Facebook Category Archives

ломография

9 April 2012 | Economics, Facebook, Internet, The Great Game | 1 Comment

ну да, как-то эти снимки должны были окупиться:

MENLO PARK, CALIF.—April 9, 2012—Facebook announced today that it has reached an agreement to acquire Instagram.

Цукерберг о том же. и Кевин Систром.

куда интереснее, однако, другое: что же все-таки придумали в Facebook?

  

интерфейсы

29 March 2012 | Facebook, Google, The Great Game | 2 Comments

интересно, думает ли Google по ночам о том, что Facebook кропает свой браузер? свой телефон? свой планшет?

и — как ответный шаг — что еще Google полагает добавить в Chrome? какие ухищрения, чтобы с их помощью все-таки затащить нас в G+?

  

перлюстрация

7 March 2012 | Facebook, Google, Internet, Privacy | No Comments

немного об интернет-сервисах и частной жизни — просто чтобы не забывали:

Social networks encourage us to share every aspect of our lives with our friends, but, by providing that service, those networks see everything that we share, and use that information to categorise, profile and predict us. These services aren’t “free” – we pay for them with our personal data <...> we do not yet fully understand the power of the data we have shared [emphasis mine].

и не заблудились:

Google already presents us with search results that it believes we want and so hides from us views or opinions with which we may disagree.

и не удивлялись:

In 2001, a researcher presented the governor of Massachusetts with his personal medical records ‘reidentified’ from anonymously released data.

AOL released an anonymous search dataset in 2006. New York Times journalists identified one individual through name and location clues, revealing her entire search history.

In 2008, NetFlix released its user rating history. Researchers were able to link individuals to their ratings, revealing their history of movie watching for the past three years.

  

о копировании

1 December 2011 | Apple, Design, Facebook, Google | 2 Comments

и снова, пожалуйста, о несостоятельности Google:

[W]hen Facebook unveiled the Like button last year, they were hardly the first to do a button. But they were the first to do a button in the correct way. One click. Done. Suddenly, everyone needed this one-click button.

But while all the competitors were busy making that button, Facebook was busy making the button obsolete. Today’s Open Graph changes represent a world where the button isn’t needed.

определенно, копирование сегодня и есть основная политика Google. хоть и тот же “tablet” market, например — всем своим поведением Google & Co. говорят, что можно переплюнуть Apple, копируя их продукты. или обыграть Facebook, сражаясь по их правилам. а помните, например, Knol? Jaiku / Buzz? Google Answers? и ведь список можно продолжать до бесконечности.

такие смешные. или слепые?

как говорится:

A good hockey player plays where the puck is. A great hockey player plays where the puck is going to be.

именно.

  

you are the product

29 November 2011 | Economics, Facebook, Google, Jurisprudence, Privacy | 1 Comment

прекрасная иннициатива:

The European Commission <...> is considering a ban on Facebook’s practice of selling demographic data to marketers and advertisers without specific permission from users.

и, к слову, почему же только Facebook? а как же Google, что занимается ровно тем же:

Facebook then uses that data — in an aggregated, anonymized form, of course — to sell media space to brands and advertising agencies. The data lets them know exactly how, when, where and to whom to market their wares for maximum effectiveness. It also means you’re less likely to see a completely irrelevant-to-you advertisement on the social network.

хотя, с другой стороны, а чему тут радоваться? ну, добавят еще пунктик в ToS, и кто его заметит? именно это, кстати, и есть основная проблема ЕК: беспомощность, увязшая в бюрократии (но это я уже о своем).

  

трубка

28 November 2011 | Facebook, Google, The Great Game | 2 Comments

Жан-Луи Гассье абсолютно справедливо интересуется, почему все больше разговоров о Facebook-телефоне. и сам же отвечает:

Both Google and Zuckerberg’s company vie for the same advertising dollars. This makes Google Facebook’s biggest, most direct competitor. The Trojan Horse applications on Android-powered smartphones are a direct threat to Facebook’s advertising business. Just like Google, Facebook wants to maximize our exposure to ads that are finely-tuned using the personal data we provide as a payment for the service. For this, the company needs a well-controlled smartphone.

телефон сегодня — это новые персональные компьютеры былых девяностых; тот самый рубеж между нами, товаром, и рекламодателями, клиентами Google и Facebook (абсолютно, как раньше основные битвы шли за операционные системы и офисные программы, — забытый прилавок, благодрая которому богатела Microsoft).

и все же, самое интересное пока остается за кадром:

It boils down to a comparison. On the one hand, an Android-powered smartphone — a Samsung Galaxy device, perhaps — with one good Facebook application and all the Google applications, the “evil” Google+ insinuating itself everywhere. On the other, a Facebook smartphone, with the Facebook experience on top of everything, its own app store, a Facebook browser, and Facebook Cloud Services.

I can’t help but think that there’s more to this hypothetical Facebook phone than a play against today’s Google+ in defense of today’s Facebook money pump. There must be something else in Facebook’s future, a new revenue stream that it will eventually need to promote/protect. But what?

вот именно, что?

  

anonymity on the Internet has to go away, ага.

12 August 2011 | Facebook, Privacy | No Comments

а нормально так Facebook пошутил, да? натурально вспоминается недавний Цукерберг.

  

миллион туда, миллион сюда

22 June 2011 | Facebook, Internet, Privacy | No Comments

just for the record:

Facebook lost 5 million active users in the U.S. last month, according to a tracking service <...> There were also user declines in the United Kingdom, Norway and Russia, where Facebook has been around for a while [emphasis mine].

  

деньги вечером, стулья утром

10 January 2011 | Economics, Facebook | 2 Comments

замечательная статья Дугласа Рашкоффа о приближающемся конце Facebook:

In fact, as I read the situation, we are witnessing the beginning of the end of Facebook. These aren’t the symptoms of a company that is winning, but one that is cashing out.

параллели и в самом деле налицо:

Indeed, 11 years ago this week, when AOL announced its $350 billion merger with Time Warner, I was asked to write an OpEd for the New York Times explaining what the deal between old and new media companies really meant. I said that AOL was cashing in its over-valued dotcom stock in order to purchase a stake in a “real” media company with movie studios, theme parks and even cable. In short, the deal meant AOL knew their reign was over.

<...>

Likewise, Rupert Murdoch’s 2005 purchase of MySpace for $580 million coincided pretty much exactly with the website’s peak of popularity. People blamed corporate ownership for the social network’s demise, but the cycle had already begun.

Now, it’s Facebook’s turn.

как бы там ни было на самом деле, но фундамент любой социальности он видит предельно ясно:

Yet social media is itself as temporary as any social gathering, nightclub or party. It’s the people that matter, not the venue. So when the trend leaders of one social niche or another decide the place everyone is socializing has lost its luster or, more important, its exclusivity, they move on to the next one, taking their followers with them. (Facebook’s successor will no doubt provide an easy “migration utility” through which you can bring all your so-called friends with you, if you even want to.)

We will move on, just as we did from the chat rooms of AOL, without even looking back. When the place is as ethereal as a website, our allegiance is much more abstract than it is to a local pub or gym. We don’t live there, we don’t know the owner, and we are all the more ready to be incensed by the latest change to a privacy policy, or to learn that every one of our social connections has been sold to the highest corporate bidder.

туда же, в общем-то, смотрят и прекрасные slashdotters[1]:

In my network, posts are getting sparser and sparser. Just like the end of Freindser, or Orkut, or any other social network system. People get bored and stop. It the infusion of new users that drives their survival, and Facebook my be nearing the end of people willing to sign up.

и дальше:

Communities of any kind, be it RL cliques, IRC channels or social networks, tend to dry up with regard to interesting new content once there is no influx of new blood. Then users one by one, beginning with the influentiel trend setters, like queen bees, tend to wander around in search for a more interesting, cool new beehive. If, no, _when_ they find one, all the lower status worker bees will naturally follow, since the value of the old place drops significantly without the social leaders.

натурально, так оно и есть: пчелы слетаются на мед, но где окажутся эти виноцветные поля завтра? поэтому Зукерберг и торопится сегодня — изменяет сеть, запускает все больше развлечений… крадет ваше время? точнее, покупает задешево.


[1] — удивительно, однако, читать данные комментарии не где-нибудь, но в другой социальной сети.

  

The Sprawl

15 December 2010 | Facebook, Geography, Lifeform | 4 Comments

материки и страны, тем временем, можно описать простыми Facebook-связями (предчувствую новый математический термин) — так, оказывается, если спроецировать эти дружбы на плоскость, то результат окажется максимально близким к физической реальности:

I began by taking a sample of about ten million pairs of friends from Apache Hive, our data warehouse. I combined that data with each user’s current city and summed the number of friends between each pair of cities. Then I merged the data with the longitude and latitude of each city.

At that point, I began exploring it in R, an open-source statistics environment. As a sanity check, I plotted points at some of the latitude and longitude coordinates. To my relief, what I saw was roughly an outline of the world. Next I erased the dots and plotted lines between the points.

<...>

I defined weights for each pair of cities as a function of the Euclidean distance between them and the number of friends between them. Then I plotted lines between the pairs by weight, so that pairs of cities with the most friendships between them were drawn on top of the others. I used a color ramp from black to blue to white, with each line’s color depending on its weight. I also transformed some of the lines to wrap around the image, rather than spanning more than halfway around the world.

и вот оно, небольшое чудо:

After a few minutes of rendering, the new plot appeared, and I was a bit taken aback by what I saw. The blob had turned into a surprisingly detailed map of the world. Not only were continents visible, certain international borders were apparent as well.

все ближе. и ближе?