Tag Archives: facebook

Facebook’s IPO Filing

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There’s not really much to say about Facebook’s IPO filing other than we all knew the day would eventually come. People love to look at the number of users as the measure of the company, but the truth is users come and go, all empires eventually fall. They have since the dawn of man. It’s a terrible measure of what a company has done, and is capable of doing. Eventually market saturation will be reached. It’s unsustainable to grow quicker than the world’s population. Everyone but Wall Street and some tech blogs know that.

What really matters is a company’s DNA. For Facebook that’s the willingness to be agile, the willingness to push things, and the willingness to change. That may occasionally backfire, however it’s proven to generally work out quite well. Especially when Facebook is willing to back down and revise as it has in the past. Mark Zuckerberg’s goal is pretty lofty, especially given the world and it’s people are struggling to figure out privacy in a connected world.

To quote him in 2010: “we’ve made great progress over the last year towards making the world more open and connected”. Balancing this mission and not crossing the line will be the challenge Facebook will face for years to come. I’ve criticized them several times in the past for either not doing enough, or not giving enough priority to the right to control privacy. Lately I’ve got less to complain about. I think that’s good for everyone.

Web App Stores Via Twittter/Facebook

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It seems likely to me that Facebook and Twitter will eventually be competing with Apple in terms of App stores. Facebook sort of already is with their extensive apps platform, however that’s just competing for developer attention. Twitter doesn’t really have an equivalent today (developers mainly build clients and interact with data), but don’t underestimate their clout.

The reason I say this is that Facebook and Twitter have become identity gatekeepers on the net. Already you can login to many sites via accounts with one of the two sites. Creating the API’s to handle purchase/subscriptions and transparently handling the billing to effectively turning a HTML5 site into an “app” is the next logical step. They could undercut Apple and still walk away with a handsome profit for not doing terribly much more than leveraging their size and reach. These apps would work on any device with a web browser. Desktop or mobile.

Given both sites need to diversify revenue streams (something Google never figured out), it seems only logical to make this step. $0.99 for Angry Birds seems more than plausible.

And yes, there are offline abilities in a browser.

Googlebot on Facebook?

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I’ve got a few Facebook Applications I’ve played around with developing that are not actually for use (read: they do nothing). I’ve noticed over the past few days their canvas URL’s are seeing traffic in the form of 1 hit approximately every 24 hours. Previously they saw no traffic at all. At first I thought this was just Facebook with some new process to check for malicious apps, which sounds like a good idea. Then I did some digging and found something surprising:

The first thing I found was the hostname where the request originated was out-sw251.tfbnw.net which is obviously owned by Facebook. That’s not terribly interesting and supports my theory up above.

Then I found these two curious bits in the request:

X-FB-USER-REMOTE-ADDR: 66.249.67.211
USER-AGENT: Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)

That IP address is crawl-66-249-67-211.googlebot.com. That UserAgent is very telling and needs no introduction.

The request is otherwise pretty unremarkable other than no query string which a normal person would generate when hitting that canvas URL. However fb_sig_request_method is set to GET which suggests to me it’s actually using POST despite that what it claims. There’s no fb_sig_user or anything else that would suggest an actual user, which makes sense because fb_sig_logged_out_facebook is set to 1.

It appears as of March 20, 2011 Google has started crawling Facebook Apps. I’ve got no idea what it’s intent, abilities or relationship is. I can tell you that I’ve monitored since at least April 2010 and this only started a few days ago.

More On Facebook Places Privacy

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Via NY Times:

“I like Foursquare because I can actually pick who sees where I actually am, compared to Facebook, where I have 1,200 friends,” she said. “I don’t want 1,200 people knowing where I am.” Facebook does let users pick a smaller subgroup of friends who can see location updates, but Ms. Lovelidge said it would be too much trouble to set that up.

Emphasis mine. This isn’t lost on Facebook. Zuckerberg himself said: “But guess what? Nobody wants to make lists”.

The problem is that for every Ms. Lovelidge who at least acknowledges the risk and avoids it, there will be 10 others completely oblivious to the risks.

One great lesson here is that you can’t change the paradigm and assume an old security model, in this case the “friends” network will continue to work. This is the equivalent to turning a store into a private residence without bothering to replace the open store front with a more traditional door.

Sharing Location With Strangers Via Facebook Places

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Twice in a weeks time [1, 2] I’ve suggested that teens in particular have more “friends” than friends. AOL apparently did some of the research for me regarding the prevalence:

…more than half of the children surveyed (54%) don’t personally know all of the friends…

54% of teens surveyed don’t know all their “friends”. Facebook defaults the privacy settings on places to “friends”. 54% of children surveyed will likely be sharing their current location with people they don’t personally know. Places will catch on, especially once the check-in games start coming up and it becomes more fun and competitive. Half will likely share their location with people they don’t know.

Think about this for a second. Just a few years ago society would have found the idea of teenagers revealing their current location to people they don’t even personally know to be insanity.

It’s easy to fix, just setup a group and include/exclude as desired. The problem is awareness of the problem is low. Also problematic is the desire and patience to sort through several hundred “friends” and bucket people.

It would also be easy for Facebook to fix by forcing users to either select specific groups or individuals rather than just defaulting to the overly broad “friends”. They have the UI, and it’s actually pretty good (I’ve got some gripes, but they don’t apply to 99.9% of the population) they just don’t make users go through it for the sake of simplicity.

I don’t really like this.

More On Facebook “Friends” And Privacy

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Last week when I wrote about the risks of Facebook Places I specifically said:

Decisions on who qualifies as a friend may have been made a few years ago when the risks were different and content being exposed was much less harmful. Letting a stranger see your obnoxious status update is different than letting them know where you are.

MG Siegler at TechCrunch just realized this himself and cut the number of friends he had in half. To quote:

Facebook is mutating. The problem is that the original social graph isn’t built for this mutation. And we’re going to see that very clearly with things like this new location element.

I’d argue MG Siegler is brighter and more in tune to this sort of thing than 90%+ of Facebook users. Perhaps 99%. If he just realized this now, it’s going to take a long time for the more casual user to catch on.

As I wrote last week, the term “friend” has been grossly distorted over the past few years. I strongly suspect the most at risk users are the ones who distorted it the most. Defaulting things like Places to “friends” isn’t good enough.

You’ll be seeing more about this in the press over the coming several months. This is going to get messy as people leak information they didn’t intend to.

Facebook “Simplistic” Privacy Settings Coming Soon

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I’d be nothing but a jerk if I didn’t post this considering I’ve spent a fair amount of time criticizing Facebook’s privacy policies. Facebook head of public policy Tim Sparapani as quoted in Wired:

“Now we’ve heard from our users that we have gotten a little bit complex,” Sparapani said in a radio interview Tuesday. “I think we are going to work on that. We are going to be providing options for users who want simplistic bands of privacy that they can choose from and I think we will see that in the next couple of weeks.”

I can deal with public defaults provided it’s clear in the UI that the defaults are public and the user has an easy way to adjust privacy. What isn’t addressed is this policy of resetting things when changes are made. No comments on that as far as I can tell.

Victoria Secret – You Like This

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Victoria Secret "Like" Limited EditionI couldn’t resist posting this one. Apparently Victoria Secret has a free “limited edition” (with store purchase of course) panty with “you like this” printed on the back with a thumbs up, an obvious homage to Facebook.

Countdown to sexual harassment for unwanted “clicking” or “liking”? I’m sure some genius will get into trouble for that.

We could of course get into a debate over if it’s objectifying women, or just make jokes about how it’s “social” and “viral”. The parallels to privacy debate, etc. But as Sigmund Freud allegedly said “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”1.

Before someone email’s me: yes, I posted the image and yes you can click for a full-sized one (you’re welcome). For the person who questions my judgment: It’s really no more mature than anything you’d see at a pool or beach. Grow up. For the person who is guaranteed to email asking where the original coupon is: you can find it here or here. Lastly, no, this isn’t the first time a butt has graced this blog, it’s the second time just this year.

[Hat Tip: Center Networks]

1. It’s attributed to him, but there’s no evidence he actually said it as far as I’m aware.

Why “The Geeks” Are Upset About Privacy

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Pete Warden on why everyone should pay attention to “the geeks”:

So why are the geeks so upset? They’re looking down the road and imagining all the things that the bad guys will be able to do once they figure out what a bonanza of information is being released. Do you remember in the 90’s when techies were hating on Windows for its poor security model? That seemed pretty esoteric for ordinary people because it didn’t cause many problems in their day-to-day usage. The next decade was when those bad decisions about the security architecture became important, as viruses and malware became far more common, and the measures to prevent them became a lot more burdensome.

I’d recommend reading the entire article.

That might be the best argument I’ve seen in a while for people who just don’t get it. When you spend enough time dealing with data you’re forced to understand the threat models that can impact your work. You become very tuned into what the potential exploits are and how it can be used to everyone’s advantage, and disadvantage. Despite surveys that show people are “concerned” about their privacy, and some “use privacy settings” I’d venture very few, likely less than 10% actually understand what harm any piece of data can have, and how exactly it’s being handled and shared.

There’s a reason the industry is so focused on this lately. There’s a reason why I’ve now dedicated a majority of recent blog posts to it.