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Facebook Home And Privacy

By
Andy Yen
– Posted on April 4, 2013Posted in: Technology

Om Malik:

So if your phone doesn’t move from a single location between the hours of 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. for say a week or so, Facebook can quickly deduce the location of your home. Facebook will be able to pinpoint on a map where your home is, whether you share your personal address with the site or not. It can start to build a bigger and better profile of you on its servers. It can start to correlate all of your relationships, all of the places you shop, all of the restaurants you dine in and other such data. The data from accelerometer inside your phone could tell it if you are walking, running or driving. As Zuckerberg said — unlike the iPhone and iOS, Android allows Facebook to do whatever it wants on the platform, and that means accessing the hardware as well.

While I don’t think Facebook would be able to get away with this Orwelllian future that Om paints, I do think it’s a valid concern. Do we really want this level of personal data exposed to a company whose business model rests on targeted advertisers?

via Why Facebook Home bothers me: It destroys any notion of privacy — Tech News and Analysis.

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YOU DON’T KNOW JACK Is On Facebook

By
Andy Yen
– Posted on May 29, 2012Posted in: Video Games

I can’t think of a better place for You Don’t Know Jack other than maybe an online-enabled mobile client. The cleverly written trivia game is still fun after over a decade.

YOU DON'T KNOW JACK on Facebook.

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Insomniac Is Making A Facebook Game Called Outernauts

By
Andy Yen
– Posted on May 21, 2012Posted in: Video Games

Rowan Belden-Clifford, Insomniac Games talking to The Verge:

“I consider myself the core audience of previous Insomniac games AND of Outernauts,” he says. “I’m 23 years old, and I play both console games and Facebook games, as does my roommate and many of my other peers. We as a company are as excited about reaching a huge new audience on Facebook as we are about satisfying our hardcore fans.”

Contrary to stereotypical gaming enthusiast beliefs, I think it’s a good thing that Insomniac is setting out to make a Facebook game. I’d love to see someone make a “legitimate” game on Facebook if nothing else but to prove that it can even be done. If there’s anyone that can pull that off, it may as well be one of the best console development studios in gaming today. Playdom’s “Avengers Alliance” came close to creating a Facebook game that isn’t a glorified progress quest, but missed the mark with its terrible shoehorning of “social” mechanics to bottleneck progress.

Knowing how that turned out, I’ve got some heavy reservations based on Insomniac’s partnership with EA (whom we all know love to microtransaction/DLC their games to comical levels), and the fact that the description of “Outernauts” in the piece make me visualize “Pokemon” and “Farmville” having inappropriate relations.

Still, count me in for at least seeing what they come up with.

via Insomniac Games explains why Facebook is the place for its new ‘hardcore’ RPG Outernauts | The Verge.

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Google Is Serious About Creating A Standard For Social Networking Widgets

By
Andy Yen
– Posted on March 27, 2008Posted in: Technology

open social logo
When I first saw that Google, Myspace, Yahoo, and others were forming the “OpenSocial Foundation,” I almost yelped for joy that someone had finally wised up and decided to create One Social Network to rule them all.  Honestly, there are just too many damn networks to be involved in, much less keep track of, these days.

Unfortunately, the foundation’s main goal is not to consolidate social networks. Rather it is to provide developers with a standard for building applications for use on the different social networks.

Much less exciting, I know.

Nevertheless, it’s still a Good Thing. Open standards are what the internet was founded upon, and it’ll make for a better experience for both developers and users.

Predictably, Facebook is not a part of the initiative, probably because they have the most mature and tenured platform for social networking apps already in full swing.

My first inclination is to draw parallels between the iTunes vs Playsforsure battle of Goliath vs the Davids.  However, this battle may not be a similar debacle, as the battleground is for a development standard and I think the developers themselves hold the final say in determining the victor.

Read More [cnet.com]

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