Writing in the New York Observer, Trust Me, I'm Lying author Ryan Holiday says that Facebook has deliberately broken its fan-page service so that only a small number of registered fans see status-updates. If "brands, agencies and artists" want to reach all the people who've signed up for status-updates, they have to pay for "sponsored posts." As Holiday notes, this is a large conflict of interest for the service: the worse it works, the more they can charge to fix it.

It’s no conspiracy. Facebook acknowledged it as recently as last week: messages now reach, on average, just 15 percent of an account’s fans. In a wonderful coincidence, Facebook has rolled out a solution for this problem: Pay them for better access.

As their advertising head, Gokul Rajaram, explained, if you want to speak to the other 80 to 85 percent of people who signed up to hear from you, “sponsoring posts is important.”

In other words, through “Sponsored Stories,” brands, agencies and artists are now charged to reach their own fans—the whole reason for having a page—because those pages have suddenly stopped working.

This is a clear conflict of interest. The worse the platform performs, the more advertisers need to use Sponsored Stories. In a way, it means that Facebook is broken, on purpose, in order to extract more money from users. In the case of Sponsored Stories, it has meant raking in nearly $1M a day.

Holiday goes on to point out problems with other services, including Twitter and Craisglist. His focus is on the cost to advertisers, but there's also the cost to users, who believe that they are getting the news they signed up for, and instead are getting the news that a deep-pocketed firm can afford to put before them. For further reading, see Eli Pariser's Filter Bubble.

Broken on Purpose: Why Getting It Wrong Pays More Than Getting It Right (via MeFi)

(Image: C&T Program Fan Club Insert, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from dcmatt's photostream)

A smashing essay on Kyro Beshay's site about the relationship between sociability and privacy is a must-read:

Social networks and services have definitely given us new and seamless ways to communicate with people from across the globe, pushing the boundaries of what in our lives is deemed acceptable to share, but a wall has been hit and the efforts to tear it down have left me uncomfortable. I’m specifically talking about this new move to broadcast what pages and messages we’ve viewed, without our consent. Services like BBM have long been guilty of this, but the idea has seen increased adoption recently with services like FB Messenger and Apple’s iMessage. In fact, this whole push for “passive sharing” has been gaining momentum, with Quora as the latest transgressor.

We’re now forced into an obligation to respond to a person’s message, almost immediately. With email and texting, there exists a wall of privacy and discretion where the person on the receiving end is given full power to read, ignore, or respond without being bound by deadlines or expectations. I may not want to read or reply to a message for a myriad of reasons – I need time to think of a proper response, I’m waiting on other plans to get sorted, or the sender is just someone who really annoys me. My question is: Is this sort of stuff increasing the value of our social interactions? I don’t think so. In fact, I’d argue that it’s making our interactions less enjoyable. Many friends have mentioned how others knowing when they’ve read a message has made for many awkward situations; and I wholeheartedly agree.

Being Social Is About Being Private

As you've no doubt heard, a large tranche of hashed LinkedIn passwords has been leaked onto the net. There's no known way to turn the hash of a password back into the password itself, but you can make guesses about passwords, hash the guesses, and see if the hashed guess matches anything in the leaked database. Bunnie Huang has been making some educated guesses about the passwords, and he's reported on his findings.

I thought it’d be fun to try to guess some passwords just based on intuition alone, using LeakedIn to check the guesses. Here’s some of the more entertaining passwords that are in the database: ‘obama2012′, ‘Obama2012′, ‘paladin’, ‘linkedinsucks’, ‘fuckyou’, ‘godsaveus’, ‘ihatemyjob’, ‘ihatejews’ (tsk tsk), ‘manson’, ‘starbucks’, ‘qwer1234′, ‘qwerty’, ‘aoeusnth’ (hello fellow dvorak user!), ‘bigtits’ (really?), ‘colbert’, ‘c0lbert’, ‘bieber’, ‘ilovejustin’, ’50cent’, ‘john316′, ‘john3:16′, ‘John3:16′, ’1cor13′, ‘psalm23′, ‘exodus20′, ‘isiah40′, ‘Matthew6:33′, ‘hebrews11′ (bible verses are quite popular passwords!).

Interestingly, there is no ‘romney2012′ or any variant thereof.

Leaked In

Maciej Ceglowski's "The Social Graph is Neither" is a scathing, spot-on critique of the deceptive and seductive simplicity of "social graphs" which purport to represent human interaction and relations through mathematical modelling. As with many "semantic web" projects, social networks can only achieve any kind of usable scale and coherence by simplifying the relationships they model to the point of triviality.

One big sticking point is privacy. Do I really want to find out that my pastor and I share the same dominatrix? If not, then who is going to be in charge of maintaining all the access control lists for every node and edge so that some information is not shared? You can either have a decentralized, communally owned social graph (like Fitzpatrick envisioned) or good privacy controls, but not the two together.

There's another fundamental problem in that a graph is a static thing, with no concept of time. Real life relationships are a shared history, but in the social graph they're just a single connection. My friend from ten years ago has the same relationship to me as the friend I dined with yesterday. You're left with forcing people (or their software) to maintain lists like 'Recent Contacts' because there is no place in the model to fit this information.

"No problem," says Poindexter. "We'll add a time series of state transitions and exponentially decaying edge weights, model group dynamics as directional flows, and pass a context object in with each query..." and around we go. p> This obsession with modeling has led us into a social version of the Uncanny Valley, that weird phenomenon from computer graphics where the more faithfully you try to represent something human, the creepier it becomes. As the model becomes more expressive, we really start to notice the places where it fails. p> Personally, I think finding an adequate data model for the totality of interpersonal connections is an AI-hard problem. But even if you disagree, it's clear that a plain old graph is not going to cut it.

Pinboard Blog (via O'Reilly Radar)

(Image: Map of top 50 UK PR twitter people and their followers, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from porternovelli's photostream)

People have exactly one canonical full name.
* People have exactly one full name which they go by.
* People have, at this point in time, exactly one canonical full name.
* People have, at this point in time, one full name which they go by.
* People have exactly N names, for any value of N.
* People's names fit within a certain defined amount of space.
* People's names do not change.
* People's names change, but only at a certain enumerated set of events.
* People's names are written in ASCII.
* People's names are written in any single character set.
* People's names are all mapped in Unicode code points.
* People's names are case sensitive.
* People's names are case insensitive.