Social Media Archives - Page 8 of 19 - Stay N Alive

Category: Social Media

The iPhone Needs Privacy Controls

Posted on by jessestay

iphone_security.jpgThe iPhone seems to have created a huge security and privacy problem recently that I think many more people should be watching. By launching a developer platform and SDK, Apple has essentially created one of the largest social network platforms in existence, bringing even more powerful and personal data than ever before to the developer. Apple is essentially enabling the developers themselves to create the iPhone social network with almost no power whatsoever given to the iPhone user on how to enable or disable that data.

I became amazingly aware of what a huge issue this is when I, like many other iPhone early adopters, downloaded the Loopt application from the iTunes App Store and signed up for their service over my iPhone. Before I knew it, I had realized I just SMS’d about half of the contacts on my iPhone, including important business contacts and more that I would just rather not have an Application have access to. I couldn’t necessarily SMS them an apology, as that would just add to the issue I had just created. In fact, my Mom, who doesn’t have an SMS plan on her cell phone called me later that day to ask that I not send her SMS text messages to her cell phone, when in reality, I had no idea it was sent to her! Loopt had assumed that it would be okay to allow their users to send their friends SMS messages inviting them to Loopt (in a very ambiguous manner), when after mass complaint, Loopt quickly retracted from their efforts.

I argue this wasn’t Loopt’s fault though. Of course, Loopt does have some responsibility to satisfy their users, but despite having to apply to be in Apple’s directory, there is nothing stopping them from being malicious with the way they are handling the data on your iPhone. I know Loopt had no ill intentions, but this could have been any App out there with ill, or even not-so-ill intentions. Apple has no privacy controls on the iPhone giving the user control over what Applications can and can’t access, and as we’ve seen already, this is coming back to haunt them.

The iPhone has some very powerful features, accessible via the API, that make it an extremely valuable and unprecedented Social Networking tool. I’ll list those here:

Location, Location, Location – the Profile

First of all, the iPhone has access to your location and where you’ve been, which, I argue, is much more valuable information than any other Social Network profile in existence can provide about an individual user. The iPhone makes the people in the “Social Network” real.

The Contact List – your Friends

The iPhone has one of the most realistic contact/friend lists available in existence. The iPhone contact list contains information about people you actually talk to and interact with in real life. It also imports your other contact lists from other locations such as Gmail. No other Social Network in history has that type of completely real information about those you truly interact with on a daily basis.

Multimedia – the big picture

The iPhone has the most up-to-date photos, audio, and other multimedia in existence. Think about it — every social network you belong to currently probably has photos that originated from your iPhone or other camera. They are on your iPhone before they are on the Social Network. The iPhone also has real-time listening habits of users, along with your mail, your internet history, your stocks, the weather in your location — I could keep going on and on!

As you can see, the iPhone provides an extremely rich set of data integration points which any Application can take right now, and use as they please, and the user has absolutely no control over it (minus one prompt if the application is trying to get your location data). This is actually quite scary if you think about it!

Apple really needs to take a lesson from Facebook on this. One of my favorite features of Facebook is the fact that I can click on a single link and control all the information I save on Facebook right then and there. As a user, I can feel comfortable that no application I install will share my information in any way I don’t want Facebook to share it. Facebook takes pride in this, and it has even caused them problems as they have tried to fight this with the likes of Google’s FriendConnect to protect this data and keep it in the hands of their users if the users do not want it shared.

Never in history has there been such a phenomena as the iPhone SDK being opened. It’s brand new, and it’s unprecedented, so issues and flaws are to be expected. I only hope that Apple can, in the end, respect their users’ privacy and place a little more control over what data the Apps you install are allowed to access. Doesn’t this concern you?

To Blog, or Not to Blog — That is the Question (via LouisGray.com)

Posted on by jessestay

“I’m noticing a trend lately which started several months ago, and I couldn’t quite pinpoint what was causing it. It seemed as though many of my friends and others that I esteemed as good bloggers were getting tired, and were posting much less frequently, or not at all. Many of these people were part of the reason I became an entrepreneur and it was disappointing to see them stop posting. It seems as though those blogging are getting tired, or just see it as a waste of time.”

You can read more of my guest post over on LouisGray.com – thank you Louis for allowing me to post!

Utah Social Media Developers Garage – Great Turnout!

Posted on by jessestay

facebook-7696940I’ve been meaning to blog this for a few days now and I want to apologize to our generous sponsors that gave us a place to host the meeting and great food, all at no cost to us for taking so long. We had one of our highest attendance meetings ever for the Utah Social Media Developers Garage last Tuesday, where we watched a great video from the Palo Alto Facebook Developers Garage in May, and then went over the new Facebook Design. There were many great questions, and I think people are more enthusiastic than ever on building Facebook apps. We had near 25 attend, and I only expect that number to grow based on the excitement we saw.

I am always impressed at these meetings, as I seem to meet new Facebook developers working on new Apps each time we have these things. Facebook is truly on the radar for many businesses in Utah – I’m very excited to see what comes out of it!

A special thanks goes to EPIC Ventures and Rachel Strate, who hosted the event – if you are writing a Facebook App and need some investment, give Rachel a ring! Also thanks to Bungee Labs, who at the last minute stepped in to provide Pizza for everyone. I’ve reviewed them before but I do recommend you try them out and see how they can fit into your software development plans if you get a chance. If your business would like to host or provide food for future events, please let me know – it’s a great way to get in front of a group of developers!

These meetings are a true community effort – if you would like to help out or be an officer please let me know and we’ll get you involved in helping me plan the events. Heck, if you think you can do it better I’m open to even letting you take over! These are not my events, but yours, so I want to be sure those attending are able to contribute – if you’re interested in helping please let me know. Also, please let me know if you have an idea for a meeting.

Our next meeting will be September 9 from 7pm to 10pm so add it to your calendars now! My O’Reilly Book, FBML Essentials, will be available then and perhaps we can do a Facebook development focus around that – maybe a launch party of some sort? You can learn more about our group on the group’s official Facebook Group here, or by joining the Google Group here.

Developers Unhappy With Facebook Profile Redesign

Posted on by jessestay

Picture 1.pngJust this past week, Facebook announced that starting next week users will begin to have the option to adopt the new profile design into their Facebook account. Facebook has been preparing this for months, and supposedly was set to try and launch a few months ago. However, even today the new Profile redesign does not seem ready, and it appears developers aren’t happy.

For the past month or two Facebook has enabled access to the new design to those that have the developers app installed in their account via the url http://www.new.facebook.com. This was to enable developers to begin to prepare their applications for when the redesign goes live. The new design change will make significant changes to the way news stories are published to the user’s mini feed in Facebook, allow the developers to move profile boxes to various areas within a user’s profile, and will introduce a new “info” profile integration point for developers as well as an entire tab on the user’s profile that can be devoted to a developer’s application.

For those developers that don’t prepare, application profile boxes will, by default, be placed in a separate tab entitled, “boxes”, away from the main area of the user’s profile. In addition, news stories will no longer be published to a user’s profile in the same way they are now. This introduces concerns for developers that are worried Facebook has not given them enough time to prepare for this change.

Developers have a valid concern too if they don’t think they were given enough time. For instance, it wasn’t until just last week that the example “MySmily” application on Facebook began to work (it had been working before, but it seems for several days it was down, and has been up and down frequently since it was shown to developers). This app is the sample that Facebook provided for developers to learn of the new integration points from. Its functionality has been quite flaky over time, making it difficult for developers to have full access to it to learn how to develop for the new design. In fact, even today installing the latest version of the “MySmily” source code per the documentation returns with an error.

We went over a demo of this application and the new design in our Social Media Developers Garage here in Salt Lake City last night, and we quickly discovered the new design was riddled with cross-browser compatibility issues. I couldn’t do things in Safari that others could do in Firefox, and others running Internet Explorer also were having major issues gaining full access to the new design. Also, ironically, while Facebook recently launched the ability to comment on mini-feed and status items in the old design, the new design is void of this new feature. Add to that on a large screen like my 27″ the site is mostly white space on both sides and really doesn’t look very good, Facebook still has some serious design issues to work out.

In addition, there still remain many mysteries for developers. Facebook has still not made any mention as to where ads can and can’t be placed in the new design. The documentation remains vague – there are many references to passing a variable into a setFBML call to determine where the application’s profile goes, but there are no examples as to how to set that. Also, the Facebook test consoles are also seemingly having issues supporting the new API and FBML tags and calls. Several FBML tags are also not working, including , a popular tag used by many developers (including myself) for displaying a comments box in their application.

The things I mention are only the tip of the iceberg. Many developers are angry that the new design will mean less traffic and user engagement for their applications. Many businesses could be dead overnight from this new design. There are several topics open in the developer forums with developers stating their frustrations with the new design. “distinctdev” says, “Still no solid spec and the new profile launches in 1 week – Whats up with that?”. There is an entire petition set up by developers asking to say “no” to the new Facebook profile. That petition is here, and thus far there are 17 signatures. From that forum post, “Wild Bill”, author of the “Robot Armies” app on Facebook states:

“I wholeheartedly agree with those of you who said the current design should be cleaned up rather than completely changed. I’ve long seen Facebook as one of the finest examples of excellent web design; it’s all very well executed. The new design is definitely a step back; it feels spread out, bloated, and clunky because of the massive amount of JavaScript piled onto it. The old design could be enhanced to correct the problems the platform currently has. I anticipate a very large reduction of activity on my apps, not only because of detrimental changes to the platform, but because of people who are bothered enough by the new design that they no longer use Facebook.

From “friendhugs“, “Nobody will be using the new format for quite awhile. It’s all opt in right now, and I suspect once they find out nothing works, they’ll just flip right back.”. Also see “madpuffin’s” issue here. I could go on and on with more developers having issues and frustrations like this.

Of course, with any new change, there is going to be whiners and complainers and fallout due to the changes – this is a fact of life with any new design. I have seen it plenty of times with redesigns I have done in the past. However, the problems Facebook seems to still have in the new design go way beyond just design issues, and frankly, I think these developers (including myself) have some valid concerns! It will be interesting to see if Facebook can work out all these issues before they launch next week, or if they’re still going to launch, bugs and all.

House Committee Seeks to Tighten the Content You Can See in Government

Posted on by jessestay

JAC_and_USS_Texas.pngRepresentative John Culberson, the Twittering and Qik’ing Congressman from my good old home town of Houston, Texas, has been on a rampage this morning about a proposed new regulation for the House of Representatives, which, he claims, will require all world wide web communications from the House floor from those in congress to receive “prior approval” from a Democratically-controlled Committee on House Administration before it goes out to the web. From the letter:

“

  • Official content posted on an external domain must be clearly identified as produced by a House office for official purposes, and meet existing content rules and regulations;

  • To the maximum extent possible, the official content should not be posted on a website or page where it may appear with commercial or political information or any other information not in compliance with the House’s content guidelines.

  • Any link from a House website to an external site on which the Member video is hosted must contain an exit notice.

  • CHA, the Office of Web Assistance(OWA), or other designated House entity should maintain a list of external sites that meet whatever requirements are established by the CHA

“

Per the above proposed recommendations, this would rule out any Twitter communication because by law, each Tweet would need to be prepended by a disclaimer, identifying it as being produced by a House office for official purposes and, as Culberson puts it, that will most likely in and of its self exceed 140 characters. Also, it would mean that any Congressman wishing to use a site such as Twitter to share publicly what is going on in Congress with their constituents will have to get prior approval, censorship essentially, before using such a site or technology.

I find it ironic that it is a Republican that is trying to show the Democrats how to use technology on this, but Representative Culberson has a point here, and we need to speak up if we’re to continue seeing social media propagate through our government. Social Media in government means a more open government, and that’s a good thing! I’d like to encourage all that read this to write your Congressman or Congresswoman about this (Pelosi is part of this!) and get them to see things straight rather than requiring censorship of our House floor.

You can read the Proposal here. (Which, were this proposal to take effect, I believe I would be breaking the law by sharing with you)

UPDATE: Want to discuss? Let’s discuss in a nice open format right below this post via the FriendFeed link below!

Utah Social Media Developers / Facebook Developer Garage Tomorrow at 7pm!

Posted on by jessestay

Facebook.jpgThose of you in the Facebook Group or Google group have already received notice about this but I just realized I hadn’t blogged about it yet. Tomorrow we have a great Facebook Developers Garage planned here in Salt Lake City. Facebook has sent us a professional copy of the DVD of the Palo Alto Facebook Developers Garage that I was able to attend in May, so we’re going to watch that, and then go over some of the new changes that are coming into play for the new Facebook design.

This should be a great event if your a developer or even non-techie, as it will help you see some of the integration points you can build into with the new design. A lot will be changing with the new Facebook design, so if you are currently, or are planning to build a Facebook application, either as a developer or in a marketing or business position, you’ll definitely want to attend. This is a completely open event so please invite your friends! All I ask is that you RSVP here.

We are still looking for someone that can provide food for the event so if your company would like some great exposure in front of possibly 20-30 developers and Facebook-interested people, please contact me! In the meantime, the event will be hosted at EPIC Ventures in downtown Salt Lake City and they will be providing snacks and drinks for all that attend. I’d like to thank them personally for hosting the event – they are doing this after hosting our food for last month’s event!

All in all, this should be a fun event as all of them are. If for some reason you can’t attend, our next meeting will be September 9th from 7pm to 10pm so put that on your calendar! I’ll look forward to seeing you all there!

Here’s a map to EPIC Ventures – it has been recommended that you park in the Joseph Smith Memorial Building parking lot across the street. I’m told they can provide vouchers for that. Also, if you arrive late a phone number will be posted on the door of the Zions building for Rachel Strate – please call that number and we’ll let you in!:

Epic Ventures
One South Main St, 8th floor
Salt Lake City, UT 84111

Facebook Top Friends Re-Appears

Posted on by jessestay

app_3_2425101550_8298.pngLast night, quietly, Facebook re-enabled Slide’s Top Friends App on Facebook. On June 26, exactly one week ago, Facebook removed the Top Friends App from its directory, citing “violations of their terms of service”. The App was no longer visible on users’ profiles, no longer accessible via canvas pages – it had just vanished from Facebook with no notice. The problem, Facebook said, was, according to InsideFacebook, “Top Friends was allowing access to non-friends’ personal information in a way that violated the TOS”. Last night it seems, again with no notice, the Top Friends App was finally made available again.

According to “tichwhack” in the Facebook developer forums, all installs remain intact, and not surprisingly, active user counts have gone down significantly at only 8,000 DAU. It will not be surprising to see that number go back up to where it was before over the next week or so.

Top Friends disappearing is just one of several Applications on Facebook that was removed with little notice by Facebook, in a recent crackdown on spamminess and TOS violations they seem to be doing. About a month or two ago, Facebook removed the Google FriendConnect App (which I mentioned earlier), and still has yet to provide a very good explanation other than “they are violating the Terms of Service”. Justin Smith of InsideFacebook mentioned just a few days ago that the “Social Me” App was also removed recently for similar reasons. That was also in addition to a few other Apps by the same developer which were removed at the same time.

The removal of such large and important Applications should make every developer on Facebook take note. Facebook is not going to just sit idly by and let developers violate their terms of service! Developers must take care to read the Facebook developers terms of service very carefully and make sure there is no question or their Application too could be at risk.

This is only the third large Application to be removed for TOS violations on Facebook. I would fully expect there to be more. In the end, while scary for developers this is a refreshing thing to see, in hopes that Facebook will be a better, less spammy, and more secure place to be.

Note: You spoke, I listened! Last night, Facebook was the clear winner on what you wanted to hear about next – let me know your thoughts and comments below!

UPDATE: It appears that Facebook has also upped their invitation limit to 40 – more spam for all!

Identi.ca Provides Users An "Open" Alternative to Twitter

Posted on by jessestay

logo.pngToday I was introduced to a new service called identi.ca, which claims to provide Twitter-like functionality, in a nice, Open Source interface. The service implements the OpenMicroBlogging protocol which, from their FAQs, states, “you can have friends on other microblogging services
that can receive your notices.” This means complete transparency and no reliance on any one service to trust your data with. I am unable to find any other services that have utilized this protocol, however.

The service seems to maintain an open atmosphere across the board. They publish all the details of the code identi.ca is based on, stating they run on the Open Source microblogging platform, Laconica. They state that “soon” they plan to implement SMS updates and notifications, a Twitter-compatible API, Maps, Cross-posting to Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, etc., Facebook integration, Hashtags, Image, video, audio notices, and even a multilingual interface. Relying on the open source community, on an open standards-based platform may just put them in direct competition with Twitter very soon.

All of your updates posted to the service are under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license and you have to agree to this when you sign up. They seem to remain open across the board – and this will make them successful. I have talked previously about how the mistake Twitter is making is that they are not open enough – they are not basing their protocols on open standards and open techniques of web development. It is showing now, as they are stuck fixing their own problems as the world watches. With a service like this, were it to go down, ideally other services would also sync data and you would not be without service when one service goes down. This is powerful!

The founder of identi.ca is ironically named Evan – they seem to be going head-to-head with Twitter in an Open platform. Based on my experience with open standards in the past, I can already tell which one has the strongest potential. They state to have 1,000 users already and are growing very fast (in Evan’s words). I look forward to seeing them grow, and hopefully contributing as I can – will you join me? You can find me at http://identi.ca/jessestay.

Twitter Continues to Fail Developers, Why They Will Still Succeed

Posted on by jessestay

twitter.pngI’m going to dub this Part 2 of my Twitter Love/Hate fest – this should be my last installment for awhile on this topic, I hope. In reality, I really love Twitter. I have a good network on Twitter and frankly, I wouldn’t have met many of you if it weren’t for Twitter. Twitter, in many ways, has changed my career. For that reason I really don’t want to see it fail. It is perhaps this reason that I am so critical of it at times – it’s my hope that someone at Twitter can read these and at least see what the world is really thinking, hoping, and wishing at a given point in time about how their service is performing and being perceived.

Twitter is still continuing to fail developers!

It’s examples like the one I learned about recently where the service, Gridjit, was put offline entirely because of a rash decision on Twitter’s part to remove a feature from Twitter’s API with little to no notice for the developers to respond. In the time Gridjit was down, they have since added FriendFeed support, and I’m willing to bet they have other strategies that don’t include Twitter. Now that Twitter has re-enabled that feature, they are now back up and running, but Gridjit is just another example of the frustration that is occurring amongst developers in the Twitter development community.

Just today, for example, I noticed Twhirl was no longer working with @replies. I remember seeing posts on the Twitter blog recently stating that the @replies tab would be removed, but I remember no notice to developers stating that the features that enable this on clients like Twhirl would be disabled in the API (they did let us know the API was down today though – still no notice it would be down when they took down the replies tab, and nothing to the developer mailing list that I’m aware of).

Twitter tries, but not quite enough

I mentioned last week that Twitter was hiring on their site, but it just wasn’t enough because I think the problems they have exist at the management level. True, they even hired 3 new individuals recently, but they are developers used to being managed, not managing large groups of other developers. Twitter really needs one or two individuals at the top that have true Enterprise-level experience managing these types of IT issues, and very large groups of developers. Remember, Twitter isn’t just the developers that work for Twitter, but the vast group of developers that are also writing applications for their API. The individual in charge of development and IT efforts at Twitter has to have strong experience in managing very large development teams, and working with a very large user-base, in which any change to any part of the system could effect. Twitter needs a staging environment in place, and a system of testing every single change that goes into place before it actually goes out live into the production environment.

They are showing some promise though!

Just this week Twitter announced the inclusion of 2 new investment partners in their list of investors. One of those, Jeff Bezos, does have experience managing the types of issues and large development audiences that Twitter lacks. This is a huge move for Twitter, and long overdue! Jeff will bring Amazon’s firm experience in scalable web environments, and I hope, enable Twitter to enter the cloud more than they currently are, and reduce the tough scaling issues they are experiencing right now.

You can bet you’ll see Twitter begin adopting Amazon’s AWS Cloud services here soon now that Bezos is on board. Amazon has the capability to scale almost instantly as traffic spikes hit, and they seem to be doing it better than any other right now. Twitter really needs this service!

Why I think they’ll still survive, no matter how many developers leave

Twitter is a Marketer’s Paradise. Twitter is full of content about the every-day life of millions of individuals and their friends, who they connect and communicate with, and what their frustrations and interests are. Businesses are beginning to embrace this and use services such as Summize to track information about their Brand, their image, and even their competitors that they could never track before. Businesses can finally track real people instead of just “visitors”.

This is powerful and valuable information to many businesses out there. Because of this it doesn’t matter how many times Twitter goes down or how many developers stay or go from Twitter. So long as users still have networks on Twitter and the Twitter user-base continues to rise as it appears to still be doing, businesses like H&R Block and Comcast and even NASA will still flock to Twitter as a valuable tool in gathering data about their customers and fans. These businesses have it in their best interest to see Twitter succeed, and you better bet they’ll do their best to help out in that effort. Twitter isn’t going anywhere my friends, and I still haven’t retracted from that statement.