We used to speak with one another, but now through the convenience of electronics, we can enable a service to do that for us. Or, in the alternative, we may opt out. The point where “sharing” drifts away from pure communication, and toward Aldous Huxley’s searingly prescient vision of thousands of couples simultaneously fornicating in glass houses under spotlights, is what blogger Robert Scoble calls “the Freaky Line.” The ability for Facebook to strategically relocate this line, as it is appearing to do once again with “frictionless sharing,” is described by Scoble as “Zuckerberg’s brilliance.
Adding a new chapter to the research that cemented the phrase “six degrees of separation” into the language, scientists at Facebook and the University of Milan reported on Monday that the average number of acquaintances separating any two people in the world was not six but 4.74.
Facebook officials are now acknowledging that the social media giant has been able to create a running log of the web pages that each of its 800 million or so members has visited during the previous 90 days. Facebook also keeps close track of where millions more non-members of the social network go on the Web, after they visit a Facebook web page for any reason.
In an anonymous industrial park in Virginia, in an unassuming brick building, the CIA is following tweets — up to 5 million a day.
At the agency’s Open Source Center, a team known affectionately as the “vengeful librarians” also pores over Facebook, newspapers, TV news channels, local radio stations, Internet chat rooms — anything overseas that anyone can access and contribute to openly.
Thiel also reiterated his belief that we’re in an education bubble — he thinks higher education pricing has grown faster than any other sector of spending, and the economics don’t work for all but the top (most expensive) schools.
Wearing a hoodie and taking heated questions – about privacy and his sometimes-scandalous past – the Facebook CEO and cofounder seemed to melt on stage.
Facebook has evolved from a simple dorm-room project to a global social network connecting millions of people. We will keep building, we will keep listening and we will continue to have a dialogue with everyone who cares enough about Facebook to share their ideas. And we will keep focused on achieving our mission of giving people the power to share and making the world more open and connected.
The Wall Street Journal is reporting on what could be a major scandal brewing for Facebook, MySpace and other social networks: despite assurances to the contrary, the sites have apparently been sending personal and identifiable information about users to their advertisers without consent.
3 months ago
