Facebook redux

Mon May 3 05:01:33 PDT 2010

http://www.infoworld.com/print/121701

Facebook wants to control the Web, like it or not
By Robert X. Cringely
Created 2010-04-23 11:08AM

Mark Zuckerberg may look and sound like the irritatingly self-satisfied 
rich kid you always hated in high school, but I.ll say this for him: He.s 
got cojones the size of tractor tires.

Facebook just made a play to take over the entire Web -- or at least, the 
parts that get the most traffic -- via its new "social graph [1],. 
officially unveiled at this week.s F8 confab.

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Some of the changes are cosmetic. Instead of declaring yourself .a fan. 
of, say, Red Bull or the Talking Heads or "I don.t care how comfortable 
Crocs are, you look like a dumbass [3]" on Facebook, you now simply Like 
them. The bigger change is that Facebook has now dismantled its garden 
walls and extended Like across the Web. Now you can express your Likes 
across a wide range of sites and have that information auto-magically 
transferred to your Facebook page, as well as the pages of everyone on 
your friends list.

You can also see who else on your Facebook list shares your deep abiding 
affection for the Bay City Rollers or Hello Kitty boxer shorts -- on the 
page itself.

In addition, Facebook has decided to generously share your personal 
information with .select. business partners. Right now that includes just 
three: Pandora, Yelp, and Microsoft.s Docs.com. This is what Facebook is 
calling "instant personalization [4]" -- grabbing information from your 
public Facebook page and using it to "improve" your experience on other 
sites.

If you.re not expecting this, it can be a bit jarring, as IT World.s Thank 
You for Not Sharing blogger Dan Tynan [5] explains:

    I couldn't sleep this morning, so I schlepped down to the nearest Wifi 
cafe. plugged in my noise-canceling ear phones and dialed up Pandora. 
Before I'd even logged in, the site launched into one of my favorite Tom 
Waits songs, "Jockey Full of Bourbon," followed by songs from John Lee 
Hooker and Tift Merritt [6]. Bang bang bang, three of my top artists, just 
like that.

    Coincidence? Nope. Pandora pulled my musical preferences from my 
public Facebook profile. I didn't ask it to. It just did. It was both cool 
and just the tiniest bit creepy.

This must be what Facebook was talking about when it unveiled proposed 
changes to its privacy policy [7] last month. To wit:

    In the proposed privacy policy, we've also explained the possibility 
of working with some partner websites that we pre-approve to offer a more 
personalized experience at the moment you visit the site. In such 
instances, we would only introduce this feature with a small, select group 
of partners and we would also offer new controls.

At the time, they were just .discussing. implementing these changes. Guess 
we.re done talking about it.

As usual with Facebook, you.re already entered into their nefarious scheme 
by default, though you can opt out. But it.s not exactly a cakewalk. PC 
World.s JR Raphael details the multistep tango [8] for turning off 
auto-sharing and disentangling your data from third-party sites.

Zuckerberg talks about the convenience of the Social Graph, and he.s right 
-- it is more convenient when Pandora knows more about my musical 
preferences. (Of course, considering a premium Pandora account costs $36 a 
year, it should already know plenty.) It.s more convenient to simply click 
a button on a site I.ve just discovered and populate yet another Web 
profile with information I.ve already entered into Facebook. It.s more 
convenient to see which friends share my perverse interests without having 
to scroll through their Facebook profiles.

But the social graph isn.t about convenience -- it.s about control. 
Facebook wants to own single-sign-on and authentication, just as Apple 
wants to own what apps you can install on your Wonder Tablet [9], and 
Amazon wants to control how you manage e-books on your Kindle [10] -- only 
Facebooks wants to do it across the entire Web.

Factory City blogger Chris Messina [11] writes:

    When all likes lead to Facebook, and liking requires a Facebook 
account, and Facebook gets to hoard all of the metadata and likes around 
the interactions between people and content, it depletes the ecosystem of 
potential and chaos . those attributes which make the technology industry 
so interesting and competitive. .  it.s dishonest to think that the 
Facebook Open Graph Protocol benefits anyone more than Facebook . as it 
exists in its current incarnation, with Facebook accounts as the only 
valid participants.

    As I and others have said before, your identity is too important to be 
owned by any one company.

Similarly, Facebook isn.t collecting and cataloging your consumer 
preferences out of the good of its heart. Clearly it.s planning to deliver 
targeted advertising based on my Likes; before long, my browser will be 
chock-full of ads for Bay City Roller reunion tours and Hello Kitty 
undergarments. The question is, what else will this information be used 
for, and by whom? Even if today Facebook aggregates and anonymizes this 
information, there.s no guarantee they won.t change their minds tomorrow 
and build nifty little profiles of all Facebook users, down to their 
favorite breakfast cereals and the deodorant they use.

Each of the 2,583 changes the site has made to its privacy policies since 
Zucky stole the idea for was divinely inspired to create Facebook has had 
the net effect of removing more privacy for its users. He.s already 
declared that sharing trumps privacy [12]. There.s no reason to expect any 
of that to change -- Like it or not.

Do you .like. Facebook.s new social sharing scheme? Spout off in the 
comments below or email me: cringe at infoworld.com [13].

This story, "Facebook wants to control the Web, Like it or not [14]," was 
originally published at InfoWorld.com [15]. Read more of Robert X. 
Cringely's Notes from the Field blog [16].

    * Adventures in IT
    * Facebook
    * Internet
    * Social networking

Source URL (retrieved on 2010-05-03 05:00AM): 
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/facebook-wants-control-the-web-it-or-not-701

Links:
[1] 
http://www.pcworld.com/article/194783/facebook_to_share_user_preferences_with_other_social_network_sites.html
[2] mailto:offtherecord at infoworld.com
[3] 
http://www.facebook.com/pages/I-Dont-care-How-Comfortable-Crocs-Are-You-Look-Like-A-Dumbass/88367110762#!/pages/I-Dont-care-How-Comfortable-Crocs-Are-You-Look-Like-A-Dumbass/88367110762?v=wall
[4] http://www.facebook.com/help/?page=1068
[5] 
http://www.itworld.com/internet/105438/whats-about-facebooks-like-button?source=peer2peerpromo
[6] http://tiftmerritt.com/
[7] http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=376904492130
[8] http://www.pcworld.com/article/194821/
[9] http://www.esarcasm.com/10845/apple-ipad/
[10] 
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/amazon-makes-amends-kindle-blunder-point-578
[11] 
http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2010/04/22/understanding-the-open-graph-protocol/
[12] http://www.esarcasm.com/10237/facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-bares-all/
[13] mailto:cringe at infoworld.com
[14] 
http://www.infoworld.com/d/adventures-in-it/facebook-wants-control-the-web-it-or-not-701?source=footer
[15] http://www.infoworld.com/?source=footer
[16] http://www.infoworld.com/blogs/robert-x-cringely?source=footer