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 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

Today's startups, entrepreneurs and investors live and die by what seem like a series of holy proverbs. "Release early, release often" is perhaps one of the most poignant phrases when considering product launch and feature scope. On this cold Saturday, we're paying homage to the origins of the concept by recognizing one of the seminal works in programming philosophy, and looking at a recent startup that's taken it to heart. Sponsor In the late nineties Eric S. Raymond presented The Cathedral and the Bazaar convincing Netscape to publish open source code. The work's premises "given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" and "release early, release often" were meant to justify early releases and crowdsourcing community feedback. While his work originally made a case for open source releases, it has gone on to inspire many outside of the open source realm. Lead by Micah Baldwin, TechStars' comic platform Graphic.ly is launching its beta version under the "release early, release often" tenet. Said Baldwin in a recent blog post , "If we are truly going to get the community involved, we need them involved early and often. We need them now." ReadWriteWeb first covered the mobile comic platform in November under its original name, TakeComics . Since then the company has rebranded as Graphic.ly, announced raising a little over a million dollars from Starz Media and appointed Baldwin as CEO. As a serial entrepreneur, Baldwin rationalizes his company's early release saying, "So many young entrepreneurs get stuck in the 'What if' world and try to release the perfect app. At Graphic.ly, we just released our Baby Beta, which frankly sucked. Badly. But we are getting amazing feedback, and its clear that it will be such a better product in the long term." Baldwin is using a combination of GetSatisfaction and Zendesk to manage early-stage feedback. Graphic.ly is also looking to adapt products like Google Moderator for proactive feedback in order to engage community members in the engineering and product discussions. When asked about possible outcomes for the release, Baldwin replied, "The worst case scenario is that we don't engage our community properly and lose their trust. There is nothing more dire than lost trust. The best case is that everyone who uses Graphic.ly sees their fingerprints all over it and shows it to their friends proudly, saying 'I built that. That's something I did.'" The service's first batch of invites got out tonight, to register for the service fill out the form here . Discuss

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How the Cathedral and the Bazaar Is Shaping the Future of Comics

Have you ever wanted to share a set of memories with some of your Twitter friends, keeping the content private while still allowing for collaboration between certain folks? It's not anything we thought we wanted, either, but after playing with TwitAlbums , we find the concept charming. Here's how it works: Using Twitter's OAuth function, users log in and create collections or "albums" containing multimedia content and text comments. They can invite whatever users they like to join them in adding files, and only the users they invite can see the content or comments. Best of all it looks like this little app already has a monetization strategy in place. Sponsor The concept is inherently charming. Users create an album with a single click. They can then proceed to upload movies, pictures and audio files. We'd like to see options for adding more file types, such as web pages, text files and more. Users can then choose others to collaborate with them on the album. A tweet is sent inviting the collaborators to the album, and they are prompted to sign in via OAuth when they click the tweet in the link. This immediate request for account access without an explanation of the app might be a bit disconcerting for some, however. If an uninvited Twitter user clicks the link, they are given an "invite only" notice and denied access to the content. Collaborators can add content, leave comments and invite other users, depending on the permissions set by the original album creator. Finally, it's interesting to note that the app's creators have built in a mechanism for modest financial returns. Each uploaded file costs the user a single onsite credit, called a TwitSeed. Accounts come with 50 TwitSeeds, and more can be purchased in bundles of 100 for $1, 500 for $4, or 1000 for $8. One thing we don't like is that the app pushes a ton of link- and hashtag-studded notifications into the user's Twitter stream. As with other apps that gain access via OAuth, from the infamous Spymaster to the successful TinyChat , this is a very fine line that most users would appreciate the app not cross. Generally speaking, users won't have a problem with a single tweet or two, but a constant stream of app-related messages when the user is active on the site can only end badly. Worst of all, we don't see a way to opt out of these notifications, so we've had to delete these tweets manually, which does nothing to mitigate the swarm of updates for our friends using Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck. Particularly since the content is set up to be private, it doesn't make sense to broadcast tweets about each user's on-site activity. We think this app would work well for younger users, social media addicts and long-distance friends, especially if the above-mentioned issues are addressed. What do you folks think so far; does TwitAlbums have what it takes to become a widely used Twitter application? Would you use it, and what would you use it for? Let us know in the comments. Discuss

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TwitAlbums: Private, Collaborative Content Sharing Via Twitter

Being a technology blogger is like having a license for an around-the-clock gadget and Web addiction. No one expects you to leave your house during the day. You're allowed to spend the majority of your life in front of a glowing screen, and flipping out over WiFi issues is par for the course. And you're never far from the Web, since your mobile is always in hand when you have to leave your laptop behind for some incomprehensible reason. But even with such a license in hand, I have to make a case for periodically disconnecting. What do you think? Sponsor More and more, I am trying to set aside unplugged hours and even days for Internet-free, mobile-free, "Luddite time." Time for asking a stranger for directions, time for talking to the people you're with rather than the people you "follow," time for interacting with the world around you in ways that don't include clicking, scrolling or downloading. Time that's increasingly being destroyed by smart phones, "super" phones and what ever "super duper" devices are in the pipeline. Sitting in front of these glowing screens (as most of us do) for around eight hours a day for work and additional hours for leisure can't be good for us as living, breathing organisms. Have you ever spent the whole day absorbed in the web - the rabbit holes of YouTube, the breadcrumb trails of Wikipedia, the party line of Twitter and the bottomless virtual library of blog posts - to find yourself startled by actual human interaction, in a strange and unrestul intellectual state. With enough consecutive days of online-only living, you might realize you're making more connections between online entities and content, but you're losing opportunities to have fresh, original thought or observations about your own world. I'm not saying that the Internet makes you stupid. I am saying that, if left to run wild across the vast territories of the Web, your mind can turn into a laboratory hamster, frantically pulling levers and running in wheels while his environment remains essentially static and his motivations essentially artificial. Another detriment to a constantly wired life is that you're not truly present with the folks around you every day, and you begin to forget how polite, normal people communicate. You become too easily distracted by notifications from your mobile, glazing over and tuning out to parse your RSS feeds while real conversations are going on without you. And being accustomed to ignoring your surroundings in favor of your online life numbs you to the fact that often, your friends are doing the same to you. If you've ever sat through a dinner with your significant other or a group of geek friends as you all happily tapped away on your mobiles, you know this is true. And while being able to buck conventional table manners and geek out together is a wonderful thing, aren't you cheating yourself out of valuable face-to-face interaction by doing so? And very often, an preoccupation with the Web leads to a total loss of perspective. If you have ever stayed awake until 2 or 3 in the morning entrenched in a furious debate on Scoble's FriendFeed over something that the entire world had completely forgotten 12 hours later (guilty!), you have definitely lost perspective. Not typically the most empathetic people, we begin to give more attention and emotion to minor tech events (Google Wave, anyone?) than to major world events. If it didn't trend on Twitter and hit Digg's front page, we tend to not notice or care. Although the social web can occasionally be used as a power for good, notably through efforts such as those carried out during the Iranian election/debacle or on World Aids Day, this circle is notoriously self-obsessed and navel-gazing to the obfuscation of much more important matters. Finally, being constantly online is probably fairly bad for your health. A few of the people I've spoken to tonight tell me that to distract themselves from Internet obsessions, they turn to physical activity, such as gym workouts, yoga or running. These dear souls are escaping the sedentary lifestyle to which we've all grown fairly accustomed and which most certainly has negative effects on how we look, how we feel, our metabolism and energy level and so much more. And although mobile and AR technologies are making it easier for us to get out and about while still connected, more often they act as a tether to larger, more stationary devices. I personally want to spend many hours in 2010 offline and off my mobile. I want to do things like watch an old movie, go for a walk, have a dinner date or read an honest-to-god newspaper without checking in on Foursquare or posting an "overheard" on Twitter. Maybe it's a sign that I'm aging. Many of my contemporaries say their sole offline time is sleeping. I've certainly lived that way, too, and I spend many days now online for 14-18 hours. But I don't want every day to be like that. What about you, dear readers? Do you currently plan for and enforce offline hours for yourself, your significant other or your family? If so, how and when do you take your breaks? Or are you a tireless defender of the Internet junkie lifestyle? Most importantly, what do you see as the explicit benefits or detriments of being online around the clock - or of taking periodic furloughs? Let us know your opinions and best practices in the comments. Discuss

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Open Thread: Should Tech Get a Turn-Off?

Seesmic has acquired Ping.fm , a status update service that allows users to update posts on over 50 social networks through SMS, mobile apps, IM services and 3rd party apps that support the service. Seesmic plans to integrate Ping.fm into all of its applications in the near future. In addition, Seesmic's users will be able to send updates to their favorite social networks through Ping.fm's email, SMS and IM gateways. Ping.fm's founders Adam Duffy and Sean McCullough will join Seesmic as full-time employees and continue to work on Ping.fm. Sponsor Neither Seesmic nor Ping.fm disclosed the terms of the acquisition. It's worth noting, however, that both Creative Commons CEO Joi Ito and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman invested in Ping.fm in December 2008. Update : Joi Ito just confirmed that this acquisition now makes him an investor in Seesmic. Seesmic's founder Loic Le Meur notes that he hopes that this acquisition will allow the company to speed up "its vision of becoming your default application to stay in touch with your friends and constantly managing your online social presence." Through Ping.fm, Seesmic's users will soon be able to easily update their status on a wide variety of social networks like Ning, Yahoo Meme, Yammer and Status.net. Seesmic already offered built-in support for Facebook, Linkedin and MySpace. According to Le Meur, Ping.fm currently has over 500,000 registered users, though the number of active users is likely far smaller. In total, Ping.fm posts about 200,000 updates per day. Seesmic's own Twhirl has offered support for Ping.fm since early 2009. Seesmic Wants to be a Lot More Than Just a Twitter Client Given Seesmic's vision, it doesn't come as a surprise that the company is interested in broadening its scope beyond Twitter. The acquisition of Ping.fm gives Seesmic all the necessary infrastructure like SMS and IM gateways to execute this vision. Ping.fm offers it's own URL shortener and gives users access to detailed statistics about how these links were used. One of the most interesting aspects of the company's recently announced native Windows client , for example, is that it includes support for a plugin architecture . This will allow developers to integrate support for virtually any social network into Seesmic. In the near future, Seesmic plans to expand this feature to all of its clients. Discuss

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Seesmic Looks Beyond Twitter - Acquires Ping.fm

Chances are that you are getting at least a few emails and IMs with links to YouTube videos every day. While watching these alone can be fun, Synchtube turns this into a far more social experience. Synchtube allows you to share and discuss a video in real time with up to four of your friends. The first person to enter the room controls the playback and also has the ability to change videos. Sponsor Features To get started, just head over to Synchtube.com and copy and paste a link to a YouTube video into the box in the lower right corner. Then send out the link to the room to your friends and start the video once they have arrived. In our tests, the service worked just as advertised. The chat room itself is basic, but it fulfills its purpose without getting in the way. The video sync sometimes lagged behind a bit by up to 4 seconds. This is definitely within an acceptable range, however. Just like these commenters on Reddit , we would love to see a few additional features in the app, including the ability to create playlists, search for videos within the app or give control over the room to another user. The developers have promised to continue to work on this app and plan to add more advanced features in the near future. Verdict For now, if you are looking for an easy way to watch YouTube videos with your friends without having to install a desktop app like DeskTube , Synchtube is one of the easiest apps to use. The app has some limitations, but for the vast majority of users, the current version should work just fine and most of the current issues will surely be fixed in the near future. Discuss

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Synchtube: Watch Synchronized YouTube Videos With Your Friends