Tag: socialnetworks

EU Internet Nonsense

The EU takes money from the Microsoft ATM with one hand, and then invests it in a sure-to-fail “Google Killer” with the other. Of course, I’m stretching the facts here to make a point. The EU is simply allowing the French and German governments to make these investments with their own taxpayer’s money. There is no direct link between Microsoft fines and these subsidies. But the point is the same – the EU is not willing to let free markets determine winners and losers. The winners must be home grown, at any cost. And US companies that have too much success in Europe seem to face a bleak choice – massive fines or government-backed competitors. It’s absurd. And it’s no wonder that many of the best European entrepreneurs keep coming to the US to start companies.

i hate european industrial policy. so misguided.
2015-03-04: europe continues to be run by morons.

Just 1 week after the American government voted to enforce net neutrality, the European Union is considering plans allowing the opposite, permitting internet providers to create a tiered internet service with paid fast lanes.

2015-12-17: europe is working very hard to retain its top spot for the dumbest tech policies.

New European data protection rules would see companies require parental consent to handle data of those under 16, effectively blocking them from social media

2016-05-26:

But the much more concerning stuff involves the regulation of the internet. Now, yes, the EU Commission basically tries to bend over backwards to say that this isn’t about creating new regulations for the internet. And also to claim that they’re not changing the “intermediary liability” regime as laid out in the E-Commerce Directive that is a decent, if unfortunately weaker, version of US intermediary liability protections, saying that platforms aren’t responsible for actions of their users. But… there’s a big “but” after those claims, and it basically undermines those claims. You can read the following and see them swearing no new regulations and no changes, but the 4 bullet points and the details buried in them suggest something entirely different

one wishes that brexit happens so that the EU doesn’t have time for nonsense like this.
2018-09-18: how the latest internet nonsense coming out of the EU will only end up harming the EU.

If regulators, EU or otherwise, truly want to constrain Facebook and Google — or, for that matter, all of the other ad networks and companies that in reality are far more of a threat to user privacy — then the ultimate force is user demand, and the lever is demanding transparency on exactly what these companies are doing. To that end, were I a regulator concerned about user privacy, my starting point would not be an enforcement mechanism but a transparency mechanism. I would establish clear metrics to measure user privacy — types of data retained, types of data inferred, mechanisms to delete user-generated data, mechanisms to delete inferred data, what data is shared, and with whom — and then measure the companies under my purview — with subpoena power if necessary — and publish the results for the users to see.

Social Graph API

Google’s announcement today of the Social Graph API is a major step in the development of what I’ve called “the Internet Operating System.” In a nutshell, what the Social Graph API does is to lower the barrier to re-use of information that people publish about themselves on the web. It’s the next step towards the vision that Brad Fitzpatrick and David Recordon outlined in Thoughts on the Social Graph.

i have had a FOAF profile since 2003. now it is finally useful for something.

Google, as usual, is not far behind. But they are taking a much different and more open approach to the social graph. Today they are launching the Social Graph API, which will allow third parties to grab social graph data that is produced by every day activities across the web – linking. Who you are (defined by Flickr, blogs, Twitter and other web services) and who you know, can be determined by data included with links, or in other data included on web pages but not shown in a browser. The 2 standards around this, XFN and FOAF, provide explicit and public data to Google (and anyone else that looks) on who you are and who you know. Technically this is pretty simple stuff. Links may contain XFN tags to state a a relationship, such as “me” or “friend.” These are explicit, public statements of relationships and are built in to many web applications, or can simply be added by humans.

bradfitz++

Toward Social Science

But it is Facebook’s role as a petri dish for the social sciences — sociology, psychology and political science that particularly excites some scholars, because the site lets them examine how people, especially young people, are connected to one another, something few data sets offer, the scholars say. Social scientists at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theories in their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement.

could “social science” actually become science one day?
2013-11-02:

The social sciences are undergoing a dramatic transformation from studying problems to solving them; from making do with a small number of sparse data sets to analyzing increasing quantities of diverse, highly informative data; from isolated scholars toiling away on their own to larger scale, collaborative, interdisciplinary, lab-style research teams; and from a purely academic pursuit to having a major impact on the world. To facilitate these important developments, universities, funding agencies, and governments need to shore up and adapt the infrastructure that supports social science research. We discuss some of these developments here, as well as a new type of organization we created at Harvard to help encourage them — the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. An increasing number of universities are beginning efforts to respond with similar institutions. This paper provides some suggestions for how individual universities might respond and how we might work together to advance social science more generally.

Playing tag

But to those building so-called “mobile” social networks, it is nirvana, linking virtual communities such as Facebook or MySpace with the real world. The idea is not new, but so far such services have not gained much traction. They have to be able to pinpoint people in order to work, but satellite positioning does not work indoors. More importantly, it is hard for such a service to gain critical mass: why join, if it does not already have many users?

A new generation of mobile social networks may have found ways to overcome these barriers. One is Aka-Aki, a start-up based in Berlin. Users of its service download a small program onto their mobile phone. The software then uses Bluetooth, the short-range radio technology built into many mobile phones, to check whether any friends or other members with similar interests are within 20m. If so, the program pulls down the person’s picture and whatever information he or she is willing to reveal from the firm’s website.

Where the economist gets all headmap.

The advantages of publicness

It’s a good thing that our lives are becoming more public and permanent on the internet. It will keep us closer as people. It might make us more civil and more forgiving as a result.While we tend to focus on the dangers of losing privacy, for a Guardian column I’m working on, I’d like to examine the benefits of living in public, of publicness.

this is the deeper issue behind all the SN hype. once people stop the sheep throwing nonsense and publish ala del.icio.us, then we are really connecting to our past. and to be able to see what shaped someone’s world view.

Brand Networking

But think about it: You’re on one of those social sites, already being social with your friends, and so why are you going to follow a link and click to a cookie site to tell you how to be social? You’re not. And so the cookie company is, I predict, going to flop at its cookie site (once today’s rush of Times traffic subsides) and then it will declare that social doesn’t work and isn’t worth anything and it will return to buying upfront TV.

in case you needed more arguments that social network “brand advertising” is an idea only dumb people on madison avenue could have.

Giant Global Graph

So, if only we could express these relationships, such as my social graph, in a way that is above the level of documents, then we would get re-use. That’s just what the graph does for us. We have the technology — it is Semantic Web technology, starting with RDF OWL and SPARQL. Not magic bullets, but the tools which allow us to break free of the document layer.

maybe the time for the semweb is finally ripe.