Comments by Gerrit Eicker

TC: “In any case, Facebook is going to achieve its biggest goals with these updates: people will soon be sharing far more with the web than they were previously, and the social network will be able to mount a substantial challenge against Twitter. Of course, this isn’t the way Facebook is positioning the changes. One of my favorite parts of the conference call was when ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick noted that Facebook was clearly looking to encourage users to open up their data to the public and asked for the social network’s motivations. Facebook’s response? It wants people to make their data public because it helps disambiguate users with similar names. My phone was muted at the time, but I was laughing heartily.”

RWW: “Facebook’s official privacy policy has long stated that you are in control of the information you chose to share. What does that mean, though? Until last week all users really only had two big choices about the visibility of their content: it was either public to everyone or visible to all their friends. Visibility to networks, like your school or city, was one of many complicating factors in a situation that confused most people. Saying that users have control over their information on Facebook has seemed like a stretch. It is very important to many Facebook users that at the very least, people not be given access to their information without approval.”

VB: “The big picture here is that Facebook wants people to feel secure knowing who they’re sharing with, so they’ll share as much information as possible. The more data that Facebook has about who is sharing what, the more it can target ads to those people as well as have more places to serve ads.”

RWW: “Making Facebook like Twitter doesn’t sound like the best idea in the world, but it’s just about the only credible explanation we can think of for the increasingly clear push towards more public sharing on the site. Privacy settings have been confusing and today’s move to simplify them is great. But Facebook is a small-group method of communication for the vast majority of its users and emphasizing list-specific messaging instead of ‘everyone’ would be a more honest way to give users more control over their privacy.”

NYT: “When asked if Facebook was trying to keep up with Twitter, Brandee Barker, Facebook’s director of communications, said the new settings were about encouraging more connections between people. ‘Sharing has always been at the core of our product,’ she said. ‘By recommending more open defaults, more people will be able to connect on the site.‘”

NYT: “For the moment, the features are only available to 40,000 Facebook members in the United States. Next week, the test pool will expand to 80,000. Once the service is out of beta, the various settings will be accessible from a drop-down menu next to the status update and photo upload boxes.”

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Facebook: “Today, we’re launching a beta version of an improved Publisher – the main place to add content such as photos, videos, and status updates on your home page and profile. The new Publisher has been streamlined a bit, and its most significant improvement is the new Publisher Privacy Control that gives you the opportunity to answer the question, ‘Who do you want to tell?’ as easily as you answer the question, ‘What’s on your mind?’ … Everyone: Anyone, on or off, of Facebook can see it.”

TC: “Don’t be fooled by what appears to be a minor change in the user interface. This is another indication of Facebook’s extreme desire to get users to make as much of their data public as possible. Just like Twitter.”

RWW: “The Day Facebook Changed Forever: Messages to Become Public By Default (UPDATED) … After we wrote this post, Facebook HQ emailed to tell us that the first wave of users who get this feature will have their messages made public by default because their profiles were already marked as public, but that when they open the feature up to subsequent users – those users will have default privacy settings that match their pre-existing profile privacy settings. Unfortunately, in our tests so far (see our screencast) – we haven’t been able to successfully change our default message settings back to friends-only, it stays stuck on public. When we switch our test account from profile public to profile private and then back again, the default for message posting gets stuck at ‘friends of friends!’ … In time, though, people may very well decide they are comfortable with their social networking being public by default. That will be a different world, and today will have been one of the most important days in that new world’s unfolding.“

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Chris Messina: “I’m going to talk about six topics: What is Unite?, The Marketing Pitch, Why isn’t Opera open source?, Is Unite really decentralized?, Owning Your Namespace, Unite & Activity Streams – Okay, so I shit all over Opera Unite, but you can’t come out and promise all kinds of world-changing, freedom-enhancing goodness and then not deliver! – worse, to do so when their newest competitor (Google!) is schooling everyone with the perfect example of how to do it right (see: Wave). … I’ll give Opera some credit – both for using Activity Streams instead of inventing their own protocol – and also for launching a fairly polished demonstration of Unite concept as an alpha. If they really want to offer transformative technologies, though, I think it’s critical that they align their business policies with their marketing rhetoric and technological objectives, down to the code level. Anything less will result in confusion and worse, more posts like this one!”

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Hunch: “In 10 questions or less, Hunch will offer you a great solution to your problem, concern or dilemma, on hundreds of topics. Hunch’s answers are based on the collective knowledge of the entire Hunch community, narrowed down to people like you, or just enough like you that you might be mistaken for each other in a dark room. Hunch is designed so that every time it’s used, it learns something new. That means Hunch’s hunches are always getting better.”

TC/UK: “Hunch, the new startup from Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake, has launched and it’s beguilingly fun. After filling out 42 questions ranging from ‘Have you sky dived’ to ‘Do you like it when the cabin crew cracks jokes on airplanes?’ I was presented with a number of things I might be interested in (I chose which film directors I should watch: Tim Burton). I was hooked enough to fill out the profile page (you can get answers without logging in) and at this point it becomes clear: Hunch is a social network where the social object is sharing questions (and thus answers) which might be relevant to you. The more questions you answer the more your profile page become relevant to you. And you can of course share those questions around with a widget.”

TC: “Other sites will be able to tap into Hunch’s question-selection and answer-selection algorithms to create their own Q&A system. Using Hunch’s API, a developer could create a custom product recommendation app for retail sites. Bob’s Bait And Tackle shop could set up a series of questions and answers to guide shoppers to the perfect fly or fishing tackle. All of these questions and answers would then feed back into Hunch’s core system. The more people who use the system, the smarter it should get.”

Mashable: “When we last used Hunch, we were impressed by its accuracy and the breadth of content it covered. Now, we’re simply astounded. I thought of practically every question I could really want to ask, and Hunch had a decision tree to help me resolve my doubts. In that regard, Hunch and its community really does help.”

SEL: “After testing a range of different topics and questions I found the results or answers to be uneven. But the process is very interesting and useful, forcing you to consider priorities or criteria at each stage. Caterina Fake told us that she saw Hunch getting better over time.“

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Twitterrific 2.0.2 which fixes Twitpocalypse bug has been submitted to the App Store: “We’ll do what we can to speed approval.”

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Facebook: “Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must be live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have a minimum 1,000 fans as of May 31, 2009. … Only one username is allowed per Page. … Once you have claimed a username by clicking the ‘Set Username’ button, it is not possible to edit it, or to transfer your username to a different account on Facebook. Additionally, when an account is removed from the site, its username will not be made available to other users for security reasons.”

VB: “On Friday, June 12th, at 9:01pm Pacific Time, you’ll be able to register a URL. But if you have a generic name like John Smith (no offense, just saying) you’ll have to act fast to beat the other John Smiths of the world. It’s first-come, first-served.”

Mashable: “There will be an inevitable gold rush for names on June 13th, and thus there will be many disappointments, complaints, and issues to sort out once the system goes live. Nonetheless, this should be a positive step towards making Facebook profiles a more shareable and personal experience.”

TC: “While Facebook had been playing around with the idea of charging users to get these vanity URLs, they will offer them for free. Facebook is also asking people with a trademarked or protected name to email them to avoid the obvious issues.”

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Mashable: “Manually setting the location to various places in the world, i.e. switching from UK to US changes Bing significantly. There’s at least three very different versions of Bing right now, and depending on where you are, your Bing experience will be very different, which is a very weird decision from Microsoft, bound to cause a lot of confusion, but hey: it’s the Microsoft way.”

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TC: “The key thing to pay attention to is the guided search assistance on the left and the different experiences for the travel, images, video, maps, news, and shopping tabs.”

SEL: “Bing is live as a ‘preview’ service. What’s the ‘preview’ mean? That anyone can use it while Live Search, the service that Bing is to replace, continues on as the ‘main’ Microsoft search engine. Then sometime on June 3, coinciding with Microsoft’s Dr. Qi Lu speaking at our SMX Advanced search marketing conference in Seattle, Bing will shift over and replace Live Search.”

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TC: “The application GroupCard is currently testing the new payment system live for all accounts that have it installed. I included some screenshots below. It’s very straightforward: There’s a big ‘Pay With Facebook‘ button, similar to the ‘Facebook Connect’ buttons you see throughout the web. Next to that, there are the other options to pay with Visa, Mastercard, etc. – Clicking on the ‘Pay With Facebook’ button pops open an overlay which asks you to confirm payment via your Facebook Credits. My $2.99 card cost me 30 Facebook Credits. Expect to see this roll out to other applications soon.”

VB: “Third party applications on Facebook are beginning to test out the social network’s new, in-house payment system, presaging what has been described as a wide-ranging war to among many companies to offer a single, universal virtual currency. There’s been no formal announcement of a launch yet, but an implementation is already live on an app called GroupCards, as spotted by TechCrunch earlier today.”

VB: “All of this is not to say that there will be only one currency. There will always be places for specialized currencies, as well as tools to clear/exchange different virtual currencies. – But the domination that would come from a consumer-embraced universal virtual currency is just a massive opportunity. And while right now it’s just startups, game-centric portals, and minor social networks who are playing with shared currencies, Facebook’s impending tests are going to escalate the current skirmishes to-all out battle. – The universal currency wars are coming. It’s going to be interesting to watch.”

TC: “You can read through the proposed list of rules (there’s also a FAQ). Most of them are pretty straightforward – Facebook basically says that it licenses all of your virtual goods and credits to you (you don’t own them), and it can do whatever it wants as far as changing the price of credits. It’s also not responsible for anything you buy (aside from ensuring that your Facebook Gifts are delivered), and there are no refunds (though the company says that it may intervene in disputes betwen users concerning payments, but that it is under no obligation to do so). Some of the language refers to transactions between users and third parties, which is indicative of the upcoming payment system.”

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TC: “We’re here in the press room at Google I/O for the follow-up press event to the Google Wave unveiling today during the keynote.” – Live Notes (paraphrased)

VB: “VentureBeat writer Anthony Ha live-blogged Wave’s pre-launch demo from the Google I/O conference this morning, but here’s a quick wrap-up of the product’s features: … This list already seems impressive, but there’s a reason Google chose to unveil the product at its developer conference: There’s still a long way to go. Right now, Wave resembles a bunch of services that already exist on the web, from Twitter to FriendFeed to Facebook. Putting them all in one place is a breakthrough in itself, but for truly radical innovation, it’s a masterful idea to tap into third-party enthusiasm. It will be interesting to see how different the product looks by launch time.”

Mashable: “We have compiled key information, definitions, and links related to the launch of Google Wave. This in-depth guide provides an overview of Google Wave, discusses the terminology associated with it, details information on Google Wave applications, (i.e. the Twitter Wave app Twave), and goes over ways to keep yourself informed. We know you’re excited about Google Wave, so here’s what we think you should know…”

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Microsoft: “We took a new approach to go beyond search to build what we call a decision engine. With a powerful set of intuitive tools on top of a world class search service, Bing will help you make smarter, faster decisions. We included features that deliver the best results, presented in a more organized way to simplify key tasks and help you make important decisions faster.”

TC: “Bing also takes advantage of Microsoft’s acquisition of Powerset to provide better previews and snippets of text when you hover over a result. Also, whenever a search brings up a ‘reference’ tab in the guided exploration pane, clicking on that will bring up an enhanced Wikipedia article with semantic tags. – Onstage at the D7 conference, Steve Ballmer acknowledges: ‘There is no way to change the whole game in one step.’ But search ‘deserves a good feature war.’ And Bing will be rolling out new features as it goes forward. But is it enough to get people to switch? Bing is certainly not a game-changer, but it does cut out a lot of the back and forth that happens with so many searches today. If Bing can help people find what they are looking for faster, it will put pressure on Google to keep advancing the ball as well.”

SEL: “I cannot predict how you or others will react or whether Microsoft’s reportedly massive ad campaign for Bing will drive adoption. Advertising can generate awareness or curiosity but that’s about it. The bottom line is whether people find the results and their presentation to be compelling enough to actually use Bing. – So to provide a more concrete sense of Bing in advance of the launch, I conducted a range of basic searches that one might do in a given week and captured screens from both Google and Bing to offer a visual side-by-side comparison.”

SEL: “Similar to Greg Sterling in his head-to-head piece, I’ve been fighting my Google Habit for the past week and deliberately running searches on Bing to compare to Google. The relevancy has been solid. Sometimes Bing gets beat, but sometimes Google does, too.”

AdAge: “But whether the changes look different enough to make consumers switch isn’t clear. Perhaps that’s why Microsoft is helping the service, which will be full deployed on June 3, with an $80 million to $100 million campaign from JWT. – Branding shop Interbrand helped conceive the name Bing, which was chosen because it was memorable, easy to spell around the world and could be used as a verb, as Microsoft hopes to convert people from ‘Google it’ to ‘Bing it.’ – Finding words like that these days ‘is getting harder and harder,’ said Paola Norambuena, senior director-head of verbal identity at Interbrand. She added that linguistically Bing had a lot of applications. ‘It’s the sound of found.‘”

RWW: “For the most part, Bing’s interface resembles that of today’s Live Search, with a large ‘cover image’ on the front page that surrounds the search box. The major difference in the user interface is the addition of guided searches in the left sidebar, though Microsoft says that the real changes are under the hood. The company argues that it can bring a new approach to Internet search by providing a richer, easier, and more organized search experience. This, for example, means that Bing will integrate data from consumer reviews when a search brings up a restaurant, for example.”

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Google: “What is a wave? A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more. – A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when. – A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.”

Googleblog: “Here’s how it works: In Google Wave you create a wave and add people to it. Everyone on your wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing, where you see on your screen nearly instantly what your fellow collaborators are typing in your wave. That means Google Wave is just as well suited for quick messages as for persistent content – it allows for both collaboration and communication. You can also use ‘playback’ to rewind the wave and see how it evolved.”

TC: “Web Workers helps turns the browser into a more full-fledged launch pad for the next generation of web apps. That was the main point of yesterday’s keynote and today’s provides the best example thus far of one of these new-style apps in Wave. – It’s a really interesting concept, one that you really do need to see in action. It’s ambitious as hell – which we love – but that also leaves it open to the possibility of it falling on its face. But that’s how great products are born. And the potential reward is huge if Google has its way as the ringleader of the complete transition to our digital lives on the web.”

TC – Exclusive Video: “Yesterday we had a chance to sit down with that founding team – brothers Lars Rasmussen and Jens Rasmussen and Stephanie Hannon – to talk about the initial idea behind Wave, and Google’s philosophy in rolling it out. VP Engineering Vic Gundotra also makes a cameo appearance at the end.”

RWW: “Google is also making a set of APIs available to developers today. These APIs should give developers the ability to enhance Wave by building extensions for the core product, but also to embed Wave’s features on other sites to make them more collaborative. … Interestingly, Google is taking a very open approach with this new product. Not only will it give developers access to Wave’s APIs, but the team also plans to open-source the protocols at the core of Wave, which really points at the greater ambition of the Wave team to see Wave and its protocols replace at least some of today’s standard communications systems.”

Mashable: “You’re going to have to wait a while though: Google Wave will not be available to the public until later this year. Right now it’s only available to a select group of developers, who will be able to create their own Wave servers. It’s also an open-source project with a lot of API integrations, so we can expect a lot of user-driven innovations and extensions for the platform as well. – So, back to the big question: could Google Wave really redefine web communication? Clearly it’s too early to tell, but we’re already very impressed with the client and its potential. We’ll be testing out its sandbox soon and giving you our assessment, as well as updating you with any more information coming out of Google I/O today.”

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