reDesign

TechCrunch is reporting that Facebook has changed course on Beacon, a controversial new data gathering and publishing system. With Beacon, participating Web sites sent data to Facebook that automatically appeared on your profile. For example, if you wrote a review on Yelp or TripAdvisor, the review would appear in your Facebook Mini-Feed and could appear in the News Feeds that your friends see. Other partner Web sites include eBay, Fandango and Overstock.com.

This has caused a couple of concerns:

• Users saw information published that they didn’t necessarily want published. Many people are purchasing Christmas presents and the contents of their orders were put out on their feed, ruining surprises.
• It’s unclear what Facebook does with data that users choose not to publish. Facebook still receives the information from partner sites.

Under the new direction, stories will be sent to Facebook, but will only be published when the user takes an explicit action. That addresses the first concern, but it doesn’t address the second. For all we know, Facebook could be storing that information indefinitely and using that to target ads.

Facebook is all about giving up privacy in exchange for social connectivity. I frequently provide false information when sites ask me about age, gender, etc. Facebook, on the other hand, gets real data because it’s essential to the core function. It’s a tradeoff that I make. But automatically providing transaction-level detail from any partner site is a tradeoff I’m not willing to make.

I’m perfectly happy to have Facebook distribute reviews I write on Yelp. (I was using an application called Yelper to do this before Beacon existed.) But I wouldn’t want Facebook to automatically publish all my reservations on OpenTable (OT is not a partner, this is hypothetical). If I sell an unwanted gift on eBay, I don’t want friends to know about it. Not only do I not want Facebook to publish that information, I don’t want them to get it in the first place.

The biggest problem with Beacon is that there isn’t a clear benefit to the user. It seems like a data grab primarily for marketing purposes. Jason Calacanis’ take on this is well worth reading.

Beacon has a lot of power and can provide a lot more benefit to users than it currently does. I’ll talk more about that in the future.

Update: Om Malik reports that Facebook is deleting information that users choose not to publish.

See also:

• Facebook Beacon 2.0: What You’ll See (TechCrunch)
• Facebook updates Beacon: now truly opt-in (Inside Facebook)
• Feeling Betrayed, Facebook Users Force Site to Honor Their Privacy (washingtonpost.com)
• To Save Its Bacon, Facebook Weakens Beacon (GigaOm)

More on: Facebook, privacy, social networking

In the last week or so, I’ve seen a few of our favorite geek topics appear in pop culture. Twitter provided key clues in CSI. The Simpsons finally got Tivo. Doonesbury featured Pandora.

Tuesday’s Jeopardy! had as the Final Jeopardy! clue:

This company’s name is a variation on a word coined by Milton Sirotta & used in the book “Mathematics and the Imagination”

Answer after the video.

Jeopardy! answer: What is Google?

Google is a variant of googol, which is the number 1 with a hundred zeros after it. Larry Page was in my high school class and was fascinated with googol even back then.

Two of the three Jeopardy! contestants got it right. The other answered Yahoo!

Yahoo, by the way, originally stood for Yet Another Hierarchically Officious Oracle.

Bonus question: What is the name of the first search engine developed by Larry and Sergey?

(Bonus question courtesy of Adam Lasnik.)

Pictures from my trip to Lake Tahoe and Reno are online. Highlights of the trip were Emerald Bay, Virginia City and the National Automobile Museum in Reno. The museum is really the only thing in Reno I found worthwhile. Here is the map.

My friends who’ve seen me walk around with a GPS as I take pictures on vacation or hikes think I’m a little bit odd. But apparently, I’m not the only one. In the 15 months since Flickr officially supported geotagging, more than 35 million pictures have been geotagged — enough that they can launch Flickr Places to show them off.

One of my big complaints with most travel sites is that they downplay the visual and visceral elements that make travel fun. At Flickr Places, that’s front and center. Places offers a gorgeous travelogue of places around the world. You can see pictures, Flickr groups about the location and connect with photographers.

A tag cloud shows the top tags for an area; this sounds more useful than it is. Most places I searched came up with words like clouds, sunset, people, church. It’d be nice if the universal words were thrown out and the focus places on words that are unique or much more common for an area.

I’d also like to be able to zoom in on the map and see where the most photographed places are. (There are some data quality issues with this, but they’re manageable.)

Flickr also changed the way maps are presented. Although the maps and overall presentation are more visually appealing, some key functionality was lost. In the previous version, the map represented your search. If you zoomed in or out, the new map defined the boundaries. As a result, you could see new pictures that didn’t appear in the other view.

The World Map view now provides a tag visualization that shows the latest tags from around the world. (See my earlier coverage of World Explorer from Yahoo! Research.)

See also:

• A page on Flickr for every place in the world (flickr blog)
• Ridiculously cool upgrade to Flickr maps and Places (Yahoo! Local & Maps blog)

More on: flickr, geotagging

Google’s latest changes to My Maps allows you to collaborate on personal maps with others in much the same way you can share a Google Document or Spreadsheet.

You can also allow anyone to edit a map.

Group editing is great for maps that are too hard for one person to scale. Before this release, I started maps of free Wi-Fi and restaurants with outdoor dining. Now I can invite my friends and the public to help build out the maps. Although some of these data is captured by vertical players such as JiWire and Skyhook, the integration with Google’s Local Search brings it to a much wider audience.

Google could use the same platform to have users build out vertical directories to augment data from providers like InfoUSA by actively soliciting users to contribute places on specific topics. This is already happening on an ad hoc basis as users follow their passions and create maps.

We’ve seen news organizations use My Maps to cover stories such as the California wildfires. They could open that up to a collaborative process with their readers.

See also:

• Google Maps gets social
• The quest for buried treasure in mapping
• Using Google Maps as a virtual notepad
• Map your world with Google Maps
• Personal mashups - letting users re-draw the map

A longstanding problem with online maps and navigation devices is that your destination is often not where they say it is. When you reach the “destination”, you’re often a few hundred feet from where you wanted to be. There are three common reasons for this:

• No one has walked every street and identified where each address is. Addresses are approximated based on standard numbering schemes. On a block that goes from 200 to 300, 250 will be placed in the middle.
• Businesses sometimes use vanity addresses. The business may have an address on Madison Avenue in New York, but the real entrance is off less glamorous 54th Street.
• The business address is incorrect or malformed in the database.

Google Maps is now tapping users to help fix this problem. Users can edit the location markers for a given address. To prevent abuse, any movements greater than about 600 feet are moderated.

This is especially helpful for addresses that are incorrect in the Google database or can’t be accurately geocoded. These appear on Google Maps with a circle to mark the location and a warning.

The Pentagon Post Office is listed with an address of “The Penagon, Arlington, VA 22201″. As a result, it appears about three miles from where it really is. I was able to move it to the correct spot, on top of the Pentagon. Because this is more than 600 feet, the change will be moderated. I’ll be watching to see how quickly that happens. (Update: Google has since removed the Pentagon Post Office record altogether.)

If this feature takes off, it will make Google’s Street View feature much more useful. Right now, when you pull up a Street View of an address, there’s a good chance you won’t see the business you were looking for because it shows a view of the approximated location.

More on: Google, maps, satellite navigation

A large untapped opportunity in social networks is connecting people with information they’re looking for.

I was flying home this weekend from Lake Tahoe and connected in Salt Lake City. While I was there, I updated my Facebook status to indicate that I was in Utah for the first time.

Later that night I received a message from my friend Dean:

hey Rocky, whatcha doing in the beautiful, bizarre state of UT?

I lived there for a year after AOL. Let me know if you need any tips on where to go while you are there.

Without doing a search, I had information coming directly to me from someone I knew. I was just in Utah for 90 minutes, so I didn’t need any tips. But when I go there for real, I now know to begin my search with Dean.

By distributing information needs through our network, social networks allow us to tap into a large base of knowledge from known sources.

Services like Yahoo! Answers allow you to ask questions, but Answers is largely anonymous. Too many of the answers devolve into insults and name calling and it’s hard to tell if people know what they’re talking about. There is also an incentive problem: I don’t participate in Yahoo! Answers because I don’t have enough time to answer questions for random strangers. But I’m happy to answer questions for friends.

LinkedIn’s Answers product usually delivers better results by posing questions just to your network. And because I know these people, I can easily assess the credibility of their answers. LinkedIn’s professional focus is a bit limiting; I wouldn’t pose questions about vacation plans there.

If I were really going to Utah, I suppose I could spam everyone I know with an email asking if anyone knew anything about Utah. The passive approach of updating my Facebook status is more socially acceptable.

For now, this relies on my friends seeing my status message and responding. It was more or less random that Dean saw my status message. As social networks get smarter (and get more data), the request can be routed automatically to the people likely to have a good answer. My status message could be displayed more prominently to friends whose profiles indicated that they’d lived in or visited Utah.

Marketers can also be part of the conversation. Facebook allows you to become a “fan” of a company or a product. If I become a “fan” of United Airlines, they could send me information about their Utah service or upcoming sales. I’d love to hear about any great deals to Park City this winter.

More on: Facebook, search

See also:

• Marketing on social networks
• The power of location in presence

Yup, that’s an Ethernet jack above the urinal. I saw this at my friend Kieran’s pub, The Local in Minneapolis.

No, I didn’t try plugging in.

Here’s what the jack is really used for.

The other day I wrote about viral marketing on social networks by getting users to engage with your products and brands. Facebook Beacon, announced on Tuesday, allows sites such as eBay and Yelp to publish your activity on your Facebook news feeds, automating this process. 44 sites in all participated in the announcement.

This is expanding what many applications already do with Facebook. Applications such as MyFlickr (pictures), Yelper (local reviews), Feedheads (Google Reader), WordPress (blog posts) and others take off-Facebook activity and publish it in your profile and feeds.

With Beacon, when you do something on a partner site — such as write a review, buy a product, win a game — that information gets transmitted to Facebook. You then have the option to publish the information on your Facebook feed. This raises privacy issues. GigaOm and John McKinley offer sharp criticism.

The big question I haven’t seen addressed is what Facebook does with the Becaon data if I don’t choose to publish it. There are brands that people would happily associate themselves with (Timbuk2), others that simply provide utility (Tide) and some that are embarrassing (Preparation H). If I buy Preparation H and tell Facebook I don’t want to publish it, do they still keep track of the fact that I’ve bought it?

With Facebook Beacon, I see the third-party sites being more concerned about the use of the data than users. If I’m Amazon or Netflix, one of my competitive advantages is the database of purchasing habits that I have. Do I really want to give that away?

More on: Facebook

After more than 12 years of heavy business travel, I thought I’d seen it all.

As I was waiting at the security checkpoint at Dulles yesterday, I saw a woman almost put a carrier with three puppies through the X-ray. Fortunately, a TSA agent saw it and had her take them out.