Author: Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

In an astonishing statistic released this morning, Web analytics service Experian Hitwise reported that of all the Web searches performed in the United States on the top three search engines Google, Yahoo, and Bing during the first four weeks of March, about two percent on average are for the word facebook. For Yahoo and Bing, Another one percent is for facebook.com, and just less than one percent is for facebook login.

Coupled with statistics for the same month from analytics service comScore, Experian’s findings suggest that, from March 1 through March 27, searches for a way to get to Facebook other than through typing the address or clicking on a bookmark, accounted for as many as 175.84 million Google searches in the US, over 78.9 million Yahoo searches, and over 80 million Bing searches.

That means an estimated 2.2% of Americans’ Web searches are for their Facebook front page.

Before one goes chocking this figure up completely to massive user inexperience: Although typing facebook into the address bar of Firefox brings up the home page of Facebook.com, typing facebook into the address bar of Internet Explorer and Google Chrome brings up results for a Web search for Facebook using the browser’s default search engine, which for many users is typically Google.

On the other hand, it’s difficult to ignore that — once again coupling Experian’s and comScore’s numbers — some 18.5 million Yahoo searches, and nearly 20.2 million Bing searches, in the US for the first four weeks of March, were for google.

The fact that tens of millions of searches every month are for the location of one of the most obvious Web portals on the planet, posed a problem for a very legitimate news site, ReadWriteWeb, last February. A news article whose headline was “Facebook Wants to Be Your One True Login,” ostensibly about the social service incorporating friends lists from multiple other services, became one of the leading search results on Google and other sites, for users typing facebook login.

The result was pandemonium, as thousands of folks confused about their new destination, commented to ReadWriteWeb wondering where their Facebook had gone…and worse, lamenting the fate of all their farm animals and crops they had tended to in the game of Farmville, a Facebook app that demands persistent participation.

But what’s even more astonishing is that the parade of confused participants continues even as late as today (April 28), some eleven weeks after the article’s original date of publication. Commenters (some for real…some perhaps pretending) continue to protest against what they believe to be a change in Facebook’s format, including redecorating from blue to red, still pleading, “How do I log in?” Protesters join a sea of equally sad lampooners ridiculing the confused patrons along with, more recently, unsolicited advertisements from attention seekers.

Learning the lesson from this experience and leveraging their own gains from it, a number of sites have renamed or retitled themselves “Facebook Login,” or something similar. Despite even that fact, the ReadWriteWeb article continues to be the #6 search result that Google provides, for the estimated 85.4 million US users who type facebook login every month.

That figure is astonishingly close to the number of people that Farmville reports as active users, as Web analyst and blogger Justin Kistner reported last month. Also putting two and two together, Kistner noted that the number of people Facebook reports to be playing Farmville in March (83.2 million) exceeds the number of people believed by independent estimates to be using Twitter (75 million).

Thus, if you couple these figures, the number of people who can’t find Facebook outnumber those who can find Twitter.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

A spokesperson for Microsoft’s legal department confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that a precise legal interpretation of the company’s patent agreement announced late yesterday with phone maker HTC is accurate, but interpretations of that announcement that imply Microsoft will charge royalties to HTC for its use of the Android operating system, are inaccurate.

“This agreement covers HTC’s use of Microsoft technology that may appear in Android,” the spokesperson told Betanews, affirming a specific interpretation of the language that we sought clarification on. As the announcement reads, “Microsoft Corp. and HTC Corp. have signed a patent agreement that provides broad coverage under Microsoft’s patent portfolio for HTC’s mobile phones running the Android mobile platform. Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will receive royalties from HTC.” (emphasis ours)

Our interpretation, which Microsoft affirmed, is that HTC will pay royalties to Microsoft for the use of technologies in phones that may (or may not) be adapted for use with Android…or, for that matter, any other mobile OS. Such an agreement enables HTC, for instance, to repurpose phones that were originally engineered for Windows Mobile, and also conceivably reuse software technologies such as HTC’s Sense UI (which the manufacturer is already doing), in Android-based phones.

The agreement takes the opposite approach from Apple, which sued HTC last month, claiming that it had misappropriated certain patented technologies from iPhone. Now, with an agreement in hand that effectively acknowledges Microsoft permitted HTC to use certain categories of its technologies — categories for which Apple claims exclusive rights — HTC may be able to counter-claim that those claims are not exclusive since Microsoft holds patents for which HTC pays royalties.

So the agreement could help HTC in its fight against Apple. But it does not, as the Associated Press suggested earlier today, make Microsoft a party to the suit, nor does it bring Android into that mess.

The legal distinction here may seem trivial, but from another angle, it’s actually colossal: The agreement permits HTC, as Microsoft confirmed to Betanews, to continue to use the technologies it’s already using and for which it’s already paying and will continue to pay royalties, in other phones besides the Windows Mobile-based models. From that angle, that means Microsoft is not permitting HTC to use the Microsoft technology that appears in Android (assuming it does appear there at all). It means Android may be adapted by HTC for use in other phones that have Microsoft technology.

That’s not to say Microsoft does not have outstanding concerns about Android’s use of possibly patented technologies, as the company’s deputy general counsel, Horacio Gutierrez, told Betanews in a statement late this morning. There certainly are concerns, and they may yet be resolved.

“Microsoft has a decades-long record of investment in software platforms. As a result, we have built a significant patent portfolio in this field, and we have a responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to ensure that competitors do not free ride on our innovations,” Gutierrez told us. “We have also consistently taken a proactive approach to licensing to resolve IP infringement by other companies, and have been talking with several device manufacturers to address our concerns relative to the Android mobile platform.”

Though Gutierrez did not provide names, of course, one of those other manufacturers may be Motorola. Last year at this time, Motorola suspended its plans to release a certain class of phone, code-named “Heron,” for Windows Mobile 6.5, opting to release it during the latter half of 2009 under Android. It never did so, perhaps because an agreement such as the one reached yesterday with HTC, has yet to be drawn.

In June 2007, Microsoft entered into a license agreement with LG, which at the time was said to cover the use of Microsoft technologies in devices that may include Linux. That broad agreement may have been a model for the HTC agreement yesterday, and it may also be covering LG right now. LG officially announced its first Android phones just today, the SU2300 slider and the SU950 widescreen, for debut this spring in South Korea and possibly Europe.

Unfortunately for the conspiracy theorists, the HTC/Microsoft agreement does not appear to be a line-in-the-sand battle against Apple or Google. Rather, it’s good news for Android, as it means Microsoft is willing to extend its technology to other platforms (naturally, for a price). The presumption that Microsoft is taking sides against Android supporters, or that it’s forcing them to pay Microsoft for their use of Android, is false.

Tim Conneally contributed significant facts and reporting for this story.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The problem for independent video producers and enthusiasts has been the inability to encode videos that can be burned to Blu-ray Discs, and then actually played on BD consoles. That changed yesterday as Jason Garrett-Glaser, the leader of the open source x264 project that has seen success with DVDs, announced his team was able to encode a playable Blu-ray video using entirely free software.

That disc is being released as a kind of “Hello, World” effort for the high-definition format. It contains free videos folks have probably seen before, such as the Creative Commons licensed cartoon “Big Buck Bunny.” But the image was designed to be small enough (2 GB) to be burned to either a DVD or a BD, to further prove the software’s versatility.

“With x264’s powerful compression, as demonstrated by the incredibly popular BD-Rebuilder Blu-ray backup software, it’s quite possible to author Blu-ray disks on DVD9s (dual-layer DVDs) or even DVD5s (single-layer DVDs) with a reasonable level of quality,” Glaser wrote yesterday. “With a free software encoder and less need for an expensive Blu-ray burner, we are one step closer to putting HD optical media creation in the hands of the everyday user.”

The x264 codec utilizes independently derived math to produce video that follows the H.264 format, so it can be decoded using commercial software and console firmware as though commercial encoders had rendered it. Independent tests indicate obvious superiority with handling artifacts and moving objects compared to Windows Media Video, especially in the comparison featured on this page (warning, several big images included, plus the site hosting it appeared to be a victim of DNS hijacking at the time we checked it).

The most recent comparison of average rate distortion curves (RD curves) over variable bitrates, by the Graphics & Media Lab of Moscow State University (PDF available here), reveals somewhat superior performance from last year’s permutation of the x264 encoder, including against expensive competitors like MainConcept H.264. Engineers conducting the test suggested that x264 could actually be used as a benchmark against which all other codecs in the last five years could be judged.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Amid news yesterday of a discovery by an independent programmer of what appeared to be another door left open for Web apps to access Facebook users’ personal data, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D – N.Y.) called upon the Federal Trade Commission to take the next step in forming the equivalent of a US “privacy commissioner.”

It was the first step in a one-two punch, as Sen. Schumer later joined three other Democrat senators in penning a letter to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, calling upon him to make his site’s privacy policy clearer and tighter, in order to give the FTC less to scrutinize.

“I am asking the FTC to use the authority given to it to examine practices in the disclosure of private information from social networking sites and to ensure users have the ability to prohibit the sharing of personal information,” reads the statement from Schumer’s office yesterday. “If the FTC feels it does not have the authority to do so under current regulations, I will support them in obtaining the tools and authority to do just that.”

The press office cited recent Facebook issues only made more prominent after last week’s unveiling of the Open Graph platform, which enables other Web sites to opt into Facebook’s sharing system through the inclusion of codes in their <META> tags and new API function calls. The functionality is being marketed to prospective Facebook partners as instant personalization. As Facebook’s updated privacy policy reveals, users can indeed opt out of other sites’ or applications’ instant personalization…on an app-by-app basis.

That means users of sites where Facebook’s “Like” system has just been deployed, will be instantly personalized…until they explicitly report they’d prefer not to be, thank you very much.

“We appreciate that Facebook is attempting to integrate the functionality of several popular Web sites, and that Facebook has carefully selected its initial partners for its new ‘instant personalization’ feature,” reads the Democrat leaders’ letter to Zuckerberg, reprinted this morning by Politico. “We are concerned, however, that this feature will now allow certain third party partners to have access not only to a user’s publicly available profile information, but also to the user’s friend list and the publicly available information about those friends. As a result of the other changes noted above, this class of information now includes significant and personal data points that should be kept private unless the user chooses to share them. Although we are pleased that Facebook allows users to opt-out of sharing private data, many users are unaware of this option and, moreover, find it complicated and confusing to navigate. Facebook should offer users the ability to opt-in to sharing such information, instead of opting out, and should make the process for doing so more clear and coherent.”

Also signing their name to this morning’s letter were Sens. Michael Bennet (D – Colo.), Mark Begich (D – Ark.), and Al Franken (D – Minn.). The senators closed by saying they look forward to the FTC examining this and the other issues they raised, but would hope Facebook would act in the meantime.
The discovery that some private data may be inadvertently shared by Facebook anyway was made by a Google employee named Ping, who posted to his Web site this Facebook app. Essentially, the app acts as a catalog that reveals every data item that is publicly accessible through Facebook’s API (which Ping identifies as the Graph API, but which has actually been a part of Facebook’s platform since before last week).

On Monday, Ping wrote, “Yesterday, I discovered something strange while playing with Facebook’s new Graph API: The API was showing a list of my events, and it seemed that anyone could get this list. Today, I spent a while checking to make sure I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t opt in for this. I even tried setting all my Privacy Settings for maximum privacy. But Facebook is still exposing the list of events I’ve attended, and maybe your events too.”

Ping accompanied his post with a screenshot of some of Mark Zuckerberg’s personal events, pulled up through his API tool.

Betanews tried using the tool to verify Ping’s claims, especially since he later reported that the tool works for some people and not for others. For us, it did not reveal personal data for accounts where personal data was blocked, for any account we tested. In other words, at least for us, Facebook was doing its job.

Early Tuesday morning, Ping reported back that the tool is no longer revealing anyone’s events. “Thanks to the Facebook folks for improving their stuff!” he wrote. Commenters to Ping’s blog also noted that users’ events that were exposed over the weekend, do not appear to be exposed now.

Either a certain someone read that letter, or he may be getting a very interesting visitor. The Hill‘s Kim Hart reported this morning that Deputy Secretary of Defense William Lynn will convene a special meeting on cybersecurity, at Zuckerberg’s office in Palo Alto.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Research In Motion could deliver sixteen completely new smartphones with built-in telekinesis amplifiers, but it would not satisfy the legions of BlackBerry users who depend on its reliable messaging ability, who need a real Web browser that shows real Web pages, and who would appreciate a media player that doesn’t look ported from a Commodore 64.

Why RIM officials can’t just deliver the news to WES conference attendees directly is puzzling, but during this second day of the three-day event, the Day 2 keynote offers RIM users a two-minute quick-cut video of BlackBerry OS 6.0, alongside a parade of new enterprise apps. Granted, enterprise apps are important, but what BlackBerry has been lacking this past year is a proper platform for them.

In an either ingenious or perverted scheme, the two-minute video released today only shows the new BB OS 6 environment in a semi-transparent frame, floating freely in front of the torso of someone who, to paraphrase the show’s name, thinks he or she can dance. We’ve cleaned up some of the images and straightened them out as best we can, and what we find are many of the now-basic smartphone features that BB users have been screaming for, presented in a classy, but tasteful motif complete with BlackBerry’s typical lack of useless frills or adornment.

We’ve tried as best we can to normalize the images from the “BlackBerry 6 Sneak Peak” [sic] video (the dancers still appear behind them…trust me, they’re not included). Users of other smartphones may snicker a bit as BlackBerry users (including myself) rejoice at the inclusion of the following built-in features, for the first time:

• A media player with downloadable album covers and categorical media library.
• A YouTube app with searchable video.

• The ability to play back said video in landscape mode and stereo sound.

• A categorical, searchable library for photographs.
• A calendar with usable meeting data that appears to sync not just the data, but the connections (who’s invited, where’s the location), very likely (though not officially confirmed) with Microsoft Outlook. Yes, BlackBerry does already have a reliable manual sync function, and enterprise users can deploy ActiveSync over the air. But Outlook 2010 expands users’ capabilities to organize meetings, and it’s important that this extra level of functionality be added to synchronization as well.



• A tabbed Web browser. No, not Opera Mini, but something that has fluid scrolling and that’s plainly legible at a distance of 18 inches. A RIM spokesperson did confirm to Betanews this morning that the new browser does use the WebKit engine (also found in Safari for iPhone), and that for multitouch-capable models, pinch-to-zoom will be supported here and throughout the system.

• A single application for maintaining multiple social network feeds, including Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Google Talk, AIM, Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, and BlackBerry Messenger. We don’t know at present whether this list is extensible with add-ons, to support other services such as LinkedIn and Plaxo.
• Individual apps for social network services including Twitter. This particular picture (above right) is important because it also demonstrates how BB OS 6 replaces the PC-style popup context menu with this graphical, more touchable, easier to interpret version.

Though we have no official confirmation of this yet, much of the BB buzz is centering on the platform’s apparent new use of “flick gesturing” or “gesture flicking.” Here, models that include the new mini-trackpad (for instance, the Pearl 9100 and Bold 9650, introduced yesterday) should interpret flick movements as commands. The video showed dancers trying to demonstrate this kind of jerky, flicky motion, though it’s possible some viewers mistook those motions for choreography.

The running live blog of this morning’s keynote event where the video premiered, on the forums of CrackBerry.com, indicate that very little new information about the platform itself was revealed today. RIM’s platform VP is scheduled to speak tomorrow, and hopefully he doesn’t dance.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

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Make your connection to Microsoft Windows Home Server “Vail” Public Beta through Fileforum now.

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One of Silverlight video’s biggest advantages to date has been the server’s ability to tweak the bitrate of video playback as it’s being played back, and as the bandwidth of the connection varies. It’s the smooth streaming feature that premiered last June with Silverlight 3. Now, with Silverlight 4 already well under way, Microsoft today premiered a public beta of a forthcoming release of Windows Home Server, which will be capable of smooth-streaming video to any Silverlight-enhanced client via the Web.

With the new server software, code-named “Vail” (as in Colorado, not “veil” as in fabric cover), the new generation of DLNA home video and audio components — including Blu-ray players and notebook PCs — will be able to receive “pushed” setup information through the home’s wireless router, enabling those components to connect to the wireless network. It will be the new Windows Home Server that does the pushing, via the “Play To” functionality that already premiered in Windows 7 but has yet to be tested in a full server setting.

“DLNA enables your home server to participate in a ‘Play To’ environment as a Digital Media Server (DMS),” reads the reviewer’s guide to the “Vail” server, published today. Other DLNA-compatible devices — TVs, stereos, your Xbox 360 (in Windows Media Center Mode) and more — can automatically find your home server from within your home network and then stream videos, music, and pictures on demand from it.”

“Vail” will also be the first Home Server rendition that plays the role the system should have been born to play: captain of the Homegroup. For the first time in Microsoft’s history, the Homegroup feature has made network connectivity actually easy. With “Vail,” libraries enrolled in the Homegroup become pushed to users’ computers throughout the home, and shared by user name rather than system ID.

The Console app to which users have grown accustomed for managing backup file locations and media libraries, has been replaced in “Vail” with a completely redone Silverlight app. While the built-in version of the new Dashboard looks simple enough, it’s actually the browser-based version that looks more dynamic. If it reminds you of apps you’ve seen recently on Windows Live, it’s not by accident. It gives “Vail” a kind of media server home page, from which the user can set up shop, literally becoming her own broadcaster.

Streaming audio from your Home Server to a client that runs Silverlight, also enables this animated album cover showcase. What will be interesting to see is whether mobile platforms on which Silverlight may run, will also be capable of presenting this same showcase. That could change the entire ballgame for many handset or netbook users who are currently stuck with substandard MP3 player apps. Imagine a media world where playback capabilities and experience are determined by your server, not by your device’s manufacturer.

(And yes, the question will inevitably come up: When a home broadcaster streams content online, including to herself, will she owe royalties? No, that is not meant in sarcasm or as a joke.)

Microsoft advises that “Vail” beta testers use clean installs only — very clean, in fact. The company would rather you not install “Vail” on a hard drive that has anything on it, including another operating system — wipe the partition clean first. Keeping true to its promise made in 2008, this server kernel is 64-bit only. A minimum 160 GB hard drive is required, which is fair enough if you stick to building a test system using parts made within the last three years.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

A slow, but steadily increasing, trickle of messages on Apple’s iPad discussion forums appears to confirm the findings of Princeton University’s Network Systems engineers, who dealt this month with a rapid influx of iPads over a concentrated area. What they’ve been noticing is that Wi-Fi on iPads that are set for dynamic DHCP leases — assignments of IP addresses to clients for limited time periods — are failing to renew those leases when time expires, often after just a few hours.

As a result, users’ iPads are stuck with the message “Connecting…” and no easy, or apparent, way to renew their network connections. Although Princeton discovered the problem as early as April 4, and Apple forum discussions began April 11, Apple’s only suggestion has left some customers struggling.

“Apple iPads began appearing on Princeton University’s campus soon after they become available April 3, 2010. On April 4, we observed our first DHCP client malfunction from an iPad. Over the next few days, additional iPads malfunctioned in the same way,” reads an ongoing page on the subject from Princeton’s Office of Information Technology. “The malfunction we see is that the iPad uses DHCP to obtain a lease, renews the lease zero or more times (as expected), but then continues using the IP address without renewing the lease further. The iPad allows the DHCP lease to expire, but it continues using the IP address after allowing the lease to expire. The incident continues for some time (typically hours); usually it ends when the iPad asks for a new DHCP lease, or the iPad disconnects from the network.”

Since the iPad was released, there have been a number of reported cases of weak Wi-Fi connectivity. But these cases don’t appear to have a common root, and in some instances, it appears users’ wireless routers were at fault, rather than the iPad. Some have suggested — and one site demonstrated with regard to dropping signals from Netflix — simply restoring Wi-Fi settings to factory defaults. One Australia-based consultant suggested setting Wi-Fi connectivity to “Auto,” and the positive public response made him something of an online hero.

But that’s not related to the DHCP lease case, which has a more defined profile. Some forum contributors report their network connectivity is stuck after putting their iPads to sleep for a while. That could be related to the Princeton issue, or it could be related to the cloud of weak Wi-Fi issues. Nonetheless, on April 5, Apple responded to the sleep problem by taking the Netflix route: resetting to default.

And since that time, volunteer supporters have been referring iPad owners with possibly related issues, such as the DHCP lease case, back to the April 5 message: Have you tried resetting to defaults? Other users with home routers have set their routers to static IP addresses, which they report solves the problem.

That doesn’t help Princeton, which runs a campus-wide network. As its OIT team explained late last week, it sets up dynamic IP addresses to expire no later than three hours after lease. “Shorter leases allow us to recover unused IP addresses rapidly, in turn permitting us to assign globally-routable IP addresses to clients without requiring Princeton to impose a NAT between wireless clients and the Internet,” the team’s iPad problem announcement page reads.

It goes on to chide some technology blogs for having reported that Princeton “banned” the use of iPads on campus, when it never did any such thing. The team’s later, in-depth explanation suggests that some on the team may resent the implication that Princeton is the one at fault here, at the very least for making an issue out of the “magical” iPad.

“We could choose instead to not take a pro-active stance to these kinds of issues. A more common approach is to ignore the kinds of problems caused by devices using IP addresses not leased to them, allowing such malfunctioning devices to cause sporadic mysterious network problems for customers as their IP addresses are ‘stolen.’ Sites that use that approach may take action only when a victim of a malfunctioning device chooses to complain. Most victims probably don’t complain because these kinds of problems appear random and short-lived to each victim, and often go away when they ‘try again.’ We feel that the stance we take ultimately benefits our customers, as it results in more reliable network service to the customers. It reduces the frequency that our customers experience network disruptions due to others’ malfunctioning devices.”

Princeton is not alone in having noticed the issue; a warning about iPad DHCP leasing turned up on this knowledge base page at LSU.

Probably gearing up for a round of “See, I Told You So” with reporters are members of Israel’s Ministry of Communications. A few weeks ago, it banned the import of iPads into the country, prior to Apple’s commencement of its distribution deal there with premium reseller iDigital. Though it was reported that iPads themselves were banned in Israel, in fact, it was the import of American versions of the device that the Ministry had banned, and then partly restored in an announcement Saturday (PDF available here).

“The scrutiny conducted by the Ministry technical team vis-à-vis Apple’s team, International laboratory and European counterparts confirmed that the device which could be operated in various standards will be operated in Israel in accordance to the local standards,” reads the Ministry spokesperson’s announcement.

But as TG Daily contributor Aharon Etengoff first noted, and Time Magazine later expounded on, iDigital is owned by Nehemia “Chemi” Peres, the son of Israel’s prime minister, Shimon Peres — a fact that was not lost on iPhone customers last year. An Israel-based commenter to the LA Times noted that iDigital had exclusive Israel sales rights to the iPhone, and only began selling it there for the first time in June 2009, well over two years after its worldwide introduction, at essentially full market prices.

That’s a total of three iPad interference problems, only one of which may have any real substance to it. That doesn’t mean it’s not real, though.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

For reasons still being debated in the press, Research In Motion was not the star of the last Mobile World Congress show in February. Evidently something wasn’t ready yet. But ahead of a smaller wireless conference in Orlando this week, RIM has plans to own the show.

This morning, the company announced two new models — not refurbished versions of existing models as some press sources have said, but new chasses with new components…just familiar brands. But spokespersons for the company tossed some bread crumbs that lead in the direction of more announcements, perhaps as soon as this afternoon. Word on the rumored BlackBerry OS 6.0 with a (real) Web browser, may be on the docket.

First, though, the company has set out some tasty hors d’oeuvres in the form of a slim new BlackBerry Pearl 3G. Its appeal is that it has many of the features of the bigger Bold, including the faster (for RIM) 624 MHz processor, 3.2 megapixel camera, 802.11n Wi-Fi, HSDPA support, and that cool new trackpad that won’t get gummed up with pocket lint like the older models. It’s the Pearl form factor without the “pearl,” and it’s black like the Bold (insert reference to Pirates of the Caribbean here).

The Pearl’s appeal to date has been its form factor — not wide like a sandwich loaf slice, but thinner than a bar of soap. The tradeoff has been the keyboard: There’s not enough room for the traditional BlackBerry QWERTY, so the new Pearl 9100 features a 20-key layout that, for some, takes some getting used to. An optional Pearl 9105 model includes a more traditional 14-key layout.

But both will incorporate SureType, which is the predictive typing system that’s all the rage on feature phones like the LG enV3 and enV Touch. The complaint we’ve heard in the past from BlackBerry SureType users has concerned speed, especially compared to the enV Touch which is rocket-fast. So we’ll see whether the new Pearls’ 624 MHz Xscale processors (loaded with apps) can handle the task. In Canada, the new Pearls are premiering today on the Rogers network.

The new BlackBerry Bold 9650 looks pretty much like the other two Bolds, until you turn it a little sideways. It’s just a little slimmer than the original Bold 9000, and a little taller than the newer 9700, so it may be ever-so-slightly more aesthetically pleasing…less like a ping-pong paddle. Neither older Bold model is being replaced.

Yet the 9650 isn’t decked out like the 9700, or even like the new Pearl — it’s not really a 3G phone. When RIM says it “supports” 3G, it’s referring to EV-DO, which is a bit more like “2.5G.” It’s a CDMA phone, and will premiere in the US on Sprint.

What we don’t know yet is which OS these new models will run, and that curiously obvious omission suggests that the number could be OS 6.0. Attendees of today’s Wireless Enterprise Symposium in Orlando are expecting a speech tomorrow morning from company co-CEO Mike Lazaridis. However, the show schedule features the company’s VP for product platform management, Alan Panezic, on the Wednesday morning docket.

In a keynote speech last Friday at a different conference altogether, Lazaridis gave attendees a very pointed hint at where his company will go next, perhaps this week: In distinguishing his company’s product line from that of Apple, with its iPad tablet, he said that there’s a certain class of customers who are waiting for the perfect blend of touchscreen technology with QWERTY keyboard control, who are sitting out the iPad.

In a transcript obtained by the Apple device blog TiPb, Lazaridis told TD Newcrest Technology Conference attendees, “The question you have to ask yourself is, when it comes to tablet [form factors], what market or what opportunities it’s solving, what problem is it solving, and is it just a replacement laptop? I think that’s a difficult one to judge…If you look at the surveys, you can see that a large amount of the customers that have purchased touchscreen devices in last two years intend to get a device with the QWERTY keyboard on it now. I mean, they’ve gotten to a point where they realize that a touchscreen alone is not enough, so that’s important.”

Similar surveys also show customers want a touchscreen phone with a reasonably working Web browser, which is something else this week’s conference attendees hope RIM will finally deliver.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

A process of elimination which has, apparently since February, cast aside a who’s-who of possible suitors, has left Lenovo as the only prospective suitor for Palm, Inc. still standing, after everyone else told Reuters no. It could mean Lenovo is genuinely interested, though it could also mean the only ones giving Palm any positive value…are in the press.

The thing about Lenovo is, it already has a smartphone. In fact, it debuted in its home country of China just last Tuesday, and it’s no slouch: It has a stupid name — LePhone — but it features the astounding 1 GHz Snapdragon processor that’s at the heart of HTC’s latest models, a widescreen AMOLED display, Wi-Fi, and an eye-catching QWERTY display with the D-pad in the middle. It was running Android 1.6 at CES in January, though reviewers say it should be running Android 2.x today. Arguably, Lenovo already has a phone that could defeat a Palm Pre Plus in a comparison test in its home country. And though analysts have said Palm could give Lenovo an entry point into the US market…wouldn’t it be more sensible to enter the market with the phone you’re already making?

If Lenovo’s phone is as groundbreaking as reviewers say it is, you might think the company wouldn’t need to purchase Palm even to remove a competitor from its midst. But NPD’s best analyst on the subject, Executive Director of Industry Analysis Ross Rubin, still sees a scenario where Palm could benefit Lenovo’s portfolio.

“Palm needs cash, time, and access to high-volume manufacturing resources; Lenovo could provide all of these as well as significant IP that it owns from the ThinkPad line,” Rubin told Betanews Friday evening. “Perhaps the best thing about Lenovo from a Palm product perspective is that it has been particularly early to announce a smartbook. WebOS could power such a device or be an alternative ‘quick boot’ operating system for ThinkPads, but these are not particularly strategic products or features for the company. Palm would open doors for Lenovo in the US handset market, but Linux rules the Chinese handset market, and PC makers getting into handsets tend to license the OS as they do with computers.”

As for the reciprocation — what Lenovo could do for Palm — Betanews Contributing Analyst Carmi Levy doesn’t see much of a payback. But that doesn’t mean Palm can afford the alternative: going it alone.

“I firmly believe Palm has exhausted its ability to fly on its own, and needs to be acquired in some capacity before it slips off the back of the mobile technology market treadmill,” Carmi told us today. “But the company can’t afford to simply say yes to the first suitor that waves enough dollars — or Euros, or Yen — in its face. The key issue here is fit, and I’m not convinced Lenovo would know what to do with Palm if it managed to win its corporate heart.

“The key criteria is core competency in building developer support and evolving the strategy beyond the hardware. While Lenovo certainly needs a way to extend its offerings beyond the PC market, and in that capacity would see Palm as a quick route to mobile bliss, it isn’t the top player on the developer front and as such would be a poor complement to Palm’s needs.”

Huawei is the Chinese telecom manufacturer that was first on many people’s lists to make the deal with Palm, with HTC a close second. However, Reuters apparently learned of Huawei’s interest in Palm when it learned from its source that it was no longer interested in Palm, after two months of negotiations no one knew about. Still, Carmi believes it’s too early to take HTC or Huawei out of the picture.

“HTC has been playing in this pond both directly and indirectly in bringing OEM and its own-branded handsets to market. It has a significantly shorter learning curve than Lenovo and stands a much more realistic chance of bringing to the table the kind of beyond-hardware competencies that Palm so desperately needs,” said Rubin. “Huawei is the dark horse here, but perhaps the one that offers the most compelling out-of-left-field story. It’s certainly the hungriest of the potential buyers, and as such would see a Palm buy as a global seal of credibility. It would probably be more willing than the others combined to invest whatever it takes to make Palm relevant again.”

Ross Rubin disagrees; although from his vantage point, there may have been at least something to a Huawei + Palm tie-up, the better names were probably taken off the table months ago. If there’s any hope left, he believes it’ll come from someone who’s both a dark, dark horse and a bright, white knight.

“Palm could be an asset to Huawei, but it is rather removed from the core business; Palm likely would not receive the kind of attention and expertise it needs within such a company,” Rubin told Betanews. “From a product fit perspective, RIM could have been a good suitor for Palm. It has strong market share in Palm’s native market, great access to the enterprise, a relatively open philosophy, and low barriers to application development, an area where RIM needs help. Like Palm, RIM has pursued vertically integrated portfolio diversification. But next week will likely bring news of the future of BlackBerry OS, to which RIM is committed, and there would have been cultural conflict.

“Developing and supporting a homegrown advanced operating system is an expensive undertaking. Microsoft, Google, and Apple can invest because the handset OS supports other vested interests the companies have. It’s often the case in instances like this that an unexpected buyer swoops in late in the game; all of the obvious candidates seem to lack the financing, flexibility, or fortitude.”

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

While bitterness continues over the implications of Sections 3.3.1 through 3.3.3 of Apple’s recently modified Developers’ Agreement (PDF available here, through the Electronic Frontier Foundation), there’s lingering suspicion about the indeterminate boundaries pointed to by the long-standing Section 3.3.14, which now applies to iPad content as well as iPhone.

“Applications may be rejected if they contain content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, sounds, etc.) that in Apple’s reasonable judgment may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory,” the section reads.

On the surface, that may seem perfectly reasonable, especially given the example the company chose to employ appears to set a standard respecting what some might call “the norms of decency.” But recent well-publicized rejections didn’t appear to have much to do with decency at all, including one it made last December that recently came to light (and that more recently has been reversed): the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Mark Fiore’s political cartoon app. In a letter to Fiore now made public, Apple cited section 3.3.14 as the basis for its decision, lumping caricatures of President Obama right in there with hardcore.

This while the makers of iFartMobile tout the creation of what it calls an “olfactic framework,” bringing to mind various aromas through the precise cataloguing and reproduction of associated sounds.

The cloud of controversy this issue has created — iFartMobile notwithstanding — is that the public attention it creates is an ecosystem unto itself. Being rejected, or perhaps just reject-worthy, is maybe the best free attention that an app can receive, as evidenced by the mention the olfactory app received on ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live last January.

In Germany, the daily news publisher Bild has been claiming censorship on the iPhone under 3.3.14. Citing unfair censorship of the news, Bild publisher Axel Springer issued a statement in February saying, “We consider Apple’s behavior to be unfair, arbitrary, bad for business and dangerous for freedom of the press.”

But as anyone in Germany who reads Bild knows, in addition to “the news,” it also features topless models. That may or may not be “porn,” though it may certainly classify as content that some folks don’t want to see. Of course, they don’t have to download the app, then.

That doesn’t explain why Playboy’s iPhone app was permitted. A quick check of the online edition of Bild this afternoon (we test content so you don’t have to) suggests Playboy’s content could actually be described as somewhat racier, and Bild‘s as very tame, as in “art museum.”

Washington Post columnist Rob Pegoraro, in a Fast Forward column online now but dated next Sunday, listed some of the other arbitrary-sounding rejections that Apple has made for some apps and some content (though perhaps not others) under Section 3.3.14, including a text-only English-language translation of the Kama Sutra of Vatsyayana. That led Pegoraro to wonder for a moment — never mind what Apple says explicitly, what do we think it says? Is there an understanding that Apple has the authority to remove the Washington Post‘s own iPhone app if, at some point, it objected to its content?

The Post‘s spokesperson told the Post‘s reporter, “This is our understanding.”

I asked Pegoraro today for clarification — certainly this doesn’t mean the Post is worried that Apple can censor its content, does it? No, he told me, he does not believe that’s a worry on the minds of Post management, and he’s not worried about it either. “The history of the App Store shows that Apple’s reviewers are at their inscrutable worst only when they think nobody’s looking,” Pegoraro told Betanews. “That said, I was glad to see that folks here realize the scope of the authority Apple’s granted itself to regulate the software selection for its mobile devices.”

A spokesperson for National Public Radio also told Pegoraro that it operates under a similar understanding with Apple, although it knows of no reason why Apple would want to censor NPR. These two admissions to Pegoraro led author Dan Gillmor to respond today in his Mediactive blog: “We now have confirmation from two of America’s most respected news organizations — the Post and NPR — that they willingly participate in a distribution/access ecosystem where the company that owns it can remove their journalism from that system for any reason it chooses. I suspect that the spokeswomen for the Post and NPR have technically violated the terms of their companies’ developers agreements with Apple even by saying that much. Which is, of course, part of the problem.”

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Many instances of malware on Windows-based systems masquerade themselves as system services — the various independent processes that respond to requests from both the operating system and applications with functions that users typically need. Network connectivity and printing are among the more common Windows services; and if you’ve ever perused the processes list of Task Manager (or, better yet, Process Explorer), you’ll find these processes are represented by the single .EXE file that hosts them, svchost.exe.

Any anti-virus database looking for a rogue system service will probably have to refer to svchost.exe as the process that launches it, even though that process is clearly part of Windows itself. On Wednesday, McAfee distributed a .DAT file to many of its enterprise customers that may have had a single faulty character. As a result, their anti-virus systems successfully quarantined not the service launched by svchost.exe, but svchost.exe itself.

“Having talked to literally hundreds of my colleagues around the world and e-mailed thousands to try and find the best way to correct these issues, let me say this has not been my favorite day. Not for me, or for McAfee. Not by a long shot,” wrote the company’s executive vice president for customer support, Barry McPherson, late Wednesday. “Mistakes happen. No excuses. The nearly 7,000 employees of McAfee are focused right now on two things, in this order. First, help our customers who have been affected by this issue get back to business as usual. And second, once that is done, make sure we put the processes in place so this never happens again.”

Wednesday’s single, solitary false positive triggered a wave of collective, true negatives from the user community. “Using PR fuzzies like ‘protect our customers from a seemingly endlessly multiplying variety and volume of attacks’ and ‘we wanted to protect our customers, as we have done successfully thousands and thousands of times before,’ you sound less concerned with your company’s screw up and more concerned about image. I pay your company to protect my computers,” wrote Mike O., “and I don’t care what you’ve done in the past. That is your job. When I am staring at a fleet of rebooting machines your past performance is meaningless. Here’s some unsolicited advice: Just stick to facts and contrition. As a customer my only concern is the answer to the question, ‘What have you done for me lately?’”

Other users raised the question of whether the fault in the .DAT file constitutes legal negligence — something that could be prosecuted. Others questioned how they were supposed to access McAfee technical support through their non-working computers (where one of the first messages of response they see, even as of now, advises customers not to reboot their systems).

And one message from a self-titled security geek began by sarcastically thanking McPherson for his support, before going on: “I’m angry because you wasted a day’s work for me and my colleagues. I’m angry because your ‘support’ achieved nothing. I’m angry because your apologies are meaningless because this will happen again as it has happened before. Most of all, I’m angry because there’s nothing I can do because as a geek I must merely work around the flaws in products from whichever vendor spent most time sucking up to our purchasing manager. Maybe a decision-maker will read this. Maybe not.”

Early Friday morning, McAfee posted what it calls a “SuperDAT Remediation Tool,” that promises to suppress the driver that triggers the false positive and that forces svchost.exe into quarantine. Acknowledging the fact that computers whose svchost.exe files are already in quarantine can’t access the Internet anyway (since that’s a service hosted by that very file), McAfee advises customers to use a working computer to download the file, save it to “portable media,” then take it to the impacted computer and run it from there.

One problem, in this era after the death of the floppy diskette, is that for many systems, “portable media” means “USB thumb drive.” And that’s another service that’s hosted by svchost.exe.

Well before McAfee published its Remediation Tool, an independent IT specialist named David Blankenship — whose own company was affected by the false positive on Wednesday — devised his own solution and posted it to his Windows Live space. The solution involves extracting the original svchost.exe file from the Windows installation disc, copying them to a CD or USB (again, the latter may not work), rebooting the affected system (something McAfee advises customers not to do), log in as an administrator under safe mode, then restore that file to its rightful location. The procedure also involves manually restoring the corrected version of McAfee’s .DAT file.

To be complete, Blankenship included a Step 12, which apparently many users obediently followed: “Send hate-mail to McAfee for ruining your day.”

The damage to users’ systems is unlikely to be permanent; unless desperate users tried drastic steps without considering the ramifications, their file systems will likely remain intact. What will have been lost could be measured in a few days’ work time, but probably not the work itself.

However, this incident does expose the reality of a single point of failure introduced into users’ systems everywhere through the introduction of what’s supposed to be a security program. The one false character in McAfee’s .DAT file (assuming that’s the cause) provided customers with more of a nuisance than most malware is capable of achieving on its own. While McAfee concerns itself, as it should, with restoring its reputation, it might also want to take the time to consider another “r” word: rearchitecture.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Yesterday’s introduction by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg of a vastly expanded form of the Facebook Platform — enabling Web sites to gather information on users’ “likes,” share them with Facebook, and get traffic as a result — did not slip past the office of Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart.

In a statement to Betanews this afternoon, Comm. Stoddart acknowledged this expansion will be of special concern to her office, especially in light of existing concerns raised by the service’s latest round of privacy policy adjustments. Some say those adjustments actually exposed more information to potential data miners than it was exposing before, leading them to question the company’s motives for attaining that data in the first place.

Though Comm. Stoddart concedes she hasn’t had time to investigate the technical details of Facebook’s service, revealed yesterday at the f8 developers’ conference, she’s seen press reports including ours, and concerns were raised. “This is an area of long-standing concern for us, and has been the subject of formal investigations by our Office,” the Commissioner told us.

As you may recall, we published findings last July into an in-depth investigation into Facebook’s privacy policies and practices, some of which related to the disclosure of personal information to advertisers, applications developers, and other third parties. As a result of that investigation, Facebook promised that, within a year, it would take all necessary steps to fully address the issues we raised in our recommendations. They are continuing to work on this undertaking, and we have been monitoring their progress.

In the meantime, last December, the company made significant privacy-related changes to its site. Some of those changes sparked concern among users. A key area of concern was the new “transition tool,” which required users to revisit their privacy settings.

Under the privacy law, we are required to investigate complaints from the public, and so we launched a new investigation in January. With this investigation open, we will continue to examine all of Facebook’s practices as they affect the privacy of Canadian users.

As incentive to encourage developers to make use of the newly expanded platform — as well as to make its new “Like” associations functional for developers at all — the company also announced yesterday it’s lifting a previous restriction on developers’ use of personal data attained from its API. Previously, developers were only allowed to store data attained through API calls for 24 hours; now, apparently, no such limit exists at all.

The blog Inside Facebook trumpeted the news as positive for developers. Wrote reporter Justin Smith: “The removal of this policy means Facebook is making it easier for developers to build richer applications on top of user data originally sourced from Facebook. Developers will be really happy about this change.”

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The strategy being employed by the Federal Communications Commission, as put forth yesterday, is to treat its loss to Comcast in DC Circuit Court two weeks ago not as a defeat of its ability to implement the entire Broadband Plan…and then hope that no one puts up any new roadblocks toward deploying at least most of it.

The priorities the FCC put forth during yesterday’s open hearing are perhaps the ones that would generate the least friction from possible opponents. One of these priorities is reflected in a major rule change yesterday with respect to what regulators originally thought should be an oxymoron: home roaming.

Specifically, this has to do with whether a wireless carrier that has limited coverage in a given area because it’s building out in that area, may be free to roam its service to other, more established carriers in that same area. A 2007 FCC order made a clear exception against this practice, in what seemed at the time to make some sense: A carrier should use its own spectrum in areas where it owns spectrum.

An unintended consequence of this exception was apparently a disincentive for carriers to build out in rural areas, feeling that they would be servicing customers there at a clear disadvantage until they had become completely established.

“With this decision, we continue to strive to adopt policies that balance competing interests, including — promoting competition among multiple carriers; ensuring that consumers have access to seamless coverage nationwide; and providing incentives for all carriers to invest and innovate by using available spectrum and constructing wireless network facilities on a widespread basis,” reads the FCC order published yesterday (PDF available here). “Upon reconsideration, we find that an up-front, categorical exclusion of home roaming from the automatic roaming obligation does not strike the best balance in furthering these goals. As a result of our decision, home roaming will be subject to the automatic roaming requirement and, as a common carrier service, is subject to Sections 201 and 202 of the Act. We will apply the same general presumption of reasonableness to requests for home roaming that we apply to other requests for automatic roaming, and take into account the competing interests when addressing roaming disputes on a case-by-case basis.”

That reversal put the Commission’s most outspoken Republican, Robert McDowell, in a good mood.

“The good news today is that we agree on a new course,” McDowell wrote yesterday (PDF available here). “Specifically, we recognize that the better, simpler path is to eliminate the home market exclusion completely. We also clarify that wireless carriers have statutory rights to complain, even if they seek automatic voice roaming arrangements within a home market. By setting forth factors that the Commission will consider in the event of a complaint, we provide a framework that will provide both sides — the host and the requesting carriers — with greater incentives to succeed in negotiating roaming agreements based on reasonable terms and conditions. We allow market forces to drive flexible deals among market players to give consumers the benefit of seamless, nationwide voice services.”

But a disparity still remains, and McDowell was not one to take his eye off of it: The wireless service rules to which the 2007 exception originally applied, were written in the days when “wireless” and “telephone” were considered synonymous. Yesterday, FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski cited the Broadband Plan as one of the driving forces behind removing the exception — and the broadband plan deals with information service. On April 6, after the DC Circuit handed down the Comcast decision, Commissioner McDowell did nothing to hide his glee, saying, “I hope this decision will provide certainty in the marketplace, and will not lead to the unnecessary classification of broadband service as a monopoly phone service under Title II of the [Telecommunications] Act.” That put McDowell’s stake firmly in the ground against any attempt at reclassifying Internet service as a way of regulating net neutrality.

The problem is, if the FCC can’t really regulate information services under Title I, then it can’t also do something that McDowell may very much appreciate: essentially the opposite of the exception, granting a mandate that carriers must negotiate automatic data roaming agreements. So in his commentary on the ruling yesterday, McDowell asked an open-ended question:
“With respect to the Further Notice on data roaming, for some time now, I have requested that interested parties submit for our consideration a legal analysis setting forth the means to this end. The question is simple: Given that, in 2007, the Commission classified wireless broadband services as Title I without dissent, is there a legally sustainable path to mandate automatic data roaming? I have sought this analysis well before the DC Circuit’s recent ruling in the Comcast case, which casts even more doubt on our jurisdiction in this area. I strongly encourage all commenters to give us their analyses of how the Comcast decision affects our ability to regulate data roaming.”

Also yesterday, the FCC took the next step in a strategic move away from its support of CableCARD, the technology that’s supposed to enable cable and satellite TV subscribers to fully utilize the capabilities of their digital signal — for example, to digitally record programs they’re permitted to record. In a new Notice of Inquiry yesterday (PDF available here), the Commission conceded its existing stance on the technology — which consisted mainly of a requirement for service providers (MVPDs) to include it but not really to support it — was a complete failure.

“The Commission’s rules require cable operators to support only one-way plug-and-play capability for retail CableCARD devices. This largely reflects the absence of a proven market for two-way services when negotiations began, and a desire within the industry to achieve consensus on how to assure access to the most basic services first and not await the conclusion of negotiations regarding access to new services that might be introduced later,” the NOI reads. “Accordingly, the Commission’s rules do not require cable operators to provide access for retail devices to two-way services such as interactive program guides, pay-per-view, or video-on-demand services, which were nascent services in 2003 and would have required complex and lengthy technical consideration. For that reason among others, retail CableCARD devices have not been able to offer all of the cable services available to subscribers who lease their set-top boxes from the cable operator. This is partially responsible for the failure of the CableCARD solution to create a strong retail market for navigation devices.”

That move prompted positive response (PDF available here) from the Commission’s other Republican, Meredith A. Baker: “As we consider a long-term solution, I hope that we recall valuable lessons from the CableCARD regime. First, our technological mandates come with significant costs. By one estimate, the cost of CableCARD compliance for the cable industry alone — costs passed on to cable consumers — has totaled nearly one billion dollars. Second, we should be careful not to mandate particular technological solutions that would freeze into place the current state of technology. We need to craft flexible rules that foster continued investment and innovation both on the network and device level. We should also not inhibit the ability of MVPDs to continue to invest in innovative devices and offerings. There are numerous promising collaborative efforts in home network and industry standard setting bodies to provide consumers with greater flexibility and options in how to view their video content. Hopefully, that spirit of collaboration between MVPD and consumer electronics companies will carry over to our consideration of a post-CableCARD regime.”

Not lost on anyone, however, including Baker, was the fact that any new “two-way” technology would involve the invocation of the “I” word. So in her comment yesterday, she suggested that since the subject involved the regulation of program distributors — which everyone agrees are under the FCC’s purview — then perhaps this should not be framed as part of the Broadband Plan.

“The National Broadband Plan framed this issue as one of broadband adoption. I agree that our set-top box policy does relate to broadband, but I believe that it relates primarily to broadband deployment, not adoption,” Baker wrote. “In order to provide higher speeds and more advanced broadband offerings, cable operators need to reclaim spectrum dedicated to video programming without eliminating the hundreds of video channels available to subscribers today. We should be vigilant that our set-top box policy does not unintentionally frustrate the efforts of cable operators investing in their next-generation broadband networks by putting up roadblocks to an affordable transition to all-digital operations or raising uncertainty about investment in more efficient technologies like switched digital video.”

The Commission remains aware that it might not be able, under its current mandate, to regulate net neutrality — a fact that commissioners cannot sweep under the rug. So the question of “how the Internet’s openness can best be preserved” will be put to a panel of experts next Wednesday, including the CTO of T-Mobile, a chief researcher for Yahoo, and the chief commercial officer for Clearwire.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

At its f8 developers’ conference in San Francisco this morning, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg presented his vision of a cross-site social platform whose developmental state may already be quite far along. Essentially, he sees a kind of online social sphere wherein anything one communicates that he likes, gets channeled to Facebook, where that like becomes a public fact.

“Today, the Web exists mostly as a series of unstructured links between pages. And this has been a powerful model, but it’s really just the start,” said Zuckerberg. “The Open Graph puts people at the center of the Web. It means that the Web can become a set of personally and semantically meaningful connections between people and things. I am friends with you. I am attending this event. I like this band. These connections aren’t just happening on Facebook, they’re happening all over the Web. And today, with the Open Graph, we’re going to bring all of these together.”

The model Zuckerberg is discussing is essentially a published API for users of any service to associate themselves with something — not just something they like, as he said at first, but also something they’re working on, including documents. Those associations then become facts of the Facebook database.

On Monday, Betanews reported on ‘Connections,’ the types of associations that a Facebook user may establish between himself and something or someone he wishes to be associated with. As demonstrated at the time, Facebook now enables individuals to create Facebook pages that represent things or perhaps celebrities that they and others may like — not a page by those celebrities as much as about them, similar to what Wikipedia provides now.

As independent Facebook developers were introduced to, for the first time today, existing Web pages outside Facebook can also be enabled to become the center of those associations, by adopting the company’s new Open Graph Protocol. The protocol involves the use of special properties in the <META> elements of Web pages, whose collective purpose is to classify those pages for Facebook. In an extremely hypothetical example, a fan site for the movie Manos: The Hands of Fate might include the tags <meta property="og:type" content="movie" />, followed by <meta property="og:title" content="Manos: The Hands of Fate" />.

Surprisingly, a check of the accepted object types for things users may like shows that Open Graph will enable sites to declare themselves the centers of attention for video games, movies, TV shows, and albums (collections of songs gathered together onto a disc, originally reproduced using an analog needle apparatus), software or “apps” is not listed, and neither is “device” such as “iPad” (although it could conceivably be classified as product). If Betanews wanted to be a Facebook “like” site for beta software (I know, it’s a stretch, but bear with me), it might be a difficult concept to explain using the current set of Open Graph tags.

“The Open Graph protocol…is currently designed for Web pages representing profiles of real-world things — things like movies, sports teams, celebrities, and restaurants,” reads Facebook’s official explanation today. “Once your pages become objects in the graph, users can establish connections to your pages as they do with Facebook Pages. Based on the structured data you provide via the Open Graph protocol, your pages show up richly across Facebook: in user profiles, within search results and in News Feed.”

Visibility in Facebook pages about the declared subject is one benefit to the Web site master. Another is the ability to communicate with users, via Facebook, who have declared they like the site’s subject matter; and to receive analytics and statistics about how Facebook users are interacting with your pages.

If you think about it, it sounds like a sensible solution to the problem Yahoo faced two decades ago: cataloging commercially-oriented Web sites by subject. This system invites the masters of those pages to do the cataloging, with the payoff being a direct connection to the Internet’s center of social activity.

Google’s YouTube is already part of the process, with its latest round of changes to its front-end controls. Where the “Favorites” button used to be is now something called “Like” (shown above), which does more than just submit a video you like to your YouTube favorites list. As the settings screen now shows (as depicted below), your likes may be communicated with Facebook (if you have an account there).

That may not happen by default, however, or by accident. First, the user must establish a Google Account (the necessary item for him to join Google Buzz), and then explicitly tie that account to Facebook (Twitter is another option, as shown above). If the user has already established a Google Buzz account, then those associations may already be made, and the videos a user likes may be fused with the Open Graph and tweeted to everyone around the world.

Also joining the service’s new Open Graph today is Microsoft, which today launched a basic form of its Office Web Apps for use in creating Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents that can serve as centers of attention, and that reside not in Microsoft’s cloud but in users’ Facebook news feeds.

“The fact that we’ve been able to adapt the Office 2010 Web Apps technology to work directly within our Facebook app truly speaks to the flexibility and power not just of the Facebook platform, but also of the Office system’s rich ‘contextual collaboration’ capabilities,” reads an actual Facebook-compliant document in Word format, published this afternoon by the leader of Microsoft’s FUSE Labs development team, Lili Cheng. “And we’d never have been able to achieve our critical ‘simplicity’ goals had it not been for our ability to use a new test feature from Facebook that allows us to build an instantly personalized and seamless document authorization & sharing experience directly from our site.”

FUSE Labs’ Facebook apps are functional versions of the real Office Web Apps, running in the context of Facebook’s platform…but on Microsoft’s site. Conceivably, they can be created either online using the Web Apps themselves, or uploaded into the Web Apps using Office 2010 applications (which consumers will be able to begin using in earnest on May 12).

As Zuckerberg explained today in a blog post, his goal is to incite all Web users with impetus to share content, including Office docs and Pandora music (another charter Facebook partner), using Facebook as the conduit.

“This next version of Facebook Platform puts people at the center of the Web,” he wrote. “It lets you shape your experiences online and make them more social. For example, if you like a band on Pandora, that information can become part of the graph so that later if you visit a concert site, the site can tell you when the band you like is coming to your area. The power of the open graph is that it helps to create a smarter, personalized Web that gets better with every action taken.”

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

As promised, the world’s trade negotiators have finally released a public and, to a limited extent, redacted version of the current draft document for the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement. Releasing a draft of a global trade agreement is actually unprecedented, say many diplomats.

Though the authors of certain passages under consideration — many of them marked by [square brackets] — have been redacted from public view, it’s clear that new legal limitations on an Internet service provider’s ability to claim “safe harbor,” excusing it from secondary liability for copyright (or patent) infringement, are being considered. That option is believed to have been proposed by the United States delegation, as indicated by a leaked document from the European Union (PDF available here from Wired). However, another option that would not limit ISP safe harbor provisions, is listed in the draft document under equal consideration.

The first option under consideration for Section 4, Article 2.18, paragraph 3 (actually a pair of options, the second contingent upon the first) defines the limitation of liability for an ISP that, by definition, doesn’t alter the content of the information it provides to subscribers on behalf of other services. Note that sections in [square brackets] are proposed text, some of which may appear next to other proposed text set off in the same way. References to footnotes here have been removed.

Option 1

[ 3. Each Party recognizes that some persons use the services of third parties, including online service providers,…for engaging in [ patent, industrial design and trademark,] copyright or related rights infringement. Each Party also recognizes that legal uncertainty with respect to application of copyright and related rights, limitations, exceptions, and defenses in the digital environment may present barriers to the economic growth of, and opportunities in, electronic commerce.] Accordingly, in order to facilitate the continued development of an industry engaged in providing information services online while also ensuring that measures to take adequate and effective action against copyright or related rights infringement are available and reasonable each Party [shall][ may]:

(a) provide limitations on the scope of civil remedies available against an online service provider for infringing activities that occur by

(i) automatic technical processes, and

(ii) the actions of the provider’s users that are not directed or initiated by that provider and when the provider does not select the material, and

(iii) the provider referring or linking users to an online location, when, in cases of subparagraphs (ii) and (iii), the provider does not have actual knowledge of the infringement and is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent; and ]

Option 2

[Each Party recognizes that some persons use the services of third parties, including online service providers,…for engaging in intellectual property rights infringements.

(a) In this respect, each Party shall provide limitation on the [liability of] [scope of civil remedies available against an] on-line service provider[s] for infringing activities that occur by

(i) automatic technical processes [ that keep the provider from taking measures to prevent the infringement], or

(ii) the actions of the provider´s users that are not initiated nor modified by that provided and when the provider does not select the material or

(iii) the storage of information provided by the recipient of the service or at the request of the recipient of the service,

when exercising the activities as stipulated in paragraph 3(a)(ii) and/or (iii) the online service providers act [takes appropriate measures] expeditiously, in accordance with applicable law [s], [such as those] to remove or disable access to infringing material or infringing activity upon obtaining actual knowledge of the infringement [or the fact that the information at the initial source has been removed or disabled.] [or having reasonable grounds to know that the infringement is occurring]]

There’s a preamble of sorts here that says, of course, we recognize that ISPs are legitimate businesses and we all want them to prosper. To that end, we’re bound to disagree on the meanings of certain terms and legal minutiae, especially as the Internet continues to evolve. Nevertheless, we should set forth here and now to resolve that an ISP’s liability — given that it’s likely to be innocent anyway — should be limited when all it does is provide the pipeline. One of the proposed footnotes (not yet adopted) would stipulate that an online service provider by definition provides only access to content without modifying it (and if it does something differently, then it’s not an ISP or “OSP” by that same definition).

Option 2 above would have the more forgiving portions of that language kick in only if the ISP published policies prohibiting the use of the service for piracy or copyright infringement, and if it also took pro-active steps to block access to infringing material once the ISP learned it was available. Exactly how it would take such steps is unspecified by this particular optional passage, although one can imagine blocking access to a Web site, or even restricting the use of — or throttling the capabilities of — an Internet application, as one acceptable possibility.

Another optional passage immediately following, which would become subparagraph (b) if adopted, is clearer as to what pro-active measures would be acceptable. To recap, “in order to facilitate the continued development of an industry…each Party [shall][ may]:”

Option 1

(b) condition the application of the provisions of subparagraph (a) on meeting the following requirements:

(i) an online service provider adopting and reasonably implementing a policy…to address the unauthorized storage or transmission of materials protected by copyright or related rights [except that no Party may condition the limitations in subparagraph (a) on the online service provider’s monitoring its services or affirmatively seeking facts indicating that infringing activity is occurring]; and

(ii) an online service provider expeditiously removing or disabling access to material or [activity][alleged infringement], upon receipt [of legally sufficient notice of alleged infringement,][of an order from a competent authority] and in the absence of a legally sufficient response from the relevant subscriber of the online service provider indicating that the notice was the result of mistake or misidentification.

except that the provisions of (ii) shall not be applied to the extent that the online service provider is acting solely as a conduit for transmissions through its system or network.]

It’s a confusing section, especially since it would appear to directly contradict the section that came before it…but that’s not unprecedented in a trade agreement at all. The original proposition here appears to stipulate that ISPs should adopt policies to prevent infringing content from being transmitted. Further, if it receives an order related to the availability of that content (maybe from a judge, maybe not from a judge) then it should act. Now, it may be up to nations to determine what “act” means; and perhaps it does not mean changing the definition of ISP (or “OSP”) to the extent that it stops “acting solely as a conduit” and becomes a filtering system.

Evidently, there’s an ongoing argument over this problem: When does an ISP stop being a conduit and start becoming the content police? If, by definition, it is unaware of what’s going on inside the conduit, then some argue it should remain innocent. That innocence can then be broken, say the authors of the above option, if they receive a certified letter from an attorney saying there’s theft, theft!, going on inside that conduit. At that point, if the ISP does nothing, then it’s aiding and abetting that theft.

As today’s newly released old text indicates, this is a very old argument that is nowhere close to being resolved. In a statement this afternoon, European Union Trade Commissioner Karel de Gucht celebrated the fact that this dispute is now public. “I am very glad that the EU convinced its partners to release the negotiation text. The text makes clear what ACTA is really about: It will provide our industry and creators with better protection in overseas markets which is essential for business to thrive. It will not have a negative impact on European citizens.”

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

In an indirect yet obvious way, Section 3.3.1 of Apple’s new iPhone developers’ agreement binds developers to a promise that whatever they bring to the iPhone will be created exclusively for the iPhone. It effectively bans the use of cross-platform tools or middleware like Adobe Flash, by saying anything Apple approves must be coded in the company’s own Objective-C, or in C or C++.

If Adobe were to have proceeded with its previous plans to forge an official, working Flash platform for iPhone, that would have been the defiant move. Instead, Mike Chambers, the company’s product manager for Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), found himself yesterday afternoon sounding the retreat.

“We will still be shipping the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5,” Chambers wrote. “However, we are not currently planning any additional investments in that feature.”

It isn’t clear to anyone, including Chambers, exactly how Apple will be able to enforce its provisions. The two possibilities are very strict policing of each and every one of its thousands of incoming App Store entries, or selective rejections that are intended to send a very clear message (similar to the record industry’s former strategy of selectively prosecuting file sharers). But as Chambers said yesterday, if Apple were to be selective, the selections that would send the clearest message would more likely concern Flash than Titanium, MonoTouch, or Unity.

Adobe won’t stop developers from using the tools the company already baked into its Creative Suite 5, for targeting the iPhone if they so choose, Chambers said. He just warned that if they do so, Apple may make their lives difficult. He said that personally, he’ll devote the attention he would have paid to iPhone to the Android platform instead, inviting fellow Flash developers to follow suit.

To that end, in an interview with Fox Business last week, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen said Flash development for smartphones has reached the point where the latest versions may be released “in the second half of the year.” Narayen made clear it won’t be Adobe doing the releasing, but rather the companies that handle their respective platforms — specifically Google, RIM, and Palm.

Apple’s insistence on restricting development to its own tools and to an absence of middleware could have a detrimental effect on the quality of the iPhone platform over time. First, middleware such as Unity made it feasible for smaller development shops to get a handle on iPhone OS — whether they were developing cross-platform or not — engaged and excited an entire realm of developers who felt they could exploit the power of the platform using tools they could manage.

Unity is perhaps the most popular cross-platform game development tool that supports the iPhone platform. Like MonoTouch, its scripting engine is Mono, the open source work-alike for the .NET Framework funded by Novell. Although that scripting is essentially C#, the object-oriented C created by Microsoft (Objective-C is the object-oriented C originally conceived for the NeXT platform, brought to Apple when it reacquired Steve Jobs’ services in 1996), the tools built by Unity around that platform are much more intuitive, and the language as a whole is both more popular and more widely taught. At the time of the iPhone’s unveiling, the TIOBE Programming Community Index ranked Objective-C the #38 most popular language in the world, actually declining to #42 by April 2009. Today, Objective-C has risen all the way to #11, though C# (#6 and climbing) picks up new converts at about the same pace.

Objective-C’s converts have apparently come rather suddenly, probably in anticipation of Apple shutting the door on approvals for apps built using other tools.

Second, Apple’s move forces a decision among professional apps developers and service providers: Should they risk everything on one platform, even if it’s a successful one?

That’s not a decision that developers enjoy making. As Microsoft Chief Software Designer Ray Ozzie told reporters last November, from his discussions with mobile developers, he saw apps companies preferring to leverage as many platforms as they could, in order to justify the development costs they were putting in. Using widely accepted cross-platform tools helps lower those costs; using a tool that targets just one platform, and that requires specialization, raises those costs and thus reduces margins.

Ozzie foresaw a time when “app phones,” as he called them (iPhone being one) were known not just for what features they contained, but what popular apps they were capable of running. And to be a popular app, you need to be available more than one place. (It’s notable that Robbie Bach wasn’t in the room to hear this at the time.) “If there’s a market there, all the apps that count will be ported. Every app that matters will be ported to every one of them, because if there’s a set of users and it costs $50,000 of consulting time to have somebody port a little app, it’s going to get ported,” Ozzie said. “So I just don’t think there’s going to be significant differentiation at the app level.”

Apple’s move disallows differentiation at the app level, at least on paper. But that’s only if it enforces that differentiation. In a discussion among Unity developers today, developers there are hopeful that as long as their toolset can be used to produce binary code that can then be compiled by Apple’s Xcode — its prescribed iPhone OS developers’ toolkit — they will still be able to use libraries such as Unity iPhone 1.7 — released just days ago — to create their products.

The hope here among Unity developers is that Apple’s only grievance is with the existence of middleware or JIT compilers or interpreters on its platform, which would enable developers to bypass its strictly regulated deployment channel.
That hope could have been brightened last week by the announcement from the makers of PhoneGap, an iPhone app development tool that doesn’t use Objective-C, but rather enables apps to be built using common Web app languages such as JavaScript and CSS. Last Wednesday, PhoneGap announced it had communicated directly with Apple, and that it was told its tools were not in violation of Section 3.3.1.

In comments for that announcement yesterday, however, one independent Web developer whose profile lists cross-platform work, including .NET, advised PhoneGap developers to adhere to the spirit of Section 3.3.1 anyway. “Apple has strict iPhone / iPad Design Guidelines and you should follow [them] as much as you can,” he wrote. “Don’t do just ‘porting,’ that’s why this Apple vs. Flash fight started and as you can see, Apple is winning! Rethink your app for the Apple devices if you can.”

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

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Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6.4 public beta for Windows from Fileforum now.

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Starting today, an ambitious project from the Mozilla Foundation called “Lorentz” makes its first public, experimental debut, with the release of a public beta of Firefox 3.6.4. Mozilla doesn’t often promote a public beta of a point release, but this time, the organization needs data from the field regarding the stability of a critical new feature that could help it regain lost traction against competitors Google, Opera, and Apple.

The one major problem with the Mozilla Firefox Web browser — what makes users, including myself, keep an eye on the competition for a better alternative — is how often it crashes. According to Mozilla’s live statistics, the latest stable version 3.6.3 crashed at least once for every two active users whose browsers reported their telemetry to Mozilla’s servers by default, on April 5 and again on April 11.

Judging from the signature data delivered to Mozilla’s servers by its crash reporter system, in recent months, most of those crashes have actually been triggered by plug-ins. For instance, engineers believe as many as half the crashes over the last four weeks that were responsible for 189,762 crashes (as of the time of this writing Tuesday afternoon) may have been caused by a non-updated version of Adobe Reader or Acrobat. Some 90,134 crashes (about 2.7% of the total) are caused by Skype. In previous months, Adobe Flash has tallied as much as 25% of live reported crashes.

The Lorentz project is step two in Mozilla’s bid to remodel Firefox architecture to take better control of its plug-ins. Step one came last November, with the introduction of Firefox 3.6 and its hardening of policies with regard to running just any binary component. With Firefox 3.6.4, Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime, and Microsoft Silverlight — three of the most used plug-ins in the browser user’s arsenal — will be run as protected processes. When they crash, they should no longer bring down Firefox with them.

“This version of Firefox will offer uninterrupted browsing for Windows and Linux users when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple QuickTime, or Microsoft Silverlight plugins,” writes Firefox product director Mike Beltzner this afternoon. “If a crash in one of these plugins happens, Firefox will continue to run and users will be able to submit a crash report before reloading the page to try again.”

The first, very early, Betanews tests on the new public beta were…well, inconclusive, at least at the moment. We tried several Silverlight pages that we knew were old, and that caused problems with more recent versions in the past. But with the new Silverlight 4, the runtime’s own process control kicks in, evidently precluding situations which used to cause the browser to crash. As we get more time to test, we’ll let you know what we find.

A quick check this afternoon of the latest crash reports from Mozilla show that nearly half of the crashes reported by testers of version 3.6.4 (including daily alpha builds) over the past week, come not from a plug-in but from a Windows kernel call related to multithreading. That could be the first big sign of real improvement to Firefox…something the browser sorely needs.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Google Buzz should not have changed Gmail to such an extent that its existing users found themselves sharing personal information on a social network without their consent. That’s the message sent in a letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt yesterday, made public today by Canada’s Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart.

In that letter, Stoddart and her counterparts from nine countries asked Google to provide them with a report about the lessons the company has learned from the Buzz experience, and how those lessons will improve the way Google rolls out products in the future.

“It is unacceptable to roll out a product that unilaterally renders personal information public, with the intention of repairing problems later as they arise. Privacy cannot be sidelined in the rush to introduce new technologies to online audiences around the world,” wrote the privacy regulators for Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom (PDF available here). “Unfortunately, Google Buzz is not an isolated case. Google Street View was launched in some countries without due consideration of privacy and data protection laws and cultural norms. In that instance, you addressed privacy concerns related to such matters as the retention of unblurred facial images only after the fact, and there is continued concern about the adequacy of the information you provide before the images are captured.”

Although the United States does not have a specifically defined “commissioner of privacy,” the Federal Trade Commission does oversee privacy issues. Its statement on the matter came last month from outgoing Commissioner (now retired) Pamela Jones Harbour, whose message before a global privacy roundtable in Barcelona (PDF available here) was not without venom:

Think about it: when Gmail first emerged, social networking was barely even a reality. When consumers, especially early adopters, created their Gmail accounts, their expectations did not include social networking. In my view, therefore, a reasonable consumer would consider the initial opt-in of Buzz to be a material change in her relationship with Google. Consumers, not companies, should exercise the ultimate decision on whether they want to sign up for new “features” that might expose additional data.

I am especially concerned that technology companies are learning harmful lessons from each other’s attempts to push the privacy envelope. Of course, providing new features to users, and making the user experience more enjoyable, are excellent goals. These efforts may win new users while also building additional loyalty in existing users. But even the most respected and popular online companies — the ones who claim to respect privacy — continue to launch products where their guiding privacy principle appears to be, “Throw it against the wall, see if it sticks — and if not, we can always pull it back.” Deeds speak louder than words, and this is turning into a dangerous game of “copycat” behavior. And unlike a lot of tech products, consumer privacy cannot be run in beta. Once data are shared, control is lost forever. In the extreme, it is only a matter of time before one might imagine the introduction of new “features” that incorporate, for example, genomic information, or data from personal health records. The privacy stakes will only get higher.

Google does not show any signs of pulling Buzz back, having implemented one new privacy provision earlier this month: giving existing Buzz users a second chance to choose which other members are on their friends list. In Buzz’s initial rollout, the system selected new friends on members’ behalf after first perusing their list of most common Gmail recipients. New members could override those choices, but that override was not very intuitive. As a result, many new members ended up publishing their frequent Gmail contacts as “friends,” to be seen by other Buzz members, even though those contacts may have been less than friends…or more than friends.

Although Buzz product manager Todd Jackson’s message last April 5 remained apologetic on behalf of the company’s first attempt, he maintained Google’s “stick-to-it-iveness” with regard to the principle that the establishment of one’s new social network can be an automatic thing.

“Shortly after launching Google Buzz, we quickly realized we didn’t get everything right and moved as fast as possible to improve the Buzz experience. We made a number of changes to the getting started experience based on your feedback, the most significant of which was replacing auto-following with suggestions for people to follow,” Jackson wrote. “Rather than automatically setting you up to follow the people you e-mail and chat with most, Google Buzz now suggests people for you to follow instead. This way, Buzz is still simple to set up (no one wants to peck out an entire social network from scratch) but you aren’t set up to follow anyone until you choose to do so.”

It’s that notion that “no one wants to peck out her social network” that still draws the ire of privacy regulators, including Stoddart, who believe it should be obvious that no one wants their social network to suddenly appear out of the blue, fully formed, for the world to see and disseminate.

In essence, you took Google Mail (Gmail), a private, one-to-one Web-based e-mail service, and converted it into a social networking service, raising concern among users that their personal information was being disclosed. Google automatically assigned users a network of “followers” from among people with whom they corresponded most often on Gmail, without adequately informing Gmail users about how this new service would work or providing sufficient information to permit informed consent decisions. This violated the fundamental principle that individuals should be able to control the use of their personal information.

Users instantly recognized the threat to their privacy and the security of their personal information, and were understandably outraged. To your credit, Google apologized and moved quickly to stem the damage.

While your company addressed the most privacy-intrusive aspects of Google Buzz in the wake of this public protest and most recently (April 5, 2010) you asked all users to reconfirm their privacy settings, we remain extremely concerned about how a product with such significant privacy issues was launched in the first place. We would have expected a company of your stature to set a better example. Launching a product in “beta” form is not a substitute for ensuring that new services comply with fair information principles before they are introduced.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Facebook’s privacy policy, like its services, is an evolving organism. Recently, that evolution has been reactive rather than pro-active. Another reaction may be in the works after today’s announcement of a new Facebook feature that enables users to subscribe to personal interests or “likes,” officially called “Connections,” the way they connect to other users.

The company said today there’s a new way for a Facebook user to block others, including friends, from seeing one’s “connections” — the list of pages that represent things one likes to do (e.g., snowboarding) or to partake in (e.g., classical music), or people they may enjoy who may not be represented by their own Facebook pages (e.g., Bertrand Russell, Elvis Presley). But someone who’s perusing the page for people or things that Facebook users vote that they “Like” (which replaces “Become a Fan Of” today) may still see the list of everyone who has voted she likes something, the company also said — indicating that one’s likes may never be completely private.

“Within your Privacy Settings under the Account menu, you have a section called ‘Friends, Tags and Connections.’ Adjusting the drop-down menus beside each field let you determine who can see those parts of your profile,” reads a post on Facebook’s blog this morning from software engineer Alex Li. “These visibility settings are a direct response to your requests to be able to hide more information on your profile. Specifically, the most requested feature a few weeks ago was to enable you to hide your friend list on your profile from your friends. As part of today’s changes, you can do that.”

As of today, Facebook’s Help Center still explains that folks who are on your friends list will be able to read the contents of the friends list. That explanation will likely change as this addition to the system filters through to users.

However, a user may find he can be discovered after all, by someone who notices his name attached to the “Connection” page for the thing he likes.

As Li (who “likes” Roger Federer, but is now “connected” to Johannes Brahms) explained, “Keep in mind that Facebook Pages you connect to are public. You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you’re connected to. If you don’t want to show up on those Pages, simply disconnect from them by clicking the ‘Unlike’ link in the bottom left column of the Page. You always decide what connections to make.”

Community pages are the destination points for connections, or likes (the terminology here could perhaps be streamlined just a bit). Based on the prototype picture supplied by Facebook, they appear to be crosses between the typical Facebook fan page and a Wikipedia entry. Current Facebook users may have already begun to see messages from the service asking them whether they’d like to connect to certain existing Community pages gleaned from the likes and affiliations already on their profiles, including their hometowns, their alma maters, and their bio entries. In any event, the message from Facebook’s Li made clear, if you don’t want people discovering you like something or someone…you can just stop liking her.

“Profiles no longer are a static list of likes and interests,” writes Li. “Now, they are a living map of all the connections that matter to you.”

Just exactly how community pages…get there, and what happens to them after they’re there, may be a bit up in the air, even after Facebook’s explanation. As the official invitation page for creating an “Official Page” or a “Community Page” or a “Group” suggests, someone creating an Official Page needs to be a representative of the subject at hand — for example, he needs to not be a fan of Roger Federer, but to be Roger Federer, or his authorized agent. A Facebook group (something which the service has had for years) continues to be an access point for multiple folks engaged in the same hobby or interest.

But a Community Page is supposed to be an entity in itself — something which a person can plant on his own, which can sprout forth through nurturing from whoever passes by, and can eventually be adopted by someone else entirely. “Generate support for your favorite cause or topic by creating a Community Page,” the invitation reads. “If it becomes very popular (attracting thousands of fans), it will be adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.”

Facebook’s own developers — who happen to be meeting next Wednesday at the f8 developers’ conference in San Francisco — aren’t having much more luck than we are discerning the distinction here. A developer with the Facebook app builder Inside Network, who goes by the handle s2facebook, asked the company earlier this month and got a response…but he says it wasn’t much of one.

“Facebook hasn’t explained clearly what it means when it says ‘adopted and maintained by the Facebook community.’ When we asked, Facebook only told us that ‘if, over time, it gains a large fan base, it will be adopted by the community and it will not have one specific owner,’” s2facebook wrote.

Having more hands-on knowledge of how Facebook apps operate, s2facebook came to this conclusion: While a “Group” maintains its own privacy settings, and may thus be protected from complete public exposure, a “Page” is designed to present some level of public information. “Group owners can’t message members if it has more than 5,000 people; Pages provide more customizable options, designed for marketers; Pages include the Insights analytics tool; because Pages are public, information in them appears in search results,” the developer wrote. “Community Pages are another way, then, that Facebook can get more content in search engines while maintaining its goals for Official Pages.”

Anticipating today’s initial rollout of Connections/”Likes”/Community Pages, the Financial Times ran a story this morning that said Facebook was using this new system to assemble a behavioral advertising platform. This way, the story (in its original form) said, Facebook would be able to gather more discrete data about its users to help advertisers better target services to them.

The FT later revised (extensively) that story; and a Facebook spokesperson told Betanews this afternoon that the original form of that story was incorrect. However, the spokesperson’s explanation was noteworthy not for saying that Facebook isn’t building such a system, but rather that no such system was being announced today.

“The Financial Times story incorrectly suggested that Facebook is launching behavioral ad targeting at f8, their upcoming developer conference,” the spokesperson told Betanews. “The FT story has been corrected. As Facebook has said previously, they are moving from ‘Become a Fan’ to ‘Like’ to make the language on the site more consistent, but they have no announcements or changes planned to their ad offering or ad policies.”

While the data being gathered through the creation of Community pages may not be expressly assembled for marketing purposes, it appears the ability to do so remains feasible — something which an enterprising developer may discover as soon as Wednesday.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

At about this time last year, we received some skeptical comments from folks who questioned whether it was wise for Betanews to declare Windows 7’s automated troubleshooting system one of the new operating system’s Top 10 features — #8, to be specific. Saying a software publisher has improved its product by making it easier to find out what’s wrong with it, is in one sense a bit ironic, and in another the sort of thing that typically smacks of the kind of messages brought to readers directly from the vendor without any filtering whatsoever.

The reason I declared what Microsoft is now calling its “Fix-It Center” (now with its own Support page) #8 is the same reason I declared Action Center #1: It has the potential for refashioning users’ impressions of Windows, so that they come to understand that troubleshooting one’s computer is as much a part of life as repairing little things in one’s home.

The automated portion of Windows’ new troubleshooting feature premiered over the weekend. Although Fix-It Center is being described as a Web site that’s accessible from Vista-based browsers as well, more importantly from my vantage point, it’s accessible from something more important than a Web browser: from the Windows 7 Control Panel. That fact removes one critical step from the process of identifying something wrong with the system, and attempting a legitimate remedy.

I know it’s a bit early in the week to remind folks of painful times in history, but if you’ll recall just briefly for a moment the era of Windows Me, with its stockpile of irritating grievances that Microsoft addressed with pat answers ranging from “Thank you for your feedback…” to the jaw-dropping, “This behavior is by design.” At the darkest moment of the Windows Me era, a hero emerged in the form of Annoyances.org — at the time, the best single independent source for suggestions from the outside world.

The first thing I noted about Annoyances.org once it became prominent is that many of the steps that advisors suggested users follow, often became the same steps. Wouldn’t it be nice, I said, if the service were capable of detecting what the user was typing, and respond with, “Stop right there — If I read you right, you’re having trouble getting Windows to recognize your modem…” The second thing I suggested at that horrible time was, wouldn’t it be wonderful if Annoyances.org became a control panel applet in itself.

It ended up being Microsoft that took my suggestions to heart, although Fix-It Center doesn’t have to parse your problems as you type them. As company engineer-in-residence Mark Russinovich has pointed out on numerous occasions since Windows 7 was first made public, the system is getting smarter about recording its own telemetry, and making it easier for not only administrators but automated scripts to determine the symptoms that users are seeing, find the patterns in those symptoms, and make possible changes that can be undone if they’re the wrong ones.

What converts incidental problems into annoyances is the time that accumulates between their discovery and their remedy. Having direct access to a potential solution minimizes the chances that annoyances can fester. And enabling others to post troubleshooting scripts (written with PowerShell) that may address problems Microsoft hasn’t discovered yet, or that may affect only a small number of Windows users, helps users to feel that trying Microsoft’s solution might not be futile.

That said, I tried Fix-It Center today with a problem I had ascertained beforehand might be futile to try to solve: I have a voice modem for which no driver has ever been written for Vista, let alone Windows 7. It works fine with Windows XP, though. (I know what you’re thinking — He has a voice modem? Show me a better device for recording phone interviews, and I’ll use it.)

The interactive nature of Fix-It Center’s scripts should comfort users who will be put off by the very idea of a robotic repairman. The script I ran this morning did not gallop uncontrollably from step to step before giving me an opportunity to cancel. Instead, it gave me a full checklist of active changes the script could possibly make, enabling me to disable those I wasn’t certain about before proceeding.

The script did notice my “PCI Simple Communications Controller” (a generic ID for a voice modem) was disabled. In trying to enable it, the script noticed then that there was no device driver for it. Now, it could have made that determination in advance, but then it would have had to try enabling the device without asking me permission first. From a security standpoint, that would have been bad — nothing automated in your system should attempt any substantive changes to your operating system without notifying the user (or, in the case of an enterprise, the admin).

There was a hint of a possibility that Fix-It Center could find a compatible driver for me online, but I was fairly confident that no such beast exists. What I was interested in was, what happens when the automated script runs out of options? As it reported: “We detected some problems with your system and were able to successfully apply the fixes. However, our verification shows that the problem still exists.” This isn’t exactly right: The script re-installed a generic driver for “PCI Simple Communications Controller,” and guess what, it doesn’t work.

Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m not complaining about this script not being able to solve an unsolvable problem (the manufacturer of this modem would have to resurrect itself from the dead). What I’m concerned about is how problems are made to become annoyances, and one way of doing that is by fluffing them up with euphemistic language. The final report rendered by this particular script is only half-right.

It also missed one more step: Perhaps there’s someplace I could have gone, or been sent, to download a driver or at least search for one. Microsoft itself does have such a service online, and linking directly to it should not have been a problem.

The good news here is, since third parties are just as capable of writing and publishing support scripts to Fix-It Center as Microsoft, some enterprising person who can improve upon the way Microsoft responded to this issue, can actually do so without just sitting back and remaining annoyed. I’m actually very pleased by the release of this service, although now is the time for everyone who used to capitalize on annoyance to start investing in solutions.

Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2010