Seems like there’s a bit of a hubaloo around Google’s recently changed settings with respect to its “Shared” feature function in Google Feed Reader — mainly in that Google decided, a couple of weeks ago, to include a new feature where things that you’ve marked as shared will automatically show up in your friend’s Google Reader under a new section.

This has some folks crying foul, as this smacks of a unilateral move to obliterate one’s sense of privacy. Others say that this is merely the meaning of the word “share”, so what’s up with that?

Ultimately this is how you define the word share, and in this case, how Google defines the word “share” (almost like how Bill Clinton defined the word “is”?) Its clear from Google’s own support folks that they fall into the latter camp, from the above, where they feel that if you’ve shared it, you’ve implicitly given your permission to share it with the world. Heck, that’s what the shared function means, where your shared news feeds show up on a link which is — quite literally — accessible by the whole world.

The people who feel maligned by this either

a) don’t know about the latter, or, probably and more like

b) know about the latter, but know that most people — let’s say, important personal people, such as friends, family, co-workers … very *specific* groups who you aren’t explicitly sharing with — don’t know that this function even exists.

Robert Scoble has hit the nail on the head with the term Granular Privacy Controls, which Facebook does pretty well (and has had to do well with, given the level of scrutiny that its gotten).

At the end of the day, people should have control over where their data goes – not the hosting service. And there should be absolutely no ambiguity over how that information is shared. Yes, on one hand, it makes the people who are complaining about this service feel like whiny crybabies because JEEBUS, don’t they understand what the word “shared” means?

But on the other hand, I think its clear that people who feel violated don’t share the same definition of the word or the term, even if Google had outlined things in their terms of service (which no one reads). And I’m pretty sure it has to do with the knowledge that even if one puts up things up on the web through an exotic link, there is the realization that no one will find unless you directly send it to folks.

(Heck, its one thing to even set up a blog with your real name without telling anyone, or blog under your real name for that matter. I rank number one for “Tony Hung” via the BlogHerald, and no one at my workplace or school still knows I blog unless I tell anyone about it)

Or, put it another way, its because those folks who have used the share button might *not* have wanted their things explicitly, in fact, shared with “everyone” – there being a distinction between the “everyone” of the world wide web, who might know or care about you, and the “everyone” including the very personal people you might have corresponded with or chatted with.

And in that sense, I think Google was wrong to make that assumption. Sure, you might sound like a whiny crybaby about it, but at the end of the day, I think there are not many golden rules about online behaviour; but explicit control of your own information is surely one of them.

And in that regard, Google could have handled it a lot better.

So four months after I unbashedly proclaimed that Google News would change the world as we know it (or something like that), the New York Times has done a bit of a pseudo-update on how things have done in the interim.

To say that progress has been “modest” would be a dramatic understatement (cue in Mat Ingram’s — a journalist himself who clearly follows new media as closely as anyone — own observations that he barely noticed that they have existed a few weeks ago), as only 150 comments have been submitted over the life of the “beta” thus far.

Now, I have to say that I’m a little disappointed in this, but I’m not surprised.

Unless there’s some marketing push behind it, I am sure that many people involved *in* media stories will necessarily know that a) Google *News* exists and b) there is in fact the option to put your *additional* comments “on the Google”.

For a company that’s planning to purchase something like a company every few days for the next year, I’m sure Google has enough cash to promote the hell of out this thing. However, I suspect that there’s probably a lack of political will within Google to push for an activity that requires a substantial amount of human capital.

That is, it takes humans to vet the credentials of sources within stories (so that they can comment), and it also takes humans to find those sources in the first place to let them know that Google comments exists, and it also takes humans to actually read the comments to filter — and I’m sure they do this no matter how they deny it, even in a post-hoc way — for appropriateness and so on.

On one hand I’m glad that Google News is getting a bit of a bump through the New York Times. On the other hand, its a bit sad to see that its not quite reaching the potential that it could — because while my initial euphoria has passed, I still think that the potential is still huge, as it really allows sources *of* a story to have their own soapbox.

(because not everyone has a blog)

Merry Christmas, blogosphere! Its hard to believe that another year has gone by. I’ll be doing another set of predictions in a few more days that takes a better look back at tech events over the past year, and what might be in store for the year to come.

In the meantime, I hope Santa’s brought you whatever you happened to wish for. And in the event he didn’t — there’s always Boxing Day! :)

Peace of the Season
Tony Hung.

Dave Cohn of NewsAssignment.net, Propeller Scout, sometime-contributor to Wired, AKA “DigiDave”, and all around Social News Dude has written an interesting post about Digg today, with respect to people gaming Digg.  I have to admit I don’t really follow Digg all that closely these days.  But I did more than a year ago … writing about how people were trying to game Digg.

Anyway, folks like Dave Cohn provide an interesting and important perspective because they have access to the inner “circle” of socially active submitters that most people aren’t usually privy to.

And I use the word “circle” deliberately, because the gist of his piece is that the relatively new “social network” aspect of Digg is propelling (pun intended) the use of instant messaging systems to promote their stories.  The worry, of course, is that the quality of the stories will suffer as what reaches the front page has more to do with the size and effectiveness of these self-promoting circles, than the actual quality of the stories themselves.

What I do wonder, however, is if this is really “gaming” Digg at all.

Last year, when stories about Digg gaming were running rampant the first time (and really, possibly the last time, as I wonder if anyone really cares as much these days), Jay Adelson was questioned about the effect of having “friends” as a function on Digg enabled this kind of “circle-digging” effect.  His answer, as I recall, was that he and Kevin wanted people to make friends, and to have people voting en bloc was an inevitable consequence of that.

Irrespective of whether or not there is a sophisticated “social network” engine behind something like Digg or not, when something like Digg gets big enough, there are real gains to gaming the system.

Front page Diggs get thousands of hits.  But that flash in the traffic-pan is almost immaterial.  What’s more important is that they also get dozens, perhaps hundreds of new backlinks in the process.  Now that Google is putting the smack down on  paid links (and paid reviews), easy “cheap” methods of generating organic links are getting harder and harder to come by.

Put simply, you can attach real dollar amounts to every front page digg, if you want to calculate the cost it takes to generate each inbound link (in time, or whatever unit cost you’d like), or, if you want, calculate the cost it would take to generate that amount of traffic by PayPerClick engine (albeit really untargeted traffic).

When there’s this amount of gain, I think it stands to reason that people will do whatever it takes to exploit a system.  If that system is based on votes, then yes — that means people creating sock puppet accounts, joining groups or creating lists of folks for the express purpose of “social news promotion”, where people vote for each other.

It isn’t new, its been happening, I’m sure in some form or another, for at least a year, and I am also sure that its not so much a function of the “social networking” aspect of Digg so much as a maturation of what Digg “can do” for any given website — and that more and more marketing folks (and I use that broadly to encompass anyone who wants to get these benefits) are cottoning on to this fact since December of 2006.

In many respects, with these kind of out-of-Digg, or “extra-social-network” promotional activities that are carrying on, I’m not sure solutions like “anonymizing” votes will do any good at all.  Private lists of people will know who to vote for, and will go ahead and do it as folks on the list point to specific stories, even if the authors are all “blinded” on Digg.

I started this post by querying if these kinds of activities were really “gaming” Digg or not.  One hand it obviously is.  But on the other hand, the answer could just as easily be “probably not” — and this is because of its a natural consequence of what happened at Digg, and an inevitable consequence of Digg getting to be as large and as influential (from a exploitable SEO point of view) as its become.

If you doubt the latter (in a larger sense), I’d respectfully point you to the $300M evaluation Digg is looking to cash out for.

Coming from the metaphorical lips of Kevin Rose himself, Pownce announced its super-alpha mobile version of Pownce today, available for mobile browsing at mobile.pownce.com.  I think this is an interesting development, given that one of the biggest pluses for Twitter has been the ability to message your crowd “off-line”, enabling all kinds of interesting uses, including the ability to broadcast live updates of events as they happen.  Although a lot of Twitter content *is* of the “my cat’s breath smells like cat food” variety, the ability to engage in your community offline — both as a contributer and a reader — allows for the potential for some very smart and very important real-time information to go back and forth, whether it be a local emergency, weather changes, and so on.

By bringing Pownce “offline”, that is, not being tethered to a machine to do your … em … “powncing”, pownce will also be able to enter the same space as Twitter.

Sort of.

After all, in its current incarnation, Pownce will only be able to be viewed via mobile browser.  While such a site is still available for Twitter, we shouldn’t forget that many people use the SMS function of their phones to Twit away.  I suspect a great deal more people have phones that enabled for SMS than, say web browsing — although early adopters being early adopters, this proportion of folks who are *also* interested in Pownce and Twitter are likely to be much more equal than “normal” folks.

(just like more of them will also own iPhones and use Gmail, I’m sure).

[And following the line as from the above, in an emergency (like a catastrophic emergency), sending messages via SMS may be (this is total conjecture) more efficient and use less data than, say web browsing].

Looks like US mobile phone company T-mobile is refusing to allow Twitterers to use its SMS service to Twitter. Its unclear on what grounds other than its an “unauthorized third party”. There are some great comments over at GetSatisfaction (which is something like the ill-begotten socially-networked version of the Consumerist) on the issue, but one of the most salient revolves around the following issue.

While much of the thoughts around Twitter has been somewhere between “Twitter is a colossal waste of time” to “Twitter is an awesome online chatroom“, what’s been forgotten is that for some people in some circumstances, people are using Twitter to broadcast and receive some critical in-time messages.

One great example has been how some individuals were posting real-time messages about the Los Angeles fires via Twitter. Or, how the Los Angeles Fire Department actually uses Twitter to post real-time messages about emergencies in and around the city. Or the potential to use messaging systems like Twitter in real (and hopefully never) catastrophes, as it gets around the logistical issue of telephone lines being down, through to SMS systems which use very little data to broadcast messages.

Twitter needs champions — real champions of these kinds of services — to have a sit-down with T-mobile, to get a better answer as to why messages have really been stopped, and that, issues of profits and losses aside, to educate them that not all twitters are of the “my cats breath smells like catfood” variety.

Not merely content with indexing the web in all its forms (and serving applications to help people work online, tell other people where they are in the world and what they’re doing, creating a platform for mobile devices, and … God, is anyone keeping track of this stuff?), Google is now making a run, as you may have heard, to start populating its own search results by itself.

Duncan Riley over at TechCrunch poses the question of whether its going to far, and I think its a good one.

Because think of it this way — as I’m sure many of you already have.

1. Google derives the majority of its income through serving ads.
2. Google serves a great deal of those ads in its search engine results pages, where they bracket organic search results.  Above them and to the right of them.
3. It doesn’t directly derive income from any organic SERPs unless those pages are also filled with Adsense ads.
4. Therefore, to maximize revenue, Google must logically populate its organic SERPs with pages filled with Adsense Ads.

Even if we remove our tinfoil hat for a moment (and I have a few), and suppose that Google Knols won’t intrinsically rank higher in its own SERPs, all we have to do is look to see how fantastically well Wikipedia ranks in its own SERPs to see that the *potential* is  already there.

Couple the fact that Google is danging the opportunity to derive revenue from said pages (and if you want to place a twist on it, allow people to do a kind of “reputation management” with Google’s stamp of approval, since it will be placing such a high premium on the identity of its authorship), and you have the potential to create a powerful loam for Google Knols to grow for real.

What’s the flipside to this?

I’m going out on a limb, by saying it might “Google’s total and utter destruction”, and I am only being mostly facetious here.  Let’s all think about this for a second.  What happened if most of the knols were utter rubbish *and* they were achieving high organic rankings on Google?

You would have a situation where it would get most people thinking — and it would be ordinary folk now, not just geeky tech bloggers — “why search on Google when all you get is Google results? (and some of them aren’t even very good)”

Which of course leads to a subtle change in perception about how Google does what its meant to be doing best — which is indexing the web.  Perceptions power all kinds of things, including stock prices, which many people believe is vastly over priced in Google’s case, anyway.

Long story short?

Google’s Knols sound like a way for Google to fiddle with its Golden Goose, so that it can maximize how much it can milk it for its Golden Eggs.  Its got to be very careful, however, with how sharp its trying to be with this new experiment (particularly as there are no editors and no obvious sense of quality control), lest it lop off the head of said goose.