I Can't See Your Face

Full article HERE.

"On Thursday, PC World detailed that Facebook was "secretly adding" third-party applications to user profiles, something that the company once again attributed to a bug and said that it had been fixed. Investor-pundit Paul Kedrosky and fanboy idol Peter Rojas, former editor of Engadget and co-founder of GDGT, both announced on Thursday that they were deactivating their Facebook profiles.

Basically, Facebook is the Pacific Ring of the Web. In its six-year history the company has radically changed its product by implementing one small, step-by-step move after another.

Recently published excerpts from David Kirkpatrick's forthcoming book "The Facebook Effect" recall small Facebook features and quirks that were quietly snuffed from the site, like the random placement of the "Wedding Crashers" quote "I don't even know what a quail looks like" under its search query field. Cue a few thousand early Facebook users saying, "Oh, yeah, I remember that!"

How do you bust up a giant landmass into seven pieces without anybody noticing? Slowly. How do you turn an uptight, closed-off Web business built by a few college students into a sprawling creature that seems capable of sharing anything with anyone anywhere? Very, very slowly. But when something big happens, people start to notice the small stuff that they wish they'd seen earlier.

Concerned Facebook members are now acting like the social network has grown into something beyond their control, that even lawmakers might not be able to do much good, that the company is acting more like an unpredictable force of nature than a business run by, well, humans. Which is funny, because these days Facebook is playing up its human side, its fallibility.

After Wednesday's privacy glitch caused Facebook to temporarily disable its chat feature while all the bugs were fixed, The New York Times quoted the company's vice president of public policy, Elliot Schrage, as saying, "Are we perfect? Of course not." We should be getting used to the fact that an "iterative" product model, the sort of practice that's become commonplace now that pushing out new features no longer requires waiting for the next release of a shrink-wrapped software package, will mean imperfections.

It will mean screw-ups. It will mean bugs that are quickly patched and poorly thought-out features that are pulled in due time, but they were there in the first place, and user data may have been affected in the process. These are Facebook's tectonic plates, and we are just riding around on them.

This is disconcerting, and perhaps unethical. It's provoked concern among lawmakers, anger among activist groups, and fear among Facebook members. But, for better or for worse, this is how Facebook has been working for the past six years, and the Web at large may finally be coming to that sort of understanding.

The ground is moving at Facebook, and it always has been. The social network can credit a big portion of its success to this ability and willingness to keep changing while some of its industry brethren -- MySpace, Digg -- kept products relatively static and are now suffering the consequences.

This doesn't mean that Facebook's unstoppable by any means, though. Maybe the coalition of U.S. senators petitioning the Federal Trade Commission to rein in social networks' handling of user data a bit will be effective, and Facebook will be forced to stabilize the iteration of its service a bit; this, in turn, could mean that its lightning-speed innovation could be curbed as red tape and roadblocks go up, making it more likely that another service could race in and start chewing at its market share.

Or members could, of course, just leave -- and Facebook's business model is only as good as the 400 million people who inhabit it. But people choose to live in areas prone to deadly natural disasters, too. Living your life (or a portion of it) on the Web and entrusting personal data to social-media services like Facebook means that you're agreeing to colonize a product that's subject to change and unexpected error.

This is true for many services besides Facebook, too. Twitter's shown hints of major expansion plans. Location-based networking start-ups have an appetite for marketing partnership dollars and a whole lot of private data in their coffers. Then there's Blippy, the new, edgy purchase-sharing start-up that accidentally exposed several users' credit card numbers last month.

You could choose to err on the side of paranoia, assume that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is greedily dreaming of how awesome it will be when he sells everyone's data to marketers and uses the profits to buy himself a private island, and delete your Facebook account.

Or you could just be aware, be cautious, and figure that maybe your credit card data is something you want to keep off of Facebook for now.

Because while Facebook is the company it is today -- subject to constant and frequent volatility, eager to tread into new marketing and networking territory --this is how it's going to be."

The only reaction there is to make is that Facebook is really about the users who sign up for free and upload their personal information. Even today bugs and crashes will occur, and there is no 100% protection against occasional hack assaults. Users must be aware of their privacy settings and should not take it as a surprise if their personal content gets sprinkled all over the web. This idea should be taken into consideration when concerning these leaks, too.

By the way, it was Facebook that patched its system in order to prevent users monitoring the visitors of their own profile. The patch was created in order to stabilize the privacy shield for each Facebook-profile, but it also represented the strictness of Facebook's official policy of the issue. Altogether, Facebook is not exactly infamous of its leaking content...

What I like most about this article is the little Facebook-icon just below the text, where one can share the link to the article and a short preview of it on their Facebook-walls. Sharing web-content á lá web 2.0 style has become so popular on social networking sites, such as Facebook, that many news portals immediately adopted the idea.

Cluny Revisited

Since an almost 30 year-old pedophile scandal resurfaced a few weeks ago, the siege of Vatican does not cease. The news of a priest from Munich sexually harassing a young boy back in the 80’s made the current pope’s reputation tremble. As the details of the scandal emerged from obscurity, it turned out that from Switzerland to France and from Brazil to entire Africa, every country could come up with at least one child molester to feed the scandal of the Church’s collapsing reputation.

According to the psychiatrist of the molester priest of Munich, Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI.), although the archdiocese in Munich during the incident, did not eventually know about the reinstallation of the abuser into service. Today, Joseph Ratzinger is dictating letter after letter to the Polish, Irish and Swiss churches in order to come over the rising tension. Apparently, he has to stand firmly on his heels if he ever wants to provide a proper response to the major news outlets’ scream for scandal: “Irish disgust over Roman Catholic Church”, “Pope’s tarnished reputation”, and so on, just to name a few of the popular headlines.

Vatican experts claim that the current scandal is mainly due to the “dam-effect”: in case of such delicate issues (like: concerning morality), one spark is enough to evoke the flames.

The outcome of this current issue is especially relevant from the aspect of the long-awaited reform of priests’ regulations, especially the question of celibate. Back in the 11^th century, the reform of Cluny aimed at reorganizing the law of the Church to prevent priest from forming families and thus (via heirs) shoveling all the wealth out of the system. Today morality issues are the weakest link in a religion’s agenda, and while Ratzinger (sadly) needs to patch up his torn reputation, an even more interesting finale of the current issue is going to be the dilemma of abolishing celibate. Will this also abolish pedophilia? Is that the real remedy?

Outdated Tyranny

The Great Firewall of China has struck again, but a bit late this time. Zhang Hong, the chief editor heading one of China’s most important and widespread daily papers, was fired after his article dared to criticize the highly suffocating bureaucracy in China’s legislative customs. One of the main concerns of Zhang’s article turned out to be the one reporting on the Chinese registration system that today ties the population to its original birth town and thus hinders the free flow of citizens migrating around the country. The only problem the Chinese government commando made this time was not preventing this snippet of news reaching some of the major news outlets in Europe and the US. The scandal erupted.

As it is obvious, people from the countryside are the most endangered segment of the current Chinese population, since in order to pursue a financially successful (= not starving to death) life, many of them are lured to the larger metropolises, such as Beijing. However, due to the good old registration system in China, many of the citizen’s rights are only available (!) in their birth town. Such reference to some vague “right of birth” is not as new as it might seem. The notion of "divide et impera", as the great Romans would recite all over the basin of the Mediterranean Sea two thousand years ago, is becoming ever more timely in China. This large country cannot actually afford the larger mega-cities and cannot compensate the economic loss that origins from a shrinking agriculture of the countryside. But the main problem is not about economics. The main problem is about preventing huge masses of people to hear about valuable information that is relevant to their lives; not letting them be near the news outlets and to experience the cracking and popping of the cultural melting pot of the city. The main problem is about preventing people to gather; since if there is a smaller gathering, there surely will be a larger one, and after that: an entire anti-governmental revolutionary party might form itself right there on the street.

The recent Google-scandal that involved Chinese hackers having a little fun with the Great Western Search Engine shed light on the strict Internet censorship in a country which, by the way, fed itself on its own self-esteem one and a half year ago when hosting the Summer Olympics in 2008. Back then, China showed the world what it has got. Zhang’s paper criticized the government, and a few hours later, Zhang was already dismissed. His former colleagues were too terrified to acknowledge the utter nonsense of such governmental repercussions.

What could still intrigue any readers of those few news outlets that could actually snatch the info covering Chinese registration issues is why such an overt punishment, arriving from a centralized government, can still nourish from people’s fear. Of course it can, but until when? Wouldn’t it be a more rewarding strategy to just simply pat Zhang on the back for his effort and make sure he disappears in a few years time, discreetly and quietly? Chinese tyrannical censorship and fake bureaucracy have been outdated to such an extent it could surprise anyone. Well, anyone who does not need to calculate with the everyday fight for survival in the Chinese idyll of living outside a “protecting” city. Still, China’s governmental behavior, especially if we consider this behavior as a strange but potentially dangerous phenomenon that is (most importantly) monitored by the entire West, is something that needs to be put into museums. Under thick glass.