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Facebook Users Complain of New Tracking By ANICK JESDANUN and RACHEL METZ – 4 days ago NEW YORK (AP) — Some users of the online hangout Facebook are complaining that its two-week-old marketing program is publicizing their purchases for friends to see.Those users say they never noticed a small box that appears on a corner of their Web browsers following transactions at Fandango, Overstock and other online retailers. The box alerts users that information is about to be shared with Facebook unless they click on "No Thanks." It disappears after about 20 seconds, after which consent is assumed.

Ultimately, consumer and business confidence are mostly irrational. The psychology of the markets is dominated by the public images that we have in mind from day to day, and that form the basis of our imaginations and of the stories we tell each other.

Bill O'Reilly can howl all he wants about the "war on Christmas." But Facebook has leaped several parsecs ahead of him, making itself into a Grinch so big that the good Dr. Seuss himself would have been gobstopped by the sheer evil magnitude of it all.

Implicit behind a lot of this stuff, like being asked to do blogging, is that we're getting a more representative view of the public.

I met up with Robert Scoble last night at an Orange party in San Francisco (my photos from the party are here). He brought along his Amazon Kindle and let me and others test it out. It was the first time I’d held one - the Kindle I bought hasn’t arrived yet and my co-editor Erick covered the New York launch. Anyway, he took video of me giving my opinion of the Kindle (thumbs down). The problem is the UI is completely non-intuitive and the screen is unreadable in medium light (it was much brighter in the room than the video suggests and it was easily bright enough to read a normal book). I was trying to simply pull up the browser and go to a web page and I couldn’t figure it out. The scroll wheel on the side is obviously designed only to frustrate users. And without any sort of mouse, I kept touching the screen to try to get it to do what I wanted (which of course doesn’t work). I also compare it in the video unfavorably to the etch-a-sketch. I asked Robert to pull up a web browser and load TechCrunch. He did it once and it took so long I asked him if I could video it. He agreed, and did it again. It took him 55 seconds to pull up the browser and enter the TechCrunch URL. I then pulled out my iPhone and did the same thing in 14 seconds. The Kindle can be given some slack since web browsing isn’t its core function. But web browsing on the iPhone isn’t the key feature of that device, either. Amazon just didn’t design a good device (the user interface, keyboard and screen are all very flawed), and they had all the time in the world to get it right. Hopefully v.2 will be an improvement. Of course this is just my opinion after trying it out for a few minutes, and I’d had a couple of beers. Don MacAskill wrote up his own review after a day with the device and says its wonderful.

My Genome, Myself: Seeking Clues in DNA function getSharePasskey() { return 'ex=1353214800&en=835081fc6a0a7ff1&ei=5124';} function getShareURL() { return encodeURIComponent('http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/17/us/17dna.html'); } function getShareHeadline() { return encodeURIComponent('My Genome, Myself: Seeking Clues in DNA'); } function getShareDescription() { return encodeURIComponent('For as little as $1,000 and a saliva sample, customers of an infant industry will be able to learn what is known about how their biological code shapes who they are.'); } function getShareKeywords() { return encodeURIComponent('Genetics and Heredity,DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid),Medicine and Health,Genetic Engineering,Computers and the Internet,23andMe'); } function getShareSection() { return encodeURIComponent('us'); } function getShareSectionDisplay() { return encodeURIComponent('The DNA Age'); } function getShareSubSection() { return encodeURIComponent(''); } function getShareByline() { return encodeURIComponent('By AMY HARMON'); } function getSharePubdate() { return encodeURIComponent('November 17, 2007'); } Sign In to E-Mail or Save This Print Single Page Reprints ShareDel.icio.usDiggFacebookNewsvinePermalink writePost(); By AMY HARMON Published: November 17, 2007 The exploration of the human genome has long been relegated to elite scientists in research laboratories. But that is about to change. An infant industry is capitalizing on the plunging cost of genetic testing technology to offer any individual unprecedented — and unmediated — entree to their own DNA.

the Web.

computer crashes

permission

Another successful story was my experience organizing against sweatshops with the Notre Dame Progressive Student Alliance as part of the United Students Against Sweatshops network. We were adequately connected to the network to model our local campaign on those of other groups – and we won.

« Previous post Next post » November 22 2007 The Secret Strategies Behind Many “Viral” Videos Dan Ackerman Greenberg 443 comments » Update: Dan has a follow up to this post, here. This guest post was written by Dan Ackerman Greenberg, co-founder of viral video marketing company The Comotion Group and lead TA for the Stanford Facebook Class. Dan will graduate from the Stanford Management Science & Engineering Masters program in June. Have you ever watched a video with 100,000 views on YouTube and thought to yourself: “How the hell did that video get so many views?” Chances are pretty good that this didn’t happen naturally, but rather that some company worked hard to make it happen – some company like mine. When most people talk about “viral videos,” they’re usually referring to videos like Miss Teen South Carolina, Smirnoff’s Tea Partay music video, the Sony Bravia ads, Soulja Boy - videos that have traveled all around the internet and been posted on YouTube, MySpace, Google Video, Facebook, Digg, blogs, etc. - videos with millions and millions of views. Over the past year, I have run clandestine marketing campaigns meant to ensure that promotional videos become truly viral, as these examples have become in the extreme. In this post, I will share some of the techniques I use to do my job: to get at least 100,000 people to watch my clients’ “viral” videos.

Jezebel and other bloggers went nuts, and soon, they'd uncovered the woman's name, her address, phone number and business registration records and plastered them all over the Web.