Jonathan Swift argued in A Modest Proposal that children of the poor should be eaten. He went to a rhetorical extreme in order to illustrate the absurdity of a perspective he mocked and opposed. In order to illustrate how absurd Facebook’s new privacy policies are, I want to imagine a fictitious but analogous situation: imagine Google announcing that our Gmail contacts and Google Reader subscriptions were to be made publicly visible to the web at large. If you don’t want the world to know who you are communicating with and what you are reading, maybe you shouldn’t be communicating with those people and reading that content. The tools you’ve used to communicate and read privately must stay current with the times, right? Sponsor What Happened at Facebook In the middle of December, Facebook began prompting users to re-evaluate their privacy settings on the site . If users had not changed any privacy settings in the past, then the privacy of status updates, photos, videos and shared was switched to a new default: no longer visible only to approved friends, that data was now by default publicly visible to everyone. That default could be opted-out of, though, and users could return their activity update settings back to private, limited to friends only. Other user-data was switched from private to public without recourse for users. User profile pictures, fan pages followed and lists of friends on the site are now made publicly visible and cannot be limited in their visibility. A fast backlash led the company to allow friends lists to be removed from public-facing profile pages, but anyone’s friends lists are still publicly available by programs that ask for it. Friends lists can no longer be made accessible only to trusted friends on the site. RSS never caught on in a big way, but Facebook democratized online subscription to syndicated content. Now your interests and subscriptions are naked as a jay bird before the world. Requiring that Fan pages be public is important because that’s how users express their interests and subscribe to updates from organizations they care about. RSS never caught on in a big way, but Facebook democratized online subscription to syndicated content. Now your interests and subscriptions are now naked as a jay bird before the world. (As an aside, did you know that most people who are fans of the Facebook page ComedyTweet are also fans of the page PornstarTweet ?) Why did Facebook do this? Company founder Mark Zuckerberg said this weekend that this is the way the world is moving – towards being more public and less private. He said that the company recently considered what settings it would apply if the site were to be created anew today and “just went for it.” I explained yesterday why I don’t think that move has been backed up by a credible argument , why privacy is still important. Last night I heard a story about a podcast for parents struggling to concieve a child. Some Facebook users have said they feel unable to subscribe to updates from the show as Fans on Facebook because they don’t want friends to know they are trying to concieve. Becoming a Fan but being discrete about it isn’t an option anymore. Stories like that are probably much more common than we might think. Consider now what it would be like if this same changes were to be made to a different set of technologies many of us use. Let’s Open Up GMail Contacts and Google Reader Subscriptions! You may have signed up for GMail and Google Reader because you thought they would be effective, private and secure ways to communicate with people and subscribe to news of interest – but you were fooling yourself if you thought that information wasn’t going to be made public someday! Don’t you know that privacy on the internet is an illusion? Do you know how little money Google is able to make from Gmail and Google Reader with your data left private? What do you mean you use Twitter to communicate with people publicly and Gmail to communicate with them privately? Have you seen how seldom people talk about Gmail on TV these days? What’s a web service to do? It’s really a sign of the times. People are blogging more and more these days, you might even have a public blog on Google’s Blogger.com. That’s evidence right there that it’s time to make your subscriptions and contacts public, too. Google Reader and Gmail are both much smaller than Facebook, half as many people use Gmail as use Facebook. Google Reader is much smaller still. Contacts and subscriptions on Facebook are public now – clearly society is moving in this direction. If you don’t want people to know about who you are emailing and what you are reading, maybe you shouldn’t be emailing them and reading it. Think this analogy is a stretch? Think that hundreds of millions of people don’t think of Facebook as a private way to communicate with the friends they’ve approved, just like you do with Gmail, and to read updates from organizations they are interested in, but don’t neccesarily want everyone to know about, like Google Reader? I don’t think it’s a stretch at all. I think these are similar tools for many people. As we’ve said before, Facebook’s unilateral privacy policy changes have violated the contract they have with users. Just imagine how that would go over if it happened on other services we consider private. We give Facebook a hard time, but we love the site, too. Come be a fan of ReadWriteWeb there . You won’t be able to hide that from anyone, but maybe it will distract people from your Comedy Tweets obsession. Discuss

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A Facebook Proposal: Let’s Make Gmail Contacts & Google Reader Subscriptions Public

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience this weekend that the world has changed, that it’s become more public and less private, and that the controversial new default and permanent settings reflect how the site would work if he were to create it today. Not everyone agrees with his move and its justification. Has society become less private or is it Facebook that’s pushing people in that direction? Is privacy online just an illusion anyway? Below are some thoughts, based primarily on the pro-privacy reactions to Zuckerberg’s statements from many of our readers this weekend. Though there is a lot to be said for analysis of public data (more on that later), I believe that Facebook is making a big mistake by moving away from its origins based on privacy for user data. Sponsor In Facebook’s early days, and for the vast majority of the site’s life, its primary differentiator was that your user data was only visible to other users that you approved friend requests from. As of mid-December, Facebook users were no longer allowed to hide from the web-at-large some information including their profile photos, list of friends and interests in the form of fan pages they followed. Text, photo and video updates shared on the site have always been by default private (friends only) but if you’d never changed your privacy settings before last month, then Facebook suggested you switch them to make those updates publicly visible to everyone. That became the new default. Here are three reasons why making some of this data public by requirement and some public by default is the wrong thing to do and why society is not in fact changing the way that Zuckerberg claims it is. Evolving Preferences Don’t Justify Elimination of Choice Mark Zuckerberg might be right, people probably are becoming more comfortable telling the world at large about more and different parts of their lives. Why does that mean it’s ok to take away peoples’ choices and force them to make public some of their information all the time? That just doesn’t make sense. Privacy is a fundamental human right and while that may seem less true when we’re operating on corporate turf like Facebook, Facebook used to be based on privacy. Why give it up so easily? (Isn’t it a cause for concern that so much of our civic interaction now goes on through this and other corporate channels?) It’s very hard to believe that the hundreds of millions of mainstream Facebook users are wanting to throw their privacy out the window – and if Facebook believes they are, why not just ask them clearly? Privacy Doesn’t Just Mean Secrecy This Summer we wrote about the academic research of University of Massachusetts-Amherst Legal Studies student Chris Peterson, who argues that an accurate and contemporary understanding of privacy is based more on the integrity of context than on absolute secrecy. Peterson tackles the contemporary reality of privacy on Facebook in a very readable draft thesis paper titled Saving Face: The Privacy Architecture of Facebook (PDF). Peterson argues that the idea that anything published ought to be understood as intended for public distribution is an antiquated understanding from the era when publishing was expensive and required a lot of effort. The opposite is true today, it’s free and easy to publish – so information at different levels of appropriateness for public eyes is being published. Why not support that? “There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment… It was even conceivable that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug into your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live – did live, from habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” – George Orwell, 1984 Instead of what Facebook is doing, Peterson says that a more appropriate understanding of privacy today is based on context. We expect our communication to go on in an appropriate context (no drinking in church or praying in the bar) and we expect to understand how our communication will be distributed. If a college friend took photos of you drinking in a bar and showed them off to people in church, you might feel your privacy has been violated in both appropriateness and distribution. The bar is a public place, though, and not completely secret. Thus the need for a more sophisticated understanding of privacy that is more than mere secrecy. By pushing your personal information and conversation through activity updates fully into the public, Facebook is eliminating any integrity of context that these conversations would naturally have. Posted updates can be directed only to limited lists of Facebook contacts, like college buddies or work friends, but that option is buried under more public default options and much of a user’s activity on the site is not subject to that kind of option. “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.” – Google CEO Eric Schmidt Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used to say that people would share more information if they felt comfortable knowing that it would only be visible to people they trusted. He told me in an interview two years ago that users who wanted to do so couldn’t take their data off of the site because privacy control “is the vector around which Facebook operates.” Now apparently, he’s changed his mind. This weekend I argued that his justification for the new stance is not credible. Many People Need Control Over Personal Information Do people no longer need to keep access to some of their personal information online limited just to trusted friends? Facebook seems to be arguing that they don’t. There is a long list of people who clearly do, though, including: people who’ve escaped abusive relationships, people with marginalized religious or sexual preferences, people who fear losing their jobs or who’ve been pushed around by bullies throughout their lives. That list adds up to a very large portion of the world, in fact. The group of Ivy League elites who run Facebook might think there’s no reason to be able to control access to their personal information, but many of them are less socially vulnerable and have less need to control their personal information. Consider this comment left by one of our readers in response to Zuckerberg’s statement this weekend. “As a person who is being stalked for being an innocent bystander in a child custody case, I can tell you that losing my choices over what is searchable or not is huge. I have nothing to hide nor be ashamed of but the loss of choice for my privacy has hit home in a poignant manner.” Stories like that are far more common than you might think and removing user control over what’s public removes the ability for millions of people to safely participate on Facebook. More than millions, tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world have reason to limit visibility of their personal information from the web but still want to be able to share that information with trusted contacts. Facebook became a huge success on that premise and ought to be able to continue to thrive without doing a 180 degree turn on privacy. Coming soon: The positive side of Facebook data made public. Hint. Discuss

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Why Facebook is Wrong: Privacy Is Still Important

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December. In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington , Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook’s privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world’s largest social network – and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny. Sponsor Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to Arrington’s question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the web. I’ll post those sentences on their own first, then follow up with the questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00. Zuckerberg: “When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’ “And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time. “We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are. “A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.” That’s Not a Believable Explanation This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is “the vector around which Facebook operates.” I don’t buy Zuckerberg’s argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending. Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient. Perhaps Facebook’s pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable, though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook. This major reversal, backed-up by superficial explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook’s changing philosophies about privacy are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to exert control over the future of the web. Facebook’s Different Stories First the company kept user data siloed inside its site alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people. Now that it has 350 million people signed up and connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before – now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large, and incidentally (as Facebook’s Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told me in December) that it’s time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue, too. The Flimsy Evidence What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging “and all these different services that have people sharing all this information.” That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It’s made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook. Facebook’s Barry Schnitt told us last month that he too believes the world is becoming more open and his evidence is Twitter, MySpace, comments posted to newspaper websites and the rise of Reality TV. But Facebook is bigger and is growing much faster than all of those other things. Do they really expect us to believe that the popularity of reality TV is evidence that users want their Facebook friends lists and fan pages made permanently public? Why cite those kinds phenomena as evidence that the red hot social network needs to change its ways? The company’s justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren’t credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they “just went for it,” to use Zuckerberg’s words from yesterday. (Why didn’t Arrington press Zuckerberg on stage about this? The rise of blogging is evidence that Facebook needs to change its fundamental stance on privacy?) This is Very Important Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutia of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos – if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples’ lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that’s old news, that people are changing. I don’t believe it. I think Facebook is just saying that because that’s what it wants to be true. Whether less privacy is good or bad is another matter, the change of the contract with users based on feigned concern for users’ desires is offensive and makes any further moves by Facebook suspect. Discuss

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Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

Chris Messina grew up in New Hampshire, the Live Free or Die state. As a high-schooler in the early 90′s he held his school’s website hostage after being suspended for running an ad on it for a controversial gay rights group. Now Chris is nearing 30, today was his 29th birthday, and he just announced that he’s taken a job at one of the biggest, most powerful corporations in the world. The latest chapter in the fascinating story of Chris Messina’s life ends with one of the most high-profile young proponents of an Open and Distributed Web joining Google, a company that aims to organize all the information in the world and a behemoth that many free spirits online eye with ambivalence. What will the future bring for Messina and his work? A look at how he got to Google might offer some clues. It isn’t all pretty, some people worry about what the move will mean for the web, but the announcement is definitely important for all of us. Sponsor Where Chris Messina Comes From Chris Messina grew up in a well-to-do suburb in New Hampshire. As a teenager he railed vocally against a middle class culture that he says he now realizes he was very much a part of. One of his biggest influences, though, was a grandmother with strong Libertarian tendencies. When Chris entered high school, the web was in its earliest days. He became the school’s web master, setting up and running its first web site. A group of students at the school wanted to start a Gay/Straight Alliance support group and were facing some resistance from parents and school officials. Messina took it upon himself to post a free banner ad promoting the organization on the school’s official web site. He got suspended from school and pulled the site down in protest. (Even in those early days a school librarian had backed up some of the files, so the situation ended without young Messina being paddled or tied to the rack.) After high school Chris went to college at Carnegie Mellon, where he studied Design. That Design training took him far in the tech world and will be an important part of his new job. After graduating from college, Messina went on to build an incredible resume of accomplishments recognized around the world. He designed the full-page ad in the New York Times announcing the launch of Firefox. Thousands of people donated $10 each to buy that ad, heralding an Open Source, community-based challenge to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. He co-founded BarCamp , the now international network of technology and culture “unconferences” that you may have heard of and should definitely attend next time there’s one in your town. He was integral in the building of the international co-working community , a network of organizations that help each other serve independent, web-based workers who seek a physical space and support infrastructure. He is a Board member of the OpenID Foundation, the organization working on standards and adoption of open, federated and portable systems of identity for use around the web. He’s a leading voice in the movement to create an Activity Streams standard that will allow user activity data to be shared and understood from one website over to another. When Messina speaks about any of the above, the biggest companies on the web listen. He’s widely respected, but some people say he’s become an arrogant power player at the front of a small parade of outspoken self-appointed leaders. That he gets all the credit when there are other, quieter, people doing a significant portion of the work. That’s one perspective, but it’s not the most common one and many of the leaders of the circle Messina runs in have shipped products that power the fundamentals of the web we all use today. Now Chris Messina will be at one of the biggest and most important companies around. Today on his 29th birthday, Messina announced he was taking a job at Google, with the title Open Web Advocate. Has Chris Messina sold out? “There are many legitimate reasons to work for a larger enterprise,” social web sociologist danah boyd , who recently joined Microsoft, told us in response to Chris’s move. “Some are practical: health insurance, stable income, and all of the other benefits that tend to come with such a package. But some come from the same ethos that entrepreneurs have… the desire to ship a product. Where you don’t have to do every inch of legwork. And where you know that your work can touch millions. There’s also something to be said for being around a whole lot of really smart people.” On Landing at Google Messina has worked at a wide variety of startup companies. Most recently he was at OpenID provider Vidoop, one of a number of high profile hires the company made while it was still based in Oklahoma. In September 2008, Vidoop put its 40 person crew in a crazy caravan to its new headquarters in Portland, Oregon. In May, 2009 the company imploded, closed its doors and told some of its employees it couldn’t pay back wages. Messina shared his account of what happened on his blog. The next half year Messina spent doing independent consulting, including a month and a half project with Mozilla. The fruits of that labor will be released to the public soon, he told us today. In September Messina was making the rounds, talking to a variety of companies in Silicon Valley and told a friend at Google that he was considering joining a big company as his next step. His Google contact told him that the company had a strong preference for hiring engineers, rather than people with the skills that Messina has. Doug Bowman, Google’s first ever staff designer had made a high-profile departure to join Twitter just a few months prior, saying that Google didn’t appreciate design. Messina left feeling like that door was closed and considered launching his own startup company. Over the next few months a few other companies offered Messina positions, he said, but then his old Google contact pinged him again and asked if he was still interested in joining Google. What had changed? His contact told him that Google was placing a new emphasis on getting the social web right, in a way that is good for the web. That month Google publicly launched a campaign that had run informally inside the company for two years, called the Data Liberation Front . It works across departments to enable users to remove their data from Google services, a key part of the vision of an Open Distributed Web that Messina has been working toward. “I went in for the interview,” Messina told us today, “and 2 weeks later they made me a great offer letting me do what I was already doing. Yes, the interview process was long but very efficient, and I had to complete 1 logic problem (which I almost nailed, but alas, I’m no Joe Smarr!)” Smarr is the widely respected developer that had been working on these same matters at Comcast Plaxo until announcing that he was joining Google in December. Messina told us that he’s excited to learn how to organize for an Open web from inside a very large company. It’s a perspective he’s never had before, but one that will lend him more credibility in his efforts to move other large companies. What This Means for the Web Messina and Smarr join a growing and impressive roster of Googlers dedicated to building an Open, Distributed web. That’s a vision that’s the opposite of a centralization and control – the typical model of financial success for a large company. This team of people will have to battle inertia, corporate interests and the natural tendency many people say is inherent in a large organization to bring more and more of a market under its control. Google controls a growing size of our search, our advertising sales, our email, our document collaboration, our mapping, our voice communication and much more online. The company is almost sure to face anti-trust legal pressure someday soon . It’s always been a part of Google’s DNA to support what’s good for the web at large, the more people use the web the more they’ll click on AdSense. This much centralization of power is cause for concern, though. It’s as if Google is set to have a battle against itself. It’s staff against the nature of its economy of scale. The culture of the corporation may be more important than its size, though. David Recordon, an open web advocate that works closely with Messina and recently joined social networking giant Facebook, had this to say: “Personally, I love how Facebook’s culture lets me continue working on what I’m passionate about while having a tremendous impact on both the technology industry and the world at large. I hope that as my friend, Chris is able to do the same at Google.” The day to day reality of effecting change may be more complex than that, though. Yahoo’s Eran Hammer-Lahav, the best-known technologist working to develop and support open login standard OAuth , raises an important concern. “This is clearly a big win for Google,” he told us. “Messina and Smarr are huge assets in the social web space.” “My concern is specific to Google. With Messina, Smarr, [inventor of OpenID and more Brad] Fitzpatrick and others all working for Google, focusing on the Social Web, there is less and less incentive for Google to reach out. Google has a strong coding culture which puts running code ahead of consensus and collaboration. Now with so many bright minds in house, they are even less likely to reach out. “A week ago, you would have to get at least Google, Plaxo, and Messina (representing the independent voice) to collaborate. This week it’s just Google. “While I am certain that Messina and Smarr will keep their independent voices, and am not suggesting they will ‘sell out’ or alter their principles, they no longer need to surface many of their ideas out to the community. They can just have an quick internal meeting and ship products.” What will going to Google mean for the rebellious young man who’s become such a big personality agitating for the open web outside of the biggest companies on the web? What does it mean that the biggest companies, especially Google and Facebook, keep hiring outside social web technical leaders? Time will tell, but Messina says he’s been told explicitly that people for whom “it’s all about them” don’t do well at Google. The company must be full of formerly big personalities now working as part of a team. PubSubHubbub co-creator and now Googler Brett Slatkin once as a brash college freshman told Newsweek that “If I made a great product, and Microsoft offered me a lot of money, I would spit in their faces.” (That’s one of my favorite quotes.) Now Slatkin has toned it down and talks tech without the bombast. Messina says he knows it’s going to be a big change and is excited to see what being part of Google is like. So the next chapter of the story of Chris Messina will be a part of the next chapter of the story of Google. Next: What could all this look like in the future? See one vision in our article Toward a Value-Added User Data Economy Discuss

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How Chris Messina Got a Job at Google

New rules from the Federal Trade Commission, requiring bloggers to disclose free gifts from companies whose products they review , came into effect on December 1st and the first major announcement of 2010 just occurred today. The Google Nexus One mobile phone was unveiled this afternoon and all the members of the press who were on-site for the announcements received free phones from Google. This is the most-anticipated phone to hit the market in years. It’s like a unicorn sparkling with magic, perhaps. Almost no one at all has disclosed getting a free unit in writing their reviews. Sponsor The idea is that receiving free goods from a vendor makes a writer more likely to write positively about a product than they would otherwise. Readers deserve to know if a writer has a financial interest in the company or has received free stuff, so that the readers can take product reviews with gifts associated with a grain of salt. Some people believe that this is essential to safeguard the trustworthiness of media in a “new media” era, others believe it is unfair to small-time bloggers who deserve a chance to profit from their writing just like the pros do. In this case, though, it’s the pros we’re talking about. Blogger Robert Scoble tells us that all the attendees were given a choice: receive the phone as a gift or sign an agreement to borrow a Nexus One on loan for 30 days. Scoble signed up for the loaner. VC blogger Fred Wilson wrote in his post “I received a gift from Google. It was a Nexus One.” Michael Arrington has said that TechCrunch will give away the phone he received at the press event. Scanning over Techmeme’s survey of coverage , we’re unable to find anyone else who makes mention of the freebie. It may be the case that big-name tech review bloggers like Walt Mossberg or Engadget are just expected to always send back the review copies of things they get and so there’s no reason to disclose on every post. (I don’t know.) It may be that all the press who got a Google Phone today is planning on giving the phones back in 30 days. How should disclosures be handled though if you’re writing an article and you haven’t decided whether you are going to send something back as a loaner or keep it? Here at ReadWriteWeb, we try hard to always make casual but clear mention when we have a financial interest in a company we are writing about. We try hard to mention the same if we are writing about a competitor to a company we have a financial interest in. And we always do our best to disclose it if we ever get free stuff from vendors we write about. That doesn’t happen very much. Sometimes the lines aren’t clear, either. The community manager at Postrank.com sent me a sock monkey she made last year and I write about that company often. (I use it daily for essential work.) I’ve never mentioned that sock monkey before, though. This is a phone made of pure sunlight and hype, though. Is it a poor reflection on the FTC’s new disclosure requirements that so few have disclosed their free Google Phones, or is it a poor reflection on our group of tech bloggers? Discuss

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1 Month Into New FTC Rules: Who’s Disclosing Their Free Google Phones?

Recently I wrote about the decline of RSS Readers as a way for people to keep up with news. I noted that while many people still use RSS Readers, usage has decreased due to the emergence of real-time and social flows of information via Twitter, Facebook and other such services. The post sparked a fascinating discussion, with over 160 comments. What I learned from that discussion is that while the RSS Reader market is indeed in decline, there are still a number of compelling use cases for RSS Readers. Not to mention new tools worth checking out. So in this more optimistic post, I list 5 reasons why you should continue to use RSS Readers. Sponsor My conclusions in the previous post still stand: 1) Google now dominates what’s left of the RSS Reader market; and 2) RSS reading is a very fragmented experience circa 2009/2010 due to Twitter, Facebook, start pages like Netvibes, Firefox bookmarks, and more. However, a lot of commenters wrote that they still use RSS Readers each and every day. Here are the main reasons why: 1. Control over Information Flow RSS Readers allow users to control their flow of information , whereas it’s impossible to keep up with the Twitter firehose of real-time information. Mathew Ballad (comment 11) put it well: “I tend to check Google Reader multiple times a day. While I do keep up with bigger news through Friendfeed or Twitter. I like to keep up with multiple Graphic Design blogs, tech blogs, entertainment blogs, photography blogs and Apple blogs on my own. I just can’t see myself ditching RSS Readers for something that I really don’t have much control over.” It’s not just about controlling your stream of daily news. Many people have feeds that they just don’t want to miss. Tim Bray has a folder of feeds in NetNewsWire that he feels is “unacceptable when I don’t at least glance at everything those people have to say.” Some people would argue that it’s a thankless task trying to control your RSS Reader. I am one of those people who long ago gave up trying to keep my “mark all read” count at zero. Indeed I don’t even try to mark as read my email nowadays (I just let it all flow in and I mark the ones I should reply to with stars, in Gmail). On a similar point, RSS pioneer Dave Winer remarked (comment 80) that Google Reader “has the wrong view of RSS.” In a follow-up post , he wrote that “fundamentally, Google Reader views RSS as email,” by which I think he means users feel compelled to read everything in it. His view is that “reading every story is a meaningless concept” and that RSS Readers need to find a way around this issue. 2. Evolving User Interfaces Some readers are expecting RSS Readers to transform their UIs in 2010, in particular for “processing life and news streams in the same interface.” ( Marco A Torres ) This has already happened to a degree in Google Reader, which has many nice social sharing features. @businessquests (comment 57) called Google Reader “a monitoring and intelligence tool enabled by tagging and publication of tag-based RSS feeds.” Eric (comment 19) agreed, commenting: “I use it [Google Reader] not only as a constantly evolving newspaper, but to share and to create new snippets using the “Note in Reader…” bookmarklet. I also subscribe to others’ interests and see what they have marked to share with me.” Eric also noted that he gets breaking news in Google Reader, thanks to its support of the real-time standard PubSubHubbub. However a number of people complained that Google Reader isn’t evolving fast enough in terms of user experience. I would put myself in that camp too. So, like me, you may want to check out some new feed reading innovations. Feedly (one of our Top 10 Semantic Web Products of 2009 ), Fever (one of our Top 10 RSS & Syndication Technologies of 2009 ) and my6sense (an iPhone app – our review ) are 3 apps that received multiple mentions from our readers. We use Fever internally at ReadWriteWeb and I just today downloaded my6sense onto my iPhone. As an aside, note that two of those apps (Feedly and my6sense) integrate Twitter as well as RSS feeds. 3. Tracking Twitter It’s not necessarily an either/or situation between RSS Readers and Twitter. Lynne Pope from New Zealand pointed out (comment 44) that she uses Google Reader to track some Twitter accounts: “Time zone differences mean a lot of good information can be missed in a tweet stream. Pulling the important streams into a reader means the information is readily available.” 4. Mobile News A number of people remarked that they commonly read their feeds via a mobile version of an RSS Reader. Something for those of us who are sick of being tied to PCs to do more of, perhaps. Bill (comment 46) wrote: “I use NewsRob on Android to pull the most recent 250 articles from Google Reader via my home wifi. Then I walk out the door and head for the commuter train, where I will read my feeds while other poor souls are stuck with the newspaper. Same on the way home and late at night when I’m rocking the baby to sleep.” 5. Categorized News Perhaps some of us are finding RSS Readers difficult to use nowadays because we don’t use them efficiently. If you spend some initial time setting up your Reader and categorizing your feeds, then chances are you will get a lot more out of it. Randy Orrison (comment 78) described a good use case that you may want to emulate: “I have folders in Google Reader for the blogs that I check every day, new release feeds for software I use (I could never remember to check all 20+ websites regularly), and down at the bottom of the folder list feeds from busy aggregators (like TechMeme) and news sites (like the BBC).” Conclusion Reading through all 160+ comments on my post restored some of my faith in RSS Readers. Viva la read/write Web! I’m going to test out some of the tools people suggested, find new ways to integrate Twitter streams with my RSS feeds, read more on my iPhone using my6sense and other services, and do some re-ordering in my Google Reader. What are your thoughts now about RSS Readers, given the discussion summarized here? Discuss

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5 Reasons Why RSS Readers Still Rock

Two years ago, ethnographer danah boyd had the blogosphere abuzz with her look at class-based divisions between teens on MySpace and Facebook . The esteemed Microsoft researcher found that Facebook’s collegiate origins encouraged a group of slightly more educated mainstream community members. Meanwhile, MySpace encouraged self-expression and the organizing of subcultures. boyd’s

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Race Shapes Teen Facebook and MySpace Adoption, says danah boyd