Author: Marshall Kirkpatrick

Nike launched a new iPhone app yesterday called True City (iTunes link) with the slogan “Make the hidden visible.” The app provides hyper-local, real-time information for 6 European cities. It combines expert curation of news and events info, crowdsourced information discovery (with a chance to become an official guide), push notifications, QR codes printed and posted around the city and apparently a little Augmented Reality. Of course True City also lets you learn about shoes you can buy.

It was built by AKQA, the same design firm that made the truly useful Augmented Reality app for the US Postal Service that lets you see if an object you’re holding up to your computer will fit in a postal shipping box.

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Design blog PSFK says that with the app, Nike appears determined to build “an army of hyper-local, mobile-connected advocates.“

Can an apparel company’s app compete with local content from companies specializing in that kind of work? As one reviewer wrote on the iTunes store, “Do you want bar recommendations from Nike? Nice app but no content. Will never compete with the likes of Yelp. Pointless really.”

Presumably the expert contributors for each city will try to help overcome these limitations. Would you be interested in a handful of select people recommending places, events and news for your local area? As one component of a larger hyper-local news and events source that sounds great to me. In fact, I think it’s a model that would serve any location based social network well.

The Downside of Corporate Portals Into Your True City

Nike may very well be able to dazzle a substantial number of users into using the app with its remarkable design, but there is still some concern about building your connection to your local area through the sterile lens of a marketing campaign. There are certain important but unpleasant things that seem unlikely to be served up on such a platform. Nike’s app makes the hidden visible, right?

Nike’s home town of Portland, Oregon for example, is a major hub of international sex trafficking. Matters like that are far more likely to be reported about by institutions that place the public interest of their communities, namely newspapers, than they are by mobile marketing apps, no matter how cool, hyper-local, curated, crowdsourced and augmented they may be. The True City campaign says it’s performed “all with Nikeʼs unmistakable irreverence” – but I think that just means it’s sassy advertising.

None the less, the technology and strategy is an interesting data point in the unfolding history of hyper-local, mobile technologies.

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The guys at AppsFire has done it again – it’s built a simple but compelling little iPhone app that you should probably download right away. Pastefire is an app that lets you capture and act upon information sent with a click from your computer’s browser to your iPhone.

See a phone number on the web you want to call? A text or a link you want to paste into an SMS? Click the Pastefire bookmarklet on your browser, then launch the Pastefire app on your phone and the most appropriate action for the type of media captured will happen automatically. It’s easy, fast and free.

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The app has some bugs, but it’s a good start. For some reason a captured address doesn’t get presented with a “search in Google” option in Pastefire, which would be really nice. I’m sure these things will be worked out.

Not to overstate things, but this is a great example of device convergence that makes the iPhone all the more valuable – is it not? We love handy little services like this and the crew at Appsfire comes up with things like this all the time. Are there other handy little must-have iPhone hack apps we should know about? Let us know in comments below.

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The Jordanian government has ruled that electronic communication like websites will be subject to the country’s Press and Publications Law, prohibiting speech that insults religion, according to reports from the region.

Jordanian blogger Gaith Saqer covered the news in English this afternoon on his blog Arab Crunch.

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Critics of the ruling worry that the law will be widely applied to social media, possibly even SMS and to websites that allow reader comments to be posted. Supporters appear to argue that free speech comes with responsibilities along these lines and that the legal framework actually facilitates online communication.

More information is available from the large Jordanian site AmmonNews or translated in English here.

Saqer contacted Google regarding this new front in the battle over censorship and democratized publishing online; he reports that a spokesperson said the company had no comment at this time.

Jordan isn’t unique in having a law that prohibits publishing words critical of religion. The Egyptian government has now held blogger Abdul Kareem Nabeel Suleiman in prison for more than 3 years for contempt of religion and defaming the president of Egypt on his blog. The international watch-dog group Reporters Without Borders issued a press release yesterday saying the Egyptian government has now blocked Suleiman from meeting in jail with his lawyers for a third time.

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The nonprofit Sunlight Foundation announced today the availability of its Real Time Congress iPhone app. The app displays an up-to-the-minute feed of updates from the House and Senate floors, Whip notices, hearings scheduled and key government documents as they are released.

Unfortunately all this information is displayed quite simply; there is as of yet no deep personalization as in Sunlight’s years-old and fabulous OpenCongress project, there’s no search and the app doesn’t make use of the iPhone’s push capabilities. It’s not a bad start, but there is a lot of potential for an iPhone app to make Congressional activity a much more engaging part of peoples’ day-to-day lives.

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Asked about push notifications, Josh Ruihley, Sunlight’s Technical Program Officer told us. “It’s definitely on the road map. Currently, every document, hearing and floor update you see in the app is tagged by the piece of legislation it is related to. Our next phase is to actually represent those relationships in the UI.”

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Jonathan Swift argued in A Modest Proposal that children of the poor should be eaten. He went to a rhetorical extreme in order to illustrate the absurdity of a perspective he mocked and opposed.

In order to illustrate how absurd Facebook’s new privacy policies are, I want to imagine a fictitious but analogous situation: Imagine Google announcing that our Gmail contacts and Google Reader subscriptions were to be made publicly visible to the web at large. If you don’t want the world to know who you are communicating with and what you are reading, maybe you shouldn’t be communicating with those people and reading that content. The tools you’ve used to communicate and read privately must stay current with the times, right?

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What Happened at Facebook

In the middle of December, Facebook began prompting users to re-evaluate their privacy settings on the site. If users had not changed any privacy settings in the past, then the privacy of status updates, photos, videos and shared was switched to a new default. No longer visible only to approved friends, that data was now by default publicly visible to everyone.

That default could be opted-out of, though, and users could return their activity update settings back to private, limited to friends only.

Other user-data was switched from private to public without recourse for users. User profile pictures, fan pages followed and lists of friends on the site are now made publicly visible and cannot be limited in their visibility. A fast backlash led the company to allow friends lists to be removed from public-facing profile pages, but anyone’s friends lists are still publicly available by programs that ask for it. Friends lists can no longer be made accessible only to trusted friends on the site.

Requiring that Fan pages be public is important because that’s how users express their interests and subscribe to updates from organizations they care about. RSS never caught on in a big way, but Facebook democratized online subscription to syndicated content. Now your interests and subscriptions are now naked as a jay bird before the world.

(As an aside, did you know that most people who are fans of the Facebook page ComedyTweet are also fans of the page PornstarTweet?)

Why did Facebook do this? Company founder Mark Zuckerberg said this weekend that this is the way the world is moving – towards being more public and less private. He said that the company recently considered what settings it would apply if the site were to be created anew today and “just went for it.” I explained yesterday why I don’t think that move has been backed up by a credible argument, why privacy is still important.

Last night I heard a story about a podcast for parents struggling to conceive a child. Some Facebook users have said they feel unable to subscribe to updates from the show as Fans on Facebook because they don’t want friends to know they are trying to conceive. Becoming a Fan but being discrete about it isn’t an option anymore. Stories like that are probably much more common than we might think.

Consider now what it would be like if this same changes were to be made to a different set of technologies many of us use.

Let’s Open Up GMail Contacts and Google Reader Subscriptions!

You may have signed up for GMail and Google Reader because you thought they would be effective, private and secure ways to communicate with people and subscribe to news of interest – but you were fooling yourself if you thought that information wasn’t going to be made public someday!

Don’t you know that privacy on the Internet is an illusion? Do you know how little money Google is able to make from Gmail and Google Reader with your data left private? What do you mean you use Twitter to communicate with people publicly and Gmail to communicate with them privately? Have you seen how seldom people talk about Gmail on TV these days? What’s a web service to do?

It’s really a sign of the times. People are blogging more and more these days, you might even have a public blog on Google’s Blogger.com. That’s evidence right there that it’s time to make your subscriptions and contacts public, too.

Google Reader and Gmail are both much smaller than Facebook; half as many people use Gmail as use Facebook. Google Reader is much smaller still. Contacts and subscriptions on Facebook are public now – clearly society is moving in this direction.

If you don’t want people to know about who you are emailing and what you are reading, maybe you shouldn’t be emailing them and reading it.

Think this analogy is a stretch? Think that hundreds of millions of people don’t think of Facebook as a private way to communicate with the friends they’ve approved, just like you do with Gmail, and to read updates from organizations they are interested in, but don’t necessarily want everyone to know about, like Google Reader? I don’t think it’s a stretch at all. I think these are similar tools for many people.

As we’ve said before, Facebook’s unilateral privacy policy changes have violated the contract they have with users. Just imagine how that would go over if it happened on other services we consider private.

We give Facebook a hard time, but we love the site, too. Come be a fan of ReadWriteWeb there. You won’t be able to hide that from anyone, but maybe it will distract people from your Comedy Tweets obsession.

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience this weekend that the world has changed, that it’s become more public and less private, and that the controversial new default and permanent settings reflect how the site would work if he were to create it today. Not everyone agrees with his move and its justification.

Has society become less private or is it Facebook that’s pushing people in that direction? Is privacy online just an illusion anyway? Below are some thoughts, based primarily on the pro-privacy reactions to Zuckerberg’s statements from many of our readers this weekend. Though there is a lot to be said for analysis of public data (more on that later), I believe that Facebook is making a big mistake by moving away from its origins based on privacy for user data.

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In Facebook’s early days, and for the vast majority of the site’s life, its primary differentiator was that your user data was only visible to other users that you approved friend requests from. As of mid-December, Facebook users were no longer allowed to hide from the web-at-large some information including their profile photos, list of friends and interests in the form of fan pages they followed. Text, photo and video updates shared on the site have always been by default private (friends only) but if you’d never changed your privacy settings before last month, then Facebook suggested you switch them to make those updates publicly visible to everyone. That became the new default.

Here are three reasons why making some of this data public by requirement and some public by default is the wrong thing to do and why society is not in fact changing the way that Zuckerberg claims it is.

Evolving Preferences Don’t Justify Elimination of Choice

Mark Zuckerberg might be right, people probably are becoming more comfortable telling the world at large about more and different parts of their lives. Why does that mean it’s ok to take away peoples’ choices and force them to make public some of their information all the time? That just doesn’t make sense.

Privacy is a fundamental human right and while that may seem less true when we’re operating on corporate turf like Facebook, Facebook used to be based on privacy. Why give it up so easily? (Isn’t it a cause for concern that so much of our civic interaction now goes on through this and other corporate channels?)

It’s very hard to believe that the hundreds of millions of mainstream Facebook users are wanting to throw their privacy out the window – and if Facebook believes they are, why not just ask them clearly?

Privacy Doesn’t Just Mean Secrecy

This Summer we wrote about the academic research of University of Massachusetts-Amherst Legal Studies student Chris Peterson, who argues that an accurate and contemporary understanding of privacy is based more on the integrity of context than on absolute secrecy. Peterson tackles the contemporary reality of privacy on Facebook in a very readable draft thesis paper titled Saving Face: The Privacy Architecture of Facebook (PDF).

Peterson argues that the idea that anything published ought to be understood as intended for public distribution is an antiquated understanding from the era when publishing was expensive and required a lot of effort. The opposite is true today, it’s free and easy to publish – so information at different levels of appropriateness for public eyes is being published. Why not support that?

Instead of what Facebook is doing, Peterson says that a more appropriate understanding of privacy today is based on context. We expect our communication to go on in an appropriate context (no drinking in church or praying in the bar) and we expect to understand how our communication will be distributed.

If a college friend took photos of you drinking in a bar and showed them off to people in church, you might feel your privacy has been violated in both appropriateness and distribution. The bar is a public place, though, and not completely secret. Thus the need for a more sophisticated understanding of privacy that is more than mere secrecy.

By pushing your personal information and conversation through activity updates fully into the public, Facebook is eliminating any integrity of context that these conversations would naturally have. Posted updates can be directed only to limited lists of Facebook contacts, like college buddies or work friends, but that option is buried under more public default options and much of a user’s activity on the site is not subject to that kind of option.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg used to say that people would share more information if they felt comfortable knowing that it would only be visible to people they trusted. He told me in an interview two years ago that users who wanted to do so couldn’t take their data off of the site because privacy control “is the vector around which Facebook operates.” Now apparently, he’s changed his mind. This weekend I argued that his justification for the new stance is not credible.

Many People Need Control Over Personal Information

Do people no longer need to keep access to some of their personal information online limited just to trusted friends? Facebook seems to be arguing that they don’t.

There is a long list of people who clearly do, though, including: people who’ve escaped abusive relationships, people with marginalized religious or sexual preferences, people who fear losing their jobs or who’ve been pushed around by bullies throughout their lives. That list adds up to a very large portion of the world, in fact. The group of Ivy League elites who run Facebook might think there’s no reason to be able to control access to their personal information, but many of them are less socially vulnerable and have less need to control their personal information.

Consider this comment left by one of our readers in response to Zuckerberg’s statement this weekend.

“As a person who is being stalked for being an innocent bystander in a child custody case, I can tell you that losing my choices over what is searchable or not is huge. I have nothing to hide nor be ashamed of but the loss of choice for my privacy has hit home in a poignant manner.”

Stories like that are far more common than you might think and removing user control over what’s public removes the ability for millions of people to safely participate on Facebook.

More than millions, tens or hundreds of millions of people around the world have reason to limit visibility of their personal information from the web but still want to be able to share that information with trusted contacts. Facebook became a huge success on that premise and ought to be able to continue to thrive without doing a 180 degree turn on privacy.

Coming soon: The positive side of Facebook data made public. Hint.

Become a friend of ReadWriteWeb on our Facebook Page.

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Eric Eldon at InsideFacebook reports that the social network has begun experimenting with a new option for users to report the senders of friend requests as someone they don’t actually know. The prompt appears after you click to ignore a friend request.

Actually knowing a person isn’t a requirement to be their friend on Facebook (unlike LinkedIn, for example), so this is an odd choice of words, but presumably the vast majority of the site’s users do only want to be friends with people they’ve met. Facebook has strict limits on the number of messages and friend requests a person can send, but apparently that hasn’t worked well enough.

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Two years ago MySpace added a requirement that any friend requests sent had to be verified as human using a CAPTCHA. That cut spam friend requests on MySpace down dramatically. There is no such requirement on Facebook.

Dealing with information overload and spam are key steps in creating and maintaining a user experience that keeps people coming back to non-essential websites like social networks – as opposed to email, which you’ll keep using anyway because you have to.

According to Eldon, Facebook hasn’t determined yet what it will do with these reports when filed. We regularly hear about people claiming abuse by the Facebook anti-spam team but every time we call Facebook about one of those complaints, the company’s response seems quite reasonable. People do a lot of obnoxious things on Facebook. I don’t know any of those people, though, and plan on clicking a button that says so when the opportunity arises.

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Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told a live audience yesterday that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years until the company changed dramatically in December.

In a six-minute interview on stage with TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington, Zuckerberg spent 60 seconds talking about Facebook’s privacy policies. His statements were of major importance for the world’s largest social network – and his arguments in favor of an about-face on privacy deserve close scrutiny.

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Zuckerberg offered roughly 8 sentences in response to Arrington’s question about where privacy was going on Facebook and around the web. The question was referencing the changes Facebook underwent last month. Your name, profile picture, gender, current city, networks, Friends List, and all the pages you subscribe to are now publicly available information on Facebook. This means everyone on the web can see it; it is searchable. I’ll post Zuckerberg’s sentences on their own first, then follow up with the questions they raise in my mind. You can also watch the video below, the privacy part we transcribe is from 3:00 to 4:00.

Zuckerberg:

“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was ‘why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?’

“And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change – doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”

That’s Not a Believable Explanation

This is a radical change from the way that Zuckerberg pounded on the importance of user privacy for years. That your information would only be visible to the people you accept as friends was fundamental to the DNA of the social network that hundreds of millions of people have joined over these past few years. Privacy control, he told me less than 2 years ago, is “the vector around which Facebook operates.”

I don’t buy Zuckerberg’s argument that Facebook is now only reflecting the changes that society is undergoing. I think Facebook itself is a major agent of social change and by acting otherwise Zuckerberg is being arrogant and condescending.

Perhaps the new privacy controls will prove sufficient. Perhaps Facebook’s pushing our culture away from privacy will end up being a good thing. The way the company is going about it makes me very uncomfortable, though, and some of the changes are clearly bad. It is clearly bad to no longer allow people to keep the pages they subscribe to private on Facebook.

This major reversal, backed-up by superficial explanations, makes me wonder if Facebook’s changing philosophies about privacy are just convenient stories to tell while the company shifts its strategy to exert control over the future of the web.

Facebook’s Different Stories

First the company kept user data siloed inside its site alone, saying that a high degree of user privacy would make users comfortable enough to share more information with a smaller number of trusted people.

Now that it has 350 million people signed up and connected to their friends and family in a way they never have been before – now Facebook decides that the initial, privacy-centric, contract with users is out of date. That users actually want to share openly, with the world at large, and incidentally (as Facebook’s Director of Public Policy Barry Schnitt told us in December) that it’s time for increased pageviews and advertising revenue, too.

The Flimsy Evidence

What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging “and all these different services that have people sharing all this information.” That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It’s made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook.

Facebook’s Barry Schnitt told us last month that he too believes the world is becoming more open and his evidence is Twitter, MySpace, comments posted to newspaper websites and the rise of Reality TV.

But Facebook is bigger and is growing much faster than all of those other things. Do they really expect us to believe that the popularity of reality TV is evidence that users want their Facebook friends lists and fan pages made permanently public? Why cite those kinds phenomena as evidence that the red hot social network needs to change its ways?

The company’s justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren’t credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they “just went for it,” to use Zuckerberg’s words from yesterday.

(Why didn’t Arrington press Zuckerberg on stage about this? The rise of blogging is evidence that Facebook needs to change its fundamental stance on privacy?)

This is Very Important

Facebook allows everyday people to share the minutiae of their daily lives with trusted friends and family, to easily distribute photos and videos – if you use it regularly you know how it has made a very real impact on families and social groups that used to communicate very infrequently. Accessible social networking technology changes communication between people in a way similar to if not as intensely as the introduction of the telephone and the printing press. It changes the fabric of peoples’ lives together. 350 million people signed up for Facebook under the belief their information could be shared just between trusted friends. Now the company says that’s old news, that people are changing. I don’t believe it.

I think Facebook is just saying that because that’s what it wants to be true.

Whether less privacy is good or bad is another matter, the change of the contract with users based on feigned concern for users’ desires is offensive and makes any further moves by Facebook suspect.

See also: Facebook’s privacy vs. real-world privacy: two different things.

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Is your podcast listening experience less than fabulous? If it is, you should check out HuffDuffer, a social discovery and organization service for podcast files.

The service was expertly built by UK designer Jeremy Keith and you’ll know you’re in for a remarkable experience when you go through the sign-up process. HuffDuffer will make you smarter and it’s fun to use. Check out our 5 minute video tour of this remarkable service below.

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Come be my friend and let’s share great podcasts at http://huffduffer.com/marshallkirkpatrick.

Don’t Miss: The Favorite Podcasts of the ReadWriteWeb Community.

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One month ago Google unveiled five big new technologies in one day – and then launched real-time search that afternoon. One of those five was something called Near Me Now, and it just went live moments ago.

The feature lets Google grab your geographic location and display restaurants, coffee shops, bars, ATM machines and more in your immediate vicinity. It’s available today for both iPhone and Android users. It’s enough to make a person bookmark Google.com, instead of just Googling through the browser search bar.

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This feature is much more useful than Google Latitude and it’s more lightweight than launching Google Maps. It probably doesn’t bode well for established local mobile search apps like Yelp or for innovative new ones like NextStop. Those are a lot of fun, but Google’s Near Me Now is good enough, it’s fast enough and gosh darn it, I think people are going to like it.

Next: See four more awesome new technologies Google unveiled along with Near Me Now.

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FluidApp is what’s called a Single Site Browser and is a great way to pull key websites you use throughout the day out of your primary browser and onto your Mac dashboard as standalone applications. It’s super easy for anyone to use. The service has a thriving community of users – I have 10 Fluid browsers running on my computer right now and wouldn’t want to work without them. In fact, I’m writing this blog post from Movable Type inside a Fluid Browser.

In a quiet mid-December move, FluidApp developer Todd Ditchendorf put “most of the code behind Fluid” up on Github under an open source license. That’s very good news – new developments are already coming fast and furious. If you haven’t checked out Fluid before, now is a great time.

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There’s something magical about the way single site browsers let you use different web apps. They don’t get lost in tabs. They don’t fall prey to browser crashes. You can put a handsome icon in your doc to jump over to them.

Windows users looking for a similar experience should check out Bubbles or Mozilla’s Prism.

Now that Fluid for the Mac is open source though, it will be very exciting to see what features are added next. Creator Ditchendorf says he has some more exciting plans under his hat but nothing to show off yet. Watch this space.

What’s your favorite Fluid App? One of my favorites is LazyFeed.

Next: 15 Fluid Apps You Can Build For Your Business.

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Facebook released an upgrade of its excellent iPhone app today and there were two very big changes. Push notifications will now notify you whenever people send you messages, tag you in a photo or comment on your messages – whether you’re looking at your phone at the time or not. That is going to change the Facebook user experience dramatically, increasing sychronous conversation and engagement on the site.

More importantly, Facebook added the ability to sync your phone’s local contacts with your Facebook contacts list. Remember when Facebook kicked blogger Robert Scoble off of the site for exporting his contacts’ emails in bulk? The company said it was important that users maintain control over their contact info. Apparently it doesn’t feel that way about phone numbers any more.

Update: Facebook has contacted us and said that the app in fact does not export the phone numbers found on Facebook profiles to the iPhone. It is only exporting profile photos and links to Facebook profiles, associating those with phone numbers you already have on your phone. I was confused when writing about the new sync feature and wrote this post under the mistaken belief that Facebook contacts and the attached phone numbers were being exported. That would have been interesting, but that’s not in fact what’s happening. I apologize for getting the story wrong.

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The syncing feature is very useful and sends to your iPhone peoples’ profile photos, phone numbers when available and a link to load a contact’s profile in the Facebook app. It does not export email addresses though, oddly enough. Emails have been obscured as an image to prevent machine export from Facebook, but phone numbers haven’t. Now that Facebook itself exports the numbers, anyone could take them off of a phone and do anything with them.

This Summer when the slick new Facebook iPhone app was launched, developer Joe Hewitt told us that Facebook to iPhone contact syncing was coming – but said it was “a Terms of Service thing more than a technical thing.” Hewitt has since stopped working on the app due to frustration with Apple. But what happened to the Terms of Service objections?

The funniest part? When you’re doing the bulk export to sync, the Facebook app requires that you agree to the following text: “if you enable this feature, contacts from your device will be sent to Facebook and your friends’ names, phots, and other info from Facebook will be added to your iPhone adress book. Please make sure your friends are comfortable with any use you make of their information.” (Emphasis added.)

Ha! Is that all it takes to make export of Facebook users’ info ok? Well let’s apply this to some other forms of data while we’re at it, shall we?

A number of theories could explain what’s going on:
1. Facebook has changed its mind about user data privacy and control. The company is certainly pushing users towards being more open than ever before.
2. Facebook was never really serious about privacy, the ban against exporting friends’ information was just a matter of corporate control and privacy was a ruse to justify it.
3. Something else is happening that we don’t know about yet. We’ve contacted Facebook for a response, we’ll update this post if we get one.

That said – this is a really convenient feature. It’s very handy to take a quick gander at someone’s Facebook Wall before calling them on the phone. The ability to do that is going to make Facebook much more important in my every day life. In other words, you should add me as a friend on Facebook so I can put you in my iPhone. (You should also become a fan of ReadWriteWeb on Facebook, while you’re at it.)

Like it or not, honest or not, this is going to make Facebook much more useful for those of us who operate in the public sphere. Even most of us though, and certainly the bulk of the hundreds of millions of people who signed up for Facebook-the-private-social-network, do have some use for a degree of privacy. Each time another bit of that is taken away, it makes you wonder how long the rest of it will last for.

Next: What’s coming next to the Facebook iPhone app? This Summer developer Joe Hewitt named 3 things that were coming soon and this update includes 2 of them. What’s still on the list? Read on to find out.

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Adam D’Angelo was a programming genius who knew Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in high school, became the young company’s first CTO and has just begun to unveil his new startup company, Quora. Built by D’Angelo and a team of crack young engineers, Quora is a real-time enabled Q&A site. The company calls itself “A continually improving collection of questions and answers.” In our very early testing it’s a pleasure to use, but we’re going to share screen shots with you tonight and write about it in depth after more extensive use tomorrow.

Is this the next Facebook?
Probably not – but it does look pretty fabulous. The service is still in closed beta (we’ve been trying to get in for months) but here’s some screenshots that show some key features.

Update: We’ve got a limited number of invites to offer. See this post for details.

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Quora is a little like Aardvark, the social Q&A service founded by ex-Googlers and rumored to be in Google’s acquisition sights, and it’s a little like Stack Overflow, the carefully crafted Q&A site for programmers that’s shot through the roof with reader interest.  It’s definitely different though.  

Co-founder Charlie Cheever says it’s built on Tornado, the real-time infrastructure built by FriendFeed, then bought and open sourced by Facebook. That’s a nice touch.

Here’s what we’ve seen so far. Click these screenshots to get a bigger view of each of them. There are more coming up. We’ll do our best to offer invites tomorrow morning.

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New rules from the Federal Trade Commission, requiring bloggers to disclose free gifts from companies whose products they review, came into effect on December 1st and the first major announcement of 2010 just occurred today.

The Google Nexus One mobile phone was unveiled this afternoon and all the members of the press who were on-site for the announcements received free phones from Google. This is the most-anticipated phone to hit the market in years. It’s like a unicorn sparkling with magic, perhaps. Almost no one at all has disclosed getting a free unit in writing their reviews.

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The idea is that receiving free goods from a vendor makes a writer more likely to write positively about a product than they would otherwise. Readers deserve to know if a writer has a financial interest in the company or has received free stuff, so that the readers can take product reviews with gifts associated with a grain of salt. Some people believe that this is essential to safeguard the trustworthiness of media in a “new media” era, others believe it is unfair to small-time bloggers who deserve a chance to profit from their writing just like the pros do.

In this case, though, it’s the pros we’re talking about. Blogger Robert Scoble tells us that all the attendees were given a choice: receive the phone as a gift or sign an agreement to borrow a Nexus One on loan for 30 days. Scoble signed up for the loaner.

VC blogger Fred Wilson wrote in his post “I received a gift from Google. It was a Nexus One.” Michael Arrington has said that TechCrunch will give away the phone he received at the press event. Scanning over Techmeme’s survey of coverage, we’re unable to find anyone else who makes mention of the freebie.

It may be the case that big-name tech review bloggers like Walt Mossberg or Engadget are just expected to always send back the review copies of things they get and so there’s no reason to disclose on every post. (Here’s Mossberg’s ethics page, where he says he never accepts free gifts. He also makes more money than all but a few journalists ever have in history, for what it’s worth.)

It may be that all the press who got a Google Phone today is planning on giving the phones back in 30 days. How should disclosures be handled though if you’re writing an article and you haven’t decided whether you are going to send something back as a loaner or keep it?

Here at ReadWriteWeb, we try hard to always make casual but clear mention when we have a financial interest in a company we are writing about. We try hard to mention the same if we are writing about a competitor to a company we have a financial interest in. And we always do our best to disclose it if we ever get free stuff from vendors we write about. That doesn’t happen very much.

Sometimes the lines aren’t clear, either. The community manager at Postrank.com sent me a sock monkey she made last year and I write about that company often. (I use it daily for essential work.) I’ve never mentioned that sock monkey before, though.

This is a phone made of pure sunlight and hype, though. Is it a poor reflection on the FTC’s new disclosure requirements that so few have disclosed their free Google Phones, or is it a poor reflection on our group of tech bloggers?

Discuss

OpenID, the open standard for federated user identity across multiple websites, is led by the OpenID Foundation. That organization announced the election of its newest Board members today. These are the people who will be moving and shaking OpenID on a policy and standards level.

While systems like Facebook Connect and Twitter Auth are making fast progress in offering website users easy access to their primary identity, social and activity data when visiting sites all around the web – OpenID technology is making progress as well. Here are the three new leaders elected to help advance that agenda.

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The OpenID Foundation has both Community and Corporate members. There is always one more community member than there is corporate members. You can see the as yet un-updated list of all the members here. Below are the three newly elected members.

Marc Frons, CTO for New York Times digital operations
At LinkedIn (Past gigs include Dow Jones, AOL and SmartMoney.com)
On Twitter (Joined April, 2009)
On Times People, the NYT link sharing network

Daniel Jacobson, Director of Application Development at NPR
On LinkedIn.
On Twitter.
Joined July, 2008, communicates with @nprtechteam, @magicmerl, @acarvin and @khopper.

John Bradley, engineer
On LiveJournal. Works on OpenID for government.

Discuss

Let’s say you’re a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you’re a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you’ve got some kind of weird baking fetish or academic interest.

Is there any way to ramp up your knowledge of these fields, fast, other than the “Google and wander” method? We think there is. Below you’ll find step-by-step instructions, with screen shots, for the process we use when we want to get smart about a new field in a hurry.

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Editor’s note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we’ll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year – and ahead to what next year holds – we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It’s not just a best-of list, it’s also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

Works With Just About Anything

We’ll use the field of Education as our example, because there is a lot of activity there and we presume we’ve got more educators as readers here than butchers or candlestick makers. These methods can be applied to discovering the hottest people and topics in social media in any field, though.

If you doubt that these kinds of steps could help in your line of work – check out this post, where we found the best work-related RSS feeds for Fire Inspectors and Physical Therapists, just to prove that we could.

In the following 13 steps, we’ll walk you through how we identify top blogs on any topic, how we quickly figure out what their most popular recent posts have been about, how we incorporate their blog archives into our knowledge about the field and how we find where else they are participating in conversation around the web. Going through the whole process takes us less time than it took us to write this post.

No end of variations are possible, of course, on this method – but we expect a lot of readers will find this useful. People new to social media are often frustrated when they are told to “join the conversation” – because they aren’t sure where to find the conversation. Here’s how we find and track the most popular conversations in niche fields. Popularity isn’t a perfect judge of quality by any means, but it’s a good place to start from.

Is this post a cheat sheet? Maybe, but we think of it as a way for you to make your cheat sheet on whatever sector you follow.

Find The Most Popular Blogs in Your Field

There are many different ways to identify the top blogs in a given field, systematically, but some methods work better than others depending on the niche you’re looking at. We compared six of our favorite methods in this post. Here, we found that visiting http://delicious.com/tag/blog+teaching gave us good results. By default the URLs are listed in reverse chronological order – the most recent items that anyone has bookmarked and have ever been called both "blog" and "teaching" will appear first. In the image above you can see that we’re running two Greasemonkey scripts called Autopagerize and Sort By Popularity. Greasemonkey is really easy to use, see our post How to Learn to Use Greasemonkey in 5 Minutes.. These scripts let us open multiple pages of bookmarks all at once and then sort them in order of popularity.

So we did that, then scanned down the top several pages of most popular items tagged both "blog" and "teaching." We tried words other words like "education" as well. Each time we found a good site, we copied the link to it and went to step two.

Add The Feeds to a Reader

We like to use Netvibes to build collections of feeds because it’s easy. Click on "add items" then "add feed" and paste in the link to the top blog you found. Netvibes will auto-discover the RSS feed for the site, often multiple variations but it shouldn’t matter which one you choose. We pick "RSS 2.0" just because it’s the most standard. Add it to your page and then go back to Delicious to find more sources.

We repeated the discovery step until we found about 10 good blogs to subscribe to. Then we visited those blogs and looked at their "blogrolls" or sidebar links to their favorite blogs. We found a number of good sources to include in our list that we had never heard of before. One was a good looking blog about education and technology that was written in Spanish, so we grabbed its feed and ran it through Mloovi.com to have it automatically translated into English, then put that translated feed into Netvibes.

Once you’ve got a good collection of top blogs in that Netvibes "tab" it’s time to get it out of there. You can read the blogs in Netvibes, but there’s more that we’re going to do with these blogs. When you’re in the "add feed" screen, you’ll see an "OPML Export" link. OPML (Outline Processor Markup Language) is the format that reading lists are imported and exported from feed readers in. It’s really simple. Export it to your dekstop and then move onto the next step below. We’re now going to edit an OPML file – but don’t be scared! It’s easy, we promise. Anyone can do it.

Pull Out Your New Tab’s Feeds

This step assumes you’ve using Netvibes, or some other start page, for other things in addition to this project. If that’s not the case, skip to the next step. We use Netvibes for a number of different things, so when we put together a new collection of feeds in it and want to export them, we have to deal with the fact that our whole collection of feeds in all our tabs gets exported. Simply search for the title of your tab in the file, then delete everything outside of that section! Everything except the very beginning and end of the file, that is. You can see what it should look like below, in the next step.

The Top of the OPML File.

Don’t delete the document type declaration of the body tags. Rename the title of the file and resave your document. Now don’t you feel smart? That was really easy though!

Now to Find the Hottest Posts from Those Top Blogs

Now that you’ve got an OPML file of the most popular blogs in your field, you can take that file over to Postrank.com and import it. You’ll need to create an account, and the service doesn’t allow you to manage multiple OPML files, so you may need to create a new account for every time you do something like this. I just create a new account with a GMail alias. Did you know that as while other apps, like Postrank, think that [email protected], [email protected] and [email protected] are all different emails – Gmail considers them the same thing? It’s true, that’s an alias and all emails sent to any of those will end up in the same inbox. So I create a new account for each OPML file (silly, but that’s how you’ve got to do some of these things) and then import my new OPML file.

Rank the Blog Posts With Robots!

Once you import that OPML file from your desktop, you’ll probably notice that Postrank has seen some of the feeds and not seen others. You should probably come back in an hour once they’ve processed the remaining feeds. What are they doing? They are checking every item in every feed to see how many comments it has, how many inbound links, how man times it’s been bookmarked in Delicious or Digg, how many times people Tweeted about it, etc. It’s then ranking each item in each feed on a scale of 1 to 10, relative only to the other items in that same feed.

What does this mean? It means you can have Postrank show you only the most popular posts in each of these top blogs, as determined by the blogs’ own communities of readers. That’s valuable information! It’s a very fast way to get up to speed on the latest hot topics in your field and by subscribing to the feeds filtered for popular items, you can pay peripheral attention to this field but know that you’ll never miss a really big story. Thanks Postrank!

If you’re interested in the Greatest Hits of Top Education Bloggers, here’s the OPML file we built with the feeds we’ve found so far: Top Education Blogs – Greatest Hits. Just right click and save that link, then upload it to your feed reader.

One of the best things about Twitter is its wildly creative ecosystem of applications built by people outside the company. Those apps have been constrained, though, by technical limits imposed on retrieving data from Twitter. Those limits are just about to be raised much higher and developers tell us that a whole new world of applications and features may become possible.

Twitter’s Director of Platform Ryan Sarver followed up on earlier public announcements this weekend with an email to developers explaining plans to raise the limit on the number of times an application can request information from Twitter for a single user to 10 times what it is today (from 150 req/hr to 1500/hr), and to offer everyone the same kind of paid access to the full “fire hose” of user updates that Google and Bing enjoy. People who build cool Twitter apps say this is very big news.

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The Twitter API gets hit every time an application wants to look up a user’s friends, their updates, their bio information and more. If you’re building an application that analyzes, cross-references and offers useful and fun insights and features based on those types of information, then current API limits are a constraint on how much analysis you can perform, bake-down and present to your users. Raising the limits on developer access to user information will enable more processing to be done behind the scenes and more magic to be presented to end-users of Twitter apps.

We spoke to some of our favorite developers about both the API limit increase and the fire hose access. Here’s what they had to say.

Iain Dodsworth, Tweetdeck

“Not wishing to overstate the case but these changes will allow for the next generation of Twitter app. So far the ecosystem has mainly concentrated on providing numerous new UIs onto Twitter (with pretty good success I might add). Potentially the 10x API will signal a shift towards richer functionality & service development: Twitter 2.0. [emphasis added]

“We’re already working on functionality which mines and analyses Twitter data within the application layer which wouldn’t be possible without a 10x API limit. I’m interested to see how the API scales with these new API limits.”

Loic Le Meur, Seesmic

“The increased API limits allow apps to come up with new interaction models for Twitter, and also to catch up on all the new features Twitter added (new RTs, lists), which couldn’t be supported properly with 150 requests per hour. ”

Justyn Howard, SproutSocial

“On the 10x increase – Not too many people bump into the authorized limit today unless they run multiple apps, but that was by design. All of us developers built in controls to limit the calls, which has left power users constantly slamming the refresh button. So this does a couple of things: 1. It allows developers to loosen the logic throttling API calls which will create a closer to real-time experience for the end-users. 2. Also opens some new opportunities on cool things we can do which require the user API vs. Search (some things you can’t get from the open API’s, you need to use the user’s account to do them). 3. Will open the doors for more secondary apps, where users previously couldn’t have more than one or two [different Twitter apps] open without hitting rate limits, you’ll see more people using niche apps in the background if they provide some capability beyond what Seesmic, Tweetie and Tweetdeck offer.”

On Access to the Firehose for Everyone

Kevin Marshall, co-founder of innovative social graph parsing application provider Wow.ly, builds apps that have a clear need for increased rate limits. “This is great,” he told us, “because the 150 per hour limit in conjunction with various API features (for example, the social graph API) makes it very difficult to pull off some more ‘advanced’ features I would like to build.”

On offering the Firehose to everyone, Marshall had an unusual and interesting response that demonstrates the maturity that this ecosystem is developing. It’s not a simple matter of everyone chasing thoughtlessly after the real-time stream.

“The more I do with and around social data, the less interested I seem to become in ‘realtime’ and the more interested I become in ‘over time.’ When I first started hacking on Twitter (and Facebook) apps, I was in love with the idea of parsing and analyzing data in real-time and I was very link/content focused. But the more I build and use these tools, the more I see the value in the history and the trails of the data set – especially when you consider that we are all living in a more asynchronous world then ever before thanks to things like blogs, Tivo, Hulu, iTunes, and other media-on-demand stuff. I don’t think it’s really so much about ‘what are you doing right now’ as it is ‘what have you done that’s interesting to me right now?’…and I think you get that by aggregating and analyzing.”

None the less, many developers will welcome the opening of previously selective fire hose access. Mailana founder Pete Warden says even his seed-funded company is looking forward to ponying up some cash.

“This may sound counter-intuitive as a starving entrepreneur,” he told us, “but the best guarantee the API will stay open and available is if Twitter makes money from it.”

“It gives developers the chance to move from being charity-cases to paying customers, and so gives Twitter a lot more reasons to listen to what we want. Anyone who wants to deal with the flood of data from the firehose already has to invest in some beefy hardware, (my server and bandwidth bills are thousands of dollars a month) so reasonable fees from Twitter shouldn’t raise the barrier to entry by much.”

These changes are expected to go live soon and we look forward to seeing what they enable new and old Twitter apps to do.

You can find and follow the RWW team on Twitter here.

Discuss

Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments.

The new app looks a lot like a less elegant, less customizable version of the Facebook iPhone app. There are a variety of useful new features, from faster invite sending to importing contact info to your phone, but the app remains based on the company’s mistaken desire of late to be your all-in-one social-media-messaging platform. It also fails to deliver the features that would make it most useful. If you’re looking for good news about new features, you can find it in the self-flattering company blog post. Here are the three things that disappoint me most about this new app; hopefully it’s a work in progress and will improve soon.

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What’s The Most Important Kind of LinkedIn Update? People Getting New Jobs!

For some reason LinkedIn will not deliver you a simple feed of the new jobs that contacts of yours have taken – not by email, not by RSS, not through its fancy new API and not on this new iPhone app. Update feeds are cluttered with imported ephemera from Twitter and all too often job changes are obscured behind the phrase “contact X has updated their profile.” They have? How did they update it? It’s maddening.

LinkedIn says it’s working on solving this problem, but it doesn’t seem to be a very high priority. Prompting users to click more and engage with a wider variety of message types seem more in line with LinkedIn’s strategy. The company clearly wants to be Facebook and Twitter for the business world – not just a place where we all go to find out essential work information that we use while doing other forms of social networking on other sites better suited for things like short, trivial messages.

Importing Contacts to Your Phone is Rudimentary

Perhaps LinkedIn isn’t to blame for this, but the ability to import LinkedIn contacts’ info onto your phone is rendered a whole lot less useful by the inability to merge that info with existing contacts. Say you’ve got someone’s name and phone number on your phone already – it’s a headache to pull in a person’s LinkedIn profile info and then merge the two manually.

Of course your phone number isn’t an optional field you can fill out on LinkedIn, so all those imported contacts will be people you’re unable to call. You won’t even be able to look them up on LinkedIn again from your phone’s contact list – peoples’ LinkedIn profile page URLs aren’t included in the contact info that gets imported.

There’s No Push Notifications

This is a professional application that people use on the iPhone – shouldn’t it include push notifications? LinkedIn is used by tons of sales people, for example – you know they’d like to get some of these updates pushed to them. As a writer, I would too.

Look at it this way. Last month my LinkedIn contact Tara Hunt changed her profile to show that she’s founded a new company called Shwowp. I want to know that, preferably right away. But I don’t know about it until a month later because I didn’t want to fish through a bunch of cross-posted Twitter updates inside LinkedIn to catch Tara’s news, and I didn’t want to click through three screens starting with the bland “Tara Hunt has updated her profile” in order to see if she’s happened to change jobs or just noted a new personal interest on her profile page.

When someone who has accepted my contact request changes jobs, I want a push notification about what the new job is and the option to call them on the phone immediately to discuss it. That doesn’t seem like too much to ask, and that’s when I’ll know that LinkedIn is really serving my professional life.

Update: LinkedIn’s Adam Nash, author of the company’s announcement blog post, responded on Twitter saying: “we’ve discussed all three of these enhancements internally. Some are harder than others. All in the queue…Rest assured, we wouldn’t have broken out profile updates into its own module if we didn’t have big plans for it. :)”

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Who was the first person to follow you on Twitter? According to the app FirstFollower.com, mine was someone I never followed back until today! Chances are you’re already following your first follower, but you probably don’t remember who they are and it’s interesting to find out.

Built by Russian developer Victor Babichev, FirstFollower appears to perform a function that’s relatively simple but in a much faster way than you can do manually. You could scroll back page by oddly numbered page through a person’s Followers list, but now this handy little app will do it for you. It’s also a very interesting way to find people who are close friends in real-life of Twitter users you admire.

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It’s hard to know for sure how accurate the service is, particularly since Twitter changed the way it displays followers earlier this year, but Twitter founder @ev is said to have been followed first by @dom, one of the handful of people credited with creating Twitter in the first place.

The first person to follow @barackobama? Cori Schlegel, a contract web developer who’s worked on several projects for tech journalist Steve Gillmor and probably a good guy to know.

Did you know that Mary Hodder was the first follower of both chronic innovator Chris Messina’s new Twitter account and our own Alex Williams? That’s enough to make you think that anyone Mary follows in the future deserves a close look.

Fun and useful! What more could you ask for from a lightweight little Twitter app? This is just a small example of the kind of social graph analysis that’s made possible by Twitter’s relatively open user data.

Don’t forget to come make friends with us at ReadWriteWeb on Twitter!

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Remember the story of the Russian police officers who went on YouTube and recorded videos condemning rampant corruption throughout the police force? The most prominent among them, Maj. Alexey Dymovsky, has not only been fired from his job – this morning he had fraud charges filed against him for allegedly embezzling $800 while working as a narcotics officer. Dymovsky’s public cry for help has been viewed almost 1 million times on YouTube.

Mark this down as an example of YouTube proving an effective way for whistle-blowers around the world to get the word out but not necessarily to stay safe in doing so. It’s long been hoped that easy online publishing would enable more people to challenge authoritarian governments – but it’s not clear yet whether those governments care.

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Of course it’s possible that Mr. Dymovsky really did embezzle $800 during his time as a cop and perhaps he should be thankful just for being alive so far after challenging corrupt police. None the less, it’s hard not to suspect that these charges were filed as more retribution for the YouTube videos. Being sent to prison after being so visibly critical of Russian police is presumably not something that would be good for Mr. Dymovsky.

Two years ago Egyptian police watch-dog blogger Wael Abbas had his videos pulled from YouTube because the company said they violated Terms of Service against showing violence on the site, though they were reposted after international criticism.

Will the Russian police officer Mr. Dymovsky receive the same type of international support now that he faces charges, perhaps effectively for speaking to the world? These early cases will likely help determine how useful these new, democratizing social media technologies really are in improving everyday peoples’ circumstances around the world.

If people in trouble can use social media to speak to the world at large, but the world doesn’t care, then perhaps we’ll all have to stick to playing Farmville instead of using this Internet thing for more important matters.

Discuss