Facebook‘s biggest and boldest move to date was announced last week at its f8 conference. Timeline is a complete overhaul of Facebook profiles and changes the way user behavior is reflected and shared across one’s network, or social graph. In essence, Facebook expects users to be active participants in the social web, actively sharing thoughts, photos, and more but also sharing semi-passively. What you’re listening to, reading, discovering and discussing across many websites can now be automatically archived on one’s Facebook timeline and published in real time to the Facebook News Feed.

Facebook has always pushed openness and sharing on its users and this latest innovation is bound to spark concern among users who wish to maintain significant privacy controls over their profile and presence. For users that embrace the increasingly open and social nature of the web, the distracting nature of Facebook is about to multiply exponentially.

News Feed
In October 2009 Facebook made its first significant shift to a focus on the home page news feed. In October 2010 it discontinued apps and revealed a roadmap signaling intentions to bring everything into the news feed. By October 2011 this will be closer to a reality as the news feed will feature a firehose of activity featuring users’ friends and interests and their actions across not only Facebook but on other websites that incorporate Facebook’s Open Graph.

The ability to see not only the primary news feed, occupying the middle of the home page but also to see the “hyper” feed at top-right can be overwhelming. This is where lists come in handy, and fortunately Facebook has begun iterating “Smart Lists” including segmentation by city. So if you just want to see updates from friends in your city, that list is automated if you click on “more” next to lists for your Lists index and then click on the list name corresponding to your city to view updates from people in a 10-mile radius.

The news feed also adds an added layer of engagement — see what friends are doing on Facebook in real time and join in. This is an area that will grow rapidly now that Open Graph has been released in Beta. Many users find this hyper-news feed to be superfluous and annoying and there is at least one Chrome browser plugin available to make it go away.

For now you can view what friends are listening to in real time by visiting http://www.facebook.com/?sk=music and interact, comment and even listen with your own Spotify, Mog, or Rdio account (or check out Earbits). In fact, Spotify is so deeply married to its open relationship with Facebook that it now requires all users to have a Facebook login.

Open Graph

This makes the Facebook Connect experience more complex and potentially more rewarding but also potentially embarrassing depending on what content you are reading. Visit this page to see Facebook’s initial partners announced at the Open Graph beta launch at f8, which in addition to the music partners include The Guardian, Washington Post and Hulu. Open Graph is in Beta and your mileage may vary, in fact, many of the supposed launch partners don’t appear to have any live integration at the moment while others lead to broken 404 pages.

By September 30th the new-look Facebook Timeline will be live for all users according to Facebook. No matter your level of Facebook engagement, interest, or concern regarding privacy, your experience and most notably the appearance of your profile will change. Those interested in implementing Facebook Timeline early can do so by clicking “Sign Me Up” at the bottom of facebook.com/timeline.

The greatest hits of everything that Facebook knows about you will be visible on your profile, in reverse chronological order. This immediately flips some simple privacy features that you may already have in place:

• Your age: Even if your profile is set to only show the month and day (and not year) of your birth it will appear on your timeline. It may even appear to date you as older than you are (for me it says 2000s, 1970s, Born; I was born in 1975). More on this here.
• Embarrassing photos: Timeline will pick and choose your greatest hits as it wishes, unless you go through and mark various updates and photos to feature in your timeline.
• Past lives: Your past jobs, relationships, hobbies, etc will all be easy to access if they are made public. Who you married, who you broke up with, what jobs you started and ended. None of this needs to be points for concern, I think it’s better that we become a more open and less bashful society, however, you may want to take a quick look in case there’s anything out of context to cherry pick.
• You can add a featured header image: I added a photo I took during a drive in Bariloche, Argentina. Amusingly, the first audible reaction beyond oohs and ahs that I got when I showed Facebook Timeline to my class last Friday was: “hello, MySpace!” I had a similar first reaction to the wider, two-column look and feel of the timeline.
• Your information: Be careful with passwords and “secrets” for all of your online accounts. If somebody really wants access they might be able to easily find your Mother’s Maiden name or date of birth right there in your Facebook Timeline.

You may or may not agree that Facebook is onto something incredible here. But if you are not already affected by the new features and the Nicholas Felton-esque Timeline design or people complaining about them) you soon will be.

Watch the archived video of the entire Facebook f8 keynote below:

Twitter’s “Who to Follow” personalized suggestions can now be seen in the right-hand sidebar of the Twitter.com user web app and under this tab. This is familiar territory to anyone who uses Facebook or even Amazon. Twitter knows who you follow and who follows you back as well as who many in your circle follow that you do not yet follow. Hence the social graph. It’s a wild and crazy algorithm, but if you think about it in physical terms, we all have friends that we want to introduce specifically to other friends. And it should be assumed that by using Twitter, you hope to communicate with and discover new peers, business partners, etc.

Why Do We Want the Social Web to Know Us?
Because this is what web 2.0 is all about. You can surf anonymously – using anything from Tor to the private browsing feature in Safari browsers. But for the fully-featured and most valuable web experience, it’s best to surf with an identity. This is why Google asks you to login when you search — it knows your history (assuming you have the feature enabled) and can personalize the search experience for you. This is why Facebook takes whatever info you enter into your profile and advertises accordingly. Are these businesses manipulating us? Absolutely not. You pay nothing for these services and in return they optimize the experience by delivering content that is relevant to you. And yet you can easily manipulate it for yourself. For example, I took “single” out of my Facebook profile months ago as I grew tired of endless ads for dating sites featuring strangely acronym-ed women who apparently are appropriate for my age. While this hasn’t led to any confusion (nobody’s asked why I’m not listed as “single”), nor has it led to any good fortune (I still am single). But I never have to look at those scary ads anymore.

Twitter isn’t as blatant with its advertising but the service has been criticized for it’s curated Suggested Users lists in the past. (I’ve documented my experience with this here). In this case — and it’s Twitter’s third attempt at a suggested follow device I believe — it is done right. There could be some more options for opting out but I look forward to seeing how this gets incorporated into the Twitter API and the hundreds of mobile, desktop, and web-based Twitter clients that each have their own features.

Old vs. New

The biggest difference is that the new feature is not curated (other than algorithmically) and — more importantly — it gives context as to why you might want to follow these users by listing friends of yours who already follow said user. One third-party app that I previously found to do this quite well is Refollow.com.

Now if only Twitter would help make it easier for me to follow so many damn awesome people without getting overwhelmed I might have some fun with this feature myself.

From the Twitter blog:

Today we’re beginning to roll out a simple, but powerful new feature to help address that — “Suggestions for You”. The algorithms in this feature, built by our user relevance team, suggest people you don’t currently follow that you may find interesting. The suggestions are based on several factors, including people you follow and the people they follow. You’ll see these suggestions on Twitter.com and the Find People section. If you like a suggestion, click “follow”; if you don’t, click “hide,” and we’ll try not to suggest that user again.

I’ve always been mixed on this, however, I now feel that it is in the service’s best interest to disallow autofollow’s across the board. Still this can be easily circumvented using other services, such as SocialToo, which accesses the Twitter API to enable auto-follows, and — much worse in my opinion — allow users to automatically send direct messages to new followers). There is even a website — http://www.twitterautofollow.com/ — devoted to listing accounts that had autofollow enabled.

Why does Twitter discourage autofollow?

“Namely, it is unlikely that anyone can actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes this activity disingenuous,” the letter reads. At the same time it is a mixed message to encourage the use of Twitter as a legitimate community-building tool, without making it easier for one to follow back followers. In the end, I grew very frustrated with the auto-follow concept, primarily due to the fact that a majority of new followers (on the @LiveEarth account that I administer) appeared to be complete fakes. Especially during the month that the account was featured as a suggested user.

I knew Twitter would disable autofollow soon enough. But the mildly defensive tone of the explanation was unexpected. What are your thoughts on Twitter etiquette?

Read the full text of the e-mail below:

Hi There,

I’m contacting you because you have a Twitter account for which
we enabled something called “autofollow.” This is not a public
feature, it’s something we did for a limited set of accounts
such that they automatically follow any account that follows
them.

We’re going to discontinue autofollow because this behavior
sends the wrong message. Namely, it is unlikely that anyone can
actually read tweets from thousands of accounts which makes
this activity disingenuous.

However, we understand that there may be exceptions such as
applications built using our API or the ability to exchange
direct messages. There are also some who think it’s simply
polite to follow back other accounts.

While we’re going to stop supporting autofollow, we’d like to
find a way to support the other goals folks are really trying
to accomplish. Please feel free to reply to this email and let
us know how we can do this better together.

Thanks,
Biz Stone, Co-founder
Twitter, Inc.

Well, now the terms indicate that anything you ever upload or share to your facebook profile — regardless of whether your account is active — is Facebook’s property to do whatever they want with.

UPDATE: Facebook did an about face and reverted to its previous ToS per a blog post on feb 17.

Did anyone receive notification to review the new Terms of Service before someone finally stumbled upon it — an outrageous 11 days after the fact? What if major publishers decide to boycott by removing “share on facebook” links? That’s not happening, not with the increasing traffic these blogs/sites receive via Facebook referrals.

This is the Internet, folks, and this is nothing new and hardly a surprise from Facebook — it was only a matter of time that they reworded the terms of content ownership (check out my previous posts on Facebook privacy here, here, and here).

If you’re someone who openly shares details and content on the Internet (as I do), you’re only fooling yourself if you believe said content cannot be “stolen” or used against you. Think you’re pre-February 4th content is protected (if you have since deleted your Facebook profile? Not likely. Facebook is the model for a walled garden online network. Now we’ll see how far they go with their power to abuse, sell, sublicense and manipulate user data and content.

The key passages of the ToS are below (new ToS / old ToS)

UPDATE: Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg made a blog statement following the initial uproar, however, my translation of his statment is: trust us, and ignore the small print. Facebook invites your feedback here.

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof.

That language is the same as in the old TOS, (per Consumerist) but there was an important couple of lines at the end of that section that have been removed:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

Furthermore, the “Termination” section states:

The following sections will survive any termination of your use of the Facebook Service: Prohibited Conduct, User Content, Your Privacy Practices, Gift Credits, Ownership; Proprietary Rights, Licenses, Submissions, User Disputes; Complaints, Indemnity, General Disclaimers, Limitation on Liability, Termination and Changes to the Facebook Service, Arbitration, Governing Law; Venue and Jurisdiction and Other.

Check out the column: http://m.mercurynews.com/sanjosemercury/db_12121/contentdetail.htm

“I, Barack Hussein Obama, do solemnly swear (Facebook status update here) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, (Twitter tweet here) and will to the best of my ability, (CNN blog and live streaming video) preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States (with the help of MySpace, Hulu, Yahoo Messenger, Jaiku and Plurk).

“So help me God.”

And on and on. Very funny LOL09.

(This post written as a test of the BOLT browser on my Blackberry Bold. Hope it doesn’t break the cages).

Lala.com is interesting. First of all, I was confused because I initially signed up for LaLa (under a diff username) when it served as middleman in a CD-swapping online network that never really took off. I traded one CD through the service (Billy Bragg for Swearing at Motorists) and continued to get occasional requests for a few CDs I was happy to part with (Prince 3121 anybody?) and finally closed that account now that LaLa has redefined itself as a legit music listening and sharing (via embed / recommendation / iTunes) social network.

I’m currently listening to this great interview with Paul Westerberg, circa 1986 on the release of Pleased to Meet Me. Westerberg is sounding drowsy, but is definitely at his rolling-stone-critics-poll loves me I’m a serious songwriter phase. He sloughs of the bands “firing” of Bob Stinson noting that he just can’t do stuff like “Nightclub Jitters.” Interviewer Roy Trakin mentions that Bob Dylan bought tickets for that night’s show… “It’s always weird, y’know…” says Paul. Fun chatter about “Alex Chilton” and what happened to Big Star, etc. He kinda likes the Coronas that everyone is throwing around these days, but his preference is Grolsch. Special Export better than Bud. Then your typical “I hate myself… I just don’t understand myself.” The band was making $750/month each according to Westerberg at that time. But the band did it for a good 10 years, and personally, I can never get enough of the ‘Mats.

In other news, I can’t stop listening to Screaming Trees Uncle Anesthesia. It was one of my favorite tapes of the early ’90s that nobody else seemed to be into (ironically, I had a similar experience with Smashing Pumpkins Gish at the time). Mark Lanegan’s voice was the real deal Still is.

Complaints about LaLa: big one here — the AJAX is a little screwy using Firefox 3.0.4 on Mac. I can’t copy the embed code to paste into this blog and I have a little trouble logging in — it often takes two tries for it to execute. Couldn’t copy / paste an embed code on Opera either. Or Safari. I’ve managed to put it on my Facebook profile (via the LaLa app) but that’s about it. I’ll embed this Westerberg Interview as soon as I figure out why I can’t successfully copy / paste the code!

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My Twitter usage has ramped up consistently since I first registered in late 2006. But now, one of the most exciting adventures about it is this: in what ways will Twitter fail today? For the past three months, Twitter users have grown accustomed to daily instances of “stress,” “overload,” faulty API limits exceeded, and random appearances of the now infamous fail whale. Many have forecast the demise of Twitter as if it is reminiscent of the second Web bubble itself and even while the weekend bitchmeme virtually handed the king-of-all-internets crown from Twitter to Friendfeed over the weekend, it’s just not so. Twitter isn’t going away and neither are it’s users. And that’s after many weeks of people like me wondering why and how we still manage to put up with a service that reminds us on a regular basis that we really don’t (or rather, can’t) depend on addictive web 2.0 tools wholly and exclusively. Perhaps it’s that reminder that we appreciate the most.

This morning’s Twitter fail is: I saw nothing at http://twitter.com/home until a few refreshes delivered Andrew Mager‘s latest tweet as distributed via ping.fm. Twhirl is experiencing API limit exceeded after only a few minutes operation which is indubitably bogus. The sharp, new Tweetdeck even quit delivering new tweets 20 minutes ago.

Could this be the long-awaited rebirth of Twitter as stable application day? We can only hope so.