Rocker Trent Reznor is angry with CNET News.com.
On Monday afternoon, the leader of the band Nine Inch Nails posted a blog at NIN.com and accused me of misquoting him in a question-and-answer interview titled: "Trent Reznor: Why won't people pay $5." He suggests in his post that he did not make statements supporting a music tax on ISPs that appeared in the January 10 article. He also implies that CNET had some kind of hidden agenda when he writes in his post that the story was "written before I was involved."
It's not uncommon for celebrities and politicians to accuse the press of misquoting them. Sometimes it's true. Not here.
Below is the recording of Reznor's comments in question.
Reznor gave me permission to tape the interview and the words in the story are as he said them. I've also included what was said immediately prior and following the comments about the ISP tax so you can hear the context in which he made them.
You'll notice that I didn't quote everything he said; that's common practice. (We spoke for an hour and the final transcription of the interview was more than 4,000 words long. Normally our stories are between 1,000 and 1,200 words. We wanted to give him as much room as possible to speak and made an exception by publishing his interview at more than 1,800 words, already longer than usual.)
Reznor is a fascinating interview. He is frank and always says something controversial. He certainly was in our interview. Click the button below and listen for yourself.
Whether or not Facebook kills its much-derided Beacon program, the controversy surrounding intrusive marketing surveillance deserves to flourish.
You remember the old story about the frog placed in a pot of water that was slowly heated up, until it was cooked? When I read the about Facebook's reaction to the anti-Beacon protests, my first impression is that Facebook's concessions are essentially along the lines of, "OK, we turned up the heat a bit too much on this one, so we'll turn it back down a little bit--for now." Are marketers counting on the fact that we'll get used to the warm bath, then the hot tub, calibrating their fine-tuned ability to stop just short of the lobster pot?
CNN.com contributes a story, "Ad targeting improves as Web sites track consumer habits," which covers the Facebook issue among other case studies. Marketers are studying the sensitivity level of consumers to intrusive advertising and adjusting their programs accordingly. For example, CNN.com reports, "Most Web sites and marketers have been shunning the ultimate targeting--ads that greet you by name. Yahoo could easily do that using registration information, but 'I'm not sure people would like that or not,' said Richard Frankel, Yahoo's senior director of product marketing."
The CNN story continues:
"Users' comfort with data profiling has indeed shifted over the years. Google faced criticism when it introduced an e-mail service that paired ads with the words inside private messages. Millions of people now use Gmail with scarcely a blink.... Read moreUsers will eventually embrace the latest tactics, too--and by then, they'll complain about even deeper levels of intimacy yet to be invented, said Tracy Ryan, professor of advertising research at Virginia Commonwealth University
'You want to have enough targeting that a consumer notices the message and pays attention, but you don't want it to be so obvious that they are thinking (there) is targeting,' she said. 'That would be scary.'"
If you're the hottest dot-com in the Valley--as Facebook undoubtedly is--you're going to come under occasional scrutiny. Over the past few days, it's been circulating around the Web that the social networking phenomenon won't let people sign up with the last name "Gay," which has led to accusations of homophobia.
Online LGBT hub GenerationQ put it in the harshest of terms, pointing out that "you're allowed to be Hitler, but don't even try being Gay on social networking site Facebook."
There is indeed reason to find Facebook's blocking of Gay as a surname a bit inappropriate. Gay is a last name, and not an inconspicuous one: According to the 1990 census, "Gay" was the 774th most-common last name in the United States; it's no Smith or Johnson, but I'm willing to bet it outranked, say, "Zuckerberg." It also happens to be the last name of one of my favorite contemporary authors. Additionally, there's been a Gay Street in Manhattan's West Village since around 1830.
But we shouldn't be so quick to point fingers at Facebook, since this was probably the action of a very small number of developers, not the company as a whole--if it was even on the part of anyone at Facebook. The most likely scenario is that some kind of data set was put in place--the sort that would be used to prevent offensive license plate letter and number combinations, for example--to prevent people from registering with unsavory or offensive names. That doesn't mean that "Gay" should be banned. It just means that, most likely, it was not a conscious decision on the part of anyone at Facebook and it was not done with homophobic undertones.
It's also likely that, given the recent blog coverage, Facebook will start allowing people to register with the last name "Gay" once again.
I take issue with the somewhat sensationalist title of Pete Cashmore's post on Mashable, "Facebook Says No To Gays." But Cashmore's actual post has the right idea: "Pretty obviously, Facebook is just trying to prevent people from injecting this infantile humor into their fake profile names--if anything, it prevents homophobia."
Commenters on the LGBT blog GaySocialites.com took a similar angle. "I never really thought about it in a way that wouldn't be protective in filtering out offensive use of a false surname," one reader said. Another reader added, "While I am sure it is a legitimate last name, I agree that the reason for not allowing it was probably to prevent homophobic people from creating obscene and offending profiles."
Facebook, meanwhile, still allows its members to list on their profiles whether they are interested in men, women or both--or to skip filling out that field entirely.
If anyone's added you as a friend on Facebook recently, you may notice something different: previously, upon confirming a friend request, you were redirected to a separate page that asked you to check a few boxes and fill out a text field or two describing your relationship with the person in question. The options range from "Went to school together" to "In my family" to "We hooked up." The Facebook member on the other end of the "relationship" must then confirm the detail before it becomes visible to anyone who's sifting through either of their friends lists. Kind of cute, especially when you fill it out with something funny that isn't true ("They were members of Wu-Tang Clan from 1895 to 1901"), but many Facebook users have typically skipped it altogether, seeing it as a bit unnecessary or annoying. A button called "Skip This Step" provided an easy way out of it.
But that's changed. Now, the "How do you know this person?" prompt is in the form of an Ajax pop-up box, not a separate page, but something else is different. You now no longer have the ability to skip the step where you describe the relationship you have with your new Facebook friend, making friend adds with ex-boyfriends and girlfriends, former high school enemies, and Craigslist Missed Connection hook-ups potentially very awkward. It's unclear as to exactly when this change came about, but it appears to have happened this weekend.
Facebook's 'Request Confirmation' option, now with no way out
(Credit: Facebook (Screen grab taken by Mashable))(Aside: I noticed this when another blogger added me as a friend on Facebook. After racking my brains over exactly what kind of relationship connection to use, I finally chose "From an organization or team" and typed in "The blogosphere." Sorry for using that overexposed term.)
Facebook users--judging by blog posts and Twitter updates--don't appear to be happy. And the last time Facebook users got really ticked over an update to the site that they perceived as a step down in privacy and control functionality (remember the early days of the News Feed?) things got a little ugly. The "Skip This Step" issue has shown early signs of also becoming a headache for the company: social-networking blog Mashable even tossed up a makeshift "petition" to bring back the "Skip This Step" option.
But according to a new high-profile Facebook employee, it's a glitch. A comment on the Mashable post Sunday night from Blake Ross, co-founder of recent Facebook acquisition Parakey, explained, "This is a bug that will be fixed soon. Trust me, we find this as annoying as you do," Ross wrote. (Thanks to Eric Skiff for pointing this out.)
We've e-mailed Facebook for confirmation and will keep you posted when we hear back.
So, ultimately it looks like we can learn an interesting tidbit from this whole mini-debacle: if the Parakey co-founder is chipping in on something pertaining to friend request confirmation, that could be a cool peek into what's to come from Facebook's new buy. Parakey, as you may know already, specializes in bridging the gap between offline desktop applications and Web services. Total speculation here (and I'm not a code guru by any means), but perhaps some kind of desktop-accessible alert system is in the works?
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