The NYTimes ran an interesting story about the new dot-com bubble that appears to be well underway ("Silicon Valley Start-Ups Awash in Dollars, Again," October 17, 2007).

It talks a bit about how it appears that many start-ups are once again focussing on building an audience more than building profits, and that this approach appears to be attracting major interest from venture capital.

Information on this amazing new cloaking technology has recently been published on National Geographics website. Hit the link below and find out how to truly obfuscate your activities from the world! Oh my nerdery knows no bounds. Enjoy.

Link

"It's hilarious to hear all of the big wireless companies speaking about open platforms and software. Good for Google.

From the NYT:

Facebook keeps tweaking its new Beacon advertising program, which tracks users’ actions on sites other than Facebook. The program sparked a petition from MoveOn.org Civic Action that has won the support of 50,000 Facebook users. Facebook introduced a new version of the Beacon alert box on Thursday that still lacks an easy way to avoid participating.

Unsurprisingly, Facebook has backed off its initial enthusiastic support for Beacon.

Late yesterday the company made an important change, saying that it would not send messages about users’ Internet activities without getting explicit approval each time.

So what's the hubub all about? Beacon tracks users' online purchases, like many other sites, but then sends an update to friends in the user's Facebook network. I see all kinds of geeky reasons why someone might find this a cool service -- keeping track of your pals' book purchases or DVD consumption. But you can already do that through other services, provided your friends have chosen to share their wish list, or movie queue, or purchase history. However, those are opt-in services while Beacon offers a per-purchase opt-out pop-up option. Annoying, to be sure. I'm sure people don't mind sharing some innocuous purchases with their social networking pals, as they see fit, but certainly not all. It seems that it would have been much easier to provide users with a preference pane that allows for permissions to be set on an opt-in basis.

However, according to Facebook vice president, Chamath Palihapitiya, the company has no plan to offer a universal opt-out service, instead sticking users with the option of having to individually approve sharing each purchase or drop the service all together. While this stance certainly will appeal to the advertisers, it caries with it the risk of driving away users needlessly.

Two privacy groups said this week that they were preparing to file privacy complaints about the system with the Federal Trade Commission. Among online merchants, Overstock.com has decided to stop running Facebook’s Beacon program on its site until it becomes an opt-in program.

While this may be small beans, and the Beacon program will probably continue as a Facebook feature, what I can guarantee will happen is that enterprising users will create patches, plugins, cracks, or entirely new services to disable, alter, circumvent, or abandon the Beacon program. Users will always adapt and will jump ship the moment another free social networking service pops up that offers better array of services or constellation of privacy settings. Perhaps one of the new programs that arise from the Beacon flap will be the next big thing, that is until another next big thing comes along.

Oh, an another thing that users love is being condescended to -- even if the sentiment is true.

“Isn’t this community getting a little hypocritical?” said Chad Stoller, director of emerging platforms at Organic, a digital advertising agency. “Now, all of a sudden, they don’t want to share something?”