God forbid that they even pay lip service to the notion that users might perhaps be given options—for then they might start to use them, and then where would we be? Sheer anarchy! Far better to reduce everything to a single dumbed-down inescapable standard, relentlessly mediocre and devoid of any color or possibility, like a tapioca straitjacket.
I haven't used Facebook Comments, but every day I wrestle with whether or not ThinkUp should have yet another configurable user setting, or if the software should just decide what's best by default. The next time that comes up, I'm going to think about that tapioca straitjacket. (Worth noting that Evans does admit Facebook Comments reduced trolling at TechCrunch, and that if he were setting up a new site he'd use it again.)
Human beings and their relationships are complex and nuanced, so the software that attempts to describe them must accomodate a wide range of expression. Last night, Google rolled out an update to the Google Profiles product, which I've promoted for for almost 2 years. The revamp is surely part of a larger movement at Google to add more people-centric social features to search and beyond.
In the new Google Profiles, I like that you can enter more information about yourself: work history, "words that describe you," brag-worthy facts, gender, relationship status. What I don't like is that a few of these fields have a limited range of possible values, defined in a drop-down list. Before I realized this was worthy of a full blog post, I had a bit of a rant about it last night, which went like this.
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg describes the dearth of women in high-level leadership positions in corporations, non-profits and government, and offers three pieces of advice on how to keep women in the workplace, help them rise to the top, and change those numbers. Her awesome TED talk is a must-see for parents, college students, and women already at work. It's only 15 minutes—watch it.
Increasing female leadership isn't just about evening out the numbers or equal rights. Layar co-founder Claire Boonstra argues competitive companies and sustainable governments today demand it. She writes:
Developer Sarah Mei's most significant contribution to the Diaspora project: changing the "Gender" dropdown to a text field. It pissed off at least one person, who argues the text field is less usable than the dropdown, causes inconvenience to the majority to accomodate the minority, and will make it harder for the software to figure out whether to refer to its users as "he" or "she." Programmer-me sees these points, but human-me knows how alienating it can be when software doesn't allow you to accurately describe yourself. (I often still have to put my name in the "husband" field when filling out forms for married couples.) This is all to say, once more: nice work, Sarah.
Yesterday on TWiG, Leo and Jeff and I discussed Facebook integration in Ping--Leo didn't know it was there, but looking at the screenshots on Apple's site, before I got the iTunes 10 download, I said it was there. But even though the Ping web page reads "Find even more music fans...by connecting to your Facebook account" right now, Kara Swisher reports that Steve Jobs told her there's no Facebook in Ping because they wanted "onerous terms that we could not agree to." So, I stand corrected. Ping is a completely walled garden.
Diaspora is a distributed, open source alternative to Facebook that a few NYU graduates want to spend this summer building. They set out to raise $10,000 on Kickstarter, and on the strength of all the backlash against Facebook's privacy problems, the project has raised over $175,000 as of writing. Good for them. There are a LOT of existing projects doing work in this area (like OneSocialWeb, DiSo, Activity Streams), but I'm ok with a new effort working both together and in parallel with existing ones--it increases the chances that something will hit the the target. Interestingly, a Facebook employee recommended to the Diaspora developers that the app exploit Facebook as a platform for third-party apps to host social data but make it accessible on Facebook. Clever. This reminds me of Postel's law: "Be liberal in what you accept, and conservative in what you send." A lot of people have and will leave Facebook, but for now, the majority won't. Any social app that wants success should allow Facebook users to find and interact with its users seamlessly.
Just because you've set your Facebook profile to "Friends only" access doesn't mean someone who is not your friend can't see it. One of the most confusing aspects of Facebook's privacy settings is an area where you specify what information your friends can share about you through applications and web sites, even parts of your profile you made private.
By default, regardless of how private your Facebook profile is, your friends can share the following pieces of information about you, straight from the screenshot on the right: Personal Info (activities, interests, etc), Status updates, Online presence, Website, Family and relationship status, Education and work, My videos, My links, My notes, My photos, Photos and videos I'm tagged in, About me, My birthday, and My hometown.
This whole friends-can-share-private-things by default can lead to some awkward situations, like one I ran into last week.
This week the White House will put out a call to techies and scientists across the internet, asking a simple question: What should the United States' next greatest technological and scientific achievement be? Get your answers ready, geeks.
When you reply to the White House's prompt--on Twitter, Facebook, or via email--your voice will be heard and your ideas will be counted. I know, because I helped build the software that will capture your responses and deliver them directly to the people in charge.
Ready to get involved? Here's what to do.
Think big! Imagine an ambitious science or technology challenge (something huge like the moon landing!) which you think can inspire great new ideas and inventions. Here are some examples President Obama listed.
Reply to the tweet or post with your idea, or a link to ideas you find interesting. On Twitter, use the hashtag #whgc. Alternately, you can email your response to challenge@ostp.gov.
Encourage your friends and followers to respond, too!
Everyone working on the Grand Challenges initiative can't wait to hear what you have to say, so thanks in advance for your insights and participation. We'll be sharing the responses we got both online and at Twitter's first official conference, Chirp, this week in San Francisco.
Hi all! I've been working furiously on ThinkTank over at Expert Labs for about six weeks now. Once in awhile I'll post an update on where we're at with the project. This is such an update, and it's cross-posted from the Expert Labs blog.
ThinkTank development has been going strong, but we need your help. If you're a ThinkTank tester and/or a web developer, join the mailing list, fork the code, install ThinkTank on your server, and help us build the software and documentation. If you don't know what you can do or where to start, here are the three main priorities for ThinkTank right now:
Cloud data backup service, Backupify, has dropped its paywall until January 31st in an effort to acquire more customers. The service backs up Gmail, Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Google Docs, WordPress, Delicious, and FriendFeed data, to name a few, though apparently the file format you get when you restore your data may not be the most useful to non-programmers (i.e., XML documents). I haven't tried Backupify myself, but this offer is tempting. ZDNet's Between the Lines blog has the full story: Backupify drops paywall; backs up your data from Twitter, Facebook, and Gmail.
Android users with Facebook friends who list their phone number in their profiles will love this: Brad Fitzpatrick offers a Greasemonkey script that exports those phone numbers to AddressBookr and offers to add/merge them into your Google Contacts. Even though this was posted last November, I just gave it a test run and it worked like a charm. Thanks, Nick!
This week the White House will put out a call to techies and scientists across the internet, asking a simple question: What should the United States' next greatest technological and scientific achievement be? Get your answers ready, geeks. 
I'm 
Logo by 
