Recently in Social Media Category

Apple's recent change to its developer rules requiring their approval to collect and send device data to third parties for aggregation, analytics or processing, has created a firestorm in the mobile blogosphere. If Facebook had a mobile operating system, they would not qualify as "independent" according to the new rules and hence could be blocked. Recent legislation, such as the draft privacy bill from Rep. Rick Boucher, seeks to define and require opt-in approval for "sensitive information." That could be your exact geographic location or something similar. Of course users comfortable with geo-location applications shouldn't have a problem providing their approval, not many people read those fine print in pop-ups anyway - but they should.  We are seeing inconsistent privacy notices and policies in use across desktop and mobile applications. Apple justifies their approach under the "privacy" banner, but could attract the scrutiny of the FTC. The recent leak of AT&T ICC-ID data to obtain user email addresses brings Apple's privacy concerns up front and personal. While not necessarily Apple's fault, they still require an email address for iTunes. Mobile advertising has evolved from the desktop space with some innovation, although there have not been many break-through ideas. Apple's iAd experience is very clever in that users clicking ads are presented an HTML5 container without leaving the app. Delivery and bundling of iAds via iTunes supports their cash engine. By forcing developers to use HTML5, this further drives the standard away from Adobe. Perhaps Apple could use iTunes as a repository for user opt-in status thereby eliminating interruptions in the application itself. 

There's a lot of commotion lately about Twitter launching its own client applications of what I would call "house apps" for platforms like the iPhone, Blackberry and today the Android. While many developers have outstanding Twitter clients, the better ones come with a price. Now that Twitter has introduced more of its own client apps free of charge, those early third-party apps quickly lose their value proposition. Some believe the trend could hurt companies like Seesmic or Twitterific. Developers will need to come up with ways to structure their applications to offer other benefits besides just connecting APIs. This is no different than what Microsoft did in the early days. Microsoft grew to domination in the desktop market on the backs of third party developers. Old applications like Harvard Graphics, WordStar, VisiCalc and dBASE were the early pioneers before we had MS Office. No one should be surprised with Twitter's actions, it's part of the software growth lifecycle. Developers will adapt and Twitter will do what fuels its own business growth. I see no problem with that.

This afternoon the Wall Street Journal reported that ten privacy organization assisted by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) have formally filed complaints with the Federal Trade Commission for Facebook's recent website changes to its privacy settings. The company spends a lot of time and money trying to mitigate government scrutiny and interference in its business. The problem here is Facebook has made "privacy" part of their business. The 350 million users of Facebook have a wide range of understanding and awareness regarding what the company does to both protect and stretch the end user's social graph as it relates to privacy. I voiced my opinion on other blogs that the average Facebook user would have difficulty understanding the privacy setting pop-up screen in the context of logging in to the system. While it did provide the option to reset the settings to those previously configured, the settings were altered during the conversion to allow search engine indexing until you went in to actively reset them. Your personal profile information and photos were set to "everyone" until you logged in to reset them. Not sure if the company has a strong consumer privacy advocate to balance the development and marketing organizations. 

Lars Rasmussen and his brother Jens, the creators of Google Maps, trotted out a first look at their latest development, Google Wave, at the I/O developer conference last week. The audience gave them a pass on a few mishaps, but overall the new application was quite impressive.  Wave introduces new concepts in communication by thinking of conversations as container objects where you can drag and drop people, threads, links, documents, images and even robots that enable the content to instantly appear on connected clients over the Internet. Wave is written entirely in the Google Web Toolkit (GWT "Gwit"). The developer codes in Java and the tool converts to HTML5 & Ajax automatically. For developers, Wave stores updates to UI state in the local XML of your gadget. Then Google transmits that state over the network where the other instance of your gadget updates in real-time. Google estimates only 5% of the code needs to be adapted for mobile device browsers; most of which involve just a layout change. Wave removes the structure found in email replies by creating a hub of conversation trees where users can chime in at any level, playback what they've missed and leave replies for others to see. There is even support for Twitter using Twave to merge wave posts to and from the popular micro-blogging platform. My main concern is the amount of network traffic generated by hundreds or thousands of users in a real-time, collaborative web application. Another open issue is federated identity; Google requires users to have an account to access any of their applications. OpenSocial gadgets will be supported natively in Wave and I expect to see more consolidation in the social web authentication space this year. No wonder Google was quiet about Twitter acquisition rumors, they've got bigger ideas.

I recently did a Google Search on my name to find out what comes up. The internet allows us to search out anything we can think of and I am often surprised what we discover along the way. I came across another Paul Lopez, who was an accomplished stunt flyer and held airshows across the country.

When Facebook Connect launched last year, there was much criticism that still lingers today. Providing the status.get API method is not enough, they still keep everything in a locked box. A Wall Street Journal article says Facebook will be announcing new developer access to photos and videos, but I believe it will be something more. What we may see is access to the crown jewels of Facebook - Feeds and Shared Items. This would allow users to access their Facebook services from potentially a different site altogether - quite a risky idea. Twitter has taken a different approach from the beginning by opening core features to developers without requiring a customized programming language like Facebook FMBL or Facebook Connect. Most observers agree that Connect doesn't necessarily generate new users but increases the level of engagement with your existing ones. The value of opening up "Shared" is that Facebook enforces network location whereas Twitter does not. You could filter stories based on geographic location more accurately because "Dallas, TX" and "DFW" mean the same thing on Facebook but not on Twitter. We need to see how they open up Feed. The default privacy settings are too restrictive to be useful to developers unless it is set to "Everyone." This is a critical time for Facebook and its 200 million members; they could become just another service connection hub by accident.