I have never believed that any of the services and products that are built on the whole fallacy of social media have ever had any concern about user privacy and security. From day one of services like Twitter, Facebook and even Google the emphasis has been centered around reducing peoples expectations of what privacy and user security means.

Sure there are the advotes of this personal openness who proclaim that if we have nothing to hide then it shouldn’t matter what either we share implicitly or gets shared by omission by those services we use.

Already we have the famous – or would that be infamous – lines from Google’s Eric Schmidt where he suggests that if you don’t like what shows up on the web about yourself is to simply change your name, or even the other day were he factiously suggests that is you don’t like the fact that your home is on street view then you should just move.

Even from day one all these social media services have been shown to have nothing but an ambivalent attitude about privacy and ignored even the most basic concepts of web security 101, as more than few notable web security experts have pointed out.

One has to wonder why there is this barest nod to privacy and security but really it boils down to one simple thing – money.

All these companies that are so reliant on us willing to pull the wool over our eyes need us to constantly lower our expectations of what privacy and security means on the web. As much as everyone in the social media business would like us to believe this is all about changing society; because only with an open society does the average person have any chance to have a say or be an influence. We’re lead to believe that all this user generated content that we create is the bedrock of social change.

From our non-stop sharing on Twitter to posting our daily lives to Facebook this is more about conning us into think that any of this really means anything. It does but not in the way that we are lead to believe.

All this user generated content that is filling massive datacenters worldwide isn’t going to change a single thing beyond our own little worlds but it does make all those social media services incredibly valuable to the companies that create reports after reports based on the demographic information we blindly hand over.

These are reports used by government agencies of every kind of alphabetical combination as well as by both huge corporations looking for any competitive edge and the marketing firms hired by those companies.

The last thing that anyone of these companies, agencies and social media companies want is for the subject of privacy or security to be raised because every time this happens their revenue and information streams become threatened. The last thing that they want is for the sheep to suddenly wake up and start asking embarrassing questions as to why these companies are nothing but patronizing prats when it comes to privacy and security.

Even now Google is still getting slammed around the world for its Street View project that was also sucking up what was suppose to be private user information. Their solution to what they say was just an employee’s 20% gone wrong - hire a director of privacy. Why did it take the threats of lawsuits from around the world to be the catalyst to do something that should have been a requisite position for any company that deals with the Web.

But then that is the way it is when it comes to all these social media and Web 2.0 companies – bury one’s head in the sand until you are forced to deal with a firestorm. A perfect example of this total lack of willingness to ensure that even the most basic user data is safe can be seen with the release of a Firefox extension that literally lets someone “borrow” your identification and login into all these cool social media sites as you.

Called Firesheep it is an extension that literally lets you hijack anyone’s identification when they connect to an unsecured WiFi. As Mike Melanson writes at ReadWriteWeb:

Firesheep takes advantage of unsecured wireless networks and unencrypted cookies to “sidejack”, or gain access to sites by way of accessing these cookies. Developed by Eric Butler, a freelance web application and software developer in Seattle, Washington, Firesheep was created and released at Toorcon 12 to demonstrate the security risk inherent in storing unencrypted login data in cookies. As Butler writes on his blog, “On an open wireless network, cookies are basically shouted through the air, making these attacks extremely easy.”

Firesheep opens a sidebar in Firefox that shows everyone who is connected to a certain unsecured WiFi network. With a single click, you can connect to most any social network using that person’s user name and password.

This is something that should never happen and doesn’t need to except for the fact that all these social media companies don’t care about web security.

If your think that they do and that I am off my gourd then you need to read a post today by Robert Scoble about a Stanford University student and professor who have created away for people to connect without the knowledge of the hosting server. The only problem is that these two gentleman can’t interest any of the social media companies that could use the technology in using it.

Let me say that again .. or better yet here is what Robert wrote about this:

While there I met a student, Arvind Narayanan, and a professor, Dan Boneh (you see them in the photo here) who showed me that they’ve developed a way to let people tell other people where they are located, or, especially, if Dan is near me so we can go and have lunch together. So? Doesn’t Foursquare do that? Doesn’t Google Latitude do that? Yes. But the system that Boneh’s team has developed does so without letting the host server or other users know. Whoa. How does it do that?

Well, through some neat cryptographic tricks. On the whiteboard they simplified it for me. Let’s say we were using Loopt and that Dan wanted to let me know where he was. He checks in, and a crypto key that I have would let me unencrypt his location without letting Loopt see that. It’s actually a lot more complex than that, and you can see how it works on the paper they drew up.

But after explaining it all to me, they said none of the location-based services were interested in it.

You see this kind of technology while making the service totally safe for the users it also totally ruins the business model of the companies like Foursquare, Google, or any number of other companies that rely on aggregating your activity online.

Instead we get stupid platitude like if you don’t want anyone to know then don’t post it to the web, or the totally inane statements from people like Eric Schmidt that are more patronizing than sensible.

The simple fact is that no matter how these companies want to phrase their lawyer-speak claims of concern about privacy and security you can be sure of one thing.

They’re lying sacks of shit.

Privacy for Web 2.0 businesses is nothing more than glib words and show is a post from: The Inquisitr

I’ve been watching the Blippy scandal unfold, but Steve has been pretty vigilant about pointing out why credit card related social networking might just be the worst idea ever when it comes to social media and sharing.

Almost comically, just like naysayers feared, we discovered last week that the credit cards of some Blippy users were searchable in Google. And the entire internet didn’t hold back with the “I told you so” posts. It was pretty obvious up front that the potential problems that could result from sharing your credit card transactions online outweighed the completely non-existent benefits.  Does anyone really need to know you’re buying tampons on your lunch break or that your consumption of Ben & Jerry’s has skyrocketed since your boyfriend friended some random chick on Facebook?

To Blippy’s credit, they were pretty upfront about it in a blog posting about Blippygate. They start out by saying they are “very sorry” and go on to disclose exactly how the information wound up in Google search results. They outline a five step plan including hiring a Chief Security Officer to prevent future credit card leaks.

While Blippy is working to address the issues of security that surround their business model, it seems that current users might drift away and anyone who had thought about signing up might be wary now. And since we now know exactly why sharing your transactions with your internet acquaintances is a bad idea, does anyone plan on starting now? If you used Blippy, did you find any benefit, and do you see yourself continuing to use the service?

Blippy addresses credit card leak, you want to give it a try now? is a post from: The Inquisitr

I was initially intrigued last week when I heard about the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine- as anyone who’s prone to compulsive signups knows that many of us leave a trail of abandoned accounts around the interwebs like so many discarded early generation iPods.

I wasn’t compelled enough to write it up here, though, mostly because I was disappointed at its limited scope. The service “kills” you off MySpace, Twitter, LinkedIn and/or Facebook, and it appears that they’ve only facilitated about 875 “suicides” as of now, a teensy, teensy number of people. The services you can off yourself from also happen to be the ones that have “stuck” the most under the massive, meaningless umbrella of Web 2.0- the ones users are least likely to want off of. To be fair, I instantly realized that finding and deleting you off the services you use least would be almost impossible and searching for forgotten accounts would lead to privacy issues, if possible. Also, it’s unlikely someone can create something comprehensive enough that wouldn’t cause a lot of wrongful deletions, so fair play to them and all.

But everyone loves a catfight, and the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine is gleefully trumpeting the fact that they’ve now been banninated from Facebook. “Your suicide team” indicates that they’re working hard to foil Facebook’s foiling:

After more than 50.000 friends being unfriended and more than 500 forever “signed-out” users, Facebook started to block our suicidemachine from their servers without any comment! We are currently looking in ways to circumvent this ungrounded restriction imposed on our service!

Thanks for your understanding
Sincerly,
Your 2.0 suicide team

PS: If you wanna support us and can set up a decent proxy server, please do not hesitate to contact us at suicide[[at]]moddr[[dot]]net

Of course, in the interim, if you want to be deleted from Facebook, you can go to Facebook and do it. Or, you can stop logging in until you feel like it again.

Facebook blocks your Web 2.0 suicide is a post from: The Inquisitr

No folks, there’s no need to go hunting for the utmost ridiculous idea to come out of 2009. It might have just scrapped under the wire with all the big fast food blogs handing out invite codes but there is no doubt – Blippy is a brain-dead idea.

When news about the service was first breathlessly broken to the world I wrote up my first impressions of the idea over at my home blog and had a bit of a conversation with Sean P. Aune in our nightly podcast about the in beta service. My feeling some fourteen days later hasn’t changed one iota.

For those of you who might not have the faintest clue as to what I am talking about here’s the gist of the Story of Blippy.

Sign up with the service.

Add one or more credit cards to your spanking new Blippy account.

As with Twitter add some people to your Blippy Followers list.

Go out and buy something using that credit card.

Then automagically what you have spent, where you spent the money and what you bought will be broadcasted to all your tag-along friends on Blippy.

Yes you read that right. You can broadcast to the world what you are buying and how much you have spent. Talk about a new way to “one up the Jones’”. Can someone please – please – tell me how this is in anyway a good idea?

In an interview with Liz Gannes over at GigaOM one of the founders of this <cough>brilliant</cough> idea, Philip “Pud” Kaplan, said that people need to get over the hump of being able to share this kind of personal information.

Uh .. No. No they don’t and neither should they just because some Social Media wanker says this is really cool idea and everyone should get in on the fun. On top of it all if you do decide to do something stupid and sign up for this Blippy defaults to share everything publicly – you actually have to go into whatever settings there and flip the switch to private.

Excuse me but this is only begging for something to go wrong. I can just see it now Christmas morning:

“Honey … where is that diamond ring that you bought the other day. You know .. the one that showed up on Blippy?”

“Uhmmmm .. ”

<Wife looks up the phone number to her lawyer>

Don’t think this will happen? Well in a world where Facebook entries are increasingly be used as grounds for divorce and lawyers are mining them for incriminating information there is no doubt that at some point Blippy will will find itself in the same place. Especially; as Kara Swisher noted in her post about the service, when Blippy inevitably integrates Facebook and Twitter as a way to expand its userbase.

Of course Mr. Breathless Blogger is back pimping a bunch more precious invites but regardless of the spin this is still the absolute stupidest idea to come of 2009. Period.

The absolute stupidest idea to come out of Web 2.0 & Social Media in 2009 – Blippy is a post from: The Inquisitr

Divorce isn’t a rare thing these days in broader society. One in two (give or take depending on the country and stats) marriages break down. Sadly one could argue that it is a fact of life.

For years I’ve seen people I’ve known in the broader internet/ web 2.0 space ending up getting divorced. Without naming names, some include people I’d regard as my friends, others include those I’ve gotten to know or worked beside.

That in the broader sense of statistics these happened may not be so remarkable, and statistically the breadth of people I know may not be representative. But likewise, I’d struggle to name people in startups I know today who remain happily married, at least over any length of time.

Yeah, I probably should add at this point that I’m now one of those statistics. You always believe that it can’t happen to you. That’s a fools position that I deluded myself with for a long time. I saw the pure statistical fact around me, but pretended that I was better than the rest. As some one who loves numbers (and believes that numbers are the root of everything) I ignored what I would on any other statistic would have believed.

This post isn’t meant to be about how I feel at the moment, but about what on (be it an unscientific basis) I’ve observed for years, but never really articulated. There is a curse in web 2.0 startups for relationships, one which is above the general population when it comes to divorce.

The reason is fairly simple to articulate and my conclusions come from talking to many people in the space.

Simply: those who start startups share mostly similar traits: an obsession to succeed, long hours (often at the behest of family,) sometimes difficult financial situations (where the startup isn’t making money) and a broader lack of understanding…or passion in the partner for what is trying to be achieved.

The often untold fact is that those running startups don’t often marry those who share the same entrepreneurship drive. If there is one thing I’ve learned over the years (from The Blog Herald, through b5media, TechCrunch, and now The Inquisitr) is that it takes a special type of person to take a serious risk on a startup; and who understands that it always is a risk, and that more often than not those risks don’t convert.

But likewise, those same risk takers are the same people who have created some of the very same startups that are great today. Even if they aren’t “great,” there and thousands, if not more startups that might not be in popular culture that none the less turn a profit.

That marriage is sometimes the cost of a startup maybe isn’t great, but likewise web 2.0 would be far worse off without those who take the risk, and make it at the cost of their wife and sometimes family.

At this point I don’t know how you change the dynamic, and perhaps you can’t. But likewise recognizing it might be a stepping stone to better recognition, and support. Hell, I’ve just put out there that if you’re getting divorced, you’re not alone. I’d rather speak out and help support others in the same situation than it remain unspoken. Web 2.0 will be better off for recognizing the issue, than denying it.

Is Divorce The Curse Of Web 2.0? is a post from: The Inquisitr

This very useful site also lets you zoom in on a specific rabbit or spot, so you can see which kind of carnal relation he or she just enjoyed. The five graphical representations of positions should cover the basics and all you have to do is tick the right box or boxes. You can also add a comment and tell us if it was indoor or outdoor.

Some users might find the 20 minutes update prevention a bit annoying, but the site is over capacitated, so I guess thats fair enough.

Currently 11,165 users has shared their moment of passion with 5 in Iran, 2 in Saudia Arabia and 10 in the North Atlantic Ocean (!?)

Tell the World where You Had Sex – IJustMadeLove.com is a post from: The Inquisitr

The absolute best picture describing Web 2.0 and Social Media is a post from: The Inquisitr

Did you see those last three Twitter messages that flew by?

Did you really read all the messages posted to your Facebook timeline in the last hour?

Have you managed to get caught up with all those RSS feeds that piled into your feed reader since you logged off last night?

How close are you to screaming email bankruptcy from the highest office building in the city?

Just how many alerts have you missed in the last couple of hours from Google, your never ending beeping Blackberry, from some iPhone app you thought would make things easier?

How many of you have jokingly asked in the last half hour if someone had a few hours they could sell you because you don’t seem to have enough of your own?

Everything is clamoring for your attention and no matter how hard you try at some point you get that blank deer caught in the headlights look as you realize that there is just too much information screaming for your attention and time. As your brain begins to freeze up in a spastic firing of neurons crying out for respite you begin to realize that the majority of all that stuff clamoring for your attention is nothing more than noise.

The problem is that as we are inexorably led to a web where things really do happen in real-time, is that more and more noise is being generated. This is leading us to a point where we are having to forego any real depth to the few and far between bits of real information fight for our attention. Everything is bite size, short posts, 140 character messages, Facebook Lite, even television commercials are spoken faster so more can fit in a smaller time scale.

Documents created today will stand a good chance of being outdated by tomorrow. News that was fresh and important is almost outdated by the time you hit the publish button. Information distribution cycles are getting squeezed unmercifully and as a result the moment we take our eyes off of the screen we begin to feel the cold sweat of the fear we are going to miss something.

Never mind about daydreaming, or having a friendly conversation over coffee without a laptop or smartphone close. God forbid we should eschew undivided one on one attention in favor of zeros and ones sent to us over the Web. Even conversations are becoming some sort of universal shorthand so that we can get our thoughts across as quick as possible and move onto the next bit-size morsel of information that has been put on a diet.

There is no doubt that this is the direction our world is headed in – a world where everything comes at you all at once and where you hope that you can maintain some sort of attention long enough to catch everything so that you don’t miss those few and far between important snack bite sizes pieces of information. Chances are that being the incredibly intelligent race that we are that we will find ways to cope with the constant onslaught of information.

Coping however is not the same as learning and growing. Sure we might actually have people who thrive in this kind of environment but for the majority the assault on our ever decreasing attention spans may be a bigger cost that we might think.

Anyone with some attention to sell, I seem to have lost some of mine. is a post from: The Inquisitr

From a Flickr founder, new search engine Hunch is out of private beta today.

So if you’re Binged out, you’ve been Google Squared and got your kosher-search on, you might need a bit of a helping hand with your next search. Hunch promises to help you find what you’re looking for on the web in “ten questions or less.” Huh. But in a searchy world where Google Answers, Wikia Search and MSN QnA have all disappeared from the landscape, will users trust the collective opinion?

Caterina Fake thinks so. Fake co-founded Flickr and had something to do with Yahoo! Answers before moving on to create Hunch. As you use it, Hunch asks a variety of seemingly irrelevant questions about you- are alien abductions real? Who makes the best fries? Do you like bumper cars? Building on your answers, the site compiles a demographic profile to find the best search results when you need them.

Clearly the site needs more input to work as intended. Earlier today, as I answered the random questions (not geared to a specific search) it would indicate that X% of users responded with that answer. But if it was a choice of three answers, my result was always the same as 33% of respondents, with no variance.

So I took the direct approach, selecting a question from the dropdown menu at the upper right hand corner of the page. Typing in “is” lead to a bunch of questions- I chose “is my partner cheating on me?” (Sorry, honey, it’s for work!)

A series of questions followed- does he tell you where he’s going? Do you both say “I love you?” Does he let you in on his schedule? After the promised ten questions, I was awarded with this result:

I don’t think Hunch will replace Google, nor is it looking to. But it might provide a comfy home for the legions of search engine surfers seeking answers to more personal questions like should I marry my boyfriend or is my son gay?

Hunch currently has a user satisfaction rate of 80%, and Fake believes with more users, it can go as high as 90-95%. So, what do you think? Will you be using Hunch?

Revolutionary search engine #2394: Hunch is a post from: The Inquisitr

What happens when you get a bunch of rich old pricks gathering together for yet another conference and the talk turns to how poor they are and how it’s the Internet’s fault?

Well you get people like Barry Diller (who looks surprising like a older version of Steve Ballmer) pontification about how the web will return to its glory days of when you paid for stuff – and all within five years. Yes folks by the time five years rolls by we will be forking over cash for all that stuff we are getting for free today.

“I absolutely believe the Internet is passing from its free days into a paid system. Inevitably, I promise you, it will be paid,” Diller said in a keynote discussion opening up the Advertising 2.0 conference held at his company’s futuristic glass building alongside the Hudson River in Manhattan. “Not every single thing, but anything of value. “

The fact that content and services on the Internet so far have been largely supplied for no charge is “an accident of historical moment that will be corrected,” he said, in an era of “creative chaos” that will span the next three to five years.

Source: Between The Lines

It’s not a matter that businesses are going to have to find new ways to be profitable in the era of Web 2.0 (or if you prefer Web 3.0 or Scoble’s favorite 2010Web). No it will be us suddenly realize that out of the goodness of our hearts that we should be paying companies for the privilege of being able to keep on doing business as usual. Even though those business models are proving all on their own that they don’t work.

Diller goes on to add

The entire Internet, in effect, would become an app – or content – store.

“That little thing – that in fact that you scroll it, you do it, it comes, everything else is taken care of, is the answer to what’s going to happen on the Internet, when in fact, you get the applicability of that broadly across the Internet,” Diller said. “It’s absolutely going to happen.”

So in effect the Web becomes nothing more than a gigantic iTunes store with the old guard once again charging what they think is a fair price and walking away with all the profits.

Okay Barry, what ever you say. How about you and I getting back together in five years and see exactly how wrong you were.

Diller pulls a dilly, says the web will become a paid system is a post from: The Inquisitr

An American language monitoring group has named Web 2.0 as the one millionth word or phrase in the English language.

The Global Language Monitor claims to track the English language through a formula that considers the frequency of words and phrases in print and electronic media. Web 2.0 got the prize after it appeared 25,000 times in searches and was widely accepted.

According to Reuters, other linguists are not surprisingly calling the finding a publicity stunt, saying it is impossible to count English words in use or to agree on how many times a word must be used before it is officially accepted.

As Adam Ostrow at Mashable also rightly points out, the award comes as the term Web 2.0 is starting to slip from regular use.

Web 2.0 named as the one millionth English word is a post from: The Inquisitr

I ran across this in one of my feeds just now and it is tying in nicely with another post I am working on for later but I couldn’t resist the urge to share this with you right now. Set to the music of Don McLean’s “The Day That the Music Died” it is a great take on why advertising as we know it is nothing but a big FAIL.

Enjoy

A big hat tip to Eric Friedman at Marketing.FM

The failure of advertising put to music – Madison Avenue Blues Video is a post from: The Inquisitr

Yelp, which bills itself as a Web 2.0 review site powered by real people giving real reviews, recently faced charges by San Francisco businesses that Yelp employees were strong arming them for better review placement in exchanges for goods and sponsorship deals. It would seem according to a story today at the Chicago Tribune that the practice isn’t just restricted to San Francisco. Apparently some Chicago businesses are accusing Yelp representatives of approaching them to re-arrange the company’s positive and negative reviews in exchange for those same type of advertising and sponsorship deals.

Ina Pinkney of Ina’s restaurant in the West Loop said that last summer a Yelp salesperson offered to "move up my good reviews if I sponsored one of their events. They called it rearranging my reviews."

The owner of More Cupcakes, Patty Rothman, said that last fall a Yelp Chicago staffer walked into her Gold Coast shop and "guaranteed us good reviews on the site if we catered one of their parties for free." Offended but resigned, Rothman complied. And just as promised, positive reviews bloomed for the business right after the party, Rothman said.

Source: Chicago Tribune

Gee…. I wonder what happened to the whole Web 2.0 and social media ethos of warm and fuzzy we’re in this altogether for the consumer ideology. As usual money trumps ethos I guess.

Yelp faces additional allegations is a post from: The Inquisitr

If there is one thing you can say about the whole Web 2.0 thing it would be that it definitely hasn’t been boring. Every time you turn around some new service being announce, some new idea is being touted as the next game changer and everybody is yakking about how hot the social media stuff is. Yup – Web 2.0 is full of bustling activity.

But where do we go from here?

What will the next iteration of the web be like?

Fred Wilson had a post this morning called Looking for the Yawn in which he quotes something from a Warren Buffet blog post in which Warren said the following

Beware the investment activity that produces applause; the great moves are usually greeted by yawns.

I’ve been thinking about that and the other things Fred talked about in his post and it got me to wondering if Web 3.0 could actually end up being very boring. The thing about Web 2.0 is that in a lot of ways it resembles the construction of a building. There is a hubbub of activity as everyone is rushing around putting all the pieces together. The foundation, the walls, the plumbing – it all a flurry of hyper activity as people excitedly raise a whole new building up from the barren earth.

At some point though everything is in place – the building is completed and then everyone sets about to do the day by day business of working in that new building. You know the boring stuff.

The stuff that makes everyone want to *YAWN*.

What do you think? Do you think the next version number will be more building or will it be a big *YAWN*fest?

Will Web 3.0 be all about the *YAWN*? is a post from: The Inquisitr

If there is one word I really want to see run out of town it is free. It is a word that has created an extremely lopsided view of what the concept of value means in our Web 2.0 world. The idea that we would be able to feast at the table of top notch web (and to a certain point desktop) software that could be supported; and show a profit (sometimes obscene profits), by straight advertising is showing itself to be the ultimate ponzi scheme.

In turn for our flocking like headless chickens to every new web service that came along what did we really get in exchanged?

We got applications that we invested time and energy in, come to rely on, only to have them disappear with all our data or just plain disappear. We get autocratic social media fiefdoms where without any warning you can find yourself thrown outside the gates of these so-called transparent and open data farms disguised as your best friend. We get contextual advertising constantly bombarding us in these free apps that is far from being contextual. We get deluded into believing we are somehow important because we have been invited into participating in using beta software; which most of the time any real developer would be embarrassed to even call alpha quality software; but is designed to get those ad dollars rolling in as soon as possible.

While some smart bloggers are writing how venture capital money is on a straight downward decline others are suggesting that this people behind all this venture capital are starting to run scared. At the root of either of these things is the fact that the advertising model of supporting software is crashing; and in some cases crashing hard. In the process the basic fallacy of the whole Web 2.0 ethos of free is being shown to world as the newest wardrobe of the emperor that it is – empty of value.

Where this idea of free falls down on its knees is expectation. When we actually pay out our hard earned cash on something we have certain expectations. With real world products and services we expect that product to work within in certain parameters – whether those parameters be set by the manufacturer of the product / service or if they are set by government regulation. In the online Web 2.0 world however we have willingly lowered our own expectations because we are getting something for free.

We have willingly said that we will accept extended periods of product or service downtime. We have willingly accepted handing over our data on a day to day basis because we are getting something for free. We have willingly agreed to use software that is just okay because we are getting something for free. We have willingly accepted the idea being foisted upon us; consumer and producer alike, that our data, our ideas, our content aren’t worth anything more than being gist for their advertising money mill all because we are getting something for free. We have also let ourselves be conned into believing that the most precious commodity we have – our time – isn’t valuable because we are getting something for nothing.

The interesting thing here is that in this movement consumers; and to a large degree the producers, have become faceless entities whose only value is the data that they can produce and the more copious the better. The web companies behind this con job don’t care about the individual – they only care about the aggregate. Just keep quiet and keep producing all those tweet, uploading all those pictures and poking people and you’ll be fine. The moment that you raise your head above the faceless crowd though you can find your account suspended, pictures deleted forever or locked out of the Web 2.0 world. The common feeling at that point is oh well it wasn’t costing me anything so why worry about it.

What about your time?

What about your data that is still a part of that aggregated pot of gold at the end of the start-up rainbow?

It doesn’t matter, because we got all that stuff for free. However once you bring money into the equation things change and those things that we have been lead to believe don’t matter because we were getting something for nothing suddenly do matter. When you hand over your money suddenly uptime isn’t just a oh well we’ll do the best we can matter. Suddenly just arbitrarily deleting a persons data takes on a whole new meaning. Suddenly terms of service are something that can be challenged. The expectation of responsibility changes once money changes hands. Reputations mean more once you include a sense of real tangible consumer cost into the mix.

Where companies could once slough off responsibilities because the word free, or beta, or alpha, or by invitation only are in the header graphic of some web service they are finding a whole new set of rules they will have to live by. This creates a problem for anyone wanting to start up some new service or make users want to use an existing one. the first question anyone asked when wanting to use something new is – is it worth spending my money on -  and in most cases I would strongly suggest this isn’t the case. As well those beta, alpha or invitation slap together services have to hit the ground running with a much more reliable and better feature set than if they were hiding under the free moniker like they do now.

Does this mean the downfall of service like Twitter, FriendFeed or Facebook?

Nope because for some folks these types of services already fill a need that is worth paying for. For other folks this won’t be the case and probably never would be the case. However for those that it does fill a need or is able to meet the expectations of they will be a lot harder to keep happy because they are going to expect a certain level of quality and respect for the money they are paying. In turn though it also means that people will finally get what they pay for because so far this getting something for free isn’t looking like it is working out to well.

Reality sucks eh.

Enough with the free crap, make stuff worth paying for is a post from: The Inquisitr

As Duncan reported earlier Google is shutting down; or removing any active upkeep and development, from a slew of services that they had paid out millions for. The reason why – money. The problem is that it is services like Jaiku, Notebook and Google Video that the company was using as part of their whole webification of our our world. Sure YouTube is a more popular product than Google Video but that doesn’t change the fact that these are all services that at some point people have entrusted their workflow to along with their data. Like everything else though when the money gets tight if something isn’t making a company money it’s time to shut the doors on it – that’s just Business 101.

Steve Rubel just raised an interesting point in a new post – could GReader be next on the chopping block at Google. After all like he points out GReader still hasn’t been able to be monetized in any serious fashion. As well, while in the Web 2.0 and social media world everyone might be deeply in love with the product the rest of the real mainstream world on the web still hasn’t gotten RSS feeds.

Enter Google Reader, one of my favorite products and by far the best RSS reader on the market. However, Google Reader is completely un-monetized. Further, RSS adoption aint exactly a robust growth market. It’s still for geeks. So I wonder if the economic storm intensifies what Reader’s future is. My bet is that they will either shut it down, cease development or start to monetize it the way they are doing with Google Finance. More likely it’s the latter. Even Google Maps now has ads.

If Google chooses to run ads in Google Reader, that creates an issue. Lots of publishers run ads in their feeds. If Google is competing against these with its own contextual ads in in Reader then what? It might just be easier for them to shut it down. Thank God for OPML exporting.

What does this portend for the rest of all those companies out there scratching for attention and users for their services. After all VC money will only go so far especially in these economic times regardless how some of the venture capital companies might want to spin it. So at what point do the users out there realize that these companies are starting to drop like flies taking all of our time invested in them along with our data right down the flick of a server switch.

What we could very well be seeing here is the very beginning of the snowball rolling down the hill. It might be starting out small with only a few companies; or existing services that are cash sink holes, getting shuttered. Unfortunately though with each one that disappears consumer willingness to expend any more time on exist services will decline. For new services starting out it will be even harder because they have the double whammy of the economy and consumer reluctance to deal with.

Personally I have been reluctant from the beginning to move my workflow to the web mainly because of things like this. One minute you might be using some service as part of your workflow and the next minute – Whoosh – it’s gone; usually with nothing more than a week or two notice on a blog somewhere that no-one probably reads. I may have gotten laughed at in the past whenever I questioned the long term viability of trusting our workflow to the web but over the next year I don’t think those people will be laughing quite as hard.

So you want to trust your workflow to the web – good luck with than plan is a post from: The Inquisitr

Before there was Disqus, sezWho or even IntenseDebate there was a service called co.mments that allowed you to track all your comments that you left scattered around the blogosphere. Well according to a post by Steve Rubel this morning the service will be shutting down on January 11. Founder Asaf Arkin announced it in a blog post the previous night

I remember using the service for awhile back in the beginning but at some point I turned it off. It looks like a lot more people have done the same and now with funding money getting harder to get it just got to be too much.

Bye Bye co.mments – to the deadpool with ya is a post from: The Inquisitr

So one day you’re blogging away and end up writing something a little on the negative side about the US government (like that’ll never happen) or more specifically about the US Air Force only to find your post the target of some barbed comments by a USAF officers. Well, don’t take it personally because you have landed yourself in the sights of the new USAF counter-blogging policy.

Yup the US Air Force as a part of its emerging technologies division of the public affairs department has provided a 12 point flow chart for the airmen to follow when dealing with bloggers.

The flow chart lays out a range of possible responses to a blog post. Airmen can offer a "factual and well-cited response [that] is not factually erroneous, a rant or rage, bashing or negative in nature." They can "let the post stand — no response." Or they cancan "fix the facts," offering up fresh perspective. No matter what, the chart says, airmen should "disclose your Air Force connection," "respond in a tone that reflects high on the rich heritage of the Air Force," and "focus on the most-used sites related to the Air Force."

Source: Danger Room]

This is all part of a larger program within the Air Force to better utilize social media tools and be a part of the Web 2.0 community

Capt. Faggard and his Air Force Emerging Technology team is responsible for developing strategy, policy and plans for an ever-changing communication landscape for communicators worldwide. What was most interesting is that with Capt. Faggard leading the way, the Air Force employs 330,000 communicators! Their mission is to use current and developing Web 2.0 applications as a way to actively engage conversations between Airmen and the general public. Yes, that’s right, the goal of the program is that every single Airman is an on-line communicator.

Source: Web Ink Now

What’s interesting here is that as David Scott says in his post on Web Ink Now the US Air Force; and other branches of the military, seem to be more open to things like Twitter and blogs that the corporate world is.

Here is the full chart used by the USAF (click on it for full view)

US Air Forces puts bloggers in their sights is a post from: The Inquisitr

Jeff Atwood had a great post the other day about the pirating of software and as much as I would like to say that there was anything new that will come out of it – well – there won’t. Of course the entertainment industry loves to point to the people doing the pirating as the bad guys and RIAA has made themselves the jackboot squad of the Internet age with their sue the fucker’s into oblivion attitude; and we can see how well that has worked out for them.

What no-one really wants to talk about is why Internet piracy works in the first place. They don’t because they don’t want to ruin the illusion that people are willing to pay for stuff. Sure people will pay for their food because if they don’t they’ll starve. People will pay for their cars because if they don’t they get repo’d. People will pay for their power (if they can) because if they don’t they’ll freeze their asses off in the dark.

Yet when it comes to the Internet suddenly everyone gets the holier than thou attitude about how everything is suppose to be free. It doesn’t matter that the person who created the goods needs to feed their family or pay for their car or be able to heat their homes just as long as you and me can get it for free.

Whadda mean buy a t-shirt – forget it.

Whadda mean look at some ads – that’s why I have an ad blocker.

Whadda mean you want money – forget it … where’s my torrents .. where’s my USENET.

Piracy works for one very simple reason – people don’t want to pay for shit. Now before you self-righteous bunch gets your panties in a bunch I am not saying that everyone is out to steal someone’s hard work – only about, oh – say –  95% of the people on the web.

This attitude that everything is free on the web is being hammered into peoples heads everyday and right at the forefront of those doing the hammering is Web 2.0 and social media. Content should be free they proclaim to the masses. Well as far as the masses are concerned that means anything whether it be an MP3, a movie, a book or a bloggers content.

Governments can kiss ass for votes and Big Media support by going after those bad pirates making all these things available for free. Big media can blame all the losses on those big bad pirates stealing their gawd awful crappy movies and music. The fact is that the pirates only exist to the degree they do because the large majority of people don’t want to pay for something that they can get for free – especially when the basic premise of the web now is that content should be free.

People by their very nature are cheap – give them a reason to justify stealing and they’ll take it. So before you start yammering too much at those big bad pirates maybe we should be looking a little closer to home. As long as we keep telling people that content on the Internet should be free they’ll keep using that as a soothing reason for steal.

Well cry me a river – people are pirating stuff is a post from: The Inquisitr

From the very first time almost when people communicate with each other via some form on computer link up nicknames have been an integral part of that communication. In the beginning days with bulletin board services right though to today’s Web 2.0 and social media the old adage of on the Internet no-one knows you’re a dog has held true.

Even though one of the basic tenets of Web 2.0 and social media is transparency and openness nicknames have persevered. For a lot of people there is still that need to either be anonymous or to create some new kind of identity for themselves. With the Internet this is so easy to do as regardless of how open you may appear no-one for the large part knows who you are. Sure in the Web 2.0 world with it’s continuing onslaught of conferences that anyone wanting to be anyone in the business of Social Media identities are easy to confirm.

However anonymity still seems to be the rule rather than the exception in the larger web experience. For some it is primarily a way to protect their offline lives. For others it also seems to be a way for them to behave in ways that their mother’s would wash their mouths out with soap.

Interestingly enough Alan Patrick at Broadstuff had a post today where he was comparing the types of conversations around some web conference in France called Le Web. He points out that there is a big difference in the types of back channel conversations be had. On the one side there is the Twitter based conversation and then there is the IRC like conversation happening on the Le Web uStream channel.

The thing that struck Alan was the quality of the conversation on each of the channels

The difference was this – one was sharp, irreverent, funny, cruel, anarchic and a hoot to watch. The other was on Twitter.
One had a go at the piousness, pomposity, posturing , product pimping and peccadilloes of the presenters and promoters, argued the rights and wrongs of the arguments, pimped and flamed various speakers, and was the olde altnet at its best (and worst). The other was respectful, simpering, careful what it said and, well, mostly lame. Thousand, and thousands of bytes of blanc tweetmange.

In his opinion the difference between the two boiled down to a single factor – anonymity.

Now as one who started out his online communication experience being fully behind using things like nicknames I think there is a problem with this anonymity. As I have grown in this online world I gradually became more comfortable with using my real identity but I don’t believe my way of communicating has changed. For me it has always been a case of calling a spade a spade and if you didn’t like it too bad.

With anonymity though I find a lot of people talk and treat others in ways that they wouldn’t have the guts to in real life. I willingly accept the responsibility for my words – good or bad. Being anonymous removes this responsibility and I personally don’t think that is right. Regardless of where I might be having conversation – online or offline – I have always believe that you are accountable for what you say and trying to hide behind some facade belittle the worth of what you have to say.

I can understand where in some cases this anonymity is needed especially in cases like whistleblowers and should be protected with all our might but in general conversation – I don’t think so. If you aren’t willing to stand in front of your words and be willing to accept any repercussion of them then what value do those words have?

Is web anonymity the last refuge of fools and idiots? is a post from: The Inquisitr