Fair Use … of Hitler!
You’ve probably heard that many of those wonderful YouTube parodies using the clips from Downfall are disappearing due to copyright claims. Well, to help combat that tragedy, Rocketboom/Know Your Meme have put together this useful Public Service Announcement ‘Challenging a YouTube Take Down with Fair Use’:
Digital Culture Links: April 23rd 2010
Facebook-centric links April 23rd 2010:
- Facebook Instant Personalization Opt OUT [YouTube] – Quick YouTube video from EFF showing how to opt out of Facebook’s ‘Instant Personalisation’ (which is turned ON by default).
- Facebook “Likes” World Domination [Mashable] – Previous social networks, you’ll remember, were destinations. As soon as Friendster became slow and unreliable, an exodus to MySpace began. Once MySpace pages became bloated and unwieldy, the crowd hopped over to Facebook. Zuckerberg is well aware of the threat: If you build a destination site, users will hop over to the next cool hangout in no time at all. That’s why Facebook longs to become a sturdy platform. The more businesses rely on Facebook, the less likely it is to fail. […] and thousands of websites now use Facebook Connect for their login systems. The toolbar and web-wide “like” button are the next phase; by providing more distributed services, Facebook becomes invaluable. Credits, Connect, toolbars — these are all distributed plays that try to weave Facebook’s social graph throughout the fabric of the web. Rather than aiming to be the coolest bar in town — and losing its clientele when they leave for a hipper spot — Facebook plans to become the Starbucks of the web …”
- Facebook Open Graph: What it Means for Privacy [Mashable] – Sensible thoughts on the privacy implications of Facebook’s new web plugins: “… it is imperative that users who have concerns about privacy make sure they read and understand what information they are making available to applications before using them. Users need to be aware that when they “Like” an article on CNN, that “Like” may show up on a customized view that their friends see. Public no longer means “public on Facebook,” it means “public in the Facebook ecosystem.” Some companies, like Pandora, are going to go to great lengths to allow users to separate or opt out of linking their Pandora and Facebook accounts together, but users can’t expect all apps and sites to take that approach. My advice to you: Be aware of your privacy settings.”
- Facebook introduces Docs, based on Microsoft Web Office [Technology | guardian.co.uk] – A good at the differences between Google and Microosft/Facebook’s cloud office tools: “Facebook Docs is still in beta, so it’s not clear how many features it will offer. However, Microsoft’s Web Apps suite is more powerful than Google Docs, and has the advantage of maintaining compatibility with the desktop version of Microsoft Office. With Google Docs, by contrast, what you get out of it is worse than what you put into it, so trying to “round trip” complex documents is basically a waste of time. Of course, Microsoft Office Web Apps will be available to everyone whether they are a member of Facebook or not. Facebook is providing the social features, such as documents appearing on walls and in profiles so that friends can comment on them, and so on. For some users, the combination will be worthwhile.”
- Introducing Docs… for Facebook [Docs.com Blog] – Microsoft’s online office 2010 offering ‘Docs’ partners with Facebook, allowing Facebook users to sign in, share and collaborate on documents. Clearly a direct challenge to Google’s emerging Google Docs and Spreadsheets.
- Breaking: Android – Now On The iPhone [App Advice] – One way around iPhone love but no wanting to be locked into Apple’s AppStore is simple: hack it and install Android instead! 🙂
Facebook “Likes” Everything
Facebook’s annual developer’s conference, f8, has resulted in a deluge of news about new Facebook changes and tools which will keep commentators and analysts busy for days to come, but the most significant is clearly the redevelopment of the tools which connect Facebook and other websites according to the social activities of Facebook’s more than 400 million users. In a post with a deceptively philanthropic tone, Building the Social Web Together, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg reinforces his company’s vision of making the web more meaningful to users (and advertisers):
People are increasingly discovering information not just through links to web pages but also from the people and things they care about. This flow of social information has profound benefits—from driving better decisions to keeping in touch more easily—and we’re really proud that Facebook is part of the shift toward more social and personalized experiences everywhere online. […] Three years ago […] I introduced the concept of the social graph, which is the idea that if you mapped out all the connections between people and the things they care about, it would form a graph that connects everyone together. Facebook has focused mostly on mapping out the part of the graph around people and their relationships. At the same time, other sites and services have been mapping out other parts of the graph so you can get relevant information about different types of things. For example, Yelp maps out the best local businesses and Pandora maps out which songs are related to each other. All of these connections are important parts of the social graph, but until now it hasn’t been possible to easily share the connections
So, in an attempt to create your total ‘social graph’ and link up all of your social data, Facebook’s has a raft of new social plugins and personal integration tools which will allow any website, news story or media item, to become something you can ‘Like’. More to the point, through Facebook you can share every single thing you ‘Like’ with all of your Facebook friends (or the entire world if you happen to have a public profile!).
The simplest explanation of ‘Like’ generated by these tools: you go to a website, you like that website, you click the Facebook ‘Like’ button and two things happen: (1) a message appears on your Facebook profile telling your friends you liked that website; and (2) on the website in question a picture of you (from your Facebook profile image) appears on the website you liked, saying you liked this website, along with pictures of any of your Facebook friends who also liked that website (importantly this personalised list is only visible to you and only if logged in to Facebook). Mashable also has a good overview, noting how very simple it is to integrate Facebook’s ‘Like’ into other websites and services. Facebook’s own explanation of the social plugins and the Like buttons is here, but it’s noteworthy that from the very beginning they are try to stress that Facebook is not giving your private Facebook data to other people:
It’s important to note that none of your personal data is shared with a site when you view these new features, and they will only be visible to you when you’re logged in to Facebook. Also, none of these features impact or change Facebook’s advertising programs or policies.
However, it is of course true that every little ‘Like’ you click deepens the profile of you that Facebook owns, and that richer information becomes more and more valuable it is to advertisers – even when that information has specific personal identifiers removed. While I do think Facebook are showing a healthier concern for people’s privacy, I’m far from convinced sharing all of this information with Facebook is a good thing. Personalisation can be incredibly useful (I find Amazon’s suggestions quite useful, for example, and that’s only possible because they cleverly mine my Amazon purchase history) but it always has some cost and that’s worth keeping in mind. Most of all, what really makes me nervous is how terribly excited marketing folks are by Facebook’s new tools; for them privacy is usually an obstacle, not a right. And, of course, privacy advocates are doing some very sensible flag-waving, asking people think before they ‘Like’. With Zuckerberg boasting that he expects a billion ‘Like’ buttons on the web within 24hours, it’s probably time for everyone to think through exactly how much information they’re willing to share, and what you’ll like Facebook to know, and remember, about you.
Digital Culture Links: April 21st 2010
Links for April 21st 2010:
- Hitler Is Very Upset That Constantin Film Is Taking Down Hitler Parodies [TechCrunch] – It looks like the Hitler Gets Upset About [Whatever] meme might be drawing to an end thanks to copyright issues. Constantin Film, the production company behind Downfall (Der Untergang in German) have asserted their copyright over the Downfall footage and YouTube’s automated system appears to be pulling the clips down all over their service. I’d like to think everyone will be filing counter-claims since this is clearly Fair Use according to US copyright law (how could this not be parody or satire?) but we’ll have to see what happens. (An Open Video Alliance post notes that the”videos were blocked by YouTube’s Content ID system, not taken down via DMCA notices”). Meanwhile, until it disappears, here’s Hitler’s thoughts on the Downfall videos disappearing.
- Facebook Further Reduces Your Control Over Personal Information [Electronic Frontier Foundation] – EFA on Facebook’s advertiser-orientated, privacy-diminishing strategies: “Today, Facebook removed its users’ ability to control who can see their own interests and personal information. Certain parts of users’ profiles, “including your current city, hometown, education and work, and likes and interests” will now be transformed into “connections,” meaning that they will be shared publicly. If you don’t want these parts of your profile to be made public, your only option is to delete them. […] The new connections features benefit Facebook and its business partners, with little benefit to you. But what are you going to do about it? Facebook has consistently ignored demands from its users to create an easy “exit plan” for migrating their personal data to another social networking website, even as it has continued — one small privacy policy update after another — to reduce its users’ control over their information. The answer: Let Facebook hear your frustration.”
- More Changes to Facebook Privacy, and More to Come [Social Hacking] – “… Facebook is changing the “Become a Fan” buttons to “Like” buttons. If you want to connect with a page for something you’re interested in, you now will simply “like” the page. In a blog post, Facebook spun the connections as an exciting improvement: “Instead of just boring text, these connections are actually Pages, so your profile will become immediately more connected to the places, things and experiences that matter to you.” I can see three main reasons why Facebook would make this change, and none of them involve text being boring. […] First, this helps software more easily process your interests. […] Second, the shift to “liking” reduces friction. The semantics may be subtle, but I’m sure Facebook has done research on this. “Liking” implies a simple, casual gesture […] Third, this increases the useful data Facebook can offer to others.”
Also, since a few people asked, I’ve used Feedburner to allow email subscriptions here, so if you want an email each time this blog is updated, click here and pop your email address in the ‘Subscribe by email …’ widget on the right.
Digital Culture Links: April 20th 2010
Links for April 19th 2010 through April 20th 2010:
- Media Watch: A Lesson in Facebook Friends (19/04/2010) [ABC TV] – Media Watch piece about two Warwich (QLD) teachers whose private Facebook photos of themselves dressed in supposedly suggestive school uniforms got them suspended from their jobs after the photos were posted in the local newspaper. It seems the photos were lifted from private Facebook accounts and that the journalists who ‘uncovered’ the story were actually Facebook friends with one of the two teachers they exposed. A suitable reminder that ‘friend’ isn’t always the best word for a social network connection! (The two teachers are now suing the journalists in question.)
- Teens and Mobile Phones – Report April 2010 [Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project] – “Daily text messaging among American teens has shot up in the past 18 months from 38% of teens texting friends daily in February of 2008, to 54% of teens texting daily in September 2009. And its not just frequency – teens are sending enormous quantities of text messages a day. Half of teens send 50 or more text messages a day, or 1,500 texts a month and one in three send more than 100 texts a day, or more than 3,000 texts a month. Older teen girls ages 14-17 lead the charge on text messaging, averaging 100 messages a day for the entire cohort. The youngest teen boys are the most resistant to texting – averaging 20 messages per day.”
- Facebook Now Commands 41% of Social Media Traffic – STATS [Mashable] – “Facebook and YouTube are displacing rivals and taking over the social web, according to data we’ve just received from comScore. In addition to showing massive and continued traffic growth throughout 2009 and the beginning of 2010, Facebook and YouTube continued to capture the highest volume of social web traffic. Twitter also garnered a ton of mainstream attention, helping the company increase the number of visitors to its site by fivefold over the course of the year. […] Taking a look at the unique visitors charts, we see the widespread migration from MySpace to Facebook even more clearly. As of March 2010, Facebook traffic made up 41% of all traffic on a list of popular social destinations. MySpace was in second place, capturing around 24% of traffic. Gmail had 15%, and Twitter had 8%. However, during the same period in 2009, MySpace was in the lead with 38% of site visits over Facebook’s 33%.” (Original post has some useful graphs, albeit without a scale.)
- How Tech Start-ups Like Foursquare and Meetup Are Tring to Overthrow Old Media and Build a Better New York [New York Magazine] – Long article from Doree Shafrir about the tech start-up culture that has gripped New York city. The featured start-up is definitely Foursquare, and there are plenty of quotes about the role of start-ups in relation to tech giants like Google and Yahoo. There is some sense that the realm of start-ups is moving toward a new tech bubble, but the dominant business model still seems to be: get popular, get the eyeballs, and then let Yahoo and Google (and maybe Microsoft) bid to buy your business.
Digital Culture Links: April 19th 2010
Links for April 19th 2010:
- Why the Library of Congress cares about archiving our tweets [Ars Technica] – Interesting look at the motivations behind the US Library of Congress twitter archive – and their perspective on how Twitter has changed communication – and why Facebook hasn’t. Some of the challenges the Library of Congress archive will face are important issues for researchers, including dealing with shortened urls through third parties such as bit.ly and tinyurl; and whether or not to archive photos on twitter specific photos (eg twitpic) – this one seems unlikely.
- Twitter Chirp Conference – Videos [Justin.tv ] – A video archive of Twitter’s first official conference – Chirp – in April 2010.
- Facebook Ads Will Use Your Web History [Mashable] – “Facebook will soon use your activity on other web pages to target ads based on your interests, Financial Times reports. That’s potentially a big boon for advertisers, but it won’t sit well with privacy advocates. Note that Facebook already targets ads using information from your profile, and this new system will not track all of your browsing. Rather, Facebook will offer sharing buttons to interested websites. Readers will be able to click on them to share the links with their Facebook friends via Facebook Connect […] Once the user shares a link with his friends, Facebook will assume that person shared it because he or she liked it, so the company will include content from that web page in the data it uses to target ads based on user interest. The ads will appear whenever the user visits the Facebook website.”
- Internet dating [SMH] – “Australians are changing the way they date and mate, a survey shows. A Nielsen poll found one in four adults have used the internet to find a partner and another 38 per cent are considering using online dating. The other 37 per cent – many presumably in relationships – said they would never go online to meet someone. Of those who had used online dating, 33.6 per cent reported a short-term relationship, 16.2 per cent said they had a long-term relationship, 8.9 per cent said they had married or were in a defacto relationship, and 2.7 per cent had children. […] The survey shows that:
* Of those who had used online dating, 62 per cent had dated someone they met online;
* Men were slightly more likely than women to use online dating services; and
* Most of those polled (72 per cent) were seeking a serious relationship, but many were looking for friendship or just sex.
Nielsen polled 3057 people online in November and 3764 in January, with the data weighted to the general population.”
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