Christopher Herot's Weblog

Facebook Backs Off on Beacon

In the next phase of its better to ask for forgiveness than permission approach to new features, Facebook has modified its controversial Beacon program to be opt-in instead of opt-out.  There is still no way to opt out of the entire program, but now each time a site is about to send an announcement back to Facebook the pop-up asks for permission instead of assuming no answer means yes.

I suspect what motivated Facebook to act was that some merchants, such as Overstock.com, had suspended their participation until Facebook changed the program.

Louse Story has a detailed account of Beacon's evolution in the New York Times, and Brad Stone has an interview with FacebookVP Chamath Palihapitiya who reiterated Facebook's philosophy of trying out features in the market instead of in the press:

A. “One of the things we try to do is listen to feedback as much as possible. Just to give you where a lot of this feedback is coming from, it’s coming more from the press than specific users,” he said. “Right now, the right thing to do is to make sure we speak to actual users, not the pundits.”

Eggs and Social Media

Jeff Pulver, who doesn't even live in Boston, has emerged as one of the prime movers behind creating a high-tech community here. After bringing the VON conference here, and hosting several evening events, Jeff shifted to the morning hours with a Mashup of Social Media and Eggs at the venerable ("Have some more eggs, Hon") S&S Restaurant in Inman Square in Cambridge.  In addition to the expected talking and eating, Jeff encouraged the 50 or so participants to engage in a real-world form of social networking.  While writing our names on the stick-on badges, we were asked to write a line that would encourage further conversation.  Jeff handed out little labels that could be used for tagging (literally, by sticking a label on a friend) and yellow Post-Its that were the meatspace version of the Facebook Wall.  (Aaron Strout's said "Social Media Guy").

The badges worked.  I was intrigued by Len Edgerly's line "Tech Evangelist to the Arts" and wound up learning about how artists promote their work with Podcasts and sell virtual paintings in Second Life's Artropolis.  Also talked to Aaron Strout and Michelle Heath about the state of the mobile phone industry, the strength of brands (especially Apple), the implications of renaming companies (Shared Insights -> Mzinga, Convoq -> Zingdom), and the importance of opt-in for on-line marketing (Facebook's Beacon vs. MatchKey.)

Jeff, please do this again soon.

Bubble - Did Someone Say Bubble?

As I previously reported, Scott Kirsner surveyed the crowd at the recent TechCrunch Boston event on the topic of whether we were in a bubble.  The results, as reported in Sunday's Boston Globe are that (a) things are still expanding, but not at an unreasonable pace and (b) when the expansion stops it won't be so bad.  There are video posted on Scott's blog, including one from yours truly.  I used the "b word" in the video, although I said it could go on much longer and would not necessarily end badly.

Happy Thanksgiving

More photos here.

Has Facebook Stepped In It with Beacon?

In another example of its "Better to apologize than ask permission" approach, Facebook launched Beacon, a system that allows participating merchants to notice when a purchaser is a Facebook user and send "alerts" back to the Facebook newsfeed announcing the purchase to all of one's friends.  Like the newsfeed itself, Facebook may have underestimated the privacy backlash and will be forced to modify the system.  On the other hand, all the publicity, including a campaign by MoveOn.org will raise Facebooks profile among potential advertisers.  Once they get the privacy settings right they will have added an important innovation to online marketing.  I'll have to say I admire their approach.  Instead of agonizing around the conference table about each new feature (opening up the membership, the newsfeed, the F8 platform) they launch things into the world and see what happens.  As long as they are responsive to their users they will retain the old users while continuing to innovate and build their business which, after all, is free to users and needs advertising to keep it that way.

The most controversial aspect of Beacon is that it that the permission dialog at the merchant site is opt-out instead of opt-in and that at the Facebook site the opt-out is on a site-by-site basis, with no way to opt out of the entire program.   As David Weinberger points out, the defaults are kind of creepy, especially the opt-out toast that assumes you mean "yes" if you don't respond within a few seconds. [See the comments in Weinberger's post for a really interesting discussion of privacy.] For those who find all this too daunting, Nate Weiner has a simple and elegant solution: install the BlockSite add-in for Firefox and tell it to block access to http://*facebook.com/beacon/*.  That will prevent the merchant site from executing the http://www.facebook.com/beacon/beacon.js.php that sends your data back to Facebook.  Fred Stutzman explains how this works, which is that when you log into Facebook, Facebook stores your login ID in a cookie.  When the merchant site runs the beacon script that sends Facebook the ID, along with your IP address and the URL of the page you are visiting, thereby giving Facebook a complete picture of where you have been and what you've done there.  Cameron Marlow points out that this is what DoubleClick and Google AdSense have been doing for years, although with DoubleClick makes it easier to opt-out and to delete the data.  Wendy Seltzer thinks part of the problem is that Facebook has taken cross-site correlation to a new level, although they are at least being open about it.  Ethan Zuckerman likens it to cookie-theft Cross-Site Scripting attack, although in this case it's the result of a legitimate, if unprecedented, cooperation between Facebook and the merchant site.

I suspect the real reason the tin-foil-hats are upset and the rest of us are queasy is that Facebook shares this information with your friends, while DoubleClick only shared it with corporations.  Personally, I don't care if my friends know what video I rented, but I am concerned about the proclivity of insurance companies to make underwriting decisions on the basis of lifestyle choices, as they are threatening to do in Massachusetts.

Companies using or planning to use Beacon: AllPosters.com, Blockbuster, Bluefly.com, CBS Interactive (CBSSports.com, Dotspotter), eBay, Epicurious, ExpoTV, Fandango, Gamefly, Hotwire, IAC (CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, iWon, Citysearch, Pronto.com, echomusic), Joost, Kiva, Kongregate, LiveNation, Mercantila, National Basketball Association, New York Times, Overstock.com, Red, Redlight, SixApart(LiveJournal, TypePad, Vox), Sony Online, Sony Pictures, STA Travel, The Knot, Travelocity, TripAdvisor, Travel Ticker, viagogo, Yelp, WeddingChannel.com and Zappos.com

TechCrunch Meetup in Boston

TechCrunch did its first Boston Meetup last night and I will say it was a big success.  While we on the East Coast may occasionally envy Silicon Valley with its seemingly constant parties, last night had all the key ingredients:  food, drink, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, press, and of course charming and attractive PR people.  It was a good mixture of industry veterans and newcomers. The key topic of the evening was whether or not we were in a tech bubble.  (Leave it to our puritan heritage to worry when we are having fun.)  Scott Kirsner was gathering video interview on the question.  My answer was that as long as we weren't seeing Fedex shipping bags of concrete or pet food, and as long as real money was being made, we at least had a few years to go.  Don Dodge added that the speculative money this time was not coming from the IPO-buying public but from professional investors who presumably were well aware of the risks, a sentiment later echoed by some of those same investors at the event.

Jeff Bussgang declared our independence from Silicon Valley in a colorful way that I won't repeat here.

Other people I had good conversations with out of the 700 that were there:  Mike Arrington, Chris Brogan, Dave Evans, Mike Ford, Neal Goldman, Chip Hazard, Tim Hurley, Doug Levin , Jeanne Logozzo, Alison Moore, Charles Moore, Christine Perkett, John Prendergast, Pito Salas and Reed Sturtevant.

iPhone Keyboard Results in More Errors - But Do Users Care?

User Centric published the results of a study that compared the iPhone keyboard with the hard-key QWERTY design.  They found that experienced users typed at the same rate on both, but the iPhone users made twice as many errors.  Interestingly, the iPhone users were less likely to correct their mistakes, with the result that messages sent from an iPhone contain three times as many errors.

Of course any device that's small enough to fit in one's pocket is the result of many compromises.   By dispensing with a hard keyboard, the iPhone gets a larger screen, so while it may not be the best device for serious text users, it is great for watching videos and surfing the Web.

Opinions Differ on Open Handset Alliance

Is the Open Handset Alliance that Google recently announced the beginning of a new wave of innovation or is it just tilting at windmills?  Andy Lippman made a good case for the former on Tom Ashbrook's NPR talk show, On Point, making the analogy to television business, where TV sets can be connected to any channel, not just the one that supplied the set, enabling lots of companies to become developers of new wireless services.

George Colony took a more pessimistic view at the Future Forward conference last week, saying that Google was going against the fundamental business model of the cellular business.  Forrester CIO George Orlov later elaborated that while T-Mobile has joined the alliance, its coverage isn't as good as Verizon or AT&T.  Unless it could make the trillion dollar investment to expand its network, the majority of customers would continue to patronize the bigger operators, and those operators would have little incentive to open their networks.

While it's too early to call - the first handsets won't be available until next year - I think there are two reasons to be optimistic.  First, T-Mobile (and perhaps Sprint) are hungry enough to try something new and may demonstrate that the market for mobile data will grow much more rapidly when a new wave of innovative applications are allowed to flourish. Selling lots of data that enables third-party applications could be more lucrative than trying to own 100% of the data and applications business.   Secondly, the rest of the world is not like the US.  If other countries continue to pull ahead in wireless applications, it will become obvious that restricting users to a handful of applications determined around a conference table in Bedminster, NJ is inferior to letting the marketplace decide.

Facebook Sliders

Deb Schultz has a suggestion for letting user regulate the amount and type of advertising they see in their Facebook news feed.  It reminds me of Nicholas Negroponte's idea in Being Digital about having knobs to change the level of sex, violence and political leaning in on-line material.

OpenSocial Critiques

Dare Obasanjo has written what is probably the most detailed critique of OpenSocial that I have seen so far.  Most of his post enumerates the things that are still missing from the documentation, such as the Activities Data API, the Service Provider Interface (SPI), or any details of how the user can control the applications access to personal data.  He also brings up some more substantive points:

• No user interface hooks, even for common operations such as interacting with a Friends list
• The data in represented as Atom feeds, which can be very convoluted.
• The persistence data API only supports key-value pairs.
• The spec is not "open" in the sense that it is owned by a standards body instead of Google.
• There is no mechanism to map identities among different container sites.

Of course this last point does create an opportunity for application developers.

We all await developments on the Google OpenSocial blog.

Other opinions:

• Danny Ayers
• Russell Beattie
• Shelly Powers (also here)

Also, see Niall Kennedy's survey of widget formats.