Facebook in my Pandora

As part of Facebook's new OpenGraph initiative the site has selected a couple key partners to share information with regarding user's preferences. One of those partners is Pandora, and this weekend while I was listening to my music stations I started noticing the following pop-ups show up on various artists & songs:

Whenever one of my Facebook friends likes the song or artist currently playing on my station, Pandora lets me know with a little image like the one above. Also, I can see a list of stations that my Facebook friends listen to, and I imagine they can see the stations I listen to.

All of this is pretty cool except for one thing: Pandora and Facebook never asked me if it was OK to do this! I don't remember ever telling Pandora to share my music preferences with everyone I know on Facebook. What if I secretly listened to Britney Spears or Miley Cirus and never told my friends about this shameful secret? All of a sudden everyone knows!

This is somewhat of a silly example, but I think it illustrates the privacy concerns around Facebook's OpenGraph initiative and the amount of data that can be shared. Right now you have to actively opt-out of the sharing service instead of having to explicitly opt-in, which is a bit concerning. I wonder if there will be a huge backlash against Facebook just like with the Beacon debacle. Anyways, I'm off to review my Facebook privacy settings to tighten up the information they can share about me with others.

Back!

I've been getting rocked all this month at work and haven't had time to post anything lately. Without getting into too much detail I've been working on a big product launch at work that just went live this Friday night, but now that it's over I should be able to start posting a bit more frequently.

Windows Phone 7: Better late than never?

From everything I've read so far, it sounds like Microsoft has done a great job with the upcoming Windows Phone 7 platform. A complete reboot from the Windows Mobile series, the Windows Phone platform has rich system features and technical specs that rival iPhone and Android devices. Microsoft has even done a good job of building up excitement in the ever important app developer community. If Microsoft released this platform today it would give Apple and Google a good run for their money in the smartphone market.

Too bad we won't see Windows Phone 7 available on devices until much later in the year. Apple and Google aren't going to stand still until then with their own products. This year several new Android devices will roll out to the market and Google is finally starting to take steps to address its Android fragmentation issue. Apple is set to release a new iPhone model and OS this year (and possibly even on a new network, Verizon). Add on top of all this the entry of the new mobile tablet PCs that could steal away market share from high-end smartphones. All of these new mobile products entering the market in 2010 will steal away Microsoft's thunder and dampen sales of its devices. The Windows Phone 7 platform looks really strong, but as Palm's WebOS system has shown us lately sometimes that's just not enough to gain traction in the marketplace.

API fun

Fun times playing around with the Twitter and Foursquare APIs. I've been brushing up on my javascript skills and putting my home server back into action in order to cook up 'proof of concepts' on a couple areas I'm exploring. I'm not one to start from scratch so I always look for samples first before I start.

On the Foursquare front, someone cooked up this nice little site (Checkin Mania) that I've dug into for sample javascript & 4SQ API code. The site is a really slick mashup of Google Maps and Foursquare/Gowalla data. You can see popular checkin venues on the map and view how many people checked into each venue and other basic information. I think if you want more detailed information you need to use OAuth data to log in, but that's not incorporated into the site just yet. Still, I have to tip my hat to Rakshith and Init Labs, they've put together a pretty robust site with limited resources here. The site was "written using notepad :), hosted on Google App Engine". Nice!

There's no shortage of Twitter API samples on the web so I'm up and running on this platform already. Here I'm digging into the issues of content curation and social discovery. How do I keep up with all the tweets of the people I'm following? Better yet, how do I keep up with all the 'good' tweets of the people I'm following, and let the noise fall by the wayside. Also, how do I find new people to follow? Based on my interests and the data that I've made publicly available, is there a way to find people who share my same interests and can add their 'good' tweets to my Twitter feed?