A significant section of the media/Web commentariat has expressed its dis-satisfiaction with Facebook’s policies and management. I can’t help noticing the irony here.

Individuals who have built businesses and reputations on the basis of  the models that underpin social media and digital advertising are now outraged at the fact that Facebook wants to make money from user data.

Really?

These people have the right to express a view, and Facebook has not managed its stakeholders well.

But…

The issue here is that Facebook wants to access, use and profit from information about its members.  Shock! Horror!

The opportunity to do both of these things is why Facebook and other services like it exist in the first place!

Many seem to think that Mark Zuckerberg provides Facebook as a service out of the goodness of his heart. This sense of entitlement makes us the ‘dumb f*cks’.

Others seem to think that they can re-define the terms of their usage after they agreed to an End User License Agreement, which handed control of their content and data to Facebook.

User data underpins the business model.  What was once considered private information will become more public.

You have a choice.

]]> http://justanother24hours.com/social-media/the-facebook-irony-recent-facebook-outrage-and-privacy-debate-doesnt-ring-true/feed/ 1 http://justanother24hours.com/politics/social-networks-weaken-arguments-against-national-identity-cards/ http://justanother24hours.com/politics/social-networks-weaken-arguments-against-national-identity-cards/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:41:04 +0000 Daniel Young http://justanother24hours.com/?p=554 In April 2006, the Australian Prime Minister John Howard announced plans to introduce an Access Card system for health and welfare services. The half baked proposal received a lot of negative press and the Government was accused of attempting to introduce an national identity card by stealth.  The Labour Government dropped the idea shortly after winning the 2007 Federal election.

Do you know who I am?

The Access Card was the latest attempt by Federal and State Governmentin Australia to introduce an identity card.

The world has changed significantly since 2006 – we’ve seen a major shift in consumer attitudes towards personal information as a result of mainstream social networking.

Internet companies now have access to vast amounts of data and in a wide variety of formats, take Google Street View for example.

Companies like Salesforce.com are tapping into social networks in order to cross reference the information that is readily available there with the information that they hold in databases and CRM systems.

Governments around the world have invested heavily in bail-outs and stimulus packages sending many into deep deficits.  Will the heightened need to ensure that public funds are spent wisely strengthen the argument for citizen accountability via an identity card?

One wonders if these developments will compromise attempts to oppose the introduction of an identity card – or equivalent – in the future.

In the same edition WARC reported on a 15% reduction in global advertising revenue – across the board i.e. digital and traditional media.  

The ‘measurability’ of digital marketing remains one of the key drivers for investment in the Web by marketers and this will continue to be the case while the industry matures and develops a method for measuring and tracking engagement and influence (i.e. qualitiative metrics).

The traditional media sector is obviously already suffering at the hands of digital. To the digital advertising sector – and particularly the massively dominant Google - the measurability of digitial advertising is a major strategic advantage. 

As competition for marketing budgets increase, I think we can expect to see companies like Google and others making more and more user data available in order to maximise their share of the total overall investment. At no cost and at the touch of a button, these organisations can enhance their strategic advantage over traditional media.  

There is a strong lobby arguing that this strategic advantage comes at the expense of consumer privacy but Google has been commended in parts for its approach.  

Could the launch of Google Voice be a strategy designed to overshadow media interest in targetted advertising.

The New York times provides a guide to Google’s privacy controls here. Industry standard story < there and an interesting counter view for Gawker here.

We're Yamming at work, yamming til the break of dawn

The big difference here is that Yammer is aimed at the Enterprise; and they have done a very clever thing. Groups are created around email domains, which means that Yammer is piggy backing off of enterprise IT environments.

Yammer is providing a private company networks as a managed service. You can’t sign up for the service with a personal email address.

The Yammer private network facilitates internal communications within individual companies. For a fee (1 dollar per user), corporations can opt to ‘Claim Their Network’, which entitles them to the following services:

Manage Content and Members – Remove a member from the network or delete any message.
Password Policies – Determine the minimum character length and complexity for passwords.
Session Settings – Require email confirmation when logging in from a new browser.
IP Range – Assign an IP range for your network, restricting access to your office network or VPN.
Custom Logo– Brand your network by uploading your company logo to appear at the top of every page.
Assign Administrator Privileges – Grant additional administrative privileges to any user on your network.

This is an ingenius business model but it remains to be seen whether it will generate much goodwill for the company. As with many Web 2,0 applications, Yammer provides users with control, at the expense of Corporate IT. This has been a great thing for innovation and time to market for new technology within business. But the Yammer approach is effectively holding potential customers to ransom. Corporate IT has the easy option of shutting access down altogether. Naturally, business leaders will be concerned about internal messages and company information residing on the servers of a third party and a start-up at that.

My team of seven jumped onto Yammer mid-week and found it useful as a means of sharing links between our small group, sharing updates, chasing deadlines, maintaining morale As with Twitter, users can opt to follow individual members to ensure that they are only on the receiving end of information that is relevant to them.

It seems pretty obvious that the business model helped get Yammer over the line at TechCrunch50 given the fact that this technology already exists and has been relatively well adopted. It will be interesting to see how this goes down and how transparent Yammer is in the coming weeks and months about enterprise adoption. I’d question the suitability of the name – Yammer – for the corporate sector.

Finally, just wondering, is an individual message a Yam. Did I just yam? Or am I yamming?

Micro-blogging for the enterprise