Lately there’s been a lot of privacy backlash over Facebook making a lot of information public by default. But one question that’s getting lost in the controversy deserves more attention. Why are they doing it?

I was lucky enough to be at a semantic web conference just after Facebook unleashed its new Graph API. What Facebook has done, for those who aren’t familiar, is changed Facebook interests and “likes” into links. So now, instead of having a list of movies and hobbies you like, your profile now links to pages for Cooking and The Godfather.

Cooking has more friends than you do

These pages are wrappers of the same information that was on Wikipedia, IMDB and elsewhere, but with likes and wall posts added. If you click on some of the Wikipedia links, you’ll get taken not to Wikipedia, but to another Facebook page that wraps it. Facebook may be using Wikipedia’s content, but the experience and the information is controlled by Facebook and stays on facebook.com.

Facebook isn’t interested in (just) becoming an encyclopedia of things, though. Facebook is interested in becoming an encyclopedia of you. All of your interests and likes are now linked, via FB, to wrapper pages that Facebook manages. Facebook is the centralized database that stores all that information.

This is how Facebook sees you. From F8 developer conference.

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Is having an open graph everywhere inevitable?

The four founders of Diaspora, in an appropriately indie band pose.

At the same time that Facebook was transforming their site into a database of everyone, a group of four NYU college students got a writeup from the New York Times. Their project, called Diaspora, was (is) to make your personal encyclopedia entry private, so you can control your information and how it gets accessed.

But while people donated nearly 200 thousand dollars to their project, and much ink was spilled over how much Facebook was now sharing about us, one might argue that the change to a public graph a la Facebook is inevitable. After all:

• Many, some at Facebook, some elsewhere, have argued that privacy is less important to members of Generation Y.
• Plus, having a shared social graph is clearly better than one where you can’t see any of the nodes, right? Once we see how useful it is to share the music we like and the news we’re interested in through the graph, we won’t want to turn back.

There are two forces that will decide this future: developers and you, the user.

Developers matter

You may have noticed recently that a huge number of sites – CNN, Pandora, the New York Times and others – have started spouting Facebook like buttons. Some other sites have included ways to login using Facebook itself, making you verify your identity by using your Facebook information.

Websites do this because it makes things easier. People are (arguably) more likely to login to CNN using Facebook than entering their email address, setting yet another password that could be forgotten, and checking their email for some confirmation link they have to click on. The added convenience makes it worth it to connect CNN to your real name and identity. For some people at least.

Web developers are the key to this, because we end up building the technology that decides if our sites are linked through Facebook or not. And, frankly: There are few good alternatives to Facebook.

For login, there are simply no sites that have the coverage of Facebook. We as developers could let you login to CNN through Google or Twitter, but allowing Facebook logins and using Facebook likes is a necessity. Or at least, a de facto standard.

Let’s say you wanted to make an alternative: You’d need to make sure that there’s an easy way for developers to incorporate it into their sites, because for a long time, you will be dealing with developers who have to put Facebook stuff on their website, and you’ll be their spare time project. If they can’t just drop it in, they won’t!

How will people react to Facebook in the long run?

As a Facebook user, the question that really matters is not privacy or the social graph. Instead: What’s in it for me? What do I get if I share all this information?

There isn’t that much value in sharing my movie preferences to a bunch of people, only some of whom are actually my friends. Twitter has proven that a market exists for conspicuous sharing – wide, out there, open sharing – but a lot of Facebook’s privacy woes come from incidental sharing – the “oops, I didn’t know that was public” type of sharing. One person came up with his own solution – all of his Facebook information is now public.

To borrow from the earlier 2000s: Some of us signed onto FB thinking it was LiveJournal, and it’s turned into MySpace. Those of us who thought that will move on.

Facebook’s main utility, for me and the one person I asked, is to see if my friends have updated their pages, and to upload and look at pictures. None of this has anything to do with the social graph, and until someone comes up with a killer app involving me sharing my links to fourteen different things, it’s not going to matter to me. I’ll just turn it off, and my Facebook page will be just another one of the many abandoned webpages I’ve made about myself.

Anyway, when I was watching it for the first time, I spotted a reference to Chronotrigger that blew me away. The clip below is what I’m talking about:

It’s an island in the sky! And they’re playing the theme from Zeal!

The music is nearly identical to the music played in Chronotrigger when you set foot on the island of Zeal. Coincidence? I think not.

Previously

Teams can basically function in one of two ways. Loosely speaking, let’s call them the light side and the dark side.

On the light side, everyone is communicating and everyone is focused on the success of the team. People are willing to make sacrifices, and everyone knows who’s making the sacrifices. There is openness and solidarity; the team shares one objective.

If this sounds a little bit doe-eyed and delusional, then I don’t need to introduce you to the dark side.

While I call it the dark side, the thinking that pulls someone over to this side is completely rational. “Why should I give up my time and my effort to get something done for someone who’s just going to claim it for themselves when I’m done, like he did last month when we finished the Spearmint project?” The big question a darksider asks is simple and practical: What’s in it for me.

The other thing about the dark side is that it’s contagious. Once one person starts doing it, everyone gets pulled in.

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Now, I’m not going to claim that you should do anything for anyone if it’s only going to benefit them. But let’s consider what’s in it for you.

Did you ever think about what separates leaders from everyone else? Is it power? Money? The privilege of belonging to a special class, knowing special people? Education? Yes, all of those things matter. But what fills in the empty space when society no longer places them on a pedestal?

Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t.

Leadership starts by being the one who acts when everyone else doesn’t. Did you ever wonder, while you were sitting in the lecture hall, if you would ever stop being driven around by a system of authority beyond your ability to influence? Or why it didn’t seem to end when you left the high school classroom and found yourself in another set of forms and bureaucratic procedures driven by some unseen force?

There are two ways of coping in the workplace. The first way is the way of procedure, rule-taking, what’s in it for me. The rule followers are the dominant breed in high school and bureaucratic monoliths. You can’t change the rules, so you get what you can out of them. But the rest of the world doesn’t have to work that way.

The smaller the organization, and the simpler the bureaucracy, the more likely it is that part of the system and the rules is defined by you. When everyone else abdicates responsibility, that’s not an alarm warning you to rush to the doors while dodging all responsibility. That’s a vacuum, a power vacuum, and you’re going to fill it. If you choose to.

cd | clip

With no parameters, cd just displays the current path, and piped to clip it’s on the clipboard now.

This is a slight record, the last known record was by liucipher at 36.  I think this will go down slowly, although i’m uncertain as to how low, likely under 30 with the “perfect storm”.

There have also been some rumblings in Canadia as to Sumo matchups.  Liu vs. Gas and Samuel L vs. Gas have both been mentioned.  So here are my Canadia rankings and some logical reasoning.

1)Chengameepheus- Clearly has the strongest legs of the group.  Long arms are good for the sumo slap.  The most interesting matchup would be vs. Job or Gas.

2)Job- Probably has the biggest arm muscles in Canadia.  One cause for concern is the knee bones, which could prove to be a weakness while locked up.  Job vs. Gas would be interesting.

3)Gas- The darkhorse of Canadia.  Doesn’t really have any advantages, except for the use of timba gas, which causes symptoms ranging from slight naseua to labored breathing to sudden bursts of forward progress by gasket.  Grudge matches against Liucipher and Samuel L would be funny matches.

4)FM-  Would normally be ranked slightly higher, due to a knowledge of leveragology.  Major weakness is a shoulder that pops out more often than a kurt warner-held football during a sack.  FM vs. Fatafile and Wall-E would be pretty even.

5)Fat- This is where the ranking gets hard, the bottom bunch are nearly interchangable parts.  Fat doesn’t really have any advantages, but he have any disadvantages, which makes him gas without gas.  Fat does have the Thal advantage, but i’m not sure what that has to do with Sumo yet.  I’d like to see the Gas/Fat or Fat/E matchup.

6)E-  E has sudden burstability, which means he could knock people out at the start.  But if he doesn’t have a burst head start, he’s probably in trouble.  Wall-E would likely have to do switcherooski’s to win in most cases without the fast start.  E would make a good matchup vs most, but the best would be E vs. Fudgemaster General.

7)Liu-  I was going to put Liu in last, but he has the chance of winning via pressure points.  I’d still bet against him, but not all the time.  Liu vs. Samuel L would be somewhat amusing.

8)Samuel L- L is a stoogepot and I don’t really know how bad or good he would be.  I’m not sure what his best matchup would be, but he would probably be good as a stoogepot vs. Gas.

http://www.gamereclaim.com/2008/10/128/