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The new definitions of privacy on the web

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My Flavors.me Homepage with my Tumblr Blog Feed opened

Upon the sharing of a friend on Facebook (ahhh… the power of social recommendation…), I discovered a new service called  in Flavors.me which enables anyone to build a personalized page on himself or anyone else and then link to it the main social content production factories. They currently carry 14 services including Facebook, Tumblr but also your DVD queue from Netflix, your checkins from Foursquare or the last tracks you’ve been listening on Last.fm.
Once you’ve added all services, the user coming to your page can click on the services you’ve added and a window will display whatever stream of activity you’ve had on that specific service.
Testing it yesterday, I mechanically added all the services I’m using including Netflix and Foursquare. Once I realized that everybody could then follow my physical traces around NY through Foursquare or all photos that I posted to Facebook (and where these only get displayed to a selected list of people), I freaked out and decided to limit that to only the safer LinkedIn and other Twitter feeds.

Well, boy, it was easy to add services but it was a nightmare to remove them. Flavors.me doesn’t include a “Remove The Service” option… Sure, they’re in beta but given the nature of their business, that should probably be part of your MVP feature… So then I went to all the services I wanted to get off my Flavors.me page and remove the authorization for Flavors.me to access these data. But even with that, Flavors.me kept the latest stream of data imported. Sure, nothing new was going to get published but all of the content previously imported was visible.

I ended terminating my account at Flavors.me to clean it. Don’t get me wrong, I think the service is pretty neat (rebuilding a page right now), but I was a little taken aback by the difficulty to keep track of all your social traces. That comes around a fairly large debate, initially provoked by the launch of PleaseRobMe which list empty homes by tapping into Twitter API. While Foursquare is a closed network (you need to approve your friends), more and more people link it automatically with their Twitter account which is an open network, all of a sudden revealing to anyone who wants to find it whether you’re at home or not. Foursquare countered back on that issue but this is just the beginning of more and more debates around open systems.

One of the key improvements there would probably be for the main companies that offers to link your accounts to open systems like Twitter to state clearly that you pushing out data on the open. I also think that the details of permissions given to 3rd-party services should be much more detailed on networks like Facebook and Twitter. You basically should be able to have the same detail of what you’re authoring and to whom as you have in your Facebook privacy settings. For once, I might be pretty ok (actually I know I would…) to display on Flavors.me my Foursquare badges, but not necessarily all my checkins…

The photo above shows my welcome screen on Flavors.me with my Tumblr blog feed open

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Towards creating richer data streams between Internet users

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I’ve been thinking about that for a while: how painful and multi-tasking it takes accomplish the day to day task that you’re accomplishing every day on the web.
Let me be concrete and consider these situations:

  • You’re talking with a friend on Google Talk and you want to send him a couple of pictures from Flickr while talking about a new restaurant and he wants to paste a map in the conversation
  • You’re tweeting about a great place you’ve been last night that you want to recommend and want to include in your post a shorten URL back to this place website as well as the location map
  • You’re blogging on a specific subject and want to include videos, some related links and tags and some pictures that are currently hosted on an outside service.
  • You’re reading an article and want to tweet about it while including a shorten URL back to it and include some other tweeter users in in.

These operations are all part of creating “enriched web streams” that mix and match photo, text, video, social networks signals etc. But to make that happen, most of the time, the average user will  have to open multiples browsers, cut and paste, login to some accounts, struggle with the limitations of each formats etc.

So obviously, when I got a demo from Google on Google Waves, I was very excited at the project underlying motto: to easily enrich the online conversations you might have, add or remove participants, facilitate sharing and communication (even in different languages). And the demo really works: you start to understand how this richer conversation can potentially change the way we communicate with each other on the web (and even keep track of these online enriched streams). Here’s the full video of the demo of the product. It’s a 1 hour and 20 minutes video but it’s really worth it:

The other very interesting project underway is The Mozilla Labs Ubiquity Project. It’s a slightly different scope and objective: the goal is to make your life easier when you’re using the Internet, just like having on your side a little robot facilitating a lot of your most usual tasks.The project is totally open to anyone to contribute, faithful in that to the spirit of the Mozilla Foundation.

The reason I’m linking the two projects is that they’re both, in their own ways, going to help us enrich the way we’re using the Internet. They also both contribute in blurring the classic frontiers between desktop apps, software and online apps. Here’s a quick video explaining the Ubiquity project (that is just starting…).

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