While I don't want to suggest that people can't change (they can), and that mistakes should be forever branded on people like a scarlet "A," I find it disturbing that MySpace, which previously threw 90,000 sex offenders from its site (29,000 in 2007), recently dragged another 6,000 off, according to TechDirt. Facebook, for its part, has dumped 5,500 from its site since May 2008.
Why don't MySpace and Facebook screen for criminal histories before allowing someone on the site, or require some sort of notice of conviction for sex offenses, rather than dusting up after the fact?
Arguably, this would be easier and less painful than state off-line policies related to housing regulations for sex offenders, which The Wall Street Journal chronicled earlier this week. Such policies significantly impact sex offenders' day-to-day lives with tight housing restrictions, among other things.
Tighter controls online would protect children with little increased burden to the sex offender, which strikes me as the ideal balance. Given that most registered sex offenders have little likelihood of recidivism - The Wall Street Journal's report noted that only 90 of the 15,800 registered sex offenders in Georgia are classified as "predators" - I'm all for a low-impact approach that protects children without unduly burdening the lives of the past offenders.
Whatever a state's offline policies on sex offenders may be, pre-filtering applications for accounts with MySpace, Facebook, and other social-networking sites does little to affect the quality of a registered sex offender's life but arguably helps to secure children while using such services. The burden is so low, why haven't we done it yet?
Follow me on Twitter at mjasay.
TechCrunch reports that LinkedIn just upgraded its people search, but fails to mention the technology behind the upgrade: Lucene, the open-source search project. Nor is LinkedIn alone: MySpace has also used Lucene to revamp its search functionality, as Ars Technica reported earlier in June.
Indeed, borrowing from open source is now standard operating procedure for Web companies. What is interesting in the use of Lucene is how the Web is branching beyond the familiar LAMP stack to build in technologies like Lucene, Yahoo!'s User Interface Library, and other open-source components.
Arguably, the Web could not exist without open-source software, which is why I continue to believe it's critical that we find ways to encourage open-source contributions in a Web world that isn't bound by Open Source 1.0's licensing. It's therefore unfortunate that the Web lacks the "Software 1.0"'s licensing restrictions.
Perhaps the market will sort all this out, with Google and others seeing a strategic interest in open-source contributions, despite a lack of compulsion from open-source licensing. Perhaps. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.
One of the problems with social networking sites is that they tend to be ugly. Not just a little bit ugly. Seriously ugly.
MySpace has upgraded its UI, but it's still noisy, long (you have to scroll way down on some pages to get where you want to go), and cluttered. Facebook? It looks like a dingy and, like MySpace, is overly noisy (It's also shockingly slow. I've been trying to change my account settings and it keeps hanging on me). Not only that, but my home page on Facebook doesn't seem to want to let me cut out all the noise - no matter how much I tell it that I don't want to hear about so-and-so "friend"ing so-and-so, it keeps telling me.
Only LinkedIn seems to respect me as a grown-up. It lets me filter out noise and presents everything in an inviting UI.
The other thing I like about LinkedIn is that it doesn't try to be my one-stop shop for social activities. I use it for one thing: Professional networking (and recruiting as a fortunate off-shoot of that). I would never dream of paying Facebook or MySpace to blare fake friend activities to me, but I gladly paid LinkedIn $500 to help me recruit a few people to my company each year.
I suspect the noisy design of Facebook and MySpace has more to do with wild attempts to be relevant to more and more people (so that they'll visit the site and get hit by advertising). I prefer LinkedIn's more direct, conservative approach. I visit it when I need it, and I pay for that "need." Form follows function.
Apple's market share in the >$1,000 retail computer segment is an astounding 66 percent, according to eWeek. While Apple is almost entirely alone in this segment of the market, it still speaks to Microsoft's increasingly fragile hold on its once indomitable market power.
But to truly get a sense for why Microsoft has never been weaker, consider where web development is going: MySpace and Facebook, according to new research from O'Reilly Media. The two web platforms have attracted tens of thousands of applications in the past year alone.
If you're a platform company, as Microsoft once was, then this has to be troubling. The web is being built on LAMP and other open-source technologies. It is emphatically not being built on Microsoft technologies. Not even close.
Microsoft's biggest opportunity in Yahoo! is the chance to embrace a more open web platform. Its biggest risk is in frittering years away in trying to make the web, via Yahoo!, conform to .Net and a "control all" approach to technology.
In typical Microsoft fashion, it is trying to get the enterprise to bet everything on Sharepoint. Outside the firewall, however, Microsoft's attempts to get the world to bet on its version of the web should get the cold shoulder.
I've suggested here that Microsoft has little to gain in the short-term from open source, and continue to think that its desktop business will remain a cash cow for many years regardless of what it does. Microsoft could call Windows and Office "squishy bath toys" and people would still buy them out of habit. The "open opportunity" for Microsoft is on the web, but that's a medium to long-term play.
InformationWeek, however, did a survey of 536 business technology professionals and discovered that:
- 54 percent say they would be more likely to buy Microsoft products if the company were more open (and only 25 percent are asking for lower prices);
- 81 percent want Microsoft to offer greater integration and interoperability with non-Microsoft products (a need recently raised by UK schools); but ... Read more
Getting lonely on your MySpace page? That's because the growth is happening elsewhere, as TechCrunch reports. Digg? Growing at a 280% clip, year over year. Facebook? 118%. LinkedIn? 257%. MySpace is only at a 28% growth rate, and that's because they decided to let the 29,000 sex offenders back on. (No, I'm kidding!)
I admit that I still don't know what I'm supposed to do with Facebook, but LinkedIn and Digg are integral parts of my work each day (well, Digg is part of my blog "work").
Oh, and Windows Live Spaces? Up 4% because Ballmer finally got around to signing up.
A friend of mine related something very interesting to me the other day. We were discussing the relative value of social networking (Facebook, specifically) over email or "more traditional" ways to connect, given Slashdot's post that "email is for old people."
That struck me as wrong since the 12-18-year olds that I know (and I actually know quite a few since I'm involved in several neighborhood youth groups) may not spend most of their communication in email, but they certainly don't spend it in Facebook or MySpace, either. They take a blended approach, just as I do, and communicate with friends according to how close they are:
... Read more
(Credit:
Barracuda Networks)
The Web may be the last bastion of uncensored speech, but things get a bit more locked down once you browse it from within the walls of your employer, according to a Barracuda Networks analysis of data contributed by thousands of its Barracuda Web Filter customers. In fact, the data shows that 50 percent of businesses using Barracuda Web Filters are blocking MySpace.com or Facebook.
Social networking may be hot with employees, but employers tend to discriminate between sites, preferring the more grown-up Facebook to MySpace, with 44 percent of the companies using Barracuda Web Filters currently blocking MySpace, while only 26 percent block Facebook. Nineteen percent block both.
Are employers leery of employees getting a life and socializing? Not really. It's a security thing, and not just a social-networking thing, as a separate Barracuda survey of 228 IT security professionals shows:
... Read moreMy faith in humanity has crumbled today. Newsweek has outed MySpace cofounder Tom Anderson for faking his age. While trying to appear young and hip at the juvenile age of 27, Tom was actually (the heavens weep at the lie!) 32 when he started the company, and is 37 now.
A grandpa by any standard. (I am, by the way, only 19.)
Whether you're a MySpace addict or a Luddite who logged on once to see what all the fuss was about, you've likely met Tom. As the public face of MySpace, cofounder Tom Anderson has become a celebrity since the site launched in 2003 because he's every user's first "friend": when you join MySpace, your profile is automatically linked to his. But it turns out that Tom, who, along with cofounder Chris DeWolfe, made a fortune when News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million in 2005, may have a secret: his real age. ... Read more
Google remembers everything
(Credit: Christian Science Monitor)The Christian Science Monitor cartoon above refers to the kind of things you search for online going into personnel files, but much about us can be gleaned well before we're offered the position. As the article above notes:
... Read more
