All Facebook’s Nick O’Neill is reporting that Facebook has called an all-hands staff meeting tomorrow at 4pM PT to discuss matters relating to privacy. He’s speculating that it’ll involve news of further changes to the site’s controversial recent changes.
While we wait for the upshot (if any), let’s conduct a silly little poll:
In the wake of ongoing controversy (some of it intense) over Facebook’s privacy policies, I’m overdue to return to the topic. (One-sentence summary of my take: Facebook has a history of asking for forgiveness rather than permission, and now says the default for everything is “social”–so the best way to keep things private is to keep them off the service, period.)
For now, here are a couple of worthwhile reads:
The New York Times got Facebook VP for Public Policy Elliot Schrage to respond to a bunch of reader questions. Schrage prefaces his answers with a humble, apologetic overview, but most of the specific answers seem to boil down to two somewhat testy points: 1) everybody has the option not to use Facebook, and/or 2) the question mischaracterizes Facebook positions or practices. My main takeaway: Facebook needs to do a heck of a better job at explaining what it does with our information, and how we can exert control over it. Schrage’s comments do give me some hope that the company gets that.
Eric Eldon of Inside Facebook has a clarifying, level-headed walkthrough of what Facebook’s recent changes (and a security glitch or two) mean for privacy on the service. It’s an exceptionally long post, but there’s so much to talk about that it’s hard to do it justice in a few hundred words.
And how are you feeling about Facebook these days?
For a brief period this morning, the Twitterblogosphere was abuzz over the discovery of a bug (although it looked like it might be an intentional backdoor feature) that let Twitter users force other people to follow them. Bizarre–and swiftly fixed by Twitter once it was widely covered and abused.
I want to make one thing clear: @janefonda was following me before all this happened. (No, I don’t know why…)
At last fall’s TechCrunch50 conference, my personal best-of-show was probably Threadsy. It’s an integrated inbox that gives you access to multiple e-mail accounts, Twitter, and your Facebook inbox all in one place–and weaves them together, so, for instance, you can view a bio, updates, and photos for the person who sent you an e-mail message. (That feature reminds me of the Outlook plugin Xobni.)
Back then, I called Threadsy an intriguing first draft. Now it’s addressed some of my initial concerns: For instance, it supports folders (Labels in Gmail parlance), making it a plausible full-time or part-time replacement for your current e-mail client rather than a severely limited compliment. And Threadsy finally moved from private beta into general availability yesterday, so anyone who’s interested can give it a try.
Threadsy could still use some more polishing (it has a neat photo viewer, but I’m finding the photos are sometimes partially obscured by misplaced text). And it’s still impossible to be a better Gmail than Gmail (when I’m in Threadsy, I miss features like the Google Calendar widget and the ability to open up attachments in Google Docs). Overall, though, it’s inventive and useful–if you try it out, let us know what you think.
Twitter has launched Blackbird Pie, a neat tool for creating static versions of tweets you can paste into other sites. It solves a problem I’ve had for a long time (and which I’ve solved via various methods–this and this). I’d show it to you right here, except…I can’t get it to work. (It involves pasting HTML and CSS code into your site, and WordPress, which I use, is sometimes unhappy with raw code.) It’s still a great idea, and maybe I’ll figure out a workaround.
This morning, I received a cheery e-mail from Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal with more information on the build-your-own-social-network’ service’s decision to end free networks in favor of focusing on ones whose organizers pay a fee to Ning.
(Maybe a tad too cheery–he refers to “new and exciting changes.” The prices look reasonable if you were already paying Ning or were inclined to start doing so, and the company says it’s going to add a bunch of new features, such as HD support. But an acknowledgment that most of the people currently operating free networks won’t be instantly thrilled with the idea of losing them might have been in order.)
(Here’s another story I wrote for FoxNews.com.)
If you think the whole Web is suddenly looking more like Facebook, you’re not imagining things. At its developer conference last week, the 800-pound gorilla of social networks made a bevy of announcements — and all the biggies involved intermingling your life as a Facebook user with other activities around the Internet.
For instance, a new Like button that’s already been rolled out on countless sites — including FoxNews.com — lets you “Like” items such as news articles, and see which your Facebook pals have liked. You can do so right at the site in question, but every time you click Like, your recommendation gets posted to your wall at Facebook, too.
Facebook is working with a handful of sites to implement even tighter integration. Listen to music at Pandora, for instance, and the online radio service may play music by artists that you’ve expressed a fondness for back on Facebook.
A couple of weeks ago, when Twitter announced that it would soon release an official Twitter app for Android phones, I fantasized that the company was going to port Loren Brichter’s miraculous Tweetie Twitter for IPhone to Android. It didn’t. But it’s done something pretty pleasing on its own terms: It’s released a really nice original (and fre) Twitter app for Android. For now, it’s replacing the very-respectable-but-not-spectacular Seesmic as my Android Twitter client of choice.
The best thing about Twitter for Android is the user interface. It’s arguably a little on the twee side: the Twitter bird is everywhere, there are animated clouds, and trending topics joggle up and down. But overall, it looks really attractive, it’s nicely intuitive, and everything’s legible–virtues which are never a given on the Android platform. (Twidroid Pro and TweetCaster are powerful Twitter clients for Android, but they make my eyeballs hurt.)
Twitter for Android’s most interesting feature is its contact syncing: You can meld your Twitterfriends with your Android contact list, merging photos and other information and putting links to tweets in Android’s contact list. (The program lets you choose between bringing all the people you’re following on Twitter into the Android contact list, or just syncing the people who are already there.) The client also supports geolocation and lists, has a widget, and is generally pretty full-featured with one notable exception: It doesn’t support multiple accounts.
I’m still getting my head around Twitter releasing its own client apps rather than leaving that challenge and opportunity to other folks. But this is a good one. And I’m keeping my fingers crossed that existing third-party Android developers will respond not by giving up but by trying to beat Twitter at its own game.
A few screens after the jump.
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Over at the official Facebook blog, they’re explaining some of last week’s changes–like the Web-wide “Like” button–and what, precisely, they involve. Facebook has an oft-stated company culture of being unafraid to change things, make mistakes, and then mop up afterwards–but wouldn’t everybody involved be happier if the company was a bit better at explaining things when they happen, rather then after users start to grouse?
Hey, Facebook is down right now–for me, at least, and for a lot of folks on Twitter. It may be imperfect, but generally speaking it feels like one of the most robustly reliable of the humongous online services…
(UPDATE: It’s back!)
