A new application aims to put users back in control of their private data stored on the increasingly public social networking site, Facebook. With “The Green Safe” app, Facebook users can now export their profile data for off-site storage on Green Safe’s servers. Data can then be purged from Facebook itself, allowing only friends to view profile information by way of a profile page tab labeled “My Info.”

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Privacy Concerns for Facebook Users

With the ever-growing concern about Facebook’s data-sharing policies – policies that are now under attack from several U.S. senators – people are becoming more concerned about how personal information shared with the world’s largest social networking site is being used.

After already having been blindsided with “recommended settings” that automatically publicized previously private data like status updates and photos, Facebook users are now dealing with even more changes that have major privacy implications. Recently announced initiatives include things like “instantly personalized” websites that tap into your Facebook data without prior authorization, revamped profile pages where every interest of yours from bands to books is made public and new terms for Facebook application developers that allow apps to store your data indefinitely.

Despite these radical changes on Facebook’s part, few users are actually deleting their Facebook accounts. Although the privacy concerns are troubling, the social network has become more than a simple pastime for many people. Instead, it has transformed into a communication tool nearly as vital as email for staying in touch with networks of friends, family, co-workers and other colleagues.

Now instead of deleting your Facebook account, The Green Safe app offers a viable alternative: keep Facebook, but remove Facebook’s ability to access your data. And with the data gone from Facebook, application developers and their partners are out of luck too…at least those whose apps you install going forward.

How “The Green Safe” Works

To use The Green Safe, you grant it access just like any other Facebook application, quiz or game, then tell it to “Import Your Data.” After the import is complete, follow the instructions provided to add the app to a tab on your Facebook profile. Here, it will appear as a tab labeled “My Info” which only your friends can see. At this point, you can return to your Facebook profile and delete the information stored there, removing it from Facebook’s control.

This is a somewhat ingenious workaround to the data privacy situation on Facebook – using Facebook’s own application platform against them. However, don’t be fooled into thinking that your personal data is now completely and entirely private, either.

The Green Safe’s homepage clearly states that the app “may use your info to serve up ads that target your interests” In other words, your personal data may be made a marketing tool. However, the privacy policy does assure that the company will not “share, trade or sell your information with anyone.”

So with “The Green Safe,” you may see a few ads in the future, it seems. Still, that’s nothing worse that what Facebook already does. (If you’ve ever wondered why Facebook’s ads are so eerily, creepily personalized, it’s because the Facebook ad platform allows advertisers the ability to very narrowly target users using the information shared on profile pages.)

At least with The Green Safe installed, you’ve turned over your data to a company whose business relies on keeping data safe instead of the opposite: sharing it with the world, as Facebook is doing now. It may not be a perfect solution, but it’s definitely a workaround that’s worth checking out.

The Green Safe’s application developer, LJ Jones, runs a blog here. The most recent post, “My Info is not a Commodity,” is a diatribe against Facebook’s changes.

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Facebook just shook the tech world by announcing several major initiatives that collectively constitute an aggressive move to weave the social net on top of the existing Web.The rumors were that the leading social network would launch a “Like” button for the entire Web. Instead, Zuckerberg & Co. unveiled a bold and visionary new platform that cannot be ignored.

The bits of this platform bring together the visions of a social, personalized and semantic Web that have been discussed since del.icio.us pioneered Web 2.0 back in 2004. Facebook’s vision is both minimalistic and encompassing – but its ambition is to kill off its competition and use 500 million users to take over entire Web.

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Whether we like it (pun intended) or not, we have to understand what this move means. It impacts users, publishers, competitors and, of course, Facebook itself. In this post, we summarize what Facebook announced and ponder the impact this will have on everyone.

Facebook Open Graph: Publisher Plugins

The Open Graph is a set combination of publisher plugins, semantic markup and a developer API.

Login with Faces & Facepile: The simpler publisher plugins enhance Facebook Connect. They makes it easy and compelling to sign in by leveraging Facebook cookies and showing faces of Facebook friends who are already members of the service.

Like Button and Like Box: These plugins add the liking feature to any content, typically the whole page. Both can be enhanced with semantic markup, described below. But the very basic intent for these is to get users to Like on the site and post a link to Facebook, which is then permanently stored on a user’s profile and points back to the original site.

Activity Feed and Live Stream: These plugins show static and dynamic activity on the site. Activity Feed lists recent likes and comments from the site, while Live Stream shows a real-time view of activity on the site and is intended for interactive events.

Recommendations: This plugin surfaces personalized recommendations for the user based on what friends and everyone else is liking on the site. It is intended to drive the users to other pages on the site.

Facebook Open Graph: Semantic Markup

Facebook announced simple, RDF-based markup to make the plugins smarter. In a nutshell, the markup enables publishers to say what object is on the page – a movie, a book, a recording artist, an event, a sports team, etc. This automatically enables semantics, that is, an understanding that the user is not just interacting with a webpage, but that he or she is liking a specific kind of thing. Semantics then leads to bucketing of the objects into categories like books, movies, music, etc., and gives rise to all sort of applications, including personalized recommendations.

Perhaps even more importantly, the markup helps Facebook connect the users across common interests across different websites. For example, if both Pandora and Last.fm annotate a page about The Beatles using Facebook’s markup, then users will be able to see their friends, who like the Beatles across different sites. This is very significant, because the data around friends is sparse and scattered around the sites. Previously, Facebook would surface this data in the stream without persisting it. Now, the information about a friend’s likes of movies, music, books, recording artists, events, sports team, etc. will be permanent on Facebook profiles and readily available in context around the Web.

Facebook Open Graph: New API

The new Facebook API is elegant and streamlined. It makes it easy to access user information (with permission of course) such as profile, friends, etc. All of the calls are REST based and return JSON objects. For example, my profile information can be fetched like this: http://graph.facebook.com/alexiskold. The authentication is based on OAuth 2.0 protocol and makes it simple not only to connect, but to also prompt for permissions to access user information.

This new API turns Facebook into a read/write storage of users’ tastes. And not just one user – all Facebook users.

Implications for the Users

With this release, Facebook asks users if they are willing to trade off privacy for personalization. To be clear, no personalization is ever possible without users telling a system about their tastes. What Facebook is asking for is necessary in order to then create personalized Web experience. Whether users want this sort of thing is a different question, but assuming that you want to know more about your friends you will.

Friends’ interests around entertainment, sports, travel, etc. will be categorized and available. It will be easy to figure out what your friends are into both on Facebook and around the Web. In addition, Facebook is going to be using its own engine to bring you recommendations for related content. This will further accelerate the discovery and cross linking between friends. This will likely further impact the amount of search people do around the Web. As Fred Wilson pointed out – passed links replace search.

Yet, the crux of user implications is neither of the above, but one single issue: privacy. It is unclear at this point that this issue is a concern for actual Facebook users, but it is clear that tech world is raising its eyebrows: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Dave Winer, Jeff Jarvis and many others expressed their concerns. People are saying that not only Facebook will know too much about us (because Google is already there today), but that it will be able to control too much.

Personally, I am skeptical that the average Facebook user is going to care all that much. People are notoriously naive about being watched on the Web, and this is likely to be no exception. More likely than not, Facebook users will enjoy the personalization aspects of the new platform and won’t think much about it – until Facebook starts openly targeting them.

This was not been part of f8 of course, but Facebook is likely to use the information for targeting. After all, advertising is a major part of its monetization already so why won’t it make it even better? If this targeting is too spot on, lots of users will probably get annoyed. Facebook is likely to sooth them via Facebook credits and heavy discounts, negotiated because of their massive volume.

How exactly users react remains to be seen, but they will probably like the new Facebook more because of increased relevancy and interaction with friends around the Web.

Next page:Implications for Publishers

This week’s poll is inspired our friends at CloudAve. Krishnan Subramanian wrote a post today about open-sourcing data center design.

It’s about time, isn’t it? Subramanian best point comes down to what is happening right now in the cloud computing world. The enthusiasm for cloud computing is such that there is no time to waste.

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Subramanian writes:

“Compared to other fields of IT, the innovation on the data center front is relatively slow because the industry as a whole is slow to change. With cloud computing capturing the imagination of enterprises and public, It is important to innovate rapidly on the data center side.”

We know the role open-source is playing in cloud computing. Just look at the role that Hadoop and Eucalyptus are playing in cloud computing.

But opening up the data center is a different story. It may be the last frontier and the key for opening up the enterprise to open-source initiatives.

The Open Source Data Center Initiative seems like it sees that potential. The group is challenging the powers of the engineering world by collaborating and pooling information that goes into designing and ultimately constructing data centers.

That’s pretty interesting.

So, here’s our question this week:

Is There A Place For Open-Source in the Data Center?trends

Last Week’s Poll: What is the top threat to cloud computing?

Last week’s poll had 244 people respond.

Top response: API’s and a poor interface. API’s are causing headaches for at least one of the leading cloud service providers.

We’ll have more later about troublesome API’s. In the meantime, what do you think? Is there a place for open-source in the data center?

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The Associated Press (AP) is saying it hopes to negotiate more lucrative licensing deals with major web sites. Reporting for the AP itself, Michale Liedtke says that AP CEO Tom Curley discussed possible revenue initiatives to protect online content.

Here are some key facts from the Liedtke’s piece: 

- Curley said after lowering its fees for U.S. newspapers by $30 million this year, the AP will reduce fees by a total of $45 million for newspapers and broadcasters next year. The plan had previously been to lower newspaper fees by $35 million.

- Curley said the AP expects its revenue to decrease both this year and next year.

- The AP intends to cut 10% of its payroll costs by the end of the year. The goal is to achieve this through attrition and early retirement offers, but layoffs haven’t been ruled out

- The AP’s contract with Google expires at the end of the year

- The AP’s four largest online partnerships are with Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL.

The AP is talking about one idea to get revenue from ads attached to its content that would include bundles of some of the organizations top stories with those of newspapers and broadcasters on different topics. This concept would include AP landing pages that they say could compete with Google News, Yahoo News and MSN.

The AP is also considering charging readers to see some of its online content. What do you think about the ideas the AP is tossing around? Would you pay to view some of the AP’s content?