News Byte
Liz Gannes in Social on February 8 at 12:24 pm PT
Personal social network Path got called out yesterday for automatically uploading users’ address books to its servers. Now the company has formally apologized and introduced a fix. CEO Dave Morin wrote in a blog post, “We now understand that the way we had designed our ‘Add Friends’ feature was wrong. We are deeply sorry if you were uncomfortable with how our application used your phone contacts.”
Liz Gannes in Social on March 16, 2011 at 5:30 am PT
At a time where you can find social aggregators everywhere, and with much of the company leadership having left the building, Comcast-owned Plaxo is getting rid of social.
Kara Swisher in News on February 28, 2011 at 6:56 pm PT
Yes, it’s actually called Mogwee, which was the codename for the new mobile social communications service being launched tonight by Ning, the high-profile social networking platform.
Part Twitter, part SMS, part Path and any number of such social start-ups, Mogwee actually stands for “more great weekends.”
Here is a video with Ning CEO Jason Rosenthal and Chairman Marc Andreessen talking Mogwee.
Liz Gannes in Social on November 15, 2010 at 9:00 pm PT
Aro Mobile on Tuesday will be exhibiting at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. The company makes a set of search-driven mobile apps for Android that link together so they can be more useful. (It is still in private beta, but as of tomorrow those who sign up on the waiting list will actually get in.)
Liz Gannes in Social on November 10, 2010 at 9:46 pm PT
As a larger question in the battle between Facebook and Google over data reciprocity, what captivates me is how much value people are putting on user email addresses. Are our email addresses really the best proxy for who we are?
News Byte
John Paczkowski in News on November 2, 2010 at 1:21 pm PT
In the end Buzz, Google’s ill-starred, privacy-violating social networking service, proved more of a public relations burden than a financial one. The company on Tuesday
settled the class action suit brought against it, for its foolish decision to use Buzz to transform our private Gmail address books into public social networks, by agreeing to establish an $8.5 million fund for Internet privacy education and policy.
John Paczkowski in News on March 17, 2010 at 12:44 pm PT
Outgoing Federal Trade Commissioner Pamela Jones Harbour had some choice words for Google today. In remarks delivered at the last in a series of three FTC privacy roundtables, Harbour lambasted Google for the privacy-violating launch of its new social networking service, Buzz.
Katherine Boehret in The Digital Solution on March 16, 2010 at 3:08 pm PT
Xobni Mobile for BlackBerry app compiles contact information on the BlackBerry for anyone you’ve emailed–regardless of whether or not you saved their information in your address book.
John Paczkowski in Social on February 16, 2010 at 3:25 pm PT
While well-intentioned, Google’s “sorry, we didn’t get everything quite right” apology hasn’t absolved the company of the bungled launch of Buzz, its new social networking service. On Tuesday afternoon, the Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission claiming Buzz violates federal consumer protection law.
Walt Mossberg in Personal Technology on January 27, 2010 at 6:04 pm PT
Thunderbird 3 is a significant improvement over earlier versions, with some interesting new features. But all the techie rough edges still haven’t been sanded off.
