Facebook Pushing People to Go Public
I think, somewhere in the back of our heads, we all had to know that this was eventually where Facebook would go. Yes, the erstwhile media darling of social networking, so prized because it was so private (unlike that icky old predator-friendly MySpace), has succumbed to the public pull of the Internet—when they prompt you to update your privacy settings now, they’ve already selected a default option to publish your information to “Everyone.”
This change comes as part of the new privacy migration tool, where users get to update their privacy settings as Facebook moves to improved privacy settings. (Or was that improved publicity settings?) It looks like this is the change promised in July to appease the Canadian government’s privacy complaints.
Facebook, it seems, is now jealous of today’s social media sweetheart: Twitter. The theory goes that FB wants people to select the “Everyone” option so that status updates, especially, will be publicly shared, and Facebook will be like Twitter, only better. (Note that, above, the “Everyone” option is only preselected for a few settings, other defaults include “Friends” and “Friends of Friends.”)
At Facebook’s blog post, people are already complaining about the loss of privacy and such features as the ability to hide wall posts, profile pictures and friend lists. (I can’t vouch for these, but several people are complaining about them.)
Users will be prompted to update their settings and are free to return to their old settings or customize the settings however they want. Yeah, it’s not cool that Facebook goes and selects “Everyone” as the default, but if they’re prompting their users to update their settings themselves, and not changing anything until the users approve it, then . . . is this really that big of a deal? What do you think?
MySpace Lags Behind Twitter in UK
Twitter, media sweetheart and microblogging service extraordinaire, has another coup to add to its list: they’ve now beat out MySpace in terms of most visits in the UK.
Remember MySpace? The overhyped media sweetheart before Twitter and Facebook? Hitwise UK reports that Twitter is now the 27th most visited website in the UK. This is a complete, stunning, and utter defeat to MySpace, coming in at a distant 28th 
. However, the traffic trends over time look pretty alarming:
However, Twitter is not the most popular social site in the UK. That honor belongs to the reigning champ, Facebook. YouTube was #2, Bebo came in at #3, and then Twitter and MySpace.
Meanwhile, Twitter may already be on the decline as far as media coverage goes. (Then again, being featured on 60 Minutes—heck, having 60 Minutes as a member—is probably a sign you’ve jumped the hype shark.)
What do you think? How long until Twitter takes out Bebo, YouTube and Facebook? Or will its limited utility limit its growth (someday)?
Facebook Sued for Stifling Competition, Click Fraud
It’s a saga we’re all familiar with by now: create a pretty awesome web service, start a trend, become a media sweetheart, make lots of money (VC or acquisition), get slapped with a lawsuit. Or two. Or fifty billion. Facebook added two more lawsuits to its heap recently: a countersuit from Power.com and a click fraud proceeding.
Facebook filed suit against Power.com in December. Facebook claimed the one-stop social-media aggregator was infringing upon their copyright, violating their TOS and scraping proprietary data. At the time, we weren’t sure whether “proprietary data” included user information.
Power.com finally decided not to take this sitting down. TechCrunch reports that Power.com has now filed a countersuit, claiming Facebook is “unlawfully withholding the data that users own (as stated in Facebookâs own ToS), and is stifling competition by refusing to allow third party services like Power.com to access the data, among other things.”
Facebook also faces legal action from RootZoo, an erstwhile advertiser. After analytics from their Nov 2007-June 2008 campaign varied greatly from Facebook’s reported data, RootZoo requested Facebook’s logs and a refund. Facebook said no to both.
RootZoo’s complaint uses 2 June 2008 as an example of the discrepancies between the two. While Facebook reported 804 clicks on their ads, RootZoo’s analytics programs show 300 clicks from the social networking giant.
While there have been rumblings about Facebook click fraud for some time, this is the first suit in the matter.
What do you think? Does Facebook have anything to worry about from these legal claims against it? Is there anyway to avoid getting slapped with lawsuits once people see you’re making some money?
Technorati: Desperate to be a Twit Relevant Again
How long has it been since we’ve heard about Technorati? When did you last visit the erstwhile-preeminent blog tracking site? And even then, didn’t you get the sense they were going downhill? While that may just be what happens to every media (or blog) sweetheart, Technorati has seen a decline. Many have attributed this to a lack of features, innovation, relevancy of results, etc.
But Technorati is fighting back. With Twitter. Launching today, Twittorati is Technorati’s latest effort to make us think they’re still relevant. The site aggregates the tweets of bloggers in the Technorati Top 100. (They don’t, however, explain why you’d want to do this. Too lazy to read their blogs?)
Twittorati integrates with both Twitter and Technorati, but there’s not a lot of crossover. For example, this pane of the right-most column of the site:
I expected the Technorati tags there would segment the Tweets shown by the genre of the blog author—but the tags led straight to the Technorati tag page. (Technorati CEO Richard Jalichandra tells TechCrunch that the capability I wanted is in the works.)
While this might attract some attention for @Twittorati, ultimately I don’t think this is going to help Technorati regain its popularity or find the following it once had.
What do you think? Is Twittorati worth watching? Will it help bring Technorati back to the fore of social media?
