Gmail Tries to Be Less Creepy, Fails
July 17, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
Gmail, Google's powerful web based email service, announced some changes to its contact management features today. Contact management has for some time been a contentious matter among Google Account holders - the company does strange and mysterious things with your email contacts, including tying them in to some other applications without anyone's permission.
Today's new changes failed to alleviate those concerns, perhaps making the situation even less clear than it was before.
There Are Your Contacts and Then There Are Your Contacts
The post on the official Gmail blog today announced a new policy. There are now two types of contacts in your Gmail contacts list. There are your explicitly added My Contacts and there are your frequently emailed Suggested Contacts. The distinction between the two is unclear enough that I won't even try to summarize it. Read the following closely.
My Contacts contains the contacts you explicitly put in your address book (via manual entry, import or sync) as well as any address you've emailed a lot (we're using five or more times as the threshold for now).Suggested Contacts is where Gmail puts its auto-created contacts. By default, Suggested Contacts you email frequently are automatically added to My Contacts, but for those of you who prefer tighter control of your address books, you can choose to disable usage-based addition of contacts to My Contacts (see the checkbox in the screenshot above). Once you do this, no matter how many times you email an auto-added email address it won't move to My Contacts.
Taking a look at my new contacts page raises some questions though. Why are suggested contacts being added to My Contacts by default? What are suggested contacts if not frequently emailed contacts? Why are so few of my suggested contacts in My Contacts if that's the policy right now and why is that the policy still by default?
It appears that Google has issued an obtuse policy around an opt-out feature while even bigger questions remain. (Continued below...)
My Gmail contacts tonight, with BetterGmail2 script changing the colors. Does it seem creepy to show some of my contacts' names in this post? Maybe you're someone who takes contact privacy seriously, then.
What Are You Doing Messing Around With My Google Contacts Inside My Google Reader?
When you open up Google Reader, the company's RSS reader, you'll find not just the feeds you've subscribed to but also the feeds of shared items from your "friends." Those friendships were defined somehow by Google, according to who you email in Gmail apparently. They can opt-out of having their shared items publicly visible at all, but short of doing that - you are seeing their shared items and someone, presumably, is seeing your shared items too. No one knows for sure.
I showed Google Reader to yet another group of new RSS readers today and without any prompting from me, several of them recoiled at the "friends' shared items" feature. Personally, I like being able to see friends' shared items but I definitely do not like that the whole phenomenon is a black box. Where else is my social graph being cross applied by Google without my knowledge?
While Google wrestles with lawsuits over user data from companies like Viacom, it would be nice to know that the company has a coherent and respectful policy. Adding a check box and a blog post for those of us "paranoid" enough to be interested in opting-out of Google's strange Contact magic is not the kind of step that would help build and maintain trust. We are unimpressed.
We love Gmail here at RWW. In December we wrote, though, about Gmail's terrible lack of adherence to standards in email. In February we wrote about Google's nonresponsiveness to complaints about Gmail's lengthy message delivery delays. In March we asked why the new Gmail Contacts API couldn't play nice with others and be based on standards.
Given all that, we'd appreciate it if Google wasn't all loosey-goosey with our contacts. Who knows. Maybe Gmail, and all the Google Apps, are an even better example than Twitter of a service we'll put up with no end of crap from. We still love it.
Related posts
Craphound, the podcast
July 12, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
Craphound, the first short story I ever published in a professional market, has been turned into a fine little audio reading by Literal Systems (using the Creative Commons license), read by Rosalia Triana.
Link (Thanks, Bri!)
Craphound had wicked yard-sale karma, for a rotten, filthy alien bastard. He was too good at panning out the single grain of gold in a raging river of uselessness for me not to like him -- respect him, anyway. But then he found the cowboy trunk. It was two months' rent to me and nothing but some squirrelly alien kitsch-fetish to Craphound.So I did the unthinkable. I violated the Code. I got into a bidding war with a buddy. Never let them tell you that women poison friendships: in my experience, wounds from women-fights heal quickly; fights over garbage leave nothing behind but scorched earth.
Craphound spotted the sign -- his karma, plus the goggles in his exoskeleton, gave him the advantage when we were doing 80 kmh on some stretch of back-highway in cottage country. He was riding shotgun while I drove, and we had the radio on to the CBC's summer-Saturday programming: eight weekends with eight hours of old radio dramas: "The Shadow," "Quiet Please," "Tom Mix," "The Crypt-Keeper" with Bela Lugosi. It was hour three, and Bogey was phoning in his performance on a radio adaptation of _The African Queen_. I had the windows of the old truck rolled down so that I could smoke without fouling Craphound's breather. My arm was hanging out the window, the radio was booming, and Craphound said "Turn around! Turn around, now, Jerry, now, turn around!"
Related posts
Weekly Wrapup, 7-11 July 2008
July 12, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
It's time to review the week that was on ReadWriteWeb. It was a very busy week on the product side, and not surprisingly it was dominated by the release of Apple's 3G iPhone and the accompanying App Store. Also this week Google launched a virtual world, Yahoo opened up its index and search engine to outside developers, and there was a (unconfirmed) rumor that Twitter had bought Summize. On the trends side: we analyzed the problem of spam in social networks, and investigated why 'old school' bloggers dominate in new apps like FriendFeed and Twitter.
Web Products
iPhone 3G Released Globally on 11 July
This was the week that Apple delivered its much anticipated 3G iPhone and second generation iPhone software, to over 20 countries around the world. The hype was partially overshadowed by the high pricing plans that international telcos charged. Nevertheless, it didn't stop iPhone fanatics (including several of us here at ReadWriteWeb) from snapping up the new phone on its first day of sale.
Note: You can view an optimized version of ReadWriteWeb (as the above screenshot shows) on your iphone at: http://m.readwriteweb.com.
This week Apple also released a new version of iTunes, which includes the long-awaited App Store. On the day of the launch, there were 552 applications available in the store. More than 25% of the apps are available for free. Applications from the App Store will run on both the iPhone and iPhone touch after users upgrade to the latest firmware.
Lively: Google Launches Virtual World
While IBM and Linden Labs are cozying up to each other, Google released its own virtual world: Lively. Lively is available through a browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer. It is Windows only for now. Lively does not feature one coherent world like Second Life but splits worlds up into different rooms. Lively was originally developed as a 20% project by Niniane Wang.
See also: After Lively, What's Next for Google? and Linden Labs and IBM Break the Metaverse Barrier, Teleport Across Virtual Worlds
Search War: Yahoo! Opens Its Search Engine to Attack Google With An Army of Verticals
Yahoo! took another bold step this week: opening up its index and search engine to any outside developers who want to incorporate Yahoo! Search's content and functionality into search engines on their own sites. The company that sees just over 20% of the searches performed each day believes that the new program, called BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service), could create a cadre of small search engines that in aggregate will outstrip their own market share and leave Google with less than 50% of the search market.
See also: MyYahoo 2.0 Goes Live for All; Developer Platform Coming Soon
Summize Likely Acquired by Twitter
Well placed rumor has it that microblogging service Twitter has acquired search engine Summize. Summize calls itself a tool for "conversation search," and that's a well deserved tagline. The service's automatic translation tool uses Google Language tools to translate non-English Twitter messages into English with a single click. It's access to the Twitter XMPP API enables it to offer on-screen notification of any new search results as they become available. The Summize search API has become the must-have Twitter search tool for all the best 3rd party Twitter clients and services.
See also: Get A Less Noisy FriendFeed With Moopz
Exclusive: First Look At Genome, A Next-Gen Social Networking Service
What are the number one problems facing today's social networks? According to the young developer Vladislav Chernyshov they are: privacy issues, distraction and time-wasting, quantity over quality, ads, and lack of control over your identity. That's why he, Dmitry Gorpinchenko, and Andrew Chernyh, all students at Novosibirsk State Technical University (NSTU) in Russia, have founded Genome, an upcoming next-generation social networking service which addresses the main problem of Web 2.0: the ever-increasing quantity of Web 2.0 resources and the lack of tools to manage them.
SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY
Web Trends
According to a new report, over the past 12 months more than four-fifths of social networking site users said that they had received unwanted friend requests, messages, or posts on their social or professional network profile. While friend requests on their own seem innocuous enough, they are often just the first step towards whatever the spammers' intended malicious activity is, be it redirects to phishing or malware sites or even just unsolicited advertisements.
See also: Six Ways To Update Your Status
Priming the Pump: New Users, Meet the Old Winners
Social media, it's all about the democratization of communication and empowering new voices - right? A few years into the new media revolution, reality is looking a little more complicated than that theory would suggest.
The wild garden of services growing from the read/write soil of the new web struggles each time a new app is launched and looks more like a ghost town than a place to enjoy the network effect of the crowd. How can new services ramp up social connections quickly? Recommending "friendship" with active early adopters is one strategy being explored by a number of sites. The end result can be a lopsided environment where a handful of winners dominate the collective mindshare - again.
SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY
Extra! RWW Live
This week we recorded the third episode of RWW Live. We discussed the following issues:
- Yahoo and the release of MyYahoo 2.0 and the related corporate issues (ie: who hasn’t been rumored to be acquiring Yahoo)
- The Powerset acquisition by Microsoft
- The rumor that Summize was acquired by Twitter
We plan to start promoting RWW Live more, including inviting people to participate live, very soon.
That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.
Related posts
Priming the Pump: New Users, Meet the Old Winners
July 11, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
Social media, it's all about the democratization of communication and empowering new voices - right? A few years into the new media revolution, reality is looking a little more complicated than that theory would suggest.
The wild garden of web sites growing from the read/write soil of the new web struggles each time a new app is launched and looks more like a ghost town than a place to enjoy the network effect of the crowd. How can new services ramp up social connections quickly? Recommending "friendship" with active early adopters is one strategy being explored by a number of sites. The end result can be a lopsided environment where a handful of winners dominates the collective mindshare - again.
Last month the Harvard Business Review called into question the "long tail" itself, the core principle of the new web that sees greater total energy in the collection of niche interests than in the "big head" of popularity. When it comes to new social news networks, though, some already popular people may be receiving enough new attention that they are liable to get "big heads" themselves.
Friend Feed
The red-hot activity aggregator FriendFeed is one of the latest suspects. FriendFeed lets you view and discuss the activities of your friends across all their various networks (YouTube, Last.fm, Twitter, Del.icio.us, etc.) whether you participate in those other networks or not. Built by two ex-Googler's, the service has stolen our hearts here at RWW and is where we spend a substantial portion of our days. (See Marshall, Sarah, Corvida, Frederic, Alex and the boss, Richard.)
Users are still figuring out how to use FriendFeed, but some of the most popular people there have been discussing how much faster the growth of their FF networks has been than it was on Twitter. We've seen that as well and attributed it primarily to two things: the friend recommendation feature (which is much improved by this script) and the friend-of-a-friend feature (also greatly improved by this script).
Allen Stern of Centernetworks has done some investigative reporting, though, and found that new users are all being served up the same default "popular users" as recommended first friends. Though FriendFeed HQ has said in response to Allen's criticism that they intend to change their algorithm to incorporate more diversity - to date the default user set has changed very minimally.
Here's another of Allen's always charming videos, followed by a screenshot of today's default recommended friends for new FriendFeed users.
Why does this matter? Because funneling audiences towards the same major players that dominate other types of media (blogs, Techmeme, Digg, etc.) mitigates a lot of the potential for discovery of new information from diverse sources that could come from a platform like FriendFeed.
It's also questionable because most of these "most popular" members are making their living commercially through web traffic, and being named a FriendFeed default member has a direct impact on their incomes.
Why, on the other hand, is it not a big deal too? Those top users also happen to be some of the most interesting and engaging people on the new web - they got to the top in large part because they add a lot of value to peoples' lives. That's not always the only reason they got there, but that's part of it. They were elected leaders, by the market, with all the complications that a statement like that includes.
The default settings are also not a big deal because FriendFeed still offers a lot of ways to discover new people, and because despite the defaults even the most popular FriendFeed users are only followed by a small percentage of the service's users.
Right: The most followed users on FriendFeed, from User21.com's FriendFeed Top 250 Most Followed Users
The Solution
What's the ideal solution to this problem? Attention data. Let me bring my historical interests with me into your application and recommend a variety of people, not just the most popular, who are roughly interested in the same kinds of things I am. FriendFeed, unfortunately, doesn't appear to be incorporating user attention data at all. Who is? Our favorite example is personalized music magazine IdioMag, though it's better in theory than it is in execution.
Seesmic
Once again, plucky power-blogger Allen Stern pounds the pavement to lead the charge on yet another timely story - video conversation platform Seesmic and a hint of default user love.
Seesmic CEO and FriendFeed default recommended friend (by the way) Loic LeMeur uses his company's own technology in a particularly human moment to articulate well the thinking behind the very temporary experiment with default users and the subsequent non-launch of the feature.
LeMeur responds genuinely as a long-time industry leader, and a man on whom venture capital is raining like it was April in Oregon, but Stern appears to begrudge him still for not speaking out about his default status at FriendFeed! It's clearly not in his interest to do so, though. More LeMeur friends anywhere equals more exposure and thus users for Seesmic. As a participant in the social media space - that's his job, to win high profile spots like being a default friend in one of the hottest early adopter networks on the web. He's a pretty interesting guy to watch, too.
Do FriendFeed users lose out in diversity of perspectives. They may.
Digg
Digg is the grandpappy of all the social news sites, though it's never really succeeded in becoming the long-tail social network it's aimed to become. Hitting the front page of Digg is really the one and only goal there. We've written here about the decline in importance of tech stories on Digg but as the mainstreaming of the site continues, the company has also moved into the recommendation space.
We wrote about the Digg recommendation engine before it was publicly available but once it was live the consequences looked remarkably similar to the situations discussed above.
According to a very interesting analysis by JD Rucker, in the days after Digg recommendations went live, this is how the numbers shook out.
"31.4% of the Digg front page was made up of stories submitted by 10 users. To extend it further, 50.4% was submitted by 28 users. Assuming that there are 3000 users who submit in any given day, that's less than 1% who control over 50% of the content."
In this case, it wasn't an explicit set of default users promoted by the company. All of the companies discussed in this post based their recommendations on an "algorithm" but Digg's was presumably the most mysterious and complex of them all.
Did it matter? Apparently to date it hasn't. Recommendation squashed the long tail at Digg, more even than at the FriendFeed.
Digg has made some minimal moves towards supporting APML, a proposed standard for communicating user preference data from one site to another and solving the "who are you?" problem. That's the problem that default users solve, if a website doesn't know who to introduce you to then it's logical to introduce you to the most popular people at the party. In real life, you might appreciate that.
On the web, though, things are supposed to be different. Web 2.0 is supposed to blow the broadcast model right out of the water, fostering niche communities where everyone has a valued voice. In many cases that has happened. If you like Monster Trucks, manga or Mediterranean marinades then you don't have to follow Robert Scoble to find those things. But when it comes to tech, the innovative new social applications launching every day are struggling to create a sense of community quickly, because their unique value-added features often depend on it. Pointing at the most popular people around is one way to try to do that. That strategy has its upsides, too.
What's your take on this situation? (Other than wanting a drink after reading such a long post about one particular strategic question faced by startup tech companies?) Do you find yourself living in the long tail on places like FriendFeed, Twitter, Seesmic and Digg - oblivious to the soap operas of A-listers and enthralled by the authenticity of thriving niche communities? If so, tell us where those communities are. We'll all click through, en masse, and enjoy them. Just tell us who to follow once we get there.
Rocker kid photo CC by Ian Ransley on Flickr
Related posts
Could Your Google Search Indict You?
July 7, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
“Knock, knock.”
“Hello?”
“Secret Service - open the door please.”
Opening the door, you ask - “Yes?”
“Are you Mr. Smythe who writes for Extrmeme Politics?”
“Yes.”
“We’d like to talk to you about some of your Web activity regarding assassination and our President.”
A little far fetched? Maybe, but we could also have this scenario….
You watch as your door comes crashing in from the police battering ram and suddenly find your home swarming with police
Mr. Smythe this is a search warrant for your home and computer equipment
What did I do?
We have information that you have been searching for child porn and related information.
Again a little far fetched?
Maybe so, but in this day and age when you have national security agencies working with telecoms like AT&T to monitor all Internet traffic, just how far off is either scenario? In a society where even the most innocent thing we do can be misconstrued in any fashion to satisfy the people looking through the information, as bloggers we have to wonder whether some of the things we search for while writing our posts could be used against us.
How many bloggers in the political realm have conducted searches with search strings that could be looked upon as being questionable? Or how about community activist bloggers who search about gangs or drugs or pedophiles? Could their search strings be misconstrued?
As it is, Google searches have become evidence in murder trials in the United States and now appear to be considered by courts and juries as valid evidence of guilt. So really how far of a stretch is it that search strings become the warning flags that are flipped to let authorities know that someone is looking for information on a red flag subject?
We live in a society now where just about everything is suspect and there is a willingness on the part of both government agencies and broadband providers to work together to monitor all the traffic being carried through the pipes. This is a society where we also find ourselves even wondering about who we are making friends with on these social media sites and whether people will misconstrue those friendships. As Louis Gray said in a post today:
On top of the occasional annoyance that youth anywhere from 10 to 15 years younger than me are engaging in the same networks I am, there’s just something that has me hesitating every time I get an invitation from a 14 year old or a 20 year old who wants to follow my updates or be connected.
At my old age of 31, were I to be a “real world” friend of any 20 year old girl, people should be asking questions. If I were palling around with some 14 year-old boy geek, they would be asking other questions. Yet, the occasional eyebrow-raising invite hits my e-mail box, and makes me wonder if somebody just might get the wrong idea.
What if I were to take the next step and move beyond a simple friend acceptance on Facebook or Twitter and try to find out more about this person?
If the point has arrived where we seriously have to begin questioning who we are making friends with online, how far off is the idea of questioning our search strings and what it could be saying about us if someone was looking over our shoulder; and are you sure someone isn’t?
---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
Google Releases Custom Search Business Edition
Google Blog Search Semi-Launched in China
Google Product Search Not as Froogle
Google Reader Gets Search!
Google Search Now on Windows Mobiles, Too
Fun Things To Do With Google Blog Search Beta
Weren’t Google Ads Already Live on MySpace?
Related posts
Video: cross-species love (not what you think)
July 3, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
BB community member Takeshi brought this lovely video to our attention. And for that, I am eternally grateful.
Animal Friendship Between Different Species (YouTube)
Related posts
Facebook has Friendfeed Envy: Adds Comments to Mini-Feed
June 25, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
According to a post on the Facebook blog, Facebook will add the ability to comment on items in the Mini-Feed today, making it even more similar to Friendfeed. Within the last few months, Facebook started to allow users to aggregate their items from various external social media, photo, and bookmarking sites such as Flickr, del.icious, and StumbleUpon.
With this latest announcement, Facebook is starting to encroach even more on Friendfeed's territory.
According to the announcement post on the Facebook blog, you can now "easily converse around friends' statuses, application stories, new friendships, videos, and most other stories you see on their profile. Just click on the comment bubble icon to write a comment or see comments other people have written." This is, of course, exactly what you would do in Friendfeed.
Facebook will also handle long comment threats very similar to the way Friendfeed deals with them. The feed will show up to 8 comments by default, with the ability to click and show more - which is exactly the way Friendfeed handles this as well.
Facebook, however, is not going to change the order of items in the Mini-Feed the way Friendfeed does. Friendfeed pushes items with new comments to the top of the page. This approach would probably not be too useful in Facebook, where users typically see far fewer items in their feeds than the typical Friendfeed user.
While Friendfeed aggregates items from a far larger pool of services than Facebook and has a lot of features that Facebook still has to copy, it is clear that Facebook is at least getting some ideas from Friendfeed's (and also Plaxo's) playbook here.
Related posts
Facebook Becomes FriendFeed; Launches Commenting On Mini-Feed Items
June 25, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
This afternoon Facebook will introduce commenting on all mini-feed items. This means that you’ll be able to comment on status updates, new friendships, application updates, or other activities listed in your friend’s mini-feeds on their profiles.
Each feed item will now include a comment bubble, which when clicked, will allow you to leave a comment. Up to 8 comments will be displayed for each item, with the ability to click to see more. Finally, if you really don’t want people commenting on your mini-feed items, you’ll be able to disable them from your privacy settings page.
To my surprise, commenting has proved extremely popular on FriendFeed, and I suspect it will do the same on Facebook, especially for things like Status Updates where a conversation can develop around what you’re doing. In a sense, this pushes Status Updates much more in the direction of Twitter.
With Facebook also now enabling you to pull in updates from third-party services like Google Reader and YouTube, it also makes it head-to-head competition for FriendFeed. For the moment, comments will not show up in the News Feed, so it’s not quite comparable to the “Everyone” or “Friends” tabs of FriendFeed … yet.
---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
Blogger Beta Gets OpenID Support
Commentt Offers Basic Video Commenting Widget
Create a Facebook Application for your Blog with Blogfuse
Multiply Launches iPhone Edition
Facebook Brings on New CFO: YouTube’s Gideon Yu
Facebook JavaScript Now Live
Facebook Exporter for iPhoto Launches
Related posts
Video: Riken and BSI-Toyota robot goes on a neural bender
June 6, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
Filed under: Robots, Transportation
[Via Impress]
Continue reading Video: Riken and BSI-Toyota robot goes on a neural bender
Read | Permalink | Email this | CommentsRelated posts
Gary Vaynerchuk Exceeds Dunbar’s Number, Seeks Mental Help
June 2, 2008 Category: Uncategorized No Comments »
WineLibrary.tv’s Gary Vaynerchuk and Mashable founder Pete Cashmore“GaryVee”, otherwise known as wine guru Gary Vaynerchuk, is a friend to everyone. An online friend, at least: leveraging Facebook, Twitter and a popular video blog at WineLibrary.tv, GaryVee has been able to build a social media brand like no other.
His wine parties are legendary: a gathering of the tech in-crowd, with congratulatory high-fiving the order of the day. And unlike many social media moguls, Gary has kept almost everyone on side, from his 9000 Twitter followers to his almost 5000 Facebook friends.
I met Gary again briefly this past week: the New Jersey-based wine aficionado was passing through San Francisco as part of a whirlwind tour to promote his new book - 101 Wines: Guaranteed to Inspire, Delight, and Bring Thunder to Your World. But the book is largely a prop, because it’s Gary Vaynerchuk - the man, the web friend - that his online audience flocks to see.
We did the predictable: a hasty phone-cammed interview on social media (below) in the Borders bookstore on Union Square. A red couch and an austere-looking chair provided all the inspiration we needed to set this up as an impromptu “psychotherapy session” for the hardest working man in wine.
And yet there was more value in the off-cameraphone chats: a discussion of how, as online publishers, we find ourselves struggling to maintain thousands of relationships. The painful truth: we probably can’t.
Gary, it’s almost universally agreed, is a Good Guy - permanently upbeat, outgoing, charismatic. But not, alas, superhuman: he’s constrained, like all of us, by Dunbar’s number: our supposed ability to form genuine friendships with a mere 150 people. Even the best Good Guys, when faced with many thousands of personal connections to manage, realize this frustrating human limitation. The result: Gary’s relationship with his audience is often, despite his best efforts, more fandom than friendship.
And contrary to the promise of the “two-way web”, this article too will be an asymmetrical social object: of the perhaps 10,000 people who will read this Mashable post all the way to the end, I can only hope to enter into a dialogue with a few hundred of you, and establish ongoing interaction with barely a handful.
You can help out, of course, by adding a comment, friending me on Facebook or following my Twitter account. But if I still forget your birthday, I’ve got an alibi: Dunbar.
---
Related Articles at Mashable! - The Social Networking Blog:
Gary Vaynerchuk Thanks You; We Do Too
Talk to Pete Cashmore Live via UStream at SXSW
Eat Drink or Die: Food, Grapes, and Some Humor For Garnish
Attention Wine Snobs: Snooth.com Goes Global
Ask Celebrities, Politicians and Athletes Questions with ZotFish
MySidekick.com Social Search: 100 Free Invites
Wikipedia Bans Overstock.com
