately like lemmings, the online viewers in the upcoming movie Untraceable, or western governments at the Bali Summit on Climate Change, we are marching ourselves willingly to an unfavourable end. This is a real shame yet utterly logical as the benefits of Facebook are, at least in my eyes, enormous. Hopefully given Facebook’s ability to create massive political swells on certain issues we will see a movement from within to force it to accept a mantra similar to ‘do no evil’. Then again, I just discovered this article.

Update

Facebook have issued a formal apology for Beacon here. You can deactivate it at the privacy page. I still think he is a little punk though.

1. http://www.facebook.com/about.php
2. http://www.facebook.com/policy.php
3. http://www.facebook.com/policy.php

Outside Fisherman’s Wharf YHI

The view up Lombard Street

God Bless America

The hostel in Chelsea I stayed in

Welcome to the centre of the Universe!

Looking down Wall Street

Well you get the idea! Of course this has been used for nefarious purposes. An entire site devoted to spotting strange happenings is now indexing the bizzare of America. Apparently Canadians don’t want this level of intrusion into their daily lives, but I say if you aren’t doing anything wrong you don’t have anything to hide :). So don’t pick your nose in public.

Microsoft has a history of slowing development in web based technologies that could undermine it’s market dominance. This has a direct effect on me as a front end web developer [think of the children!], as well as slowing overall economic growth by stifling innovation.

Office 2007 containing Outlook was recently released which displays HTML emails poorly. This has been well documented at Campaign Monitor and there are instructions from Microsoft for how to mitigate develop for it here. In short, the latest version of Outlook (Office 2007) uses the new version of Microsoft Word’s rendering engine rather than the rendering engine of Internet Explorer (IE) 7. Word 2007 has worse HTML and CSS support than Internet Explorer 6. This means that many of the web technologies that were improved in the latest round of the Browser Wars are now rendered useless because of one decision by Redmond. Which leads me to the pertinent question…

How can Microsoft make such a short sighted judgement, if it wasn’t in their overall business interests, to use a bad HTML rendering engine in one of their flagship products when internet technology is heading in the other direction? They have billions of dollars in reserve, a highly successful gaming console and online media content delivery system, and recently simultaneously developed and released IE 7, Windows Vista and Microsoft Office. Why can’t they employ managers to provide strategy and oversight between different development teams.

It is about here where I cross that boundary from disgruntled web developer to conspiratorial nut-job. I see something awry when a corporation as large as Microsoft continues to make apparently backwards decisions or drag the chain when it comes to web development. It is not the first time that they have done this. The delay in release between IE 6 and IE 7 was 5 years. This is comparable to the time it took them to release the next versions of Windows and Office. However developing one browser is a much smaller programming task than either an operating system or an entire suite of programs. In comparison Adobe have released a new version of Photoshop, arguably a far more complicated piece of software, every one or two years since 1990 along with many other products. So Microsoft, what is going on here?

Microsoft is a corporation and it all comes back to it’s business model and it’s bottom line. When the browser wars were at their peak IE updates came thick and fast. Then when Netscape fumbled and released Netscape 6 (bleurgh!) Microsoft released the nail in the coffin that was IE 6 and stopped developing. But Microsoft didn’t stop developing other things. They released the DotNet framework which expanded IE’s ability to run applications through software developers who could transport code from desktop apps to web browser apps. These applications either won’t function or function badly in other browsers. This keeps Microsoft in the money.

Then along came Web 2.0 and Firefox with rich internet applications that were built on open-source and standards. Web developers pushed the limits of what could be done inside a browser using existing technologies which has culminated in AJAX (HTML/CSS/Javascript with web requests to servers). IE 6 began losing significant market share for the first time since 1998 and IE 7 was finally released at the end of 2006. Thus Microsoft is being forced to accept there will be web based applications built on technology which they don’t own.

Which brings me full circle back to the email issue. Office and thus Outlook still have a stranglehold on the business market. They can make ‘mistakes’ with impunity, no other competitor is currently in a position to immediately capitalise. The more standards based the internet is, the easier it is for competitors and the open source community to build applications which compete with it. Thus in an attempt to keep email development from progressing as fast as web development I believe they have deliberately retarded Outlook. As most emails will be sent and received using Microsoft Office, this then slows third parties from building online web systems that could harness new technologies. XML feeds mashing up with email? Not for the next five years.

yngwie j malmsteen – rising force mp3 download