Better Noise Control on Google+ is Coming, but its More Beautiful Than You Think
Over the last 2 or 3 years Facebook, Google, Plaxo, Myspace, and others have all been working on a standard to make fixing the noise problem easier. It’s called ActivityStrea.ms (pronouced “Activity Streams”), and its intention was to make it so companies don’t have to duplicate the efforts of re-creating stream formats in their news […]
Read more...Facebook Listens. RSS Added Back to Pages. Will Twitter be next?
In perhaps one of my most controversial articles (unintentionally), I wrote a week or two ago about how both Twitter and Facebook both quietly removed RSS from user accounts and Pages. Of course, with Facebook, on user accounts that made sense since they were intended to be private, but with Pages, 100% public versions of […]
Read more...Twitter and Facebook Both Quietly Kill RSS, Completely
Last year I shared how Twitter was moving more and more towards a closed, less-standards oriented model of sharing content as they upgraded their design to bring more people to the Twitter.com website. At that time, they removed the prominent RSS icons and made it only possible to access an RSS feed for an individual […]
Read more...Privacy is Not an On and Off Switch – "Do Not Track" is Not the Answer
Victoria Salisbury wrote an excellent blog post today on “Who’s Creepier? Facebook or Google?“. I’ve been intrigued by the hypocrisy over criticism of Facebook’s own very granular privacy controls when sites like Google, Foursquare, Gowalla, Twitter, and others have an all-or-nothing approach with some things (location and email in particular) that are even more private […]
Read more...Are Toll Roads Open?
Twitter proved me wrong. Well, sorta. After my last article I had a whole slurry of rebuttals by Twitter employees suggesting my last article had “serious factual errors” and that the move by Twitter to charge $360,000 a year for 50% access to their full firehose through Gnip actually made Twitter “more accessible” and “open”, […]
Read more...Twitter’s Gnip Deal Ensures a Closed Ecosystem
Today, at Defrag conference, Twitter announced a new deal with the Real-Time stream proxy Gnip, where for $360,000 per year they will search 50% of all content posted to Twitter. This move follows the move, as I mentioned earlier, of Twitter moving further and further away from an open platform, and more towards one they […]
Read more...Mobile, Tablets, and the Need for an Extended E-Reading Experience
Imagine buying a book from the book store and only being allowed to use a yellow highlighter to highlight that book and not being able to add any notes as you read it. Seems pretty ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yet we’re forced into that with today’s default readers on devices such as the iPhone and iPad, […]
Read more...Pornography and Choice – The Dilemma Over the Future of Open
I’ve been following the Ryan Tate late-night rant (language) over Steve Jobs’ desire for a world “free from porn” and his objections therein (while still not completely sure the purpose for his rant). While pornography was only one of the things Jobs highlighted, Tate, who has no children of his own, seemed to focus on […]
Read more...How Does One Compete With This Beast? Here’s How:
As you can tell from this blog, my Tweets, and just about the entire blogosphere, the entire web is talking about Facebook making every website on the web a part of its own network. Basically, with a few lines of code copied into your own website you can immediately have access and share to 400 […]
Read more...Facebook Launches OpenGraphProtocol.org: Adds Second Product to the OWFa
Just two years ago at OSCON, Facebook, Google, Myspace, and others all joined forces to create the Open Web Foundation, a sort of GPL-like agreement for platform builders to have a common agreement users could understand. Facebook announced their first support of the OWF agreement in November of 2009 with the launch of the OAuth […]
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