Today, Facebook announced their new "mobile platform" and it was full of creepy quotes. Here are my top seven.

7. "First thing is single sign-on. Making it so that you have the Facebook app and you're signed in, and once you do that you don't have the hassle with any other app on the phone". Yes, it's easy, and it gives Facebook and its partners one big shared pool of information about you, your activities, and your behaviour.

6. "Today we're going to open up the write API, and any app can build on top of this — any app can write to the location of Facebook and read on top of that." – not sure about this, but it sounds like they are saying any application can collect your current location from your phone? Lovely.

5. "We're working to give deals to people who are nearby local businesses." The idea that you want to have your phone tell you that there is a sale on shoes because you walk near a shoe store is deeply perverted.

4. "The deals platform allows businesses to turn fans and views and eyeballs into dollars." Those would be your dollars.

3. … Continue reading

RSS is better than Twitter for keeping up with online reading. But that doesn't really matter, because Twitter has won. So I'm starting to share my posts via Twitter (@whimsley) and will increasingly be following your blog on Twitter or not at all.

I will continue to resist sharing anything on Facebook except snarky comments aimed solely at my friends.

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While eagerly awaiting Evgeny Morozov's "The Net Delusion" I was reading the two excerpts posted here and here. I'm thrilled to be quoted in the second one, and am now more sure than ever that this will be an important book.

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Macrowikinomics is the new book from Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, authors of 2007’s “best-selling management book in the United States” Wikinomics. It proclaims the end of the industrial mode of production, that “centralized, one-way, one-size-fits-all mass model controlled by the powerful owners of production and society”. The authors tell us that “The world is broken and the industrial economy and many of its industries and organizations have finally run out of gas”.

But “don’t look to big government or big corporations to supply the answers.” The way forward is Internet-driven mass collaboration, for example “ordinary people everywhere are connecting to create a mass movement that is bringing greater awareness and sense of community to the process of making household and business decisions that can reduce our carbon footprints.”

It’s all relentlessly populist and anti-establishment, so there is something wackily wonderful about this list of endorsers on the book’s web site.

• CEO of Dell Inc
• President and CEO of Transparency International-USA
• Professor at the University of Michigan
• Chairman and CEO of ONEX
• CEO of Intergroup Financial Services Corporation, Peru
• Chief Scientist, BT Group PLC
• Executive Vice … Continue reading
  

As I seem unable to write anything myself, here are some things worth reading.

For those in and around Waterloo, Yappa Ding Ding continues to be a keen observer of our urban environment. Her recent pieces on Silver Creek and King Street are great examples. She deserves a wider readership, and not just because she is a friend.

The staff at world's finest video store Generation X Video have been posting a huge number of movie reviews this year at their blog. There are lots of reviews of movies I have never heard of, which in itself is great. I do want to highlight the review by Maggie of Summer Hours, which is one of the best movie reviews I've read in some time.

On the other side of the ocean, Phil Edwards is often an occasional blogger who I usually read for the politics, but he has just been writing some wonderful posts about beer, about the sublime Stan Rogers and his mother's gravestone – which you can see from the comments touched me for a couple of personal reasons – and about much else (including nice … Continue reading

I was thinking of writing about this, but the always-on-the-ball and perceptive Ivor Tossell beat me to it and did it better in this morning's Grope and Flail so I'll point to him instead. Now that half a billion of us are Facebook users, how do we think about the Web 2.0 phenomenon? Do we think of it as the friendly publican who provides a place for us to talk, or as a dynamic and fascinating landscape to move in, or as the provider of a necessary service like our ISP or cable company? Turns out it's more of the latter. We use Facebook despite, not because of, our relationship to the company. Here is Tossell.

Last week, the American Customer Satisfaction Index, a venerable consumer survey, for the first time published findings on consumer satisfaction with social networks. Facebook scored remarkably poorly, squeaking in at the bottom of the category, just ahead of MySpace, which is about as pleasant as a monster-truck rally.

“This puts Facebook in the bottom 5 per cent of all measured private-sector companies, and in the same range as airlines and cable companies, two perennially low-scoring industries with terrible customer satisfaction,” reported the ACSI.

Airlines and … Continue reading

She meets a reader for coffee. He tells her she's being defeatist. Think of the Awesomeness of the Internet!

She gets an email from a reader, who has a brilliant idea. She can turn to the Awesomeness of the Internet.

and more awesomeness, at paperpools.blogspot.com

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