Facebook today announced that application developers will be allowed to store user data for more than 24 hours, removing a major restriction that the company had imposed on its ecosystem for years. Competitors like Twitter and MySpace had no such restrictions and now Facebook is in the same boat. Founder Mark Zukerberg used to say that the rule against storing data was essential to protect users and their privacy.

Where are those now? Privacy, Zuckerberg told me in a March 2008 interview, “is the vector around which Facebook operates.” Two years later, not so much. In a December 2009 interview, Zuckerberg said that Facebook’s new public-by-default privacy settings reflected how he would build the site if he were to do it again from scratch today. Compare below what Zuckerberg said in 2008 and what today’s new Developer Terms of Service say about holding on to user data now.

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I believe that the Facebook policy change on storing user data is a net win for the web: it will enable all kinds of new innovation. It was that kind of innovation that I was asking about two years ago when I got the following answer about privacy that just doesn’t sound right anymore today.

Zuckerberg on Data Portability, March 10th 2008 interview with ReadWriteWeb:

“If you export your friends list, does their contact information come with that? What if they change their privacy settings later? Right now if you take an action that gets published to your friends’ news feeds, but then if you change your privacy settings later to be more restrictive – then those events disappear from the news feeds. If that data is published off-site, then there’s no longer any control over the data for users.” (emphasis added)

And today, on the new Developers’ Terms of Service:

You must give users control over their data by posting a privacy policy that explains what data you collect, and how you will use, store, and/or transfer their data….You may cache data you receive from the Facebook API in order to improve your application’s user experience, but you should try to keep the data up to date…You will delete all data you receive from us concerning a user if the user asks you to do so, and will provide a mechanism for users to make such a request. (emphasis added)

One thing that remains the same? “You cannot use a user’s friend list outside of your application, even if a user consents to such use.” Facebook doesn’t want you taking your data out of the Facebook ecosystem, to other competing services, but it doesn’t insist that 3rd parties under its shadow check in with you daily anymore, either. It’s hard not to feel a little cynical about that.

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Rally Up, a new location-based social network with a strong focus on privacy, just became the first fully featured location-based social network with an iPad app. The app, which is available for free (iTunes link), includes all of the features of Rally Up’s iPhone app. Thanks to making good use of the iPad’s expanded screen estate, however, using the iPad app is far easier and a lot more fun.

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Location-Based Services on the iPad: On Hold Until the WiFi + 3G Models Arrive

The current version of the iPad has to rely on WiFi triangulation to pinpoint a user’s location. As long as you are in a city, this works reasonably well. We expect to see more location-based iPad apps, including from Foursquare and Gowalla, once Apple launches the WiFi + 3G version of the iPad, which will include a GPS chip. For now, Loopt’s Pulse is the only other location-based social network that has arrived on the iPad, but Loopt’s app doesn’t allow users to check in from the app and focuses on letting users browser photos, places, events and their friends streams instead.

Rally Up on the iPad

When we first reviewed Rally Up’s iPhone service a few weeks ago, we noted that the application puts a very strong emphasis on privacy and allows you to tweak these privacy settings individually for every single on of your followers and the people you follow. As Rally Up’s co-founder Sol Lipman told us, Rally Up is really more about connecting you to your “real” friends. It is important to note that Rally Up’s sophisticated privacy controls also gives you the flexibility to follow whoever you want to and just broadcast very little to none of your location data to people you don’t fully trust or know.

Using the iPhone version of Rally Up is a lot of fun – in part thanks to the application’s minimalist design – but as with so many iPad apps, the larger screen makes browsing your friends streams and looking at their locations on a large map a lot easier. Rally Up’s iPad app also emphasizes the microblogging aspects of the service, where the extra screen estate comes in handy for posts with photos, for example.

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Later today, Google will ask all Google Buzz users to reconfirm their privacy settings. Since the launch of the service, which was quickly overshadowed by a major controversy around the default privacy settings, Google has made significant changes to the Buzz start-up process and privacy settings. A lot of people started using Buzz long before these changes were rolled out, however. Starting this afternoon, all existing Buzz users will see a confirmation screen that summarizes their current settings and gives them the option to change these settings, as well as the option to turn off Buzz altogether.

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The gradual roll-out of this confirmation screen will begin today and will likely take a while, so there is no need to be concerned if you don’t actually get to see this screen today.

According to a blog post that will go up on the Gmail blog in the afternoon today, Google wants to ensure that even those users who joined Buzz long before Buzz automatically added people’s email and chat contacts to their social networks will see these changes. After all, not every Buzz users kept up with the day-to-day news about Buzz after the launch and many of these users are probably unaware of the changes Google has made since then.

The confirmation screen will include a link to a video that explains how Buzz works, a list of all the people you are following and who are following you. There will also be a switch that allows you to turn off the list of people you are following on your public Google profile, as well as a link to all the your sites and services that are currently connected to Buzz. At the bottom of the page, users will then be able to either accept these settings or turn off Buzz altogether.

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Without a doubt, location-based services and social networks are one of the hottest topics on the Internet right now. Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt and many others are vying for users, but strong privacy concerns are still holding back the mainstream adoption of these kinds of services. Rally Up for the iPhone is a new location-based social network that puts a very strong emphasis on privacy and also features some innovative new concepts.

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Focus on Privacy

While Rally Up (iTunes link) allows you to friend anybody who is a member of the service, it features some nifty privacy settings, which are represented by a slider on every friend’s profile. You can choose between four different privacy settings. These range from not sharing information with this person to just seeing this friend’s update but not sharing information with them, to giving the contact the full firehose of settings with and without push notifications. The idea here is that you only give your real friends full access to all of your updates, while still giving you the option to follow anybody else on the service – though these users can obviously also choose to not share any information with you. Your own home’s location is always private and never shared on the service.

Just like Gowalla and Foursquare, Rally Up features badges, but the emphasis of the service is more on connecting you to your real friends. Because of this, the Rally Up team also decided not to allow users to syndicate their location feed on Twitter. You can, however, choose to share your location with your Facebook friends. The assumption here, we assume, is that your Facebook friends are more likely to be your “real” friends and that Facebook will keep this data private.

Instead of connecting to Twitter, Rally Up emphasizes private microblogging on the service itself. Rally Up allows you to send short text messages to your friends, but you can also attach photos to any location.

I’m On My Way

Besides focusing on privacy, Rally Up also included some interesting innovations in its service that aren’t available in most of the current crop of popular location-based services yet.

While most services only allow you to check in once you have arrived at a location, Rally Up also allows you to send out a notification when you are on your way to a venue. You can also set up temporary locations, which is quite useful when you go to a party at somebody’s house, for example.

The app, which, by the way, is very well designed, doesn’t focus so much on venues as on connecting people. This is a nice departure from quite a few of the location-based social networks we have recently seen.

Overall, Rally Up represents a very nifty take on the location-based social networking model and we especially like the company’s focus on privacy.

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Soon, you will be able to share your location with your Facebook friends. According to the New York Times’ Nick Bilton, Facebook plans to reveal this new feature during its f8 developer conference at the end of April. As Bilton notes, Facebook updated its privacy policy last year to incorporate language about location sharing. Facebook, according to this report, has been working on this feature for over a year. The company will offer location-based services through its own mobile applications and developers will be able to use this data to develop their own location-based apps on top of a new Facebook location API.

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How Will Facebook’s Users React?

It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s users – who are famously averse to change – will react to the arrival of location as a status update on the service. According to Bilton, Facebook “has been trying to figure out how to add location data to its service without raising potential privacy concerns or negative feedback from its users, as it has in the past with new features and redesigns.”

When Facebook introduced the newsfeed (which is now an integral part of the service), a large number of users considered this to be an invasion of their privacy. Location-based services have long suffered from the impression that sharing your location online can be dangerous and services like the Foursquare-based PleaseRobMe have only strengthened this sentiment among many users. Even though Facebook offers relatively sophisticated privacy controls, it will be interesting to see if the service’s users will warm up to the idea of sharing their location with their friends. A lot of the success of this service will depend on how well Facebook can educate its users and how it implements this feature and the privacy controls around it.

Will Facebook’s Users Care?

It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s users are even interested in sharing this information. While services like Foursquare and Gowalla are slowly but surely gaining new users (in part thanks to offering incentives for checking in at various venues), Twitter, which introduced a geotagging API last year and just introduced some location features on its website today, hasn’t seen a very strong response from users and developers so far.

Not Competing with Foursquare and Co.?

According to the New York Times report, Facebook isn’t trying to compete with location-based networks like Loopt, Gowalla and Foursquare, however. Instead, Bilton argues, the company is far more interested in competing with Google for small-business advertising. This will surely raise additional privacy concerns among Facebook’s users.

It’s also important to note that Facebook’s API, will allow intrepid developers (including Foursquare, Gowalla and Loopt) to develop interesting location-based services on top of Facebook, however.

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Chrome, Google’s entry into the browser market, has a new beta version today that shows off two new features – instant language translation and privacy settings.

The browser was the only browser to make gains in February and we’re thinking additions like these will only help to propel it’s popularity.

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According to the blog post, “when the language of the webpage you’re viewing is different from your preferred language setting, Chrome will display a prompt asking if you’d like the page to be translated for you using Google Translate.”

Google has, of course, been hard at work in the translation business. In early February, we wrote about how the company has been developing software to conduct real-time translation over mobile phones.

Chrome will use Google Translate, which currently translates between 52 languages, to automatically translate websites.

In addition to translation, the browser known for being lite on pretty much everything will get a little more cumbersome as it gets some privacy settings, though we don’t think this will be the sort of thing to bog it down at all. Rather, we’re glad to see Google looking after the user’s privacy concerns. The new settings will allow you to “control how browser cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis.”

The features will be part of the automatic update in the near future, but for those who don’t like to wait, you can download the beta version here.

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As we’ve seen from some of the previews of the new layout, search is becoming more of a focal point for Facebook, and today’s announcement seems to back that up. Microsoft and Facebook announced this morning an expanded partnership, making Bing the default search engine for Facebook’s more than 400 million users worldwide.

The two companies also came to a “mutual decision” to allow Facebook to take over sole responsibility for advertisements on the social network, a move that we see as part of Facebook’s continual progression toward becoming an ad provider.

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Facebook’s Slide Into Advertising?

Facebook and Microsoft had entered into a deal last August to start serving up Microsoft ads, but Facebook has made several moves lately that look to protect its valuable stake in advertising. On Wednesday, the site rolled out a new set of terms for ad and offer providers, increasing accountability and further clarifying how user information gathered through apps could not be shared for advertising.

Facebook has also told us that the company’s recent moves to usher more user content into the light of day and outside of privacy settings are motivated in part by a desire to improve and grow advertising. Furthermore, the company is uniquely positioned, with its Facebook Connect preferred by users by a margin of 2-to-1, to offer tailored advertising to third-party sites using the mass of information it gathers daily on its users. And with Facebook moving into the full-featured webmail game, it may soon be able to compete with Google with an all-encompassing grasp on your information.

Back To That Search Engine Part…

As for the deal with Bing, the search engine had already been providing search capabilities for users in the U.S., but now will expand its services worldwide. The announcement also said that the search engine would provide results “beyond a set of links, including richer answers combined with tools that help customers make faster, smarter decisions. beyond a set of links, including richer answers combined with tools that help customers make faster, smarter decisions.”

By increasing the capabilities of the on-site search, Facebook is hoping to become your one and only portal to the web. If Facebook can get its users to perform on-site searches, it can not only keep you on the site longer, but like Google, it can gather even more information about its users through their searches. This stuff is advertising gold.

While some argue that the difficulty here is that it’s hard to monetize Facebook’s data compared to Google’s – Facebook know’s you care about Haiti, while Google knows you’re in the market for a Lexus – this move goes directly at the heart of that problem. By making search a focal point of the site, Facebook is looking to gather the type of data it knows it can leverage in the advertising world.

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Life360 is often described as an “OnStar for life,” providing its users with tools to track and protect people and things through a variety of interfaces.

The company offers IRL services such as child identification paraphernalia, medical IDs, and credit and identity protection; but they also have a cool suite of features that revolve around Internet and mobile tracking of people, objects, and even pets. Their Android application for tracking and securely messaging people even netted them a seed round from Google

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The concept for the company, which was founded in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, revolves around disaster preparedness and emergency messaging. Currently, the available features include an emergency messenger that uses email, web, SMS, and phone to get messages through to emergency contacts; a thorough, web-enabled ID service that gives first responders instant access to critical information; a service for cataloging and tracking valuable items via coded tags; and identity protection services.

The mobile tracking feature – which got the company a $300,000 investment from Google – allows users to locate family members using the web interface or the mobile application. Custom privacy settings allow users to find loved ones in an emergency, check their locations, see their statuses, and retrace their previous locations. While the company states this will not make family members feel stalked, we see this app as Cheaters fodder as well as a great way to keep track of the ones you care about most during times of crisis.

The Android app allows users to access all their Life360 services from their phones. Right now, Android devices are supported, with a BlackBerry app coming soon and an iPhone app stuck in App Store purgatory.

Another “coming soon” service we thought was cool – and also excellent Cheaters fodder – is a GPS-enabled tracking dongle that can be thrown in a bag, duct-taped to the underside of a car, tossed onto a pet’s collar, stapled to a child – you name it. Life360 founder Chris Hulls told us in an email that he hopes to roll out the hardware within the next six months. “There will be an additional fee, probably in the neighborhood of $100 for the device and $10 per month for each tracked person,” he said.

Some other GPS- and mobile-enabled features Hulls plans to release within the next year are a Curfew 2.0 app, a check-in system for “distributed” families to touch base, and customized alerts for emergency notifications in a user’s specific location.

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YouTube has launched a feature that lets video uploaders share information they collect with YouTube Insight. The shared info is able to be viewed by anyone watching the user’s videos.

"Now when you watch a video, you can learn even more about it and its audience: on the watch page, under the ‘Statistics & Data’ section, users will be able to see more information about a video’s views over time, its popularity in different parts of the world, the top drivers of traffic, and the video’s top three audience demographics," explains YouTube Software Engineer Jonas Yngvesson.

Things that can be shared are:

- total views
- number of ratings
- where the video is most popular (geographically)
- popularity by demographic
- referrals

Yngvesson says that partners can attract more advertisers by allowing this information to be viewed. Advertisers are looking for brands with lots of views and audiences who are engaged. Those who fit the bill can basically show this off by sharing the data.

"We’ve seen popular users like Paul Telner and Chris Bosh leverage YouTube Insight to sign business deals and sponsorships," says Yngvesson.

Advertisers can use the data to help them match content with their target audience. They can also find new partners of interest.

When you upload content, you have the ability to turn the feature on or off for each individual video. This can be done in the privacy settings under "My Account".

Have you been lured in by “Texas Hold’em” or “Mafia Wars”? This week I was analyzing a branded application on Facebook using three different data sources: Facebook’s native analytics, Google Analytics and Atlas. One could merely use Facebook’s native analytics platform for tracking app usage, notifications, installs and uninstalls, but you can also glean a lot more from the canvas page than you might think if you creatively use your Web analytics tools to mine some of the data.

The “Canvas page” is the application page that is hosted by the application developer. You can insert a Web analytics tag on the page and mine social graph data about users (if they have granted you permission when installing the app). Data points that are accessible include age, location, gender, interests and number of friends. For the exhaustive list (which might scare you — honestly) visit the Facebook developer wiki as it may provoke you to go change your own personal privacy settings.

Tags that you place on the Canvas page allow for grabbing these data points and inserting them into the URL as either directories or query string variables that you can later mine through your Web analytics tool. Keep in mind that you want to be concise about “bucketing” information so that the data is manageable for analysis. For example, capturing “male” or “female” only adds two elements to a list for analysis, but “city” could add hundreds if not thousands of elements for analysis. Depending on the tool that you use, cardinality may or may not be an issue (something to keep in mind before you go data-collection crazy).

Facebook provides some good tools for looking at the application data in that they will provide the “median” for how other apps are performing across their network. While this doesn’t tell you how you might be doing within a specific segment, it at least provides a benchmark for comparison.

A few pitfalls to note in Facebook’s application analytics:

• “Usage” statistics are reporting in PST while “Features” are reported in GMT (these two reports are just tabs away from each other). One of the cardinal rules in any Web analytics implementation is ensuring that your Web servers are time-synchronized. Ending up with logs (and reports) that are off by seconds, minutes and in this case hours can really throw off your data analysis. My guess is that many application developers or analysts may not see the footnote and have no idea that they are aligning two different time zones of data to each other.
• Definitions aren’t well-defined anywhere within Facebook (that I could find). Understanding how this data is tabulated and filtered would be very helpful to the analyst when trying to interpret the results.

Regardless, Facebook applications provide the application developer with a litany of data points for analysis about those users who are installing and using the application. For brands, this is huge! Just one look at the granularity of information provided within the Facebook API and you’ll see that it is a marketer’s dream (or data overload, depending on your perspective).

I’ve only scratched the surface on what is possible in analyzing here. The point is that utilizing your existing in-house Web analytics tools in conjunction with Facebook’s offerings will provide a more in-depth analysis than using either analytics package in “stand-alone” mode.

Post from: SiteProNews: Webmaster News & Resources

It Takes A Village To Measure Social Applications

iPhone 3.0 users waiting for an updated Facebook app apparently won’t have to wait too much longer. Its developer Joe Hewitt posted a Facebook note outlining the update’s new features, and saying that it is 98% done.

Here’s a screenshot of the note, listing the features:

As you can see from the above image, a lot of people like this. We’ll see if the enthusiasm translates to actual use of the product.

In other Facebook news, the company is getting ready to roll out some new privacy settings. WebProNews sat in on a conference call discussing them earlier today, and from the sound of it, users are going to have a lot more control over what posts they share with what friends.

Not only will these new settings simplify privacy controls, but they will allow users to keep their status updates more relevant for their friends. You can read more about that and checkout Facebook’s slideshow here.

WebProNews just sat in on a conference call and webcast with Facebook, where the social network’s upcoming changes to privacy settings were discussed. These were designed to give users more control over what they share with whom. Are you looking forward to privacy changes with Facebook? Share your thoughts.

The features were discussed a bit last week, but were elaborated much more in this discussion. The company made clear up front that the changes were not related to talk of a Facebook payment system, and have nothing to do with advertising or info that Facebook will make available to advertisers. Users still have control over what info is shared with advertisers.

Here is the slideshow that was presented:

Facebook says its mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. The new privacy controls enhance this and will allow people to share with as narrow or as broad of an audience as they want.

Facebook discussed the new features as broken down into three principles:

1.Control
2 Simplicity
3 Connecting

The changes were initiated by pain points that users made known to the company. The company acknowldged that privacy settings can add up and pile up over time, and not always be as clean a process as one would like. They wanted to simplify this.

Control

Facebook says when people can easily control the audience, they share more and more meaningfully. There is definitely something to that statement. It’s a relevancy issue just as much as it is a privacy one. Certain status updates may be more appropropriate for a certain group of people.

Facebook has removed regional networks. The company says that these generated a lot of confusion and reduced user control. People were joining networks that they were not sure who all was in. It is a fragmented user experience. They say something like 50% of people don’t even join them. They also said the concept doesn’t really fit into the new model.

Simplicity

The new settings make privacy more simple. You can choose between the same set of privacy options throughout different features. There is a single set of privacy controls wherever you are on the site. If you make a change in one place, it stays consitent throughout the entire site. There will be a universal lock icon (as shown in the top image), so that you always know where you can adjust settings. They are consolidating six different privacy pages. For each setting, there is a question mark so you can tell exactly what each thing is for.

As far as sharing options, you can: 

- share with everyone

- share with friends and authenticated networks

- share with friends of friends

- share with your friends (like always)

- customize who all you are sharing with when you have specific pieces of content for sharing with a specific audience

Connecting

During the connecting part of the dicussion, they talked about the transition period, which is definitely important, considering how upset some users got after the big redesign of Facebook.

They are testing six different transition tools that users will see when the settings roll out. Basically, the company is just testing different ways to give users the ability to opt in to settings. They want to make sure that people really understand the changes that are happening.

When Facebook rolls them out, users will sign on to the site, see a transition tool, then they will be asked about settings. Once they provide their preferences, they will get a confirmation. Of course, settings will always be able to be adjusted on a post-by-post basis via the publisher box.

With regards to the "everyone" option, this is divided into two distinctions – minors and adults.

The new privacy settings and controls are still in the testing stages and will be rolling out soon. You’re probably wondering if info will be indexable by search engines. Facebook says "It’s certainly something we’ve talked about, but it’s not like that at this time."

What do you think of the new privacy options? Do you intend to be more open or more private with your updates? What will be your default setting? Please share.

iPhone 3.0 users waiting for an updated Facebook app apparently won’t have to wait too much longer. Its developer Joe Hewitt posted a Facebook note outlining the update’s new features, and saying that it is 98% done.

Here’s a screenshot of the note, listing the features:

As you can see from the above image, a lot of people like this. We’ll see if the enthusiasm translates to actual use of the product.

In other Facebook news, the company is getting ready to roll out some new privacy settings. WebProNews sat in on a conference call discussing them earlier today, and from the sound of it, users are going to have a lot more control over what posts they share with what friends.

Not only will these new settings simplify privacy controls, but they will allow users to keep their status updates more relevant for their friends. You can read more about that and checkout Facebook’s slideshow here.

WebProNews just sat in on a conference call and webcast with Facebook, where the social network’s upcoming changes to privacy settings were discussed. These were designed to give users more control over what they share with whom. Are you looking forward to privacy changes with Facebook? Share your thoughts.

The features were discussed a bit last week, but were elaborated much more in this discussion. The company made clear up front that the changes were not related to talk of a Facebook payment system, and have nothing to do with advertising or info that Facebook will make available to advertisers. Users still have control over what info is shared with advertisers.

Here is the slideshow that was presented:

Facebook says its mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected. The new privacy controls enhance this and will allow people to share with as narrow or as broad of an audience as they want.

Facebook discussed the new features as broken down into three principles:

1.Control
2 Simplicity
3 Connecting

The changes were initiated by pain points that users made known to the company. The company acknowldged that privacy settings can add up and pile up over time, and not always be as clean a process as one would like. They wanted to simplify this.

Control

Facebook says when people can easily control the audience, they share more and more meaningfully. There is definitely something to that statement. It’s a relevancy issue just as much as it is a privacy one. Certain status updates may be more appropropriate for a certain group of people.

Facebook has removed regional networks. The company says that these generated a lot of confusion and reduced user control. People were joining networks that they were not sure who all was in. It is a fragmented user experience. They say something like 50% of people don’t even join them. They also said the concept doesn’t really fit into the new model.

Simplicity

The new settings make privacy more simple. You can choose between the same set of privacy options throughout different features. There is a single set of privacy controls wherever you are on the site. If you make a change in one place, it stays consitent throughout the entire site. There will be a universal lock icon (as shown in the top image), so that you always know where you can adjust settings. They are consolidating six different privacy pages. For each setting, there is a question mark so you can tell exactly what each thing is for.

As far as sharing options, you can: 

- share with everyone

- share with friends and authenticated networks

- share with friends of friends

- share with your friends (like always)

- customize who all you are sharing with when you have specific pieces of content for sharing with a specific audience

Connecting

During the connecting part of the dicussion, they talked about the transition period, which is definitely important, considering how upset some users got after the big redesign of Facebook.

They are testing six different transition tools that users will see when the settings roll out. Basically, the company is just testing different ways to give users the ability to opt in to settings. They want to make sure that people really understand the changes that are happening.

When Facebook rolls them out, users will sign on to the site, see a transition tool, then they will be asked about settings. Once they provide their preferences, they will get a confirmation. Of course, settings will always be able to be adjusted on a post-by-post basis via the publisher box.

With regards to the "everyone" option, this is divided into two distinctions – minors and adults.

The new privacy settings and controls are still in the testing stages and will be rolling out soon. You’re probably wondering if info will be indexable by search engines. Facebook says "It’s certainly something we’ve talked about, but it’s not like that at this time."

What do you think of the new privacy options? Do you intend to be more open or more private with your updates? What will be your default setting? Please share.