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.

Google Buzz is not trending

One thing I've noticed about Google Buzz is that it's not being used that much to share stories from popular sites like Mashable and TechCrunch. If you run through the archives of these sites and look at the share counts, you'll see that Twitter is king, Facebook is a distant second, and Buzz is an even further third. Sites like Mashable tend to have stories that are shared a lot on social networks, and seeing the low number of people using Buzz can give you an idea of how Google is faring against Twitter and Facebook in the social arena.

URL Shorteners: Bit.ly, Goo.gl, Shr.ty

I'm not a huge fan of URL shorteners. Quite honestly, I don't trust them. I like to see exactly where someone is trying to send me, and I can often sniff out a spammy link just by looking at the URL. There was a time when I refused to click on a TinyURL link. But with the rise of Twitter and 140 character limits I've been forced to change my habits as shortened links are pretty much unavoidable these days.

For most of the year URL shorteners like Bit.ly and Ow.ly were quiet servants of the internet, not making too much noise and working as well as one would expect them to. This past month however there's been a bit of shake-up with the entry of Google and Facebook into this tiny (pun intended) space. Goo.gl and Fb.me were launched for internal use at each respective company, but it's easy to see how these shortening services might be extended to the general public, especially in the case of Google. How will sites like Bit.ly continue to operate in the face of this tough competition?

What is Bit.ly's value proposition? Right now it's the market leader mostly because it’s the default shortener for Twitter. But before Bit.ly the shortener of choice for Twitter was TinyURL. Twitter was able to change over to Bit.ly without too much disruption, so what’s to stop it from changing providers again? Why wouldn't Twitter create its own shortening service, something like a Twi.tr service?

It's really not too hard to start a URL shortening service. In fact, if I wanted to I could start up my own URL shortening service tomorrow without too much effort. (I would call it Shr.ty). But why would I, when there are services like Bit.ly and Goo.gl out there that will take care of all that for me?

Right now I use Bit.ly because it's the default Twitter shortener and because it seems to be the most 'trusted' service out there (whatever that means). But if Google were to offer its service for free to the public, I would probably use Goo.gl over Bit.ly. Why? Well, because I simply trust Google more than I do Bit.ly. I trust that Google has a small army behind it dedicated to security and data integrity, and I trust that Google has a massive database behind it that will allow it to verify and secure all of the URLs that go through its service. Bit.ly simply doesn't the firepower and data to keep up with Google in this area.

Google can probably also offer better reliability and real-time tracking capabilities than Bit.ly. Interestingly enough, Twitter switched over from TinyURL to Bit.ly earlier this year due to these exact issues. Twitter and Google have already partnered up for real-time search, so why wouldn’t they also partner together for URL shortening and link tracking services?

Bit.ly hasn’t remained dormant throughout all this. Bit.ly responded to Google's entry by releasing Bit.ly Pro and Bitly.tv, premium services built on top of its basic platform. Bit.ly Pro allows web publishers to create custom branded shortened links through its service. Sites like the New York Times (nyti.ms), Foursquare (4sq.com) and Meebo (mee.bo) have already started using this service. Bitly.tv is an analytical service that lets you see what videos are currently going viral on the web. Since a lot of the link sharing these days happens through Bit.ly links, Bitly.tv is a pretty accurate view of what is trending right now on the internet. Expect to see this service expand to cover news events and blogs.

Still, the advantage that Bit.ly would gain from these premium services seems fleeting. There’s no real barrier preventing a competitor like Google from entering and stealing away Bit.ly’s customer base. And if Bit.ly figures out how to monetize its service, they why wouldn't Twitter move into this space? Right now Twitter has no real reason to make its own URL shortening service since there's no real profits to be made through this, but if Bit.ly can create a working business model then that’s a whole different game. Why would Twitter give away the link data and profits generated on its platform to a 3rd party company like Bit.ly?

2009 was a good year for Bit.ly, but 2010 will be a rough year for the service. If Goo.gl is opened to the public or partners with Twitter we'll see Bit.ly squeezed out of the market. If Bit.ly figures out how to monetize its service then Twitter will bring this service in-house and leave Bit.ly out in the cold. Either way, it seems like a ‘lose-lose’ situation for Bit.ly.

Or who knows, maybe I'll go ahead and launch Shr.ty and take the URL shortening world by storm!

Social class on the internet

CNN posted (yet another) story last week on the social class divide between MySpace and Facebook. This concept has been thrown around for a while now; I think I first read about it a year ago. Basically, users of Facebook tend to be more educated and affluent than users of MySpace. This makes sense when you think about how and where Facebook got started. It originally started out as a service for students at Harvard, and branched out to other colleges before becoming fully public in 2006. MySpace, on the other hand, started out open to everyone.

I avoided the whole MySpace craze back in its day. I had a Friendster account way back when and then joined Facebook pretty late after taking a hiatus from social networking sites. So I may not be the best resource on all these sites, but from a personal perspective I never liked (and still don’t like) MySpace. Every profile page I looked at had HTML diarrhea all over the place. It was the most cluttered busy obnoxious site I could imagine, and I couldn’t comprehend why people needed to add so much junk to their profile pages. It appeared “uneducated”, if that makes any sense… it all seemed so childish and amateurish I couldn’t bring myself to make a profile and validate MySpace’s existence. I know, it sounds a little harsh, but I don’t take too kindly to my eyeballs being violated every time I had to visit MySpace.

Facebook on the other hand has a lot more structure and control, and that visually and logically appeals to me. The privacy controls are important to me, because I understand the risks of letting the public see my profile, both personally and professionally. In my mind, Facebook has a lot more ‘functionality’ in place that actually serves a purpose and isn’t just there to flaunt the latest style or widget that was hot at the time.

Back to social class on the internet. It makes sense to me why the demographics are lining up the way they are on those two social networking sites. There are several articles out on the internet that talk about that. The CNN article also mentions two other sites that attract even more affluent users: Twitter and LinkedIn.

LinkedIn makes sense; it’s a site for white-collar professionals who are seeking to build up their professional network.

Twitter is a bit more interesting… is it because only upper-class yuppies would be so self-centered to think that anyone really wants to ready the very minutia of their lives? Or because only they have that much free time on their hands to waste time twittering about life’s little foibles? :)

Here’s another example of a class divide between internet services. Gmail users tend to have a higher credit score than Yahoo users… the article notes that it might be because young users favor Yahoo email so that drives down the average credit score on that site.

I wonder what other cases might be out there… YouTube vs. Hulu? Flickr vs Picasa? Blogger vs. LiveJournal?