Users gain ability to strictly monitor who can access content they store on the social network

By Heather Havenstein

March 19, 2008 (Computerworld) After enduring withering criticism late last year for the lack of adequate privacy controls in its Beacon advertising system, Facebook Inc. today garnered positive reviews for new controls that let users more strictly monitor who can access the content they create on the site.

The privacy controls launched Wednesday let users limit access to information like photo albums or contact information to specific Facebook friends or friends lists, the company said. Facebook had rolled out the friends list feature in December as a way to help users communicate with groups of friends on the network.

Nick O’Neill, a blogger on All Facebook, noted that the new features

provide users with more granular privacy by specifying various settings for each friend list. “This means that, in theory, all of my professional contacts will no longer be able to access my photos, and I can start posting those photos of my crazy times in college,” he added.

“These new settings have theoretically transformed Facebook, making it possible to manage all of my contacts from one site,” O’Neill wrote.

The All Facebook blogger also noted that the social networking firm today also launched a new option that allows users to opt-out of personalized SocialAds that integrate into photos a notice telling his or her friends about recent purchases made at various online retailers.

“If you hadn’t noticed already, once in a while your friends’ photos have been showing up on ads promoting applications and fan pages,” O’Neill said. “Many were turned off by those ads complaining that making money off of our profiles is crossing the line. This is a significant step by Facebook, highlighting that Facebook has granted a higher priority to user privacy over monetization. This is an encouraging step and greatly welcomed, considering there wasn’t much controversy over the ads as they existed.”

Josh Catone, a blogger on ReadWriteWeb, said that when the friends list feature was rolled out in December, he called it a necessary first step in attracting the business networking crowd to Facebook. However, he also noted that the feature “had no teeth” because of a lack of privacy controls. That has changed because the new features give users the option of showing private information to only specific friends or “friends of friends,” which is similar to features in the more business-oriented LinkedIn professional networking site, Catone added.

“While going after the business networking crowd has never been an objective expressed overtly by the company, it does make sense,” he said. “As Facebook’s core early audience — college students — grows up, they’ll need a more secure environment to network with colleagues and friends. Facebook is slowly positioning itself to be a place where both casual and business networking can take place at the same time, which means that rather than maintaining two accounts — one at Facebook and one at LinkedIn or Xing — users could stay at Facebook and use the tools they grew accustomed to in college.”

Not all industry observers were pleased with the changes. Jeffrey Chester, founder and executive director at the Center for Digital Democracy — one of the strongest critics of Beacon’s initial lack of privacy controls — noted that Facebook still has to ensure that its members are candidly informed about any personal data shared with advertisers and marketers.

“Its incremental improvements — all due to the increasing scrutiny in the EU and U.S. and from privacy advocates — are occurring at a snail’s pace,” he said. “Facebook’s senior managers still have not come to terms with the need for them to ensure transparency and full user control.”

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By Tim Conneally, BetaNews

March 20, 2008, 4:56 PM

Google yesterday announced the availability of a plug-in for Windows Mobile devices, which provides a shortcut on the home screen to Google’s search.

The plug-in was first made available to BlackBerry devices last December, and then to Symbian-based phones more recently. Making it available on Microsoft’s popular mobile operating system was only a logical step for Google.

The plug-in can be found at mobile.google.com, where Google offers its other mobile services. It comes as a 300KB file called “googlesearch.CAB,” which upon installation makes a Google search field appear on the home screen of the phone.

By eliminating the need to open a browser and navigate to Google, the company claims that searches have increased 20% among those with the Symbian and BlackBerry versions of the software.

Google’s dominance in mobile Web searches was the subject of debate at the Visiongain Mobile Web Search Conference in London. While some said the company is the last word in Web searches in both traditional and mobile settings, others accused Google of lacking innovation in its mobile search delivery, where more appropriate (e.g. location-based) results are required.

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Apple uses the update mechanism for Windows for distributing the latest versions of its iTunes music store and for the QuickTime video player.

By Antone Gonsalves
InformationWeek

Apple on Thursday said it is distributing the latest version of the Safari Web browser to Windows users through Apple Software Update, a move that reflects a more aggressive attempt to grab market share fromMicrosoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Internet Explorer.

Apple uses the update mechanism for Windows for distributing the latest versions of its iTunes music store and for the QuickTime video player, which is a foundation technology for iTunes. With the release of Safari 3.1 this week, Apple also started offering Windows users the option of installing the browser upgrade. Software Update is also used to update Apple software in Mac computers.

“We are using Software Update to make it easy and convenient for both Mac and Windows users to get the latest Safari update from Apple,” company spokesman Bill Evans said in an emailed statement.

As of February, IE had 74.9% of the browser market in terms of usage, followed by Mozilla Firefox, 17.3%; and Safari, 5.7%, according to Web site analysis company Net Applications.

By shipping Safari via Software Update, Apple is taking a more aggressive approach to distributing its browser within Microsoft’s home turf. In releasing Safari 3.1, Apple claimed its browser loads Web pages 1.9 times faster than IE 7 and 1.7 times faster than Firefox 2. Such claims are not unusual among vendors comparing products to rivals’.

Among the key improvements in the latest version of Safari, which is available at no charge, is support for additional Web standards. On that front, the upgrade supports new video and audio tags in HTML 5, and animations created through the use of cascading style sheets. The browser also supports CSS Web fonts.

Microsoft this month said it would configure the default settings in the upcoming IE 8 to render content using methods that give a top priority to Web standards interoperability. In choosing to favor standards, Microsoft recognized a “concrete benefit to Web designers if all vendors give priority to interoperability around commonly accepted standards as they evolve,” Ray Ozzie, chief software architect for Microsoft, said in a statement.

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Posted by Elinor Mills

Google on Wednesday unveiled Gadgets for Spreadsheets in Google Docs, allowing people to create graphical representations of data in spreadsheets and publish them on Web sites.

For consumers, this means they have a dozen or so new ways to look at data in their spreadsheets. Google has put up a gallery of specialty gadgets to choose from. They include gadgets to display data on a pie chart, map, time chart, funnel chart, Gantt chart, pivot table, and on a heat map if it’s geographical data. You can even create interactive charts like those used by Google Finance and for motion charts.

These visuals can also be pushed out to appear on an iGoogle home page or any other site and they will be dynamically updated as changes are made to the spreadsheet.

Gadgets will soon be coming to other apps in Google Docs and eventually search, to help people find relevant content and links, says Jonathan Rochelle, senior product manager for Google Docs.

Google has also added new features that make using Spreadsheets easier. For one, there is a notification system that will e-mail you when somebody has made a change to a spreadsheet that is being collaborated on. You can set it to alert you once a day or after each new change is made. The changes are highlighted so you can easily detect what is new.

There is also a column-based auto-complete function that looks for cues from adjacent cells to try to guess what you are typing, an updated color palette and function editing capability that uses the arrow keys, as well as an auto-complete function for typing long formulas.

In addition, spreadsheet creators now have access to historical stock market data through a Google Finance function and new functions to automatically sort and filter data.

Google is doing something interesting with its Gadgets platform, making gadgets a data source for spreadsheets as well as a data distribution method for developers.

“If I’m collecting census data and putting it into a spreadsheet, I can also make that data available to statisticians,” through the Visualization API, says Rochelle. “It doesn’t have to be in a spreadsheet form” to distribute.

Spreadsheets is just the first data source that can be handled this way.

“We’re making the spreadsheet almost a platform for simple development and delivery,” he says.

With the enhancements, Google is ratcheting up the competition its free Web-hosted apps are giving Microsoft’s desktop productivity suite, which companies pay for.

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SAN FRANCISCO -(Dow Jones)- The iPhone Dev Team, a group of independent software developers, say they are close to unleashing a new product that undoes the tight control Apple Inc. (AAPL) plans to have over the flow of the software to its iPhone.

The developer team is working on a feature it’s calling Pwnage, which lets iPhones download and run other software programs that haven’t gone through any official, Apple-controlled software distribution channels.

“You can do things like installing custom-made files, straight from (Apple’s) iTunes,” according to comments attributed to one of the iPhone Dev Team’s developers, who goes by the name MuscleNerd, posted on the team’s Web site, iphone-dev.org. “The tools are undergoing intensive developing and soon will be ready for public consumption.”

Pwnage is the latest example of how disruptive software developers have been to Apple’s best-laid plans for its iPhone, a key product for Apple. Once distributed, the Pwnage feature means Apple may no longer be able to count on taking a 30% share of every iPhone software program sold, as it said it would.

Meanwhile, the Pwnage software also weakens the steps Apple is taking to rein in a developer community regarding iPhone software sales, which are expected to blossom into hundreds of millions of dollars, if not $1 billion a year, in annual sales.

As outlined by Apple about 10 days ago, starting sometime in June Apple plans to begin distributing iPhone software made by outside developers. But it first will inspect iPhone software programs from third parties, then distribute them either through Apple’s iTunes Web store, or directly to the phone via an Apple- controlled “Apps Store.”

Meanwhile, Pwnage may also weigh on Apple’s plans to sell more iPhones to businesses, steps it announced two weeks ago when it said every iPhone will soon be able to access Microsoft Corp.’s (MSFT) Outlook email. But Apple also plans to make business software providers like SAP AG (SAP) or Oracle Corp. (ORCL) distribute their iPhone software through official Apple channels, a move that rankled an industry not used to having to deal with an intermediary. It remains to be seen, though, if enterprises would see the new Pwnage software as a decent workaround to the issue.

An Apple spokeswoman did not comment for this story, citing company policy not to talk about products in development at other companies. A representative for iPhone Dev Team, which rarely grants interviews, did not return several emails seeking comment.

The iPhone, a combination phone and digital media player with a touch-screen interface, was introduced last June, and has since become Apple’s fastest selling device. As of two weeks ago, Apple was the No. 2 seller of smart phones, with a 28% share, behind No. 1-ranked Research In Motion Ltd. (RIM), the maker of the BlackBerry wireless email device and cell phone.

Shortly after the iPhone was released, Apple promised to open the iPhone so developers could create and distribute software programs for the device. From the start, Apple has allowed developers to create Web-based features for the iPhone to use.

But lots of developers didn’t wait for official channels. Within a few days of the iPhone’s release, they came up with their first substantial, market-changing development: software to unlock the iPhone so it will work on any GSM-based cellphone network, rather than just AT&T Inc.’s (T), which at the time was the only iPhone service provider.

Even though Apple wiped out those programs with an iPhone software update of its own, unlocking software still exists and its sales have thrived. Nearly 25% of all the iPhones sold, according to various estimates, are now unlocked, thus depriving Apple and its carrier partners the fees they would normally have collected from phone service revenue.

The popularity of the unlocking software is also putting more pressure on Apple to do away with its strategy of picking a single carrier per country to exclusively sell the device.

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By KEVIN J. DELANEY

Google Inc. plans to announce a new service that Web publishers can use to manage their online ad sales and serve up ads each time a consumer pulls up a Web page.

The offering is an early sign of Google’s plans to broaden its ad offerings following the completion of its $3.1 billion DoubleClick Inc. acquisition this week.

The new Ad Manager service, which a limited number of Web sites are testing, will provide the ad serving free, where companies such as DoubleClick have traditionally charged Web publishers to serve up their ads. Even when they sell their own ads, publishers usually rely on such ad-serving companies to actually insert the ads in a Web page when a consumer pulls it up.

Google, Mountain View, Calif., is hoping that Ad Manager users will agree to carry some ads Google sells in ad spots on their Web sites they haven’t filled themselves. Google would take a commission on revenue from any ads it sells.

The move comes as the Internet giant looks to expand its online ad offerings beyond the small text ads that run alongside Web search results and other content, which today represent the bulk of Google’s revenue, and amid fears that a consumer slowdown could spill over into online ads.

Google says it won’t require Ad Manager users to carry the ads from Google’s AdSense system, and they can also choose to fill the spots with ads from other online ad networks in cases where they generate more money for the publisher. The Ad Manager service will handle formats including graphical display, video and text ads.

Google developed Ad Manager itself and says that it will serve Web publishers with small- to medium-size sales forces, while DoubleClick’s services are suited for higher-end ad-sales operations. Some industry executives have speculated that Google will eventually make DoubleClick’s ad-serving services free. A Google spokesman says the company has no immediate plans to make DoubleClick products free.

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