HTC announced two phones with dedicated buttons for Facebook. The touchscreen Salsa and ChaCha (pictured below).

Running Android Gingerbread 2.3.3, HTC modified the Sense UI to integrate the Facebook into the experience. According to the HTC press release,

The Facebook button on HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa is context-aware, gently pulsing with light whenever there is an opportunity to share content or updates through Facebook. With a single press of the button, you can update your status, upload a photo, share a Website, post what song you are listening to, ‘check in’ to a location and more. For example, you can take a photograph of friends on your phone and upload it instantly to Facebook by simply pressing the button. Or let your friends know what song you’re listening to by pressing the button while listening to music on the phone. The track is automatically identified and shared on Facebook.

Dedicated hardware keys are nothing new (see Yahoo button on Japanese feature phone below) but HTC has taken advantage of the phone sensors and software to give this button multiple uses, as long as your preferred social network is Facebook.

Shipping in Q2 2011 across Europe and Asia and launching exclusively with AT&T “later this year.”

Facebook just announced that they are suspending a previously announced expansion of their API allowing third party developers to request access to a user’s address and phone number. Some history and a modest suggestion follow.

When Facebook announced Facebook Connect in 2008, Dave Morin wrote about a concept he called Dynamic Privacy. Facebook Connect would let developers to access your profile but data retention policies required developers to flush this cache of data and refresh it every 24 hours. This way, Facebook could  guarantee your data would not only be current but also deleted if you decided to revoke an application’s permission to access your profile.

Since then, Facebook’s data caching policies have been relaxed. With every Facebook platform developer hitting their servers for a data refresh every 24-hours you can imagine the impact this had on the Facebook infrastructure. In April 2010, Facebook announced that the 24-hour data caching policy would be removed. Developers rejoiced. Facebook operations could relax again. But, for users, the promise of Dynamic Privacy was no more.

Fast forward to last Friday’s announcement that Facebook would allow developers to ask for access to your profile Contact information such as home address and phone number. Without Dynamic Privacy, an application could ask for access to your contact information and keep it. One stray click could give out some very personal data.  There’s no way to opt out of giving out this information in error. No way to put your phone number or address into a special bucket that is locked down to all but a handful of mobile or shopping applications that would be greatly enhanced with access to your phone number.

Rules-based Privacy

Is there a way for Facebook (or any service) to grant access to information provided the conditions under which I grant this access are maintained? How can Facebook ensure that anytime I delete my information it will also be removed from any sites that ever had access to this info? What if I store my private information with a site such as threewords.me which, after only a few weeks in play, is auctioned off to the highest bidder? Is there a way to require the eventual new owner to re-acquire permissions to my contact data. The Facebook Platform Policy currently states:

You will not sell any data. If you are acquired by or merge with a third party, you can continue to use user data within your application, but you cannot transfer data outside your application.

My reading of this is that the new owner of threewords.me can use the data as long as it is used in conjunction with the operation of threewords.me. This includes any future features added should they improve the site to meet their needs. In 2008, the passage of 24-hours required a data refresh, in 2011, at a minimum, legal change of control should do the same. The Platform Policy further states,

You must not give your secret key to another party, unless that party is an agent acting on your behalf as an operator of your application. You are responsible for all activities that occur under your account identifiers.

What if the statement was re-written so that an application’s secret key can never be transferred? Any new owner of an application could run it using their own secret key but it would kick off a refresh of all requested user data. This request could be sent out as via a notification on Facebook Messaging or an alert that would appear the next time the user tries to use the application or web site. Maybe this is already the case but it would be better to state this clearly.

So my modest proposal to bring back the original intent of Dynamic Privacy is,

1. Revision of the Facebook Platform Policy to clearly state that change in ownership would require re-authorization of grated user permissions.
2. Enforcing limitations on transferring application secret keys by tying each key to verified named accounts only. An example of this is how domain names are tied to an administrative and technical contact who are legally and technically responsible for activity on that domain.
3. Requiring all applications to support the Deauthorization Callback and extending it with an API call that is authorized to overwrite or remove data on the 3rd party server. All domain-name root servers are given the ability to update the hosts file information on their downstream servers. Might a similar root server role be appropriate for Facebook as the provider for your private data stored on all downstream applications?
4. The option for users to place personal data into a more secure area which would require more than a single click to grant access.  Something that requires two step authorization and sends me a confirmation email informing me that this access has been granted.

The best way to build up trust is to put in place features that give users control and the option to take something back. These are the post-lunch ramblings of an observer. Please correct me if what I’m suggested is crazy talk!

Stumbled across a quick and dirty side project that uses Facebook’s social graph api to pull your newsfeed and present an alternate display. Try it yourself at Facebook-me.com.

USA Today reports that Facebook Credits will be available as gift cards at Target.

The new Facebook gift cards will be available in values of $15, $25 and $50 at all of Target’s 1,750 retail stores and at Target.com. Two or three more national retailers will start selling the cards in coming months.

The article goes on to report that cards for online games such as Farmville are already available and that the overall market for gift cards was $80.6 billion last year.

I wonder how the gift card economy works. Does facebook get to book revenues for gift card sales before they are re-deemed? How are gift card sales classified for taxes? If you sell gift cards in other currencies, does the gift card revenue get counted towards the US GDP?

Michael Berstein, a researcher at MIT, posts a snapshot of the algorithm used to calculate what is shown to you in the Facebook Top News feed.

The algo is called EdgeRank and he describes it as such:

I’ll cut through the math using words. Whenever somebody interacts with a news feed item, they create an edge to that item. So if I comment on a friend’s new puppy photos, I’ve created an edge to your photos. When trying whether  to show the photos in your news feed, Facebook looks at how closely you interact with everyone who has an edge to the item. So, with the puppy photos, it considers your affinity to the friend who created the photos, and then me because I commented on them.

This all comes down to — initialization matters. If my high school friends are the first to comment on a news feed item, the EdgeRank of that item for other high school friends is high. So, other high school friends will see the item. If grad school friends are the first to comment, then other grad school friends are likewise going to see it.

I had no idea that the elapsed time between a posting and when you interact with the object had something to do with future relevance calculations but now that I think of it, it makes sense. The same has happened to my twitter usage – since I’ve shifted timezones, I mostly see tweets and posts from friends in the European timezone so, in a self-fulfilling way, any service looking to see which content I engage with the most will most likely determine that it’s things coming from my European friends.

More details about Faebook’s EdgeRank algorithm and a link to the full video which was presented at f8 over on TechCrunch.

It’s hard to wrap up a major conference, especially when you didn’t attend, but viewing things from a distance sometimes helps because only the loudest messages make it all the way over.

Before the conference even started, Fred Wilson threw out a one-liner that got people thinking. He called it the Golden Triangle.

The three current big megatrends in the web/tech sector are mobile, social, and real-time.

To Fred, the vectors between each of these points on his triangle represented the biggest opportunities over the next few years and where he, as a technology VC, was going to focus his attention.

Ross Mayfield, his line from the first Web 2.0 conference is still relevant, added Geo to Fred’s Triangle and posted his virtual napkin up on flickr.

The importance of Geo cannot be ignored as the most obvious (and easiest) way to add context to information which is being harvested and sent our way in increasingly alarming rates. We talk about a world in which there are 1 billion mobile devices. Imagine what happens when each of these gets a camera, gps, and bluetooth sensor and an IP connection to pull in real-time updates. Adds a new dimension to Right Here, Right Now.

So while HTML Page Indexers of yore were failing at finding us the best Chinese in Helsinki or plumber in London, Social Discovery became the new nectar. Facebook leads to FriendFeed leads to Twitter and now our capacity to consume and process has overloaded. Groups, Hashtags, Lists, Folders, call them what you will but this manual organization of streams is beginning to feel like e-mail folder management all over again. The Googles and Microsofts have added the Twitter firehose to their indexes but somehow I don’t see that as solving the problem unless they can filter on your social connections as well (rumor has it Google Profiles are about to play a much more important role Google Social Search is now live).

Which brings us to Social Filters.

Marshall Kirkpatrick has been following this topic for a long time. He bangs the Social Filter drum again in a post about Facebook’s News Feed redesign,

Someday social networking is going to be like the telephone. Today you can’t send messages from Facebook to people on MySpace or LinkedIn but that isn’t going to last forever. Just as you can call someone who uses T-Mobile from your Sprint phone, someday sharing and messaging between online social networks will be a given.

How will social networks retain users then? Why stick with Facebook when some smaller service offers a decentralized social networking service outside of Facebook’s control but still tied into your friends on Facebook and elsewhere?

These services will someday have to compete on user experience, when they no longer have your social connections locked-in. The service that does the best job filtering up the most important information you have coming your way will likely be the service you stick with. That’s going to be a key area of competition between social networks.

Yes, it’s no longer about who “owns” the social graph – it’s who provides the best services on top of a shared graph. Someone mentioned that Tim Berners Lee said at the conference that AOL was to WWW as Facebook is to distributed social networks. Just as we thought it silly that AOL wanted to put it’s famous wall around the internet, we may also look back in amazement thinking that anyone could have the audacity to think they could own the world’s social address book.

Some historical perspective from Tim O’Reilly and John Battelle in Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On

There is a race on right now to own the social graph. But we must ask whether this service is so fundamental that it needs to be open to all.

It’s easy to forget that only 15 years ago, email was as fragmented as social networking is today, with hundreds of incompatible email systems joined by fragile and congested gateways. One of those systems – internet RFC 822 email – became the gold standard for interchange.

We expect to see similar standardization in key internet utilities and subsystems. Vendors who are competing with a winner-takes-all mindset would be advised to join together to enable systems built from the best-of-breed data subsystems of cooperating companies.

Bringing it all together you can almost hear the synapses of the global brain achieve self-awareness. Not only are we moving to a web of sensors feeding real-time data into the grid, we are annotating it by injecting bits of human commentary and behaviors across an increasingly distributed social graph.

A phone in one corner of the world sends off a snapshot which is immediately re-tweeted via the world’s largest telephone tree. More reasoned minds pick up the samples, turn it over and examine it and later conclude that no, the calculated mass of the balloon could in fact not hold a small boy aloft – rumor refuted! Lesson learned and the network becomes a little smarter, more skeptical, less knee-jerk adolescent. Sentient if you will.

The pieces are in place, the machines are warmed up. It was fun while it lasted but it’s time to put Failblog aside and see if we can move on to tackle bigger problems. O’Reilly and Battelle wrap up with their call to arms,

2009 marks a pivot point in the history of the Web. It’s time to leverage the true power of the platform we’ve built. The Web is no longer an industry unto itself – the Web is now the world.

This is really well done. In honor of Barack Obama’s first 100 days in office, Slate has mocked up a parody of his Facebook page.

Remember, What will Facebook look like in 40 years?

We can be so cruel sometimes but that doesn’t make this any less funny. Reflections of Reflections is a series of critiques of MySpace/Facebook profile pictures. More in this genre in 20 Male Poses of Facebook.

There’s been good debate around how the source of traffic to sites is changing, shifting from the search engines to social sites such as Facebook and Twitter. I confirmed that I too am seeing a greater percentage of traffic come in via links shared on social sites and shared a colleague’s theory about what this would mean for Google’s advertising revenues. Fred Wilson also posted about this topic here and here.

What about attention? How does the average visitor from a social site compare to someone from a search engine? Niall Kennedy tweeted the following stats from his referral logs:

• Twitter: 7 seconds
• Digg: 20 seconds
• StumbleUpon: 40 seconds
• Facebook: 52 seconds
• Delicious: 82 seconds

Here are my stats for the past year:

• StumbleUpon: 40 seconds
• Digg: 42 seconds
• FriendFeed: 53 seconds
• Facebook: 60 seconds
• Twitter: 86 seconds*
• Delicious: 110 seconds
• Techmeme: 114
• MyBlogLog: 176 seconds

Compared to the attention span of those coming from the major search engines we get:

• Live.com (MSFT): 21 seconds
• Yahoo: 35 seconds
• Google : 40 seconds
• Ask: 46 seconds

It would be interesting to see figures from other sites, especially online shopping sites which are the ones most interested in getting (and therefore likely to pay for) traffic. While it’s clear that visitors from social sites are more engaged with my blog because they tend to hang around a bit longer, that may not be the case with a shopping site where there is less intent to purchase than if they come from a search engine but Mark Essel thinks otherwise.

Increasingly, the flow of web links is being made between individuals via social media sites.  Your good fishing buddy who knows the Bay area, shares a link to his favorite supply store.  As focused communities become populated across geographic barriers, local quality referrals become more likely.  But what if you want to know what store fishermen prefer in San Francisco?  You could simply use twitter search for fishing san francisco.  In real time you could send a message to several individuals who are interested in fishing in that region.

Shared links are compelling but they need to be matched with impulse buying or discoverable when you’re looking for it. I’m thinking of O’Reilly’s flash discount shared via twitter (44% off to celebrate the 44th president) which was effective in bumping registration at the recent Web 2.0 Expo. The other way to generate business via shared links is to make them searchable so you can find what you need when you want it – but then we’re right back at sending traffic via search again.  Yes, you can search twitter but you can find this stuff on Google too.

The jury’s still out as I think this will be a slow shift of behavior that will take a long time to impact existing business models. The real prize is back to social search which would combine the best of the recommendation trusts of social networks with the ability to find what you need when you’re looking for it.

Facebook recommendations married to Google ‘s structure and ranking? That’s the subject of another post.

—o—

* I dug into the Twitter figures because they’re so out of whack with what Niall is seeing and it looks like there are a few visitors that hung out for a long time that are pushing that average higher than it should be.

With over 175M users, Facebook has famously opened up for distribution of marketing messages from businesses, brands, and celebrities. My wife Tivo’d an appearence by Mark Zuckerberg on Oprah introducing it to its mainstream audience and most surely to any brand marketer interested in reaching Oprah’s audience. If Jason Calcanis puts the value of a slot on twitter’s suggested users at $250,000, then a slot on any Facebook featured user page has got to be multiples of that.

If you hit Facebook in a logged out state, look for the, “To create a page for a celebrity, band or business, click here.” link and this is what you’ll see. No more fan pages – social influence is now officially reserved and will most likely be for sale.