Facebook’s Growing Influence on the World: Could 250 Million Users Be Too Big?

Facebook announced today that it now has 250 million users, having added 50 million new users in just the past three months. If Facebook was a country it would now be the 4th most populous place on earth. If it maintains this kind of growth there will be more Facebookers than people living in the United States by early November. The man who ostensibly rules this kingdom is 25 years old.
Could Facebook be too big? It has centralized an incredible amount of power over a huge number of peoples’ lives; the texture of Facebook now shapes the pattern of a substantial portion of human communication around the world. Is Facebook too big? That seems like an important question.

Subtle Influences

Let’s look at an analogy. Every week about 30 million Americans watch American Idol on television. What are the lessons re-enforced by this program? Perhaps it’s that anyone can achieve great things, that harsh public judgment can be funny and appropriate, that the story of our culture is one of rising from obscurity through hard work to wealth and heroism. There may be more subtle messages communicated. It’s widely understood that American Idol is an important cultural influence at this point in history.

Facebook is almost 10 times as big and its users spend far more time on the site than people spend watching American Idol. They use it to communicate with some of their closest friends and family. Surely there can be no doubt that the culture of Facebook has an impact on the larger culture of the human experience. The old cliche “the medium is the message” still rings true and Facebook is a very big medium. Read more…

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Twitter Hack Raises Flags on Security

SAN FRANCISCO — You might think your password protects the confidential information stored on Web sites. But as Twitter executives discovered, that is a dangerous assumption.

The Web was abuzz Wednesday after it was revealed that a hacker had exposed corporate information about Twitter after breaking into an employee’s e-mail account. The breach raised red flags for individuals as well as businesses about the passwords used to secure information they store on the Web.

On Web sites containing personal information like e-mail, financial data or documents, there is usually just a user name and password for protection. More individuals are storing information on Web servers, where it is accessible from any online computer through services offered by Google, Amazon, Microsoft, social networks like Facebook or back-up services like Mozy.

But password-protected sites are growing more vulnerable because to keep up with the growing number of passwords, people use the same simple ones on numerous sites across the Web. In a study last year, Sophos, a security firm, found that 40 percent of Internet users use the same password for every Web site they access.

The attack on Twitter highlights the problem. For its internal documents, the company uses the business version of Google Apps, a service that Google offers to individuals free. Google Apps provides e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets and calendars over the Web.

The content is stored on Google’s servers, which can save time and money and enable employees to work together on documents at the same time. But it also means that the security is only as good as the password. A hacker who breaks into one person’s account can access information shared by friends, family members or colleagues, which is what happened at Twitter. Read more…

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Bing, the Imitator, Often Goes Google One Better

For the last 15 years, Microsoft’s master business plan seems to have been, “Wait until somebody else has a hit. Then copy it.”

I know that sounds mean, but come on — the list of commercial hits/Microsoft knockoffs is as long as your arm. PalmPilot/PocketPC. Netscape Navigator/Internet Explorer. Mac OS X/Windows Vista. Apple iPod/Microsoft Zune.

You’d think Microsoft would feel a little sheepish after a while.

And now we have yet another me-too effort. It’s something called Bing, and it’s the latest iteration of Microsoft’s multiyear attempt to imitate Google.

The name, presumably, is supposed to evoke the sound of a winning game-show bell. The cynics online, however, joke that Bing is an acronym for “But It’s Not Google.”

Here’s the shocker, though: in many ways, Bing is better.

That’s quite a statement, of course — almost heresy. But check it out yourself. It’s easy to compare the two, thanks to sites like bing-vs-google.com. Here, you’re shown search results from both Bing and Google, side by side, on a split screen. Read more…

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Extend LinkedIn Into an Online Document Collaboration Platform

While we have covered the social media aspects of LinkedIn in the past, the service is now being extended with third-party applications. Right now, Box.net Files and Huddle WorkSpaces enable you to use LinkedIn as an online document collaboration platform. These free tools are light versions of more full-featured products, but should serve you just fine for one-off collaboration needs.

The potential of LinkedIn for document collaboration may sound hinky to some, but there are some real benefits, including:

* Secure access via the LinkedIn social network of contacts.
* No infrastructure or administrative costs.
* Access documents anywhere via the web, as long as you are a LinkedIn member.

However, there is a flip side, in that that there are basically two types of LinkedIn users — those who log in faithfully on a regular basis, and those who log in just often enough to respond to network invites, and otherwise spend little time on the site. Online document collaboration via LinkedIn is going to work best for organizations where LinkedIn is already part of the corporate culture. In other words, frequent LinkedIn users are going to be the best adopters of these applications.

Both of these applications are accessible from your LinkedIn profile, via the “Featured Applications” section. Read more…

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Google’s Research Interests: From Web 3.0 to Low-Tech Camera Kits

If Google’s mission is to organize the whole world’s information, it makes sense for the company to look a few steps ahead. Today the Google Research team highlighted seven academic researchers whose work has captured the company’s imagination.

Juan E. Vargas, who works at Google’s University Relations department, says submissions to the company’s University Research Awards program are at an all-time high. He summarized some of the most interesting scientific work the company has seen lately in a blog post today; the projects range from using Street View to construct semantically-marked up 3D models of cities to sending camera kits to kids in developing countries so they can learn some engineering and share photos with the world online. These are the scientific projects Google believes could make the world, and its business, better.

Here are the research projects Vargas pointed to as particularly interesting.

Thomas Funkhouser of Princeton University is working to “develop methods for automatic construction of semantically-labeled, detailed, and photorealistic 3D models of cities from Street View data.” Robots reading street signs via Google Maps? More like recognizing fire hydrants and parking meters for now, it seems. Funkhouser’s research is all about 3D search and could contribute to the kind of searchable “internet of things” we’ve been hearing about. Read more…

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Bing Starts Strong and Keeps Climbing

Bing, the new Microsoft search engine, captured slightly more United States searches than Yahoo in the first eight days of June, according to StatCounter Global Stats, a firm that tracks Web use. That is a milestone for Bing, whose share of the search pie has been slowly rising since it was unveiled on June 3.

During June, Bing increased Microsoft’s share of the search market by 1 percentage point, according to StatCounter, which tracks the number of times users click on search results, rather than the number of searches run. Aodhan Cullen, StatCounter’s chief executive, said it was common for search engines to briefly surge after being introduced, as did the search engine Cuil in July 2008, but it was less common for them to stay hot for this long. Read more…

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New Chief Defends U.S. Base for Agency That Manages Web

PARIS — The U.S.-based agency that regulates Internet addresses, facing criticism that it is too America-centric, remains the best guardian of a “single, unified, global Internet,” according its new chief executive.

Rod Beckstrom, a technology entrepreneur and former U.S. government Internet security official, took over this month as head of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, succeeding Paul Twomey, an Australian.

As use of the Internet expands around the world, there have been rising calls for a new way of overseeing some of its basic functions, including the allocation of domain suffixes like .com and .org. This duty, and other important technical functions, have been in the hands of Icann, a private, nonprofit organization based in Marina Del Rey, California, for the past decade, under an agreement with the U.S. Commerce Department.

“There will always be different voices out there, but the ultimate proof that Icann is functioning properly is that the Internet is functioning properly,” Mr. Beckstrom said by telephone last week.

One critic of Icann, the European Union media and telecommunications commissioner, Viviane Reding, recently called for a severing of Icann’s links with the U.S. government when the current agreement with the Commerce Department expires this autumn. Instead, she proposed the creation of a “G-12 for Internet governance” to oversee an independent Icann. Read more…

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Swiss Postal Service Is Moving Some Mail Online

The Swiss postal service has started redirecting some mail from the letter box to the in-box.

A program introduced by the Swiss Post in June allows subscribers to receive scans of their unopened envelopes by e-mail message and then decide which ones they want opened and scanned in their entirety, to be read online.

Subscribers can also ask to have the contents archived, send unopened letters to another address or have them shredded and recycled.

The success of the program, called Swiss Post Box, will depend on how widely digital mail is accepted, said Mark Levitt, a former analyst at the International Data Corporation in Washington, a research firm.

“Even people who warmly embraced digital tools stopped short of giving up on paper,” he said. “In fact, the electronic age has generated even greater demand for printers, paper and ink because people have even more information that they feel the need to print out on paper to read.”

The program uses technology provided by Earth Class Mail, a company based in Seattle that has tens of thousands of individual subscribers worldwide, mostly in Britain, the United States, Canada and Mexico. Clients in those countries have mail sent to one of more than two dozen designated addresses for processing. Read more…

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How the Media Wrestle With the Web

LIKE a research scientist who gets a chance to play with a chemistry set, Sreenath Sreenivasan, a new-media professor at the Columbia Journalism School, returned to the roots of his chosen field last month riding home on the No. 1 train.

It was 5:54 p.m. and he was being overwhelmed with messages from people he follows on Twitter saying that Michael Jackson was dead. He gasped at the news, announced it to his fellow riders, and they all gasped too. This is Sree Sreenivasan reporting live from beneath the busy streets of Manhattan.

So, how good was his sourcing?

“I knew he was in the hospital,” he said in an interview. “And by then, so many people who I trusted were tweeting about it. But, of course, they were all quoting the same source.”

That source was TMZ, the celebrity gossip site owned by Time Warner with a reputation as both salacious and accurate. As early as 5:20 p.m., TMZ was reporting that Mr. Jackson had died. When Mr. Sreenivasan emerged from the subway and switched among the three cable news networks, he realized he had much had looser sourcing standards than many of the nation’s largest news outlets. They were still reporting that Mr. Jackson was in a coma, he said, with no mention that the Internet was buzzing with the news that the King of Pop was dead.

“If I had been in fact wrong, it would not have been good,” he said.

Mr. Sreenivasan later posted to Facebook a screenshot of the news alerts he was sent that evening. It shows that, finally, at 6:23 p.m., The Los Angeles Times reported that Michael Jackson was dead. Two minutes later, The Seattle Times sent a bulletin: “L.A. Times Reports Michael Jackson Is Dead.” By 6:34, NBC News, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times had checked in, in that order. Read more…

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Google Chrome OS: Distraction or Opportunity?

This afternoon I had the pleasure of being a guest on Randall Bennett’s TechVi video show. I worked with Randall back in the old AOL/Weblogs days, and I enjoy talking tech with him. TechVi uses a two-guest format, so I always get to chat with new folks in this space. Today it was Ross Rubin from The NPD Group, whom I generally only see once a year at CES. Besides being an analyst at The NPD Group, Ross authors the weekly “Switched On” column for Engadget.

Today’s chat was focused on Google’s Chrome OS announcement, but not from a nuts-and-bolts standpoint. Read more…

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