Frankie Roberto in the Independent

The article goes on to look how social-networking sites like 43 things can be backed by large corporations (like Amazon and Google), who might like to use them “as a sophisticated market-research tool” or by offering targetted ads (ala Google). Neither, of course, is particularly malicious, but the article does cover the way that 43 things wasn’t totally upfront about being funded by Amazon.

Robot Co-op have posted a blog entry today which, seemingly co-incidentally, answers many of the points raised:

Part of this concern about privacy is about the fact that The Robot Co-op is funded by Amazon.com and that the facts of that funding emerged in some sensationalist press before either company had issued a press release on the deal. Live and learn on that front. But perhaps we could put the matter to rest by making it clear that no personal information is required (or desired) to use 43 Things and that Amazon.com would have no access to any information that isn’t already available to the rest of the world, through an individual’s decision to publicize that information.

So, they admit to making a mistake on that front then. The article also poses some interesting questions on whether social-networking sites could contain a “publicity policy” making clear that posts to these sites are public, indexed by Google, and so on. They also suggest that they could required even less ‘personal information’ from users, by not requiring an e-mail address, and making it more clear that you can use aliases. This then more then answers the Independent’s observation that “judging by some of the heartfelt comments, many use the site as an anonymous personal diary” (which I don’t think neccessarily follows anyhow). 43 things is also fairly unique in allowing users to both delete their ‘things’ from the site entirely, and to be able to edit or delete the comments they make on other ‘things’ in perpetuity (often seen as a bad idea on forums and the like).

The quotes used in the article do represent my views pretty accurately though. There is a danger with posting personal content to social networks, but the danger is more that the content will become less accessible, not more. The bigger risks are that the company will go bankrupt, suddenly start asking for money, have server slowdowns or add annoying adverts and turn overly commercial.

Ultimately, though, there’s a trade-off between the networking and cross-linking advantages of having all the content on a single site, and the disadvantages of having to give up control of this content to the company running the site. For 43 things, I think the advantages easily come out on top. For Flickr, I’m not so sure, and tend to post photos that I want to comment on to my own blog, uploading only spurious photos to Flickr. For blogging, it’s definately worth hosting your own blog, as this is your most precious content. Features like trackback and RSS help make up for the loss of easy aggregation and cross-linking that you’d get on hosted blog communities - although these aren’t perfect (comments are a nuisance), and there are some social-networking advantages of blogging sites like livejournal.

Finally, it’s worth repeating again that the relationship between 43 things and Amazon is suspicious. Whilst Robot Co-op have now admitted being funded by Amazon, the precise nature of this relationship is unclear. Who owns 43 things, and what does Amazon hope to earn from the deal?

Added to My Things:

• Get mentioned in a newspaper article - DONE!
• Find out if 43 things is really owned by Amazon - still to do!

« Good Charlotte Gig| Tony Blair and the great School Dinners bandwagon »