Yesterday Facebook unveiled a plan to let brands turn Facebook users’ online activities into ads. If anyone is complaining, it’s news to me.

Easy enough to see why: There are some very big differences between Facebook’s ill-fated Beacon and Sponsored Stories, the site’s new ad unit.

For starters, Facebook unveiled yesterday’s news in the trade press, not in a high-profile, Apple-aping event. More important is that while the new ads can tell your friends what you’re doing outside of Facebook, they’re mainly focused, for now, on what you do on the site.

Most important: The ads are replicas of the updates your friends are already seeing in their Facebook newsfeeds. So while Starbucks doesn’t pay a cent when this shows up on on the center of your friends’ pages:

It can now pay up and place this on the right side of your pals’ pages, too.

Users can’t opt out of the ads, which seems like a red flag given Facebook’s history. But if a brand wants to shell out money to tell your friends something you’ve already told your friends, who cares? No one, apparently.

Still, recall what Zuckerberg was saying less than four years ago, when he was going to “build a new kind of ad system” based on “social actions” and “information that is shared between friends.” At the time, that sounded wildly ambitious, and maybe a bit creepy.

And look what Sponsored Stories does now. Marketers can purchase ads that tell your Facebook friends when you’ve “liked” something of theirs. Or posted on one of their Facebook pages. Or checked-in to one of their outposts or played with one of their apps.

And they can do it when you’re not on Facebook, too, via “likes” you make on sites that have tied up with the social network.

This is what Zuckerberg was talking about in 2007, right? He just needed time to get there. So did his users.

Remember that when Facebook rolled out Beacon, the site was a big deal, but not the biggest: A mere 50 million users, not 600 million. Many of those people were still trying to get a handle on how the site worked, and what they ought to do with it.

And recall that the newsfeed itself–more or less the core of today’s service–was still a relatively new idea too, introduced just a year earlier. (Another controversy, and another Zuckerberg apology.)

Now, I think, just about everyone who uses Facebook knows, more or less, what they’ve signed on for: A place that wants you to share as much of yourself, with as many people, as you can.

Letting advertisers help you share that much more? No big deal. This is isn’t 2007, you know.

Sites like Gilt are supposedly exclusive discount fashion communities, but the reality is they will take anyone who will pay. Groupon, which just got Google to say it was worth as much as $6 billion and is on the verge of an investor valuation of $4.75 billion, is a glorified email list. Sure, users must swarm a deal to activate it, but that always happens. And users can share deals with their friends on Facebook and Twitter, earning referral rewards if they buy a deal.

Hitwise researcher Bill Tancer told me via email that only 8.3 percent of Groupon traffic comes from social media referrals. That’s compared to 24 percent of Groupon traffic coming from shopping and classifieds Web pages (as in, ads) and 13 percent from email sites.

Upstream traffic from social networks as a portion of total Groupon traffic declined 83 percent from Nov. 9 to Nov. 10. Tancer said the move from social networks to email reflects the shift of Groupon visitors from early adopters to mainstream users.

The thing is, as seen particularly in the gaming business, social may have the capacity to be an incredible multiplier for any industry. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has said more than once that he thinks e-commerce will be one of the next big sectors to be disrupted by companies that are built to be social from the ground up.

Linking social with commerce is tricky. Besides user reviews and accounts, which have been around forever, much of social commerce is very basic.

For example, Amazon recently launched the most minimal of minimal Facebook integrations, recommending products based on opted-in users’ public “Likes” and giving gift suggestions for friends with upcoming birthdays. The Web retailer could have gone much deeper, by, for instance, automatically connecting Amazon users to their Facebook accounts or helping users tell friends about new items they have bought.

But that would have raised privacy hackles, as with previous Facebook initiatives, such as the discontinued Facebook Beacon effort or the current Instant Personalization program.

Some retailers are trying to sell things directly on Facebook, such as Delta Air Lines tickets and JCPenney apparel. I see the point of trying to capture users on the sites where they spend all their time, but it seems a little awkward.

Not to say Facebook isn’t already developing a burgeoning business in virtual e-commerce through its gaming partners that could eventually extend to real-world goods (although the margins would be much worse).

And, yes, there are all sorts of real-world deals you can access by playing the “mayor game” on a local social service like Foursquare.

Also on the start-up front, the collage community Polyvore arranges deals and creates tools to help its two million users influence fashion designers, and indie retailer Moxsie asks its Twitter followers to help it choose what items to sell.

There are also start-ups, like Payvment and Milyoni, that provide tools for Facebook storefronts. And the purchase-sharing platforms Blippy and Swipely are social commerce taken to the extreme.

While none of those are Groupon-scale businesses, there are many playing around with the potentially explosive combination of social and commerce.

One cool example of social commerce I just saw today was in a post by E.B. Boyd at Fast Company.

Tea Collection, a boutique children’s clothing maker, used the Facebook Like button to decide which of its selection of discontinued girls’ dresses to deeply discount. When a $59 dress was chosen by user Likes, it was discounted to $10. It quickly sold out at a loss, but additional purchases by customers brought in by the sale gave the company one of its biggest overall sales days ever.

This Sunday, the CBS television news magazine “60 Minutes” returns to Facebook after several years to check in on co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

In the first interview by correspondent Lesley Stahl in early 2008, Zuckerberg’s social networking empire was much smaller, beset by a series of management snafus and mired in yet another privacy controversy.

Plus, he was more than a lot more awkward. His “was-that-a-question?” response to an obvious question by Stahl was a near classic in geek communications.

Fast-forward to today: Zuckerberg rules an incredibly powerful tech company worth gazillions more (good), has developed into a very polished leader (good) and even had a big Hollywood movie called “The Social Network” made about him (not so good).

Presumably, Stahl will cover all that in her new chat with him, which includes a visit to Facebook’s new Palo Alto, Calif. HQ.

Stahl also interviewed me again and pistol-whipped me–okay, she just asked–until I took back my snarkiest remark from the first one, in which I called Zuckerberg a “toddler CEO.”

My new take, now sporting smart-lady glasses and much grayer hair: The toddler has turned out to be a prodigy!

In other words, the worm has officially turned.

Stahl also wanted to know about the rivalry with Google, the fallout of the movie, my epic de-hoodie-ing of Zuckerberg at D8 conference and what-up with the Winklevii (whom, I believe, I called “hambones.”)

Here is a small taste of the new piece, which airs at 7 pm this Sunday, followed by the entire one from 2008 and the blog post I did about it:

For those who missed it, here is the entire video of the piece CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired on Facebook last night, helmed by veteran correspondent Lesley Stahl.

It is not exactly the big wet kiss I was expecting the hot social networking company would get, but it was also definitely not an ouch-that-hurts piece that could have been done.

For those who don’t know the tale, it hits all the high (and low) points of the Facebook saga, with a button-pushing efficiency that television does so well. Thus, a synopsis:

Web Wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg, who seems genetically unable to smile (unlike, say, his deeply charming sister). Harvard. Ratty hoodies and flip-flops. Mark makes a Facebook profile for Lesley (how much do we love that she blocked her boss Les Moonves?).

Next stop: Silicon Valley! Dropping out and venture funding. Toddler CEO (that one was coined by BoomTown). Crazy HQ with kooky-looking employees, one of whom you know was forced to ride a unicycle through the office by Lesley.

Big growth. Is Mark Google’s Larry and Sergey rolled into one? Inexplicably, ZERO mention of its bigger rival, MySpace, even once. Worth $15 billion?–an insane number Lesley does not question nearly enough.

Oops, Privacy! Oops, Beacon! BoomTown tsks-tsks that stalkerish advertising idiocy and is asked about Mark’s qualifications as CEO (although no one cares what BoomTown thinks). Mark retorts: Hey, we need to make money. Lesley, so give the Wunderkind a break!

Now, two years later, Zuckerberg will once again take the D stage. And once again, his appearance follows another privacy debacle, another apology and another rejiggering of the company’s privacy safeguards. Let’s see what he has to say about leadership this time around.

Update: See video highlights from Zuckerburg’s interview. We’ve compiled a reel on his answers to privacy questions, and a clip on the inside of the Zucker-hoodie.

Liveblog

4:54 pm: “There are a lot of things to talk about with Mark,” says Kara. “And I think he’s got a lot of guts coming up here.”

4:54 pm: Walt kicks things off by asking about Facebook’s business. It’s based on sharing, but there is this perception that you’re on a course to push people’s information into a position where it’s visible on the Internet. Is that correct?

Zuckerberg: Privacy is very important to us. I think there are some misperceptions. People use Facebook to share and to stay connected. You don’t start off on Facebook being connected to your friends, you’ve got to be able to find them. So having some information available broadly is good for that. Now, there have been misperceptions that we’re trying to make all information open, but that’s false. We encourage people to keep their most private information private. But some of the most basic information, we suggest that people leave public.

4:58 pm: Zuckerberg–We recommend settings for people, and we asked that everyone review their settings and make a choice about what they wanted them to be. We didn’t simply change them….The big feedback that we got was that the privacy settings had become too complex. Over the years we’d just accumulated many, many settings.

4:59 pm: Walt–The real issue here is whether people trust that you are still on board with the idea that they thought you were on board with when they joined: That you will keep the information they want to be private, private. But you’ve done some abrupt things and forced people to do something to maintain their privacy settings. Why are you making me have to take steps to protect my information?

Zuckerberg dodges. Talks about the serendipitous connections that Facebook enables. Offers an anecdote about meeting someone for dinner.

5:03 pm: More on serendipitous connections. Zuckerberg continues with this theme until Walt jumps in and asks him to answer the original question.

5:04 pm: Zuckerberg stresses that people can still control their Facebook information. More than 50 percent of Facebook users have changed their privacy settings at one point. That demonstrates that our users understand the tools, he says. “To me, that’s a signal that on the whole, we’re getting it right and giving people the control they want.”

5:05 pm: Kara–So do you feel this recent backlash against you is unfair? How do you explain the hubbub around this? She notes some old inflammatory college IM messages of his that have been making the rounds lately that suggest he may have a cavalier attitude towards privacy.

Zuckerberg: When I was in college I did a lot of stupid things and I don’t want to make an excuse for that. Some of the things that people accuse me of are true, some of them aren’t. There are pranks, IMs…. I started building this when I was around 19 years old, and along the way, a lot of stuff changed. We went from building a service in a dorm room to running a service that 500 million people use.

Kara: But people want to know about you. Do you feel that you’re adequately portrayed?

Zuckerberg seems confounded for a moment. Then recounts his oft-told story of moving to California and being approached with offers to buy the company. Another long rambling answer to a simple question. Finally: “I can’t go back and change the past, I can only do the best that I can do moving forward.”

Kara and Walt again circle back to the issue of privacy. Is Zuckerberg attempting to force his vision of privacy on all of Facebook?

5:08 pm: [My God, Zuckerberg is literally dissolving in a lake of his own sweat. He is visibly flushed, and you can see the beads of sweat rolling down his face. Could this be his Nixon moment?]

Kara sympathizes, suggests he take off the hoodie he’s wearing, “You all right?” she asks. “We’re not even yelling at you…yet.”

Zuckerberg refuses to take off the hoodie. “I never take it off,” he says. Then he wipes the sweat from his brow, looks at the resulting water stain on his arm, says “whoa,” relents and takes it off.

5:10 pm: Kara helps him and then examines the hoodie. Evidently Facebook’s mission statement is printed inside it along with a giant Illuminati-style insignia (“Making the world more open and connected”). “Oh my God. You’re a cult!” jokes Kara, commenting on the emblem inside. Zuckerberg’s obviously relieved that the privacy questions have paused, at least for a moment.

Walt moves on. “So what is instant personalization?”

5:10 pm: Zuckerberg–”We have this strategy where what we’re trying to do is make it possible for everyone to design social apps where their contacts are at the center….What we’re trying to do now is to make it so that people can extend that to the rest of the Web….We’ve made it so that people can build these people-centric Web sites.” These points are buried in a long rambling answer. He’s fumbling here.

5:13 pm: Walt–Why not, when I log on to Facebook, give people the option to use instant personalization instead of automatically personalizing things for them?

Zuckerberg dodges again, then suggests that doing so would create “a lot more friction.”

Walt again tries to get him to answer the question at hand: But shouldn’t people make this decision themselves? Shouldn’t they have to opt in? [C'mon, Mark. Just answer the question. It would be so much easier....Over on Twitter, longtime tech observer Dan Gillmor just wrote: "Walt Mossberg insists on an answer re FB’s unilateral privacy changes; nope, still no answer."]

Opt in versus opt out is part of a balance in sharing, says Zuckerberg. He rambles on for a while before noting some previous Facebook innovations that people rebelled against, that are today viewed as essential to the service. Newsfeed, for example. [At last a decent point.] “My prediction would be a few years from now is that we’ll all look back and wonder why these services weren’t personalized. The world is moving in this direction where everything is designed around people.”

5:17 pm: Kara–What’s your next big goal? What’s on the short-term horizon and the long-term horizon?

It’s tough to follow Zuckerberg’s answer, here. He seems to be replying to another question. He talks a bit about the development of applications. He says that the industry is moving into an age where more services will be built with people at their core.

5:20 pm: Walt, moving on again–What is the social graph? Is it something you control?

Zuckerberg: The idea of the social graph is that if you mapped out all the connections between people in the world it would form this graph, and that’s what we’re doing at Facebook. Once you’ve done that, you can start building services on them and enable this broader platform, build games, etc. A lot of people have characterized the social graph as something that we own or control, but we don’t.

5:22 pm: Kara–So what kind of power does Facebook have in this graph?

Zuckerberg: I think people look to us a the leader in this space. And I think there’s a widely held belief that we’re much closer to the beginning of the space than the end. It would be easy for us to just keep things as they are, but we don’t believe that if we did, we’d be doing the best thing for us or the industry. So we do what we think are the best things, even if they are controversial.

Walt: How does the social graph get monetized?

Relevant advertising, says Zuckerberg. And user engagement. He cites a recent campaign by Starbucks (SBUX), which was evidently quite successful. He says that people are sharing information about brands in the same way they are sharing information about themselves.

5:25 pm: Kara–Who are your competitors in this space?

Zuckerberg: We compete with different companies in different ways. One of the things I try to do as CEO of this company is not make mistakes that other companies make….I make different ones, he jokes. [Given his performance today, one wonders if he's really qualified to be the public face of his company.]

The world is changing so quickly now that I think the biggest competitor for us is someone we haven’t heard of, Zuckerberg continues. So we just need to stay focused on doing what we do and doing at well.

5:27 pm: Kara–You’re going to be CEO of this company when it goes public?

Zuckerberg: Yeah.

Kara: When will that be?

Zuckerberg: I don’t know.

5:28 pm: Some more patter. Then Zuckerberg again circles back to this theme of a Web centered around people. This is obviously his D8 PR bullet point, just as “Facebook is about helping people to share information and share themselves” was his bullet point for D6.

Kara: How do you think you’ve changed as a CEO in the past few years?

Zuckerberg: I’ve always just focused on a couple of things. One is having a clear direction. The other is having a good team. Right now, I think we have a clear direction. We’ve got a lot of cool apps and a great platform. On the people side: Just continuing to bring in great people and putting them in positions that they’ll excel at is important. We’re out in the valley recruiting the very best people for the roles we have available in the company. I think as a company, if you get those two things right, then you can do pretty well.

Q&A

Q (from RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser): Do you realize that you’ve built at the age of 26 one of the five most important Internet companies in the world? Because of that, people view you differently. How do you deal with that?

A: Maybe I’m in denial. I think our goals haven’t really changed much at all. We don’t think of the company as successful. We know that we have a service that many people use. But it goes back to this concept where I really think we’re just a lot closer to the beginning than the end. Personally, I have a core group of people that I really trust, and that’s what I care about: Those people that share my values and the values of the company.

Q: Who’s your role model? Who would be the best person to run Facebook–aside from you?

A: [Pause] I don’t think I can answer either of those questions. I feel like I learn the most from the people around me now. [Who's your role model? Easy question, Mark. How about "my Mom." ... No real answer.] … I think if something happened to me you could pick any of the people around me and they’d do a great job of running the company. And that’s important because we’re still a very small company.

Q: I’ve heard that you’re going to offer an email platform. Is that true?

A: We’re not building a Web-mail competitor. People already use Facebook for messaging. There are definitely these great services that people use that are full Web-mail clients, but I think the opportunity is more around short-form communications.

Q: How are important decisions made at Facebook?

A: We’re a company where there’s a lot of open dialogue. We have crazy dialogue and arguments. Every Friday, I have an open Q&A where people can come and ask me whatever questions they want. We try to do what we think is right, but we also listen to feedback and use it to improve. And we look at data about how people are using the site. In response to the most recent changes we made, we innovated, we did what we thought was right about the defaults, and then we listened to the feedback and then we holed up for two weeks to crank out a new privacy system.

Q: When it comes to Facebook, what’s your opinion of Flash?

A: We’re agnostic on that issue. I tend to believe more in the Web than apps. The thing that I actually care a lot more about is how you integrate people into all this stuff.

Q: I wonder if you can comment on what it means for Facebook to have mobile apps?

A: Our mobile experience is growing really quickly. It’s well more than 100 million people using Facebook on their phones right now. I think that one of the challenges of mobile is that there’s no standard platform yet. Is it going to be Android, iPhone, HTML apps?

Q: Will you have an iPad app?

A: I assume that we will.

And that’s a wrap!

A note about our coverage: This liveblog is not an official transcript of the conversation that occurred onstage. Rather, it is a compilation of quotes, paraphrased statements and ad-lib observations written and posted to the Web as quickly as possible. It is not intended as a transcript and should not be interpreted as one.

Today, a coalition of privacy groups, led by the Electronic Privacy Information Center, filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission asking the regulators to force Facebook to turn on its old settings. The complaint, and Facebook’s response, are at the bottom of this post.

I have no idea if the Feds will end up getting Facebook to do anything. But the privacy groups can still accomplish a lot without injunctive relief.

“What we’re going to do is drag Facebook into the halls of the FTC, and have them examine all of their policies,” says Jeff Chester, executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, one of the groups backing the complaint.

That could certainly slow down the company. So could inquiries from European governments, which have become more inclined to regulate American technology outfits. Just ask Microsoft (MSFT).

The real concern for Facebook is if the private sector starts complaining. Recall that Facebook only reversed course on its ill-fated Beacon project two years ago after advertisers started questioning the program, which was designed to share your shopping and branding choices with your pals.

Since that debacle, marketers seem to have gotten comfortable with Facebook, and Mark Zuckerberg has a real ad business now. And I’ve yet to hear a peep from big brands with second thoughts. But if the privacy blowback gets big enough, that could change.

Again, I don’t think the proposition that Facebook is offering its users–the opportunity to share every detail about their online lives with anyone with a browser–is an inherently bad one. There are lots of people who are comfortable with the notion.

The problem is that Facebook has switched course midstream. It started off as a site that limited users’ information to the outside world and now wants to invert that. But the switch has been badly explained, done in such a way that many users don’t understand what happened.

Facebook says this criticism is overblown and that lots of people do understand the switch. Spokesman Barry Schnitt says at least half of Facebook’s users have made changes to their privacy settings since the new rules went into place. Which means, he argues, that at least half of its users understand them.

Entirely possible. But Facebook now has up to 350 million users. Which means that tens of millions of users could be unaware of what’s going on. And they’ll only find out when their party pictures or baby videos or whatever turn up on Google (GOOG).

Facebook could easily solve this by clearly explaining that its “Share With Everyone” option really does mean everyone and–crucially–making it an opt-in proposition. But then adoption rates would shrivel, and the company wouldn’t be able to pull off its goal: Making as much of the site as public as possible.

This one isn’t going away anytime soon.

EPIC’s complaint, followed below by Facebook’s response:

EPIC-FacebookComplaint –

Facebook’s response:

We’ve had productive discussions with dozens of organizations around the world about the recent changes and we’re disappointed that EPIC has chosen to share their concerns with the FTC while refusing to talk to us about them.

Facebook’s plan to provide users control over their privacy and how they share content is unprecedented in the Internet age. We have gone to great lengths to inform users about our platform changes, beginning with our July announcement; founder Mark Zuckerberg’s open letter to our 350 million users; our robust press and analyst outreach; the notice-and-comment framework for our new privacy policy; and simple customization tools for users.

We’re pleased that so many users have already gone through the process of reviewing and updating their privacy settings and are impressed that so many have chosen to customize their settings, demonstrating the effectiveness of Facebook’s user empowerment and transparency efforts. Of course, the new tools offer users the opportunity to decide on privacy with every photo, link or status update they wish to post, so the process of personalizing privacy on Facebook will continue.

We discussed the privacy program with many regulators, including the FTC, prior to launch and expect to continue to work with them in the future.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the social networking site has a very small staff–just a trio of on-the-young-side dudes–battening down the hatches from a funky office in a funky section of D.C., Dupont Circle, far from the tonier and lobbyist-rich K Street corridor.

In contrast, both Microsoft (MSFT) and Google (GOOG) have a massive D.C. presence, trying to influence policy.

Still, as many in government know–such as Sarah Palin this week–Facebook has become a key tool in the basic bag of political tricks, used for organizing, canvassing, communicating and, every now and then, inspiring.

But there is also a raft of thorny legislative issues for Facebook, especially related to privacy, an arena where the company has repeatedly shot itself in the foot (Beacon! TOS!).

The company’s relatively new D.C. staff will presumably be a little smoother going forward.

They include:

Director of Public Policy Tim Sparapani, most recently with the American Civil Liberties Union, who joined in the spring.

Adam Conner, who opened Facebook’s D.C. office and who worked for some pols when he was still a college student, showing them how to use social media.

And, most recently, joining as manager of public policy communications, Andrew Noyes, a former reporter for the National Journal (and the man in 17D who pinged me on a Virgin America flight last week to meet him and the other Facebook policy wonks).

Here’s a video of the interview, in which we discuss all the big issues, from privacy to data retention to how Washington’s view of tech still has not evolved much:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20091117/kara-visits-facebooks-washington-d-c-office-and-talks-policy/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20090930/survey-says-americans-dont-like-being-hunted-online-by-marketers/ http://allthingsd.com/20090930/survey-says-americans-dont-like-being-hunted-online-by-marketers/#comments Wed, 30 Sep 2009 12:11:59 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=19005

A new survey that should surprise only the people behind the Beacon debacle shows that a majority of Americans of all ages don’t like being tracked online by advertisers.

In related stating-the-obvious news, Americans also find Jon and Kate Gosselin super-annoying.

Actually, the independent poll, titled “Americans Reject Tailored Advertising,” by a passel of academics at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California at Berkeley–which was first handed over to the New York Times and will be released today–comes at a very good time given all the focus on online privacy of late among lawmakers and regulators.

While advertisers have been trying to avoid a lot of stringent laws in this arena, it seems clear from the survey that most consumers–66 percent–don’t like being followed around and hate it more the more they know about said stalking by marketers.

Noted the report:

“It is hard to escape the conclusion that our survey is tapping into a deep concern by Americans that marketers’ tailoring of ads for them and various forms of tracking that informs those personalizations are wrong….Whatever the reasons, our findings suggest that if Americans could vote on behavioral targeting today, they would shut it down.”

Not that Americans actually know a lot about how online behavorial targeting works. Many surveyed had little knowledge of the tactics, but most did want a law that would give them the right to know what, say, the social networking minions of Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg know about them.

In other words, consumers want transparency and control of their data, which–at the pace things are going–continues to spin out of their grasp.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090930/survey-says-americans-dont-like-being-hunted-online-by-marketers/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20090624/boomtowns-top-10-list-of-fact-challenged-revelations-that-should-be-in-the-facebook-tell-all-book/ http://allthingsd.com/20090624/boomtowns-top-10-list-of-fact-challenged-revelations-that-should-be-in-the-facebook-tell-all-book/#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 22:34:39 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=14955

How much is BoomTown and everyone else in Silicon Valley trying to nab a copy of Ben Mezrich’s likely-to-be-entirely-made-up-but-who-cares tale of dirty doings at Facebook?

Muchety-much! So much so that I called all my book industry contacts–hey, I am a published author, ya know!–even though I have not actually completed reading a book since the Internet started and gave me permanent attention deficit disorder.

But, so far I have come up peanuts in grabbing an early copy of Mezrich’s tome, “The Accidental Billionaires,” which is set to come out July 14.

Facebook is not pleased, of course, and will likely be challenging Mezrich’s work as specious dreck. But the drama around the book should be interesting, to say the least.

More so, since this week also came news that actors Michael Cera and Shia LaBeouf are being considered to play founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and that David Fincher, the director of the lugubrious Brad Pitt snoozer, “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” is “attached” to the movie version.

Even better: “West Wing” creator Aaron Sorkin will pen it and actor Kevin Spacey will produce the Columbia Pictures film, which will be called “The Social Network.”

Well, Hollywood sure came up with an original title!

It certainly does not signal the juiciness of the proposal for the book–which did manage to leak out last year–with a lot of tale tales in it that seem to have pretty much tracked on its oddly purple subtitle of “The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal.”

The cover–which you can see on the book’s Facebook page (the delicious gall of Mezrich!)–features a spilled martini glass and a red bra flung nearby.

Martinis? Red bras? Sex? Facebook? Really?

Obviously, Mezrich has not actually met Zuckerberg, who is a very nice geekish young man, but who has approximately the sex appeal of a rack of Facebook servers.

Powerful yes! Spockish? Yes! Sexy? Um, no, no, no.

I will not even begin to parse the red bra thing, although I am attributing the martinis to stylish former COO (and now MySpace CEO) Owen Van Natta.

But, apparently, the sex part seems to have to do with Zuckerberg starting the company with others while an undergrad at Harvard University, as a scheme to meet some ladies.

I would say there are easier ways to attract the womenfolk–not that I could give tips or anything–but whatever!

Thus, since I cannot get my mitts on the book (yet!), here’s my list of 10 completely made-up, utterly fabricated, just-call-me-Jayson-Blair things that should be in the book.

10.) Facebook was actually going to be called OnlyPrettyLadyFacebook, but cooler heads prevailed.

9.) The Wall? A clever plot by Zuckerberg to build his online service on a fascist construct, touting his hegemony over all he surveyed.

Wait, that actually happened, and now some Russians are even investors.

Long live the Zuckrepublic of Palo Alto!

8.) Reason for stealing, oops, borrowing, oops again, completely separately developing an exact replica of ConnectU social network at Harvard:

The Olympically muscle-headed Winklevoss twins used to beat up the brainy Zuckerberg on his way back to the dorm, prompting a “Revenge of the Nerds” plot line.

7.) Facebook’s Beacon advertising? All Randi Zuckerberg’s idea, so she could find out what she was getting for her birthday from her billionaire-on-paper brother.

6.) Zuckerberg’s famous flip-flops were made in China under dubious working conditions. Wait, that’s true too.

5.) The 20-something Zuckerberg is actually 93 years old, a real-life version of Benjamin Button, which would explain the social awkwardness and staring-into-space-sometimes thing.

4.) The no-breast-feeding-pictures controversy pretty much proves no one is interested in bras or, more precisely, what goes in them at Facebook.

3.) COO Sheryl Sandberg is a cyborg sent to Facebook from Google for purposes of infiltration. She and her crafty sidekick, Elliott Schrage, will become self-aware in 2012 and hunt down Zuckerberg in a thrilling chase that will also become a movie.

2.) The sex, drugs and rock-and-roll stuff actually all took place at MySpace, which really pisses off certifiably dashing co-Founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson because, once again, Zuckerberg stole their mojo!

1.) This work of fiction, oops, “fact”-ion, oops again, nonfiction, is probably not going to sell many copies because it will mysteriously be uploaded in its entirety by a widget that will distribute it free to Facebook’s 200 million plus users while simultaneously SuperDuperPoking Mezrich, by throwing real sheep at him.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you, Ben.

(By the way, here is an extra for you: The $15 billion valuation for Facebook, along with all the other Web 2.0 ones? Totally true. Just ask any VC.)

And, in case anyone was wondering what the real Facebook looks like, here is a recent video tour I did of its new HQ in Palo Alto, Calif.:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090624/boomtowns-top-10-list-of-fact-challenged-revelations-that-should-be-in-the-facebook-tell-all-book/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20090512/facebooks-privacy-chief-and-california-attorney-general-candidate-chris-kelly-speaks/ http://allthingsd.com/20090512/facebooks-privacy-chief-and-california-attorney-general-candidate-chris-kelly-speaks/#comments Tue, 12 May 2009 09:52:53 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=13492

BoomTown tried to get Chris Kelly (pictured here) to give up more during an onstage interview I did with the Facebook chief privacy officer last night at the third “Tech Policy Summit” and was only moderately successful in the endeavor.

He talked about the recent Terms of Service debacle as a snafu that got sensationalized by the media, the Beacon advertising controversy as a snafu that got sensationalized by the media and the Free-the-Scoble-5,000 data-sharing debate as a snafu that got sensationalized by the media.

But Kelly also managed to say that the media were sensational for keeping Facebook–the dominant social-networking site in the whole wide world–honest as it grows into a behemoth grasping a scary amount of personal information on its 200 million users in its claws.

Oh, he is a smoothie all right, as a lawyer and now as a wannabe politician.

Kelly–who is still working at the start-up, where his job it is to make sure consumer data, privacy, the children and CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s reputation are all safe and sound–is also running for the job of California’s attorney general.

(Here is his Facebook page about the effort.)

Born in Silicon Valley, with a troika of diplomas from fancy schools (undergraduate from Georgetown in 1991, a master’s from Yale in 1992 and a law degree from Harvard in 1997), Kelly worked as a lawyer and also as a policy adviser for President Bill Clinton’s White House Domestic Policy Council and Department of Education before coming to Facebook four years ago.

For a closer look-see at the candidate for the Golden State’s top cop position, here’s a video interview I did with him after the onstage chat in San Mateo, Calif.:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090512/facebooks-privacy-chief-and-california-attorney-general-candidate-chris-kelly-speaks/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090422/chris-dewolfe-likely-to-step-down-as-ceo-news-corp-talking-to-facebook-veteran-owen-van-natta/ http://allthingsd.com/20090422/chris-dewolfe-likely-to-step-down-as-ceo-news-corp-talking-to-facebook-veteran-owen-van-natta/#comments Wed, 22 Apr 2009 18:41:05 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=6527 MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe is likely to be on his way out of the company he helped found, and News Corp., which bought the social network in 2005, has a single potential successor in mind. Sources say that person is former Facebook COO Owen Van Natta, who is currently CEO of music start-up Project Playlist.

People familiar with the matter tell me that DeWolfe and News Corp., specifically new digital boss Jon Miller, are discussing a leadership change today. News Corp. (NWS) officials declined to comment. (News Corp. is the owner of Dow Jones, which owns this Web site.)

Sources tell me Miller hadn’t been planning on getting rid of DeWolfe (pictured above) in the near future, and that until yesterday he was still evaluating his options. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch had once treated DeWolfe as a favorite and gave him significant autonomy at MySpace. But Murdoch, who brought Miller on earlier this month, has been leaning toward a change as MySpace’s traffic has stagnated and its buzz and momentum have moved to Facebook.

Still, Murdoch had left the decision about the site’s leadership to Miller, his new hire, sources said. One possibility: Elevating DeWolfe to a nonexecutive advisory position.

Those options narrowed last night once TechCrunch ran a story claiming that News Corp. had hired a headhunting firm to “scour for possible replacements” for DeWolfe.

News Corp. hadn’t actually hired a headhunter, I’m told by multiple sources. But I’m also told that the report was enough to spook DeWolfe into calling Miller to ask what his plans were. That conversation led to today’s negotiations, which will likely lead to his stepping down as CEO, although he may remain affiliated with MySpace in some capacity.

Meanwhile, News Corp. has been talking to Van Natta (pictured here) about taking DeWolfe’s place. Van Natta, who had been a highly regarded executive at Facebook, was at one point the leading candidate to head up MySpace Music, which launched last fall, and the two sides held extensive conversations.

But Van Natta, like many other potential hires for that position, bristled at the job’s org chart: Rather than a standalone company, a la Hulu, the site News Corp. set up with GE’s (GE) NBC, MySpace Music is simply a unit of MySpace, reporting to DeWolfe. MTV executive Courtney Holt eventually took the job.

But Van Natta’s fate has remained closely intertwined with MySpace anyway. Project Playlist, the free music-streaming site he took over last fall, has seen traffic plummet after MySpace, along with Facebook, cut off the site’s access to their users, a move prompted by lawsuits from several major music companies.

Van Natta has made some headway at extracting the company from its legal mess, which predated his hiring, and he has hammered out a settlement with EMI Music Group. But Playlist is still being sued by Warner Music Group (WMG) and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group, and even music sites that aren’t in legal trouble are struggling to keep their heads above water. Plenty of Silicon Valley watchers wonder why Van Natta landed at Playlist in the first place and think that he has been looking for a way out.

Here’s a video of DeWolfe talking with BoomTown’s Kara Swisher a little more than a year ago when MySpace opened a new office in San Francisco. Below that is a video of Van Natta talking to Swisher in 2007 about Facebook’s ill-fated “Beacon” project.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090422/chris-dewolfe-likely-to-step-down-as-ceo-news-corp-talking-to-facebook-veteran-owen-van-natta/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20090226/liveblogging-the-facebook-our-tos-is-your-tos-press-conference/ http://allthingsd.com/20090226/liveblogging-the-facebook-our-tos-is-your-tos-press-conference/#comments Thu, 26 Feb 2009 19:14:56 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=10418

BoomTown is impatiently cooling heels, waiting for a press conference to begin about “new steps Facebook is taking to improve user understanding and ownership of the Facebook terms of service and, more generally, the policies of the Facebook service.”

The Yahoo (YHOO) reorg finally announced this morning is positively thrilling in comparison!

But we’re liveblogging it anyway!

Here’s what I got in the morning mail:

Hi Kara–

You are invited to participate in a press conference call with Mark Zuckerberg today at 11am PT where he will announce the new steps Facebook is taking to improve user understanding and ownership of the Facebook terms of service and, more generally, the policies of the Facebook service.

For more and future updates we encourage you to join the Facebook Group called the Official Group for Media & Analysts Following Facebook.

Also this:

Subject: Facebook Opens Governance of Service and Policy Process to Users

Today we’re announcing new opportunities for users to play a meaningful role in determining the policies governing our site. We released the first proposals subject to these procedures–The Facebook Principles, a set of values that will guide the development of the service, and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that governs Facebook’s operations. Users will have the opportunity to review, comment and vote on these documents over the coming weeks and, if they are approved, other future policy changes. We’ve posted the documents in separate groups and have invited users to offer comments and suggestions. You can find these groups here:

Facebook Principles

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=54964476066

Statement of Rights and Responsibilities

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=67758697570

For more information and the full press release, please check out the recent news section of this group.

As always, you can feel free to email us with any questions at press@facebook.com

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

11:11 am:

Facebook PR honcho Elliot Schrage opens up the conference, but I am honestly only hear: “Blah, blah, blah.”

Then, Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg comes on.

“Openness and transparency is not just an end state,” he said. “It’s also a process.”

Say what, Willis?

Soon Zuckerberg is explaining how he wants to craft Facebook’s rules of the road going forward. It’s like being at the Constitutional Convention, except for geeks.

Alert! Comment! Notify! Transparency! Oversharing!

11:17 am:

“We want to be as clear as possible that we do not own user data,” said Zuckerberg. “We feel really bad about that.”

Us too!

11:21 am:

I get to ask the first question, which is about how this whole mess happened.

Zuckerberg said Facebook had made previous changes all the time to its Terms of Service to complex legal documents. This time, in trying to make them simpler, “we made a few mistakes,” which in turn set off a firestorm.

Ah, the mistakes-were-made defense!

“A lot of the feedback was fair,” acknowledged Zuckerberg, who then talked about the new notification and feedback and comments options, so it will not happen ever again. Except next month.

Also, there will be a vote. Well, only on some issues that get people all hot and bothered, presumably. But who decides what gets voted on and who wins the vote?

Unclear. But vote early and often.

But, said Schrage: “We underestimated the sense of ownership” that Facebook users have for the service.

11:25 am:

A question about whether or not Facebook should have known better after its Beacon advertising debacle.

Not the same thing, said Zuckerberg. But point taken!

11:27 am:

More legal stuff. Zzzzzz.

Then a question on phishing scams. Off topic! Schrage cuts it off tout de suite. Sorry, fella, but this is about one screw-up at a time.

Another shouldn’t-you-have-known-better related question, referring back to the News Feed debacle of 2007. That was before the Beacon debacle of 2008. Which was before the ToS debacle of 2009. (Is anyone noticing a pattern here?)

In other words, Facebook should have known better.

Radical transparency, said Zuckerberg: “This is all about us trusting our users.”

He might start that ball rolling by not sneaking up on us all the time.

11:33 am:

More about rules of the road. More about the transparent community.

Zuckerberg is now fully channelling Casper the Friendly Ghost.

Call ends.

Boo!

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090226/liveblogging-the-facebook-our-tos-is-your-tos-press-conference/feed/ 2 http://allthingsd.com/20090218/boomtown-decodes-the-zuckerberg-terms-of-service-my-bad-memo-now-with-10-percent-more-so-very-sorrys/ http://allthingsd.com/20090218/boomtown-decodes-the-zuckerberg-terms-of-service-my-bad-memo-now-with-10-percent-more-so-very-sorrys/#comments Wed, 18 Feb 2009 10:21:00 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=9939

Under cover of darkness last night, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced on the social-networking site’s blog that it would “return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.”

Oh, this is just too good to resist. Therefore, BoomTown shall not tarry in our ongoing job of busting the chops of the young Facebook leader, whose minions have actually–and I am not joking here–given him the nickname: The Wizard.

Well, the Wizard obviously had to pull back the curtain last night and show some serious mea culpa to the people, before they got out the pitchforks.

That’s due to the controversy Facebook has been embroiled in this week about changes it recently made to its Terms of Service that gave the company unusually sweeping rights over customers’ content and privacy.

While Zuckerberg had said in his first post about the issue that Facebook was not in the content-stealing business, the strong language in the ToS sent the usual suspects into a major meltdown over the possibility that the young geek had gone into full-scale evil mogul mode.

As if!

In fact, Zuckerberg has been ensconced in his Silicon Valley lair for years now, counting down until he knows precisely everything about everyone’s drunken college days!

Until D-Day then, here is my translation of his latest backtracking post:

What the Wizard wrote: Update on Terms

by Mark Zuckerberg

Today at 10:17 pm

Translation: OK, I have reached my limit of being yelled at by Sheryl and Elliot, have had my usual breakfast of Red Bull and Frosted Flakes–they’re grrreat!–and am ready to eat some major digital crow this morning.

I mean, night, which is my morning, because I actually slept through all this noise today about this whole Terms of Service “controversy.”

What the Wizard wrote: A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

Translation: Did you know crow is delicious if you eat it with a little Bosco on top?

More to the point, I would just like to assure you that we have taken our lawyers–who idiotically rewrote our ToS to give us ownership rights to the Bible, “American Idol” and everything Bill O’Reilly utters–and sent them over to our friends at MySpace, because their owner, News Corp. (NWS), already owns two of those three [and also this site!].

What the Wizard wrote: Many of us at Facebook spent most of today discussing how best to move forward. One approach would have been to quickly amend the new terms with new language to clarify our positions further. Another approach was simply to revert to our old terms while we begin working on our next version. As we thought through this, we reached out to respected organizations to get their input.

Translation: As in: More yelling by Sheryl and Elliott and more Fedexing of lawyers to MySpace HQ in Beverly Hills.

But after we calmed down, we all decided the best course of action was to shoot ourselves in the right foot to stop the bleeding from when we shot our left foot before.

We are, of course, completely out of feet now, so if these hijinks continue, sooner or later, someone is going to lose an eye. By someone, I mean, um, me.

What the Wizard wrote: Going forward, we’ve decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don’t plan to leave it there for long.

Translation: Facebook, of course, never had any intention of stealing content and copyright! Perish the thought! After all, that’s the job of Google (GOOG)!

By contrast, ours is to collect incredibly embarrassing photos of everyone in the United States until one of them runs for president, and then our nefarious scheme to control the world begins.

We were planning on blackmailing the world for one billllliiiion dollars then, but Microsoft kind of forked over 15 times that without any pressure.

Still, we would like to own Palo Alto, Calif., and get free parking 24/7, so there will be demands!

Until then, enjoy the sheep-throwing. Mwaahahahahahahaha! (Quick visual: I am petting my white cat right now with Ernst Stavro Blofeld-like evil glee, and am, of course, cackling.)

What the Wizard wrote: More than 175 million people use Facebook. If it were a country, it would be the sixth most populated country in the world. Our terms aren’t just a document that protect our rights; it’s the governing document for how the service is used by everyone across the world. Given its importance, we need to make sure the terms reflect the principles and values of the people using the service.

Translation: Not to be completely and utterly arrogant or anything, but we just passed Pakistan, and those Brazilians better get ready to samba.

By the way, once we get to No. 1–look out, China!–we plan on decreeing that everyone in the world speak Pig Latin and that forthwith it will be flip-flop Fridays.

Also: Esyay, Iway amway anway alienway omfray anotherway anetplay.

What the Wizard wrote: Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we’ll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms.

Translation: Ybay ethay ayway, “Otay Ervesay Anmay”? It’sway away ookbookcay.

In other words, I am sure you will make delicious contributions, after which Facebook will “invite” you to our world-wide HQ to share in a lovely meal.

Especially those Winklevii. I look forward to the twins coming by soon!

What the Wizard wrote: You have my commitment that we’ll do all of these things, but in order to do them right it will take a little bit of time. We expect to complete this in the next few weeks. In the meantime, we’ve changed the terms back to what existed before the February 4th change, which was what most people asked us for and was the recommendation of the outside experts we consulted.

Translation: To my credit, I did give in much quicker than with the Beacon ad snafu. And you thought I learned nothing during that debacle!

And, by outside experts, I mean Microsoft (MSFT) CEO Steve Ballmer, who yells much, much louder than Sheryl or Elliot combined.

What the Wizard wrote: If you’d like to get involved in crafting our new terms, you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we’ve created–Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I’m looking forward to reading your input.

Translation: Here’s my first pass, based on the U.S. Bill of Rights, Amendment I:

Facebook shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition Faebook for a redress of grievances.*

*Exceptway, ithway ymay ompletecay iscretionday, enwhay Iway
ecideday otherwiseway.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090218/boomtown-decodes-the-zuckerberg-terms-of-service-my-bad-memo-now-with-10-percent-more-so-very-sorrys/feed/ 4 http://allthingsd.com/20090216/you-have-zero-privacy-anyway-get-over-it-that-goes-double-on-social-networks/ http://allthingsd.com/20090216/you-have-zero-privacy-anyway-get-over-it-that-goes-double-on-social-networks/#comments Tue, 17 Feb 2009 01:36:51 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=9850

When Sun Microsystems (JAVA) Gadfly-in-Chief Scott McNealy made his infamous statement about online privacy in 1999, there was a horrified hubbub at the time that he had the audacity to say such a thing.

You know, that he actually uttered such a terrible thing as the truth.

What a shock then that everyone is now in yet another tizzy about Facebook changes to its Terms of Service, which pretty much state the obvious again by noting that Facebook archives info you posted, even if you quit the service.

As in, you probably can’t delete it.

No, you can’t–because you shared it, whether it be a photo, an email, a Wall post, whatever, already.

Because the fact of the matter is–since the moment the first caveman sent the first email to another Neanderthal–there has never been true online privacy for anyone who has chosen to participate in this highly interactive medium.

Here’s the key definition of interactive: “mutually or reciprocally active.”

That means once you send something to others, it is out there in cyberspace forever, never ever to return.

And that goes double on social-networking sites, where–let’s be honest–people egregiously overshare and then get all righteous when it is explained to them that sharing means, um, sharing.

As in: You cannot take it back, if you have shared with 476 of your closest “friends,” your bikini shots from Cabo.

Now, BoomTown has learned to live with some very unfortunate haircut choices preserved forever online and does not often agree with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg (I and everyone else slapped him silly on the Beacon debacle until he gave in, for example).

But he is technically right on this, even if Facebook could have done a much better job communicating the changes it made to its ToS, especially since ToS controversies are the Bermuda Triangle of the online arena.

This lack of clarity has always a major Facebook weakness, but it was the same for AOL–now owned by Time Warner (TWX)–back in the day when it was raising privacy red flags all the time.

But that does not make Facebook wrong, as Zuckerberg finally said clearly in a post on Facebook:

People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information. These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.”

Zuckerberg then notes that users are just going to have to trust services like Facebook with their data, which is up to the individual to decide before posting whatever online.

And, if regrets come later? Well, try this quote from the great playwright Arthur Miller: “Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20090216/you-have-zero-privacy-anyway-get-over-it-that-goes-double-on-social-networks/feed/ 12 http://allthingsd.com/20080819/the-entire-d6-interview-with-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-and-sheryl-sandberg-2-of-4/ http://allthingsd.com/20080819/the-entire-d6-interview-with-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-and-sheryl-sandberg-2-of-4/#comments Tue, 19 Aug 2008 14:03:40 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=2893 We’re posting all the interviews from the sixth D: All Things Digital conference that took place in late May.

Unfortunately, due to issues too complicated to go into, we have to post all the D6 interviews in several 15-minute parts (I know, I know).

But–as many readers have requested–they will all be available in their entirety in this column.

Here’s Part 2 of 4 of an interview I did with Facebook Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg. (I will post one video part of the discussion with Zuckerberg and Sandberg every day this week, starting yesterday and concluding Thursday.)

The social-networking site has had quite a year as the hottest and most hyped on the Web 2.0 landscape. With fast growth and still-questionable monetization power, where Facebook is going will be a journey plenty will be paying attention to.

In this video, Zuckerberg talks even more about sharing information, explains why he wants to stay CEO, discusses mistakes like Beacon and successes like Facebook’s open platform, and defends widgets.

Meanwhile, Sandberg talks about why she came to Facebook from Google, compares widget popularity to Elvis fans and talks about where advertising spending is going online (think virtual ice cream cones).

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080819/the-entire-d6-interview-with-facebooks-mark-zuckerberg-and-sheryl-sandberg-2-of-4/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080814/status-update-mark-zuckerberg-is-reading-a-class-action-suit/ http://allthingsd.com/20080814/status-update-mark-zuckerberg-is-reading-a-class-action-suit/#comments Thu, 14 Aug 2008 17:04:49 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=3277

It’s taken nearly a year, but the inevitable class-action fallout from Facebook’s ill-starred Beacon advertising system has finally begun. Filed in California, the suit claims Facebook and its ad partners violated online privacy and computer fraud laws by collecting and publicly disclosing information about users’ online activities without proper consent. Facebook’s “Beacon” advertisements, as you may recall, transformed member transactions on third-party partner sites into product/service endorsements and inserted them into their friends’ “news feeds.” Facebook members, or should I say “fansumers,” were automatically opted-in to the program. Worse, Beacon collected information about member actions on affiliate sites even if they’d opted out of the service and logged off from Facebook. As the suit notes, “By the time any user was notified that Facebook was (at a minimum) an observing party to the transaction, and that Facebook was asking for an approval to publicly broadcast identifying information regarding the event, personally identifying information had already been communicated to Facebook.”

Given that, it’s surprising this suit, which demands the deletion of any ill-gotten data and some form of restitution, wasn’t filed earlier. Certainly, it seems a sure thing after Facebook’s acknowledgment of these issues.

[Image credit: FSJ]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080814/status-update-mark-zuckerberg-is-reading-a-class-action-suit/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080506/schrage/ http://allthingsd.com/20080506/schrage/#comments Tue, 06 May 2008 12:11:19 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080506/schrage/ Who says Google (GOOG) is hoarding Silicon Valley’s tech talent? In August of 2007, Gideon Yu, a Valley train-hopper with stints at Yahoo (YHOO) and then YouTube, resigned from his position at the video-sharing site shortly after it was acquired by the search engine to become CFO of Facebook. A few months later, Benjamin “bling” Ling, described as one of “Larry and Sergey’s golden boys,” left Google to run Facebook’s platform program. Then this past March, Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s vice president of global online sales and operations, bailed to join the social network as chief operating officer. Ethan Beard, Google’s director of social media, followed shortly after, taking a job as Facebook’s director of business development.

Now another prominent Googler has train-hopped to the popular social-networking company as well. As first reported by BoomTown, Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications and public affairs at Google, is leaving the search sovereign to become Facebook’s vice president of communications and public policy.

“[Elliot Schrage] will be responsible for developing the key messages we want people to understand about our products, our business and the growing global importance of social networking and what we do,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an email to employees announcing the hire. “The goal here is to help people understand how the Internet can strengthen people’s relationships. Elliot will direct our efforts to work with users, media, governments and other entities around the world to ensure that Facebook’s policies are transparent, responsive, effective and are recognized as being those things. … This is a really important role for us and one that we’ve been trying to find the right person for a while. Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness and honest internal communications.”

“Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness, and honest internal communications”?

Clearly, Zuckerberg meant “build from the ground up a culture that values transparency, openness and honest internal communications.” Because it’s only been about six months since the Beacon fiasco, which demonstrated how grievously the company was lacking in those qualities (see “DiaperFetishFactory.com Is Sending a Story to Your Profile,” “Epicurious Has Added a Potential Privacy Violation to Your Facebook Profile,” “Fiascobook,” and “Fiascobook, Redux“).

Perhaps if Facebook recruits enough former Googlers, it too will be able to lay claim to a silly informal motto like “Don’t Be Evil.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080506/schrage/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080506/schrage-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20080506/schrage-2/#comments Tue, 06 May 2008 12:11:19 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080506/schrage/ Who says Google (GOOG) is hoarding Silicon Valley’s tech talent? In August of 2007, Gideon Yu, a Valley train-hopper with stints at Yahoo (YHOO) and then YouTube, resigned from his position at the video-sharing site shortly after it was acquired by the search engine to become CFO of Facebook. A few months later, Benjamin “bling” Ling, described as one of “Larry and Sergey’s golden boys,” left Google to run Facebook’s platform program. Then this past March, Sheryl Sandberg, Google’s vice president of global online sales and operations, bailed to join the social network as chief operating officer. Ethan Beard, Google’s director of social media, followed shortly after, taking a job as Facebook’s director of business development.

Now another prominent Googler has train-hopped to the popular social-networking company as well. As first reported by BoomTown, Elliot Schrage, vice president of global communications and public affairs at Google, is leaving the search sovereign to become Facebook’s vice president of communications and public policy.

“[Elliot Schrage] will be responsible for developing the key messages we want people to understand about our products, our business and the growing global importance of social networking and what we do,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in an email to employees announcing the hire. “The goal here is to help people understand how the Internet can strengthen people’s relationships. Elliot will direct our efforts to work with users, media, governments and other entities around the world to ensure that Facebook’s policies are transparent, responsive, effective and are recognized as being those things. … This is a really important role for us and one that we’ve been trying to find the right person for a while. Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness and honest internal communications.”

“Elliot’s role will be critical to helping us scale based on our culture that values transparency, openness, and honest internal communications”?

Clearly, Zuckerberg meant “build from the ground up a culture that values transparency, openness and honest internal communications.” Because it’s only been about six months since the Beacon fiasco, which demonstrated how grievously the company was lacking in those qualities (see “DiaperFetishFactory.com Is Sending a Story to Your Profile,” “Epicurious Has Added a Potential Privacy Violation to Your Facebook Profile,” “Fiascobook,” and “Fiascobook, Redux“).

Perhaps if Facebook recruits enough former Googlers, it too will be able to lay claim to a silly informal motto like “Don’t Be Evil.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080506/schrage-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080417/fiascobook/ http://allthingsd.com/20080417/fiascobook/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:42:49 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080417/fiascobook/

The ability to control how much information is available to the public has long been one of Facebook’s core principles. It was this very feature, for example, that Facebook used to distinguish itself from other social networks back when it first launched.

Of course, the ensuing years proved that protecting the privacy of its users was not exactly Facebook’s strong suit–especially when it came to digging up the advertising revenues necessary to justify its fantastical $15 billion valuation. There have been privacy issues with Facebook’s news-feed service, with its controversial Beacon advertising system, and with its terms of service, which granted popular applications access to far more personal user data than is necessary.

And now there’s another. A bug in permission restrictions in Facebook Groups allows members to upload content without first receiving permission from a Group admin. I know this firsthand, because over the past few days videos, photos and blog posts have been appearing on the All Things Digital Facebook Group, and neither Walt, Kara nor I–the only three people with admin privileges to the group–put them there (see screen below). Worse, while I was able to delete the photos and blog posts, I was unable to pull the videos off the page. There was no mechanism to remove them.

Worse still, the bug that makes this possible is not specific to the All Things Digital Facebook Group alone. It affects all Facebook Groups, site-wide.

We alerted Facebook to the issue and the company quickly identified the bug. Said spokesperson Brandee Barker: “Engineering has pushed out a fix that should go site wide shortly.”

UPDATE: Facebook engineers fixed the permissions bug, and we were able to remove the rogue videos from our page.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080417/fiascobook/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20080417/beacon-2/ http://allthingsd.com/20080417/beacon-2/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:29:21 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080417/beacon/ The controversy over Facebook’s Beacon advertising system may have been laid to rest last December, but its memory lingers on.

Today brings news of the first lawsuit over the service and, oddly enough, it wasn’t filed against Facebook. It was filed against Blockbuster. Facebook member Cathryn Elaine Harris is suing the video chain Blockbuster (BBI) for its participation in the Beacon program. Her complaint alleges that Blockbuster violated the federal Videotape Privacy Protection Act when it shared information about her movie rentals and sales with Facebook without her consent. It seeks class action status and $2,500 for each violation of the 1988 statute.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080417/beacon-2/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080417/beacon/ http://allthingsd.com/20080417/beacon/#comments Thu, 17 Apr 2008 20:29:21 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080417/beacon/ The controversy over Facebook’s Beacon advertising system may have been laid to rest last December, but its memory lingers on.

Today brings news of the first lawsuit over the service and, oddly enough, it wasn’t filed against Facebook. It was filed against Blockbuster. Facebook member Cathryn Elaine Harris is suing the video chain Blockbuster (BBI) for its participation in the Beacon program. Her complaint alleges that Blockbuster violated the federal Videotape Privacy Protection Act when it shared information about her movie rentals and sales with Facebook without her consent. It seeks class action status and $2,500 for each violation of the 1988 statute.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080417/beacon/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080123/quoted-13/ http://allthingsd.com/20080123/quoted-13/#comments Wed, 23 Jan 2008 22:08:02 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/20080123/quoted-13/ It’s been nary a month since Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg apologized for the social network’s first privacy scandal, and already the site seems poised to embark on its second.

According to a new study from the University of Virginia, many of Facebook’s most popular applications access far more personal user data than is necessary. From the study:

We performed a systematic review of the top 150 Facebook applications in October 2007 and examined their information needs. We found that 8.7% didn’t need any information; 82% used public data (name, network, list of friends); and only 9.3% needed private information (e.g., birthday). Since all of the applications are given full access to private data, this means that 90.7% of applications are being given more privileges than they need.”

And what sort of user data are we talking about here? Pretty much all of it, according to the company’s terms of service.

In order to allow you to use and participate in Platform Applications created by Developers (“Developer Applications”), Facebook may from time to time provide Developers access to the following information (collectively, the “Facebook Site Information”). … Examples of Facebook Site Information: your name, your profile picture, your gender, your birthday, your hometown location (city/state/country), your current location (city/state/country), your political view, your activities, your interests, your musical preferences, television shows in which you are interested, movies in which you are interested, books in which you are interested, your favorite quotes, the text of your “About Me” section, your relationship status, your dating interests, your relationship interests, your summer plans, your Facebook user network affiliations, your education history, your work history, your course information, copies of photos in your Facebook Site photo albums, metadata associated with your Facebook Site photo albums (e.g., time of upload, album name, comments on your photos, etc.), the total number of messages sent and/or received by you, the total number of unread messages in your Facebook in-box, the total number of “pokes” you have sent and/or received, the total number of wall posts on your Wall™, a list of user IDs mapped to your Facebook friends, your social timeline, and events associated with your Facebook profile.”

Quite a list–and one that the social network’s users could recall the next time Facebook asks them to agree to “allow this application to … know who I am and access my information” …

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080123/quoted-13/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20080114/facebook-the-entire-60-minutes-segment/ http://allthingsd.com/20080114/facebook-the-entire-60-minutes-segment/#comments Mon, 14 Jan 2008 08:04:06 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080114/facebook-the-entire-60-minutes-segment/ For those who missed it, here is the entire video of the piece CBS’ “60 Minutes” aired on Facebook last night, helmed by veteran correspondent Lesley Stahl.

It is not exactly the big wet kiss I was expecting the hot social-networking company would get, but it was also definitely not an ouch-that-hurts piece that could have been done.

For those who don’t know the tale, it hits all the high (and low) points of the Facebook saga, with a button-pushing efficiency that television does so well. Thus, a synopsis:

Web Wunderkind Mark Zuckerberg, who seems genetically unable to smile (unlike, say, his deeply charming sister). Harvard. Ratty hoodies and flip-flops. Mark makes a Facebook profile for Lesley (how much do we love that she blocked her boss Les Moonves?).

Next stop: Silicon Valley! Dropping out and venture funding. Toddler CEO (that one was coined by BoomTown). Crazy HQ with kooky-looking employees, one of whom you know was forced to ride a unicycle through the office by Lesley.

Big growth. Is Mark Google’s Larry and Sergey rolled into one? Inexplicably, ZERO mention of its bigger rival, MySpace, even once. Worth $15 billion?–an insane number Lesley does not question nearly enough.

Oops, Privacy! Oops, Beacon! BoomTown tsks tsks that stalkerish advertising idiocy and is asked about Mark’s qualifications as CEO (although no one cares what BoomTown thinks). Mark retorts: Hey, we need to make money. Lesley, so give the Wunderkind a break!

But here is the entire segment for your viewing enjoyment:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080114/facebook-the-entire-60-minutes-segment/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20080111/facebooks-60-minutes-of-fame/ http://allthingsd.com/20080111/facebooks-60-minutes-of-fame/#comments Fri, 11 Jan 2008 08:23:49 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080111/facebooks-60-minutes-of-fame/

CBS’s “60 Minutes” will air its Facebook piece on Sunday, and BoomTown is curious to see what take the iconic new magazine show will have on the hot and hyped social network and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.

In clips it has released, Zuckerberg tells veteran correspondent Lesley Stahl that its stalkerish ad product Beacon–a half-baked ad scheme Facebook cooked up that sends information about your purchases on partner Web sites back to your profile on the service–needs work.

Really? I had no idea! Oh, wait, I did.

Zuckerberg goes on to assure Stahl and the viewing public that Beacon will be a good tool someday. “It might take some work for us to get this exactly right,” said Zuckerberg in the interview. “This is something we think is going to be a really good thing.”

Since the 23-year-old is no Martha Stewart, we would like to take his word for it, but will not for now.

Zuckerberg also tells Stahl not to expect an IPO in 2008–well, I was not expecting one, but thanks for the confirmation–meaning that Facebook would have to make do with the $300 million it recently got from Microsoft and Chinese rich man Li Ka-shing for small stakes in the company.

The investments, as faithful BoomTown readers know, gave Facebook an insane $15 billion valuation. Despite the start-up’s fast growth and impressive record of building a pretty good service, I hope Stahl gives that wacky number her patented dubious eyebrow raise she always throws at various and sundry midrange dictators talking democracy.

We’re also interested in seeing the piece for you’re-so-vain reasons, because I was also interviewed by Stahl for the segment.

No surprise, Stahl asked if I was biased because of my partner, the Google exec (see my voluminous disclosure about that and more here), and because Rupert Murdoch now owned both Facebook rival MySpace and Dow Jones (owner of this site).

Well, no to both, since I was slapping around Facebook long before Google declared Open Social war on it and also before News Corp. was our corporate pooh-bah (also, the idea of me doing Rupe’s social-networking dirty work is laughable).

But most of the interview was about the many challenging issues I and others have raised about Facebook. In her lean-forward style, Stahl asked me a range of questions, mostly having to do with my many pieces on the start-up and Zuckerberg.

An old pro at the shake-up game, she noted at the start that some had called me “nasty” and “mean” for my sharpish reporting on Facebook.

I confess! I confess! It’s all true!

That is, if by mean, Stahl meant my thinking the valuation was undeserved thus far, raising questions about the need for a magic business plan to support that valuation and, of course, my wondering if Zuckerberg was experienced enough to be Facebook’s CEO.

Then, of course you can call me Cruella De Poke.

How I wish CBS–paging Quincy Smith!–would allow embedding of its videos, but here is a link to one clip from the interview where Zuckerberg talks about Beacon. And here is another about Zuckerberg’s wacky days as a hacker at Harvard.

The show airs at 7 p.m.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080111/facebooks-60-minutes-of-fame/feed/ 12 http://allthingsd.com/20080103/free-the-scoble-5000/ http://allthingsd.com/20080103/free-the-scoble-5000/#comments Thu, 03 Jan 2008 14:04:05 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20080103/free-the-scoble-5000/ It is easy to make light of the constant swirl of twittery online activity that surrounds well-known blogger Robert Scoble.

But Facebook’s disabling of his account yesterday–because he was apparently using a script to access and pull data from his own profile there to move it to other social graphs of his choice–is not going to turn out well for the social-networking company.

In fact, it seems to me that the company is about to shoot itself in the foot once again. And–let’s be honest–Facebook certainly doesn’t have any bullet-free feet to aim at after its recent debacles with its stalkerish Beacon ad product and its ill-advised legal action against a magazine that published embarrassing information about Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

As goofy as it seems, it looks like Scoble has aimed perfectly at the Achilles’ heel of Facebook–the testy issue of data portability and how much control you should have over your own information online.

In this case, as Scoble wrote in a blog post today, the fight with Facebook is over an effort he has been making with DataPortability.org, which notes on its Web site that “our identity, photos, videos and other forms of personal data should be discoverable by, and shared between, our chosen tools or vendors.”

Such activity–which Facebook characterizes as “scraping”–is not allowed under its Terms of Use.

More to the point, such an ability would be damaging to Facebook’s business plan around building a robust ad business. The success of that squarely relies on people staying and actively using the service because they have committed time and effort in putting up scads of information, photos and videos about themselves on the service, as well as establishing a complex and personally valuable network of friends.

For example, Scoble has said he has about 5,000 friends on Facebook alone–the upper limit on the service.

That’s some digital Rolodex you don’t want to lose, and Facebook knows this.

Thus, it has zero interest in allowing people to escape easily if they want to, even though THE INFORMATION ON FACEBOOK IS THEIRS AND NOT FACEBOOK’S.

Sorry for the caps, but I wanted to be as clear as I could: All that information on Facebook is Robert Scoble’s. So, he should–even if he agreed to give away his rights to move it to use the service in the first place (he had no other choice if he wanted to join)–be allowed to move it wherever he wants.

Still, in an email to him, Facebook customer service wrote: “Our systems indicate that you’ve been highly active on Facebook lately and viewing pages at a quick enough rate that we suspect you may be running an automated script. This kind of activity would be a violation of our Terms of Use and potentially of federal and state laws.

“As a result, your account has been disabled. Please reply to this email with a description of your recent activity on Facebook. In addition, please confirm with us that in the future you will not scrape or otherwise attempt to obtain in any manner information from our Web site except as permitted by our Terms of Use, and that you will immediately delete and not use in any manner any such information you may have previously obtained.”

Scary! Of course, because it is Facebook, there is already a group formed to urge he be reinstated.

In other words, Facebook is about to get Scobleized and it is not going to be pretty.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20080103/free-the-scoble-5000/feed/ 22 http://allthingsd.com/20071218/what-could-facebooks-beacon-have-been-and-still-be/ http://allthingsd.com/20071218/what-could-facebooks-beacon-have-been-and-still-be/#comments Tue, 18 Dec 2007 08:31:22 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/20071218/what-could-facebooks-beacon-have-been-and-still-be/ Just because it is the holiday season and BoomTown is feeling all holly and jolly and merry, it doesn’t mean we’re going to back down on the fiasco that was, is and will always be Facebook’s Beacon.

In fact, we’re hopping mad all over again after a talk we had last week with a very smart exec at a company that Facebook does a lot of business with, who posited the right way the social-networking phenomenon could have rolled out the now radioactive ad system.

It did not have to be that way, as the exec I was talking to noted, if Facebook had first launched the Beacon service–which can track your purchases on some external sites and send the information back to your Facebook profile’s news feed–as a noncommercial tool for users, focusing on things they had posted on a range of external Web sites that they actually might like being broadcast back to friends at Facebook.

Specifically, that could mean popular sharing sites like Flickr, YouTube, Yelp, Craigslist and Twitter, or any place where people like to and–more importantly–intend to share. Finding an easy way to let friends know what you are posting on the Web, as anyone knows, is still not very easy at all to do.

Thus, Facebook would have provided a valuable service if it had just tweaked Beacon to be actually helpful, rather than actually stalkerish.

So why did Facebook focus the service on ads first?

Well, to my mind, there were 15 billion reasons.

In other words, Facebook had to and has to desperately find some sort of magic advertising pill to sell to somehow backfill its spectacularly impossible $15 billion valuation, a financing whose pressure to perform is clearly at the rotten core of the Beacon program.

So a successful Beacon meant a successful Facebook, even if it was not such a successful idea to help consumers.

During a discussion of the mess, the exec noted correctly that the real problem lay in the fact that there has never been a true value proposition offered to Facebook users for tolerating Beacon.

In fact, the value accrued only to Facebook and to the advertiser or retailer, who might get new sales. Advertisers’ reasons for Beaconing are obvious–there is a benefit to this kind of deep relationship-targeting, or there surely will be over time.

After much noise over Beacon, Facebook did back down, trying to assuage those critics by giving users more control over the data with a global opt-out option for users.

That still has raised a lot of questions about security and privacy of data that still could be transmitted.

And it also did not put the onus on Facebook to remove its opt-out system and try to design something users would want to opt-in to.

Opting in, of course, is at the heart of Facebook’s third-party universe of widgets, which users can pick and choose from without being forced to.

It would be nice then, if Facebook would extend those same rights to its audience that it does when it is happily serving up SuperPokes and Vampire Bites.

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