It's funny. As technologists, we're supposed to be privacy nuts. That's part of our stereotype, our schtick. We know just how vulnerable our personal data is and it scares the bejesus out of us.

But our actions certainly don't back that up. At least, not mine. I use the latest websites in my daily routine, I blog, I use twitter, flickr and just about everything else publicly. I stopped creating accounts under aliases and prefer to speak openly as "Alex Rudloff" most every where online. My reasons are fairly straight forward (anonymity brings out the worst in people), but yet there's a certain element of creepiness associated to things like facebook's beacon. I don't blog about specifics when it comes to business or work encounters or what I've been searching for on Google or buying on Amazon. Not only is it often in poor taste, in this day of profiling, I guess it's just the notion that there are certain history books best bought with cash, ya know? Privacy has become this strange, mixed up concept. We're really sensitive in some ways, but completely not in others.

I started thinking recently about the amount of data I've given about my life and my habits. I think the tides started to turn with Google making larger and larger headway into our lives. GMail was the specific catalyst, but only because its the most obvious privacy related thing. Long before GMail, Google could track our every move on the web via search and AdSense widgets on what seems like a majority of sites.

We expect things on the web to be free. At the same time, we know that very little in the world is actually free, it's just monetarily free. A web company's goal is to create something that is so valuable to you that you are willing to overlook certain questionable things, like scanning emails for relevant ads (initially seen as super creepy). I checked out GMail though, and decided that I really liked it. The ads became less important. In fact, they almost became kind of neat. Gavin and I will bounce company ideas off each other via e-mail sometimes, and on more than one occasional, Google has displayed an advertisement for a company doing the same thing that we didn't know existed. Lazy man's research.

Ultimately, I've traded an element of my privacy in exchange for a service that I find great worth in. It's not a free service, I'm just not paying for it with my wallet. My privacy is the currency.

Facebook has increasingly shown an unwillingness to put user concerns first in their thinking. They'll release something incredibly invasive and then apologize when their community freaks out. We all know how that works, the whole "it's better to apologize than ask permission" thing. All Zuck has to do is smile pretty, apologize, and scale the feature back a tiny little bit and people calm down and move on. It happened with news feed, it's happening with beacon -- but those are just the two things people noticed. What else is facebook doing with our data? Should we care, or is facebook worth the cost?

Beacon had me so freaked out that I walked through what would happen if I simply removed my account (my natural, gut reaction). The fact is, I'd lose contact with a lot of people instantly. There's no easy way for me to take my data out and apply it somewhere else. There is no friend export and there isn't anywhere suitable for me to go. I'm paying the currency because I find worth in facebook the same way I find worth in my cable company. I want the cable, I just don't want it from them. Unfortunately, I have little choice (for now).

How many people who signed up for Mint.com, a site where you add all of your financial accounts in exchange for advice on how/where to save money, are still finding value in it? Would anyone feel comfortable letting others (say, a social community) see their search terms if it meant a better search experience? Or do we just trust google with that information?

I guess the question is, at what point does something cost too much when it comes to privacy? Who are we comfortable paying with privacy, and what level of trust defines that?

I'm not sure what my answers are yet, but I'm curious to hear other folks' thoughts.

When I first saw a thread on UCF rivals instructing people to poke the other teams QB, I paid no mind. This week, with USF QB Matt Grothe, I again passed up the opportunity. But, after reading this quote on tampabay.com, I think it's time I join in the fun:

"On Facebook, they have this stupid, ridiculous thing called Poke the Opposing Team's Quarterback," said Grothe, likely prompting much, more poking in the next four days. "I've probably been poked three or four times by other schools all year. I've probably been poked about 6-million times this week."

So there you have it. Sweet, sweet acknowledgment... Poke away ;)

UPDATE: Hah! Here are a few more players (thanks to Lisa on the rivals board): George Selvie, Amarri Jackson, Carlton Mitchell, Jessie Hester, Cedric Hill

Saturday's game was amazing. A few opening-game quirks (running out of water, for one), but otherwise I couldn't have asked for anything more. UCF gave an amazing effort and almost knocked off the #7 team in the country. A few plays go another way, and that game was ours.

Thanks to the Sentinel for outstanding coverage leading up to the game. I hope it continues -- we're going to need a great crowd for the memphis game!

I'm out in San Francisco as of last night. We're here at the Palace Hotel for TechCrunch 40. So far so good, except the internet coverage is abysmal. Hotel internet is only via ethernet, and is $18 a day. WiFi is overloaded from all the laptops and iPhone's in the crowd. What was supposed to be 400 people has swelled to 1000 all in the ballroom here. High class problems, I suppose ;)

I'll do a writeup on my favorite companies after tommorow. A few of them have been great, some of them.... Not so much. I'm wondering if 40 may have been too many. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder" though, and I'm one of those pesky east-coast cynics.

Mark Zukerberg chats with Mike Arrington for the keynote tonight, which should be good times. I'm really looking forward to that!

I've been getting more and more friend requests on Facebook from people with no picture and no network. I think we're all pretty conditioned from MySpace not to add such suspect people to our networks. Is this a sign that the new found lack of exclusivity on Facebook is lending itself to "friend spam?"

Ugh.

Celly just sent this out on our list.. Some USC kids made a facebook commercial to the tune of the eHarmony commercials.

Well done, random USC kids, well done.


Poke poke poke!

I've mentioned in the past how I felt Facebook is truly the social network positioned the best. Let's go ahead and make that a "was."

I wasn't going to hop on the hate bandwagon. In fact, I actually thought their new stalker features were fairly clever, if nothing else, original. Seeing how poorly their user community reacted to the change makes me wonder if they really bothered to run it by anyone though. Say it with me guys, Usability Tests. Not only would their users give them interesting feedback on their thoughts regarding features, they'd probably help them further improve things like the navigation (which I personally think could be better.. just my opinion, of course...).

Anyway, now they're allowing any creepy internet predator guy to create an account and "poke" sorority girls at colleges.? The charm behind Facebook is the exclusivity. The technology, as many have noted, isn't anything special and quite easily re-creatable. How is this going to pane out? I'm not sure, but I'm no longer going to emphatically preach that their going to win the war.

Unless they know something that we don't. I mean, when Netscape made the switch, we knew damn well we were going to piss off anywhere from 20-40% of the user base. It wasn't a profitable enough user base though. So... Here we are.

Somehow I doubt thats the case, and they're really just trying to scale this thing to extremely large numbers. It's not wasn't about the numbers though, it was about the penetration rate amongst college students. And that demographic should be a valuable one, more importantly, college alumni should be a valuable one. Wait 10-15 years when these kids are using Facebook to keep up with old college classmates and find future business partners, and you've got an indispensable tool that can write its own ticket. Killing that off to raise your user count, really just makes you another social network.

Anyway.. I hope they know more than everyone seems to think, and they do now seem to be reaching out to their community. Facebook was the first (and other than LinkedIn, the only) social network to actually impress me. We'll just have to wait and see what moves they make I guess.