Today's the day that Facebook makes their big press push for their Facebook Connect service, which was first announced last May. The NY Times has a story giving a broad overview of Connect as well as competing services from MySpace (Data Availability) and Google (Friend Connect).
All three services are platforms for third party sites (Digg, Twitter, Citisearch, CBS, whatever) to let users sign in via their favorite social network instead of the normal approach. Some profile information flows with the sign in, which the sites can keep for a period of time. And activity that occurs on the site - Twitters written, Digg stories voted on, restaurant reviews on Citysearch, etc.) can optionally flow back to the user's activity stream.
What the third party sites get out of these services: easy sign in for users, particularly new users. They can also use the profile data to help users create accounts at their site with little data input. The activity stream information published on the social networks includes links back to their sites. And one of the most interesting features, for Facebook Connect partners: sites can request friend lists from Facebook to help them make more connections on their own services. Digg CEO Jay Adelson recently gushed over the potential of Facebook Connect for his service.
Facebook also gives Connect partners most of the same tools as their application developers to promote their services via the news feed, invites, etc.
But the real value goes to the social networks. These services make users begin to think about their identity in terms of their MySpace profile, or Facebook login as they use it to sign into their favorite services. That makes it even more likely the users will maintain their profiles on those services, add friends, etc.
MySpace in particular wants to own user identities. Their MySpace profile is their name online, which is why they've embraced OpenID so completely in recent months. Data Availability and OpenID are two parts to a single strategy.
Facebook is probably less concerned with identity - there is no branded URL for users, for example. But they do want to own the definitive profile for an individual and, more importantly, their social graph. Knowing who you are and who your friends are is the key to their yet-unrealized business model.
And the biggest win of all is this free flow of data back to the social networks, which quite nicely fills out a user's profile for advertising purposes.
Facebook is moving ahead alone with Connect, using proprietary standards for login and data sharing. They've also prohibited Google from trying to get in the middle of things with their Friend Connect service. MySpace, by contrast, is using mostly open standards in their approach, and is working closely with Google to make sure the services work properly together.
The battle for partners is intense. MySpace announced Twitter as a launch partner, but rumor is that Twitter is actually integrating with Facebook first (there's no reason they can't offer both, and they probably will). MySpace also announced Yahoo and eBay as launch partners. To date, though, they've only launched with Flixster and Eventful.
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“I have been impressed with the urgency of doing. Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Being willing is not enough; we must do.”
- Leonardo da Vinci
From The Economist print edition:
---------------------------------------------AS WELL as embracing blogs, firms have been exploiting social networks such as Facebook and MySpace to get their messages to a broader audience. But although they have the potential to be useful marketing tools, such networks can also be a source of damaging publicity, as British Airways (BA) and Virgin Atlantic have discovered to their cost.
On October 31st Virgin fired 13 of its cabin crew who had posted derogatory comments about its safety standards and some of its passengers on a Facebook forum. Among other things, crew members joked that some Virgin planes were infested with cockroaches and described customers as “chavs”, a disparaging British term for people with flashy bad taste. On November 3rd BA began investigating the behaviour of several employees who had described some passengers as “smelly” and “annoying” in Facebook postings.
Some airline customers may not be fragrant paragons of exquisite taste, but attacking them online is a public-relations (PR) disaster that raises the question of whether the two firms have done enough to educate staff about acceptable use of the internet. BA says employees sign a policy that forbids them from posting information about the firm online without specific authorisation. But it clearly needs to do more to reinforce that message. Virgin points out that it has several internal channels through which staff can vent frustrations. But if these were effective, why would employees feel the need to moan on Facebook?
Communications specialists say the rise of Facebook, MySpace and Twitter make it all the more important to reiterate online guidelines frequently. “Anything you now say online is amplified by these services,” warns Aedhmar Hynes, the boss of Text 100, a PR firm.
"We have proved that the true strength of our nation comes not from the scale of our wealth but from the power of our ideals - opportunity, democracy, liberty and hope."
- Barack Obama, Election 2008 Victory Address
From CBC News:
The malicious Storm virus is back, this time infecting Google's Blogger website through fake postings that trick people into download software that can take over their computers.
Hackers are then mining infected computers for valuable data, or using them for other attacks.
The blog entries have the same text as that used by the Storm spam e-mail earlier this year that lured people into clicking on links that then infected their computers. Security researchers say the virus, which originated in January as spam promising information about a winter storm in northern Europe, has since infected 1.3 million machines.
The fake blog entries use text such as, "Dude don't send that stuff to my home e-mail …" or "OMG, what are you thinking," while some include links that supposedly lead to YouTube videos. Other entries claim to be looking for software testers or present themselves as links to digital greeting cards.
Google has not yet commented on the attack.
Alex Eckelberry, president of security firm Sunbelt Software, first noticed the latest attack and blogged about it on Monday. He could not explain how it happened, but guessed that hackers used Blogger's ability to send e-mail through a posting.
"What it really shows to me is how pernicious these guys are and they're indefatigable in trying to get into every place," he told The Register. "This is a voracious, voracious worm. I don't think anybody in malware research has seen anything like Storm."
Duncan Riley writing for TechCrunch:
The SaveNetRadio coalition will be holding a National Day of Silence June 26 to draw attention to an impending royalty rate increase that could lead to the shutdown of most of the US Internet radio industry.Most large online music and radio providers are participating including Yahoo, Real (Rhapsody), Accuradio, Live365, MTV and Pandora. Conspicuous in its absence is the now CBS owned Last.fm.
To date there appears to be no comment at all from Last.fm, including no response to questions by users on the Last.fm forums.
On the surface it seems strange that CBS/ Last.fm wouldn’t be participating. Last.fm is obliged to pay royalties in the same way that any online music streaming service is obliged to. CBS is an investor in TargetPoint, a company that allows advertisers to customize online radio ads, pinpointing specific demographics and locations that would be affected by any industry down-turn. Is it perhaps a case of CBS deciding to let the competition die? CBS radio stations stream online and unlike many others in the business CBS has deep pockets and a much larger advertiser pool from which to cover costs under the new royalty scheme.No matter what the reasoning, Last.fm’s failure to participate in the National Day of Silence runs the risk of causing a backlash. Many early adopters who are also Last.fm users will not be pleased to see a company they champion being a poor corporate citizen by failing to support the online music streaming industry.
Spencer Kelly writing for BBC News:
Back in the early 90s, those of us that were online were just sending text e-mails of a few bytes each, traffic across the main US data lines was estimated at a few terabytes a month, steadily doubling every year.
But the mid 90s saw the arrival of picture-rich websites, and the invention of the MP3. Suddenly each net user wanted megabytes of pictures and music, and the monthly traffic figure exploded.
For the next few years we saw more steady growth with traffic again roughly doubling every year.
But since 2003, we have seen another change in the way we use the net. The YouTube generation want to stream video, and download gigabytes of data in one go.
"In one day, YouTube sends data equivalent to 75 billion e-mails; so it's clearly very different," said Phil Smith, head of technology and corporate marketing at Cisco Systems.
"The network is growing up, is starting to get more capacity than it ever had, but it is a challenge.
"Video is real-time, it needs to not have mistakes or errors. E-mail can be a little slow. You wouldn't notice if it was 11 seconds rather than 10, but you would notice that on a video."
Perhaps unsurprisingly, every year someone says the internet is going to collapse under the weight of the traffic.
Looking at the figures, that seems a reasonable prediction.
Wojtek Dabrowski writing for Reuters, via Yahoo! Canada News:
Research In Motion is making internal changes to ensure that a massive outage of its BlackBerry e-mail service like the one that hit thousands of North American users this week doesn't happen again, its co-chief executive said on Friday."It's very rare that we have these events," Jim Balsillie told Reuters in an interview.
"I think it's pretty likely that the systems are in place that this kind of thing, as incredibly unlikely as it is to happen, is all the more unlikely to happen again," he said.
The outage, which hit Tuesday night and lasted well into Wednesday for some, left business executives, lawyers, politicians and others addicted to the "CrackBerry" without uninterrupted on-the-go e-mail access, which has been the BlackBerry's main draw.
Some fumed, accusing the company of being less than forthcoming about the cause of the outage and what it was doing to address it on Wednesday morning. Balsillie said that the top priority was restoring service.
"It wasn't a capacity issue, it wasn't a security issue. It was an outage overnight when there was an upgrade," he said.
Still, capacity was a concern raised by at least one analyst, who questioned whether Waterloo, Ontario-based RIM has enough infrastructure to handle the torrid pace of its growth.
The company has about 8 million subscribers for various models of its BlackBerry device. It added more than 1 million in the last quarter alone and plans to add more than that in the three months ending June 2.
RIM said in an e-mailed statement late Thursday night that the cause of the outage was a new storage feature that had not been properly tested. It "triggered a compounding series of interaction errors" in RIM's operations.
CTV.ca news staff writes:
Environment Minister John Baird shot back at critics Friday, calling the Conservative government's position towards the Kyoto Protocol a "balanced approach."
"What we want to do is take a balanced approach, an approach where we can actually reduce greenhouse gas emissions... in a way that helps our environment and preserves Canadian jobs," Baird told CTV's Canada AM.
The Senate environmental committee is currently considering a bill put forward by Liberal MP Pablo Rodriquez that would force the government to comply with the Kyoto targets.
On Thursday, Baird was accused of using scare tactics when he painted a grim depiction of the economic mayhem that Canada would have to endure if it were to comply with the Kyoto Protocol.
Meanwhile, David Suzuki is set to meet with Baird on Friday to hand over a petition bearing the names of 30,000 people who consider the environment a top priority.
"Canadians, I believe, are far ahead of the political posturing that we see," the respected environmental activist told reporters Friday. "They're not afraid to pay more and what they want is action."
While Baird said yesterday that meeting the Kyoto carbon emissions targets would "manufacture a recession" for Canada, Suzuki says other economists have estimated the cost at one per cent of gross national product.
He said ignoring global warming will cost more than both world wars put together.
Eric Auchard of Reuters writes, via Yahoo! Canada News:
Computer Web search leader Google Inc. on Friday stepped up an experiment to use speech recognition on telephones so consumers can ask for local information, in a challenge to directory assistance providers.The company is inviting U.S. callers to dial 1-800-GOOG-411 (1-800-466-4411) from any phone to test a voice-activated service free-of-charge that it calls Google Voice Local Search, which is available on its experimental Google Labs site.
"Using this service, you get fast access to the same local information you'd find on Google Maps," an explanation of the new experiment said on the Google Labs site. "You don't need a computer, you don't need an Internet connection, and you don't even need to use your cellphone keypad," it said.
Details are available at http://labs.google.com/goog411/.
Google's experiment comes weeks after Microsoft Corp. agreed to acquire voice search firm Tellme Networks, in a deal sources said is valued at more than $800 million. The transaction is Microsoft's largest acquisition in five years.
Improving quality and falling costs of voice search technology are enticing Internet players Google, Microsoft, and rival Yahoo Inc. to expand beyond pay-per-click Web search advertising business into pay-per-call marketing.
From The Observer:
Reverie is crucial to the creative mind. And although this predominantly comes down to nurture over nature, creativity is lost without an instinctive ability to access free-floating mental states. The myth goes that creatives either lie back and let the muse come to them, or force it out through hard work and lengthy trial and error. The reality is somewhere between the two - a combination of inspiration and evaluation, of being able to let an idea come to you and then crafting it into shape. When AE Housman walked home after a liquid lunch at the Spaniards Inn on Hampstead Heath, three stanzas popped fully formed into his head. It took him another 12 months, he said, to finally come up with the fourth stanza.
This is a classic story of creativity, where at some unpredictable moment the unconscious serves something up to you, which is pretty well formed, and anecdotal evidence shows that the majority of people get their best ideas when they are off guard and least expect it.In the cognitive science of consciousness, there is a lot of interest in what people call the 'fringe of the mind', an idea started by William James, the father of psychology, who in 1890 wrote about the 'reinstatement of the vague' - the ability to be interested in ideas that are not yet fully formed. Creative people have a more intimate relationship with the fringes of their mind, and consequently are able to catch the gleam of an idea as it flashes across the corner of their consciousness. Ted Hughes was a great fisherman and liked to use the metaphor of fishing for the creative process. He believed that in order to be creative you have to be able to 'catch' concepts as they come up from the unconscious. If we can't do that, he believed, then 'our minds lie in us like fish in the pond of a man who cannot fish'.
Creativity is mainly learnt. And while there is an element of nature involved, it predominantly comes down to nurture - a way of thinking that is picked up from parents or the people around you. Timely encouragement, of course plays, its part, along with finding an area of interest that really gets under your skin.
Creative people do, however, intuitively know the value of alternating the rhythms of work: when to let the mind wander, when to get down to hard work and when to put a problem on the back burner and leave the subconscious to mull it over. This is a crucial flexibility of mind demonstrated by the way creative people, even during periods of intense activity, manage to create little holes for themselves where they will instinctively take the mini breaks they need to let ideas come to them.
Time out feeds the quietness of mind that is essential to creativity.
Malcolm Ritter of The Associated Press writes, via CBC News:
Researchers are studying a pervasive psychological phenomenon in which oh man we've got to finish doing the taxes this weekend ... C'mon, admit it. Your train of thought has derailed like that many times. It's just mind-wandering. We all do it, and surprisingly often, whether we're struggling to avoid it or not.Mainstream psychology hasn't paid much attention to this common mental habit. But a spate of new studies is chipping away at its mysteries and scientists say the topic is beginning to gain visibility.
Someday, such research may turn up ways to help students keep their focus on textbooks and lectures, and drivers to keep their minds on the road. It may reveal ways to reap payoffs from the habit.
And it might shed light on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, which can include an unusually severe inability to focus that causes trouble in multiple areas of life.
More generally, scientists say, mind-wandering is worth studying because it's just too common to ignore.
Michael Kane, a psychologist at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, sampled the thoughts of students at eight random times a day for a week. He found that on average, they were not thinking about what they were doing 30 percent of the time.
