Smalltalk with James Robertson

There's an unbelievable amount of video being uploaded to YouTube:

Remember in March when we shared with you that more than 24 hours of video being uploaded to YouTube every minute? Well, you continue to amaze us: you’ve increased the amount of video uploaded to YouTube to 35 hours per minute. That breaks out to 2,100 hours uploaded every 60 minutes, or 50,400 hours uploaded to YouTube every day.

The amount of disk space alone is staggering, never mind the ongoing bandwidth usage.

Technorati Tags: youtube, video

This makes me wonder - it's in a long screed about how Facebook is missing some level of privacy controls:

maybe I only want to tell a few close buddies about that episode with the VERY BAD bean burrito. maybe your girlfriend only wants a FEW honest opinions from her CLOSE friends on whether that new dress makes her ass look fat. and maybe your frat brother only wants to tell a few buddies about the AWESOME house party he's throwing next weekend, when he's planning to invite the smoking hot new freshman sensation over with 3 of her equally sizzling BFFs. and finally, maybe I only want to share that airfare deal on a Final Four Vegas roadtrip (& the pictures!) with my set of close friends. what happens in Vegas stays in a very tight and private social graph... you hope, anyway.

Maybe, just maybe, Dave McClure could figure out that sending an email, or picking up the phone works just fine for that class of problem. Expecting a social media service to solve every problem for you is.... silly.

Technorati Tags: facebook, privacy

This should be interesting - Twitter is going to introduce an "Event" feature - something you would use instead of the ubiquitous hashtag. The hashtag has gone into general use though; I wonder how much adoption of this there's going to be? Not from a "we don't need it" standpoint so much as from a sheer inertia of common practice standpoint. Anyway:

"I think we're finally going to have the Events feature," Stone said, in a brief interview. "It's something we've been talking about forever... and now that Ev's back on products, I think that's something that's going to be coming up soon.

IMHO, they'll have to make it pretty darn useful in order to override the very, very easy (and extremely widespread) hashtag usage.

Technorati Tags: twitter, hashtag

There's been a mini-tempest over the last couple of days - apparently, anyone can add other people to arbitrary Facebook groups. That sounds like nothing more than an annoyance until you realize that there are some pretty unsavory groups out there (take a look at this post from Jason Calacanis, and this one from Michael Arrington - I'm not going to link to the nasty example they have).

The good news? You can drop out of groups easily, after which you can't be added back to that group. The bad news? It's up to you to ensure that you haven't been added to some unsavory group. Why should you care? Well, employers (and potential employers) are now scouring things like Facebook to get a glimpse beyond what shows up in an interview. Membership in some groups could paint a picture you would rather not have painted - especially if being in that group wasn't your choice.

It wouldn't be so hard for Facebook to move this one level back, and just allow people to invite you to groups instead of slamming you into them.

Technorati Tags: facebook, privacy

Ever since Twitter went to OAuth it's been nothing but massive irritation (why they couldn't have kept using Basic Auth behind HTTPS is beyond me; I guess the simplest solution was too easy, or something).

Anyway, here's my issue with their service: it's not reliable. I'll send an API request from my code, with the proper credentials, and it'll work. I'll pick the same code up a different day, and it gives me back 401 (Unauthorized) errors. This is maddening.

At this point, I wish Google would acquire Twitter. Authenticated calls to their services never fail, so maybe the injection of some competent systems people into the Twitter service would help.

Technorati Tags: twitter

Unlike most of the people reporting on the "Facebook crime spree", Jeff Jarvis did some actual reporting:

I emailed Nashua, NH detective Dan Archambault, who told me that only two of the cases involved Facebook and in each case, “one or two of the suspects were Facebook friends with the respective homeowners. They basically had access to the walls and could read that the families were away on vacation. The information was only available to friends and the Facebook Places feature was NOT a part of this. And finally my advice to Facebook users is carefully pick your friends and watch what you post.”

That's way less exciting than stalking criminals trawling the social seas for location based information, but it is what happened. The last line in the quoted section is accurate online and off; most of the thefts I've heard about locally happened based on idle chatter between kids, where some of the "friends" were drug addicts looking for a cheap score. As Jeff says, pick your friends carefully - and that's true online and off.

Technorati Tags: news

I wasn't imagining things - Ping is connected to Facebook, it's just that Apple has pulled the iTunes-side UI out. I just went to my Facebook account and saw this:

Which is exactly what TechCrunch is reporting:

When I first loaded iTunes 10 yesterday and started up Ping, connecting with Facebook was the first thing I did to find friends. At first, I will say that it didn’t work. I hit the Connect button, entered my credentials, and nothing happened. But I tried again and it worked perfectly. I found a handful of Facebook friends who had just started using Ping as well and connected with them.

So I guess Apple and Facebook are still talking about stuff...

Technorati Tags: ping, facebook

Now I'm confused. Kara Swisher reports that Apple's new Ping service has no interface to Facebook:

And Facebook is nowhere on Ping too. Currently, there is no linking, sharing or participation of any kind with Facebook or Twitter or MySpace either on Ping, which will work only on the iTunes software on computers, iPhones and iPods.

Except... when I signed up yesterday, I immediately got a Facebook Connect prompt, asking me whether I wanted to share with my existing Facebook friends. Today, I can't find any trace of that in Ping. I know I entered my Facebook credentials in and ok'd sharing; did Apple build the support and then turn it off, due to the "onerous terms" that Swisher says Jobs brought up?

It's just weird. I'm not the only one wondering about this. A sharp eyed reporter at SFGate noticed a facebook reference during yesterday's demo.

Technorati Tags: facebook, ping

Tomorrow Twitter is turning off Basic Auth, and going with OAuth only. For the life of me, I haven't been able to get OAuth to work with Twitter; every time I make a request for a token, I get a 401. As best as I can tell, I'm setting things up right, but clearly I'm doing something wrong. In the meantime, the auto-tweets will be coming to an end.

Technorati Tags: twitter, smalltalk

The main reasons that I don't think that Diaspora will impact Facebook much?

• Outside the technorati, privacy issues just don't seem to get much traction
• The sheer inertial weight of Facebook - the fact that "everyone" is there already - is a huge barrier to entry