Outside Innovation

The Dangers of Facebook's Non-Optional Timeline

"OMG, I've been Timelined!" is becoming a common lament among Facebook users these days. Facebook is making a sweeping user interface change that:

1. Is mandatory for both business and consumer pages

2. Entices consumers into capturing and sharing life events for easier data mining and target marketing

3. Encourages users to adopt applications that log their actions in the virtual and physical worlds

4. Is promulgating a de facto standard API for defining actions and objects on the Internet

5. Seduces Facebook users into violating their friends' privacy without their consent

Giving Up Your Privacy: 28 Years Late, but Is 1984 Finally Happening?

By Ronni Marshak

I am not a conspiracy theorist, I don’t view the world pessimistically, and I’m not particularly paranoid, but after reading Patty Seybold’s article this week on Facebook privacy and her earlier article on Google’s privacy policies, I’m starting to look over my (virtual) shoulder.

For years, I have been dismayed at the abandon with which people (primarily teens to young adults) have posted very personal and oft embarrassing things on MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube for the whole world to see. I worry that the nasty posts to ex-boyfriends/girlfriends will come back to bite them in the butts. Putting up that photo of yourself carousing with a bunch of drunken friends in Caligula-like costumes will be referenced at the most inappropriate times, like a job interview or a presidential campaign.

What’s Your Customer Cloud Strategy?

With the looming Facebook IPO and the flap about Google’s new privacy policies on many peoples’ minds, we thought it would be a good time to step back and think about how customers want to use the cloud.

The Cloud Stores and Synchronizes Information for Us. When we think of consumer cloud offerings, we think of capabilities like Apple’s iCloud, which is useful for backing up our photographs, keeping our digital music libraries, and synchronizing all of our data across our various mobile and non-mobile i-friendly devices. If we use any of the current Apple devices and software, iCloud is available to us as a free service. If we want to use Apple’s Music Match service, or to buy additional storage in the iCloud, we can pay extra.

We Don’t Need to Know What Computers and Operating Systems Run in the Cloud. As customers, we know that the cloud is “out there” somewhere. It’s on the Internet. We don’t much care where it is. In fact, that’s the benefit to us. All of the stuff that we care about is backed up and synchronized using these ephemeral services that run “out there, somewhere.” The “cloud” that Apple offers us is actually powered by physical computers that run in one or more physical data centers in one or more regions of the world. But we don’t care where they are or what they are, as long as they keep running and backing up and synchronizing our data.

Should You Read The Accidental Billionaires?

By Ronni Marshak
SVP and Sr. Consultant/Analyst, Patricia Seybold Group

Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires, and the hit movie that it spawned, The Social Network, are interesting and an enjoyable enough way to spend a few hours. But rather than really talking about the social networking phenomenon that Facebook, the subject of the book and movie, created, they are really about the bad feelings among the people who were involved in the emergence of Facebook as a business.

In Patty Seybold’s book review, she points out that “what’s missing from the book (and the movie) is any explanation of why and how people want to strut their stuff to the rest of the world. Or how Facebook has managed to seduce all of us into sharing our lives publicly, despite the fact that we are clearly exchanging our privacy (and that of our friends and family members, apparently) for the privilege of showing off.”

She also cautions Facebook users to think about how the Facebook ecosystem is using the information that you provide, as well as information about members of your social network, to generate revenues by selling targeted ads. She also warns about unexpected—and, to me, unacceptable actions, such as the fact that Facebook actually copies your CONTACTS’ phone numbers from the phone book on your Blackberry, etc. without their consent!

Accidental Billionaires?
Is Ben Mezrich’s Depiction of Facebook’s History Worth Reading?
By Patricia B. Seybold, CEO and Sr. Consultant, November 11, 2010

Facebook: Does Mark Zuckerberg Care about Customers' Privacy?

There's a lot of buzz around the new Facebook movie, Social Network. I haven't seen it yet, but I've been reading the book, The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich, on my Kindle. The fictionalized account of the founding of Facebook makes great theater. But what also comes across loud and clear is how seductive an experience people find it to be to talk about themselves and among themselves about their stuff.

For me, the most sensational tidbits in the Facebook story don’t revolve around who ripped off whose idea and how much money they made. I'm more interested in the social media phenomenon and in the idea that if you make it the path of least resistance for everyone to share everything with everyone, they will!

The most telling tidbit I've read to-date was the IM snippet that was apparently leaked to Silicon Alley Insider and found its way to Jose Antonio Vargas, who included it in his New Yorker profile of Mark Zuckerberg, The Face of Facebook, in which Mark Zuckerberg (Zuck) offers a friend inside information about anyone at Harvard University:

"ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
ZUCK: just ask
ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
FRIEND: what!? how'd you manage that one?
ZUCK: people just submitted it
ZUCK: i don't know why
ZUCK: they 'trust me'
ZUCK: dumb fucks'"