Privacy issues

1. I want to be in control on the data that I share
2. I am concerned about my privacy and therefore I do want to be in control of my data (or at least in as much control as possible)
3. I do not want to have anybody else making aggregations and connections concerning my profiles apart the ones that I explicitly create
4. I do not aggree that Facebook claims that everything I post/like/share on this social media platform has anything to do with my real life. Actually I am aware of my posts and likes and I was always posting keeping in mind that potentially everybody has access to this content. Facebook Timeline does not reflect my life in any sense. In order to prevent others from thinking so I at least have to be controlling all the activity going on on my timeline or delete my entire account. The latter was the better option for me.
5. Second I am a computer scientist who has some knowledge on machine learning, social media analytics and user profiling techniques and knows how to apply them. So I do know what you can do with data on Facebook and I don’t want to be subject of such action.

Friendship issues

1. 75% of my Facebook friends are not my “real” friends
2. With 75% of my Facebook friends I do not have contact
3. I can also keep in touch with my real friends without using Facebook

Focusing on more important things

1. I want to spend my time in a more productive manner rather than keeping track and correcting updates on facebook (probably made by others)
2. I do not want to use Facebook just as a tool of promoting myself (there are other social media platforms which better suite this use case such as linkedin or xing)
3. I want to spend more time maintaining my blog and less time feeding social networks with the latest gossip news
4. I am not a Social Media Expert
5. I do not want to read only filtered information that Facebook thinks is important to me (well I am aware that Google does the same but at least there is some kind of excape to search for information on other sources
6. …

This are some of my reasons for deleting my Facebook account. What do you think about this?

Eli Pariser explains in the following TED Talk how “human information filters” get substituted by algorithmic ones, which means how recommendation engines filter information for you. Have a look at the video is is really worth watching:

Do you know other examples of web personalization or recommendations engines? Please leave me a comment at the end of this post.

Related articles

• Who Decides What You Read? Hint: It’s Not You (bigthink.com)
• TED 2011: Junk Food Algorithms and the World They Feed Us (wired.com)
• Gatekeepers Make a Lot of Sense (pravdam.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Have you ever asked yourself if why your employer is not really able to motivate you to love your work? One of the reasons why people are motivated doing what they do is because they see a purpose in their work. This fact you already see in “Maslov’s Hierarchy of Needs“. The following video demonstrates the surprising truth about what drives our motivation.

(via Facebook: Georg Kompacher)

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• The Psychology of Business (zachary-quinto.com)
• The Way We Live Now: Living to Be a Parent (nytimes.com)
• Top Ten Management on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs Theory: An Overview of How Different Needs Motivate Us Differently (bizcovering.com)

(via crowdspring and mashable)

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Image via Wikipedia

Mashable has just published a post titled “Nobody Can Stop Facebook Because Nobody Understands Facebook“. There is an interesting sentence in this post:

Have the nuances of online privacy become so complex that they’re beyond the comprehension of mere mortals? I’m not saying that Facebook has any intent to cause confusion, but the complexities of the open vs closed debate and the prescriptive vs descriptive nature of the “everybody” setting effectively act to shut down public discourse.

I agree that it has not become easier to control privacy specially in the scope of Facebook. I do not really know what data which I publish on Facebook stays there, do you know? Actually when posting on Facebook I keep in mind that everything that I provide is for anybody to use. This you should also keep in mind when you act on Facebook.

Other interesting articles:

• Facebook Personalizes the Web with Open Graph (michaelfertik.com)
• How to Restore Your Privacy on Facebook (e1evation.com)
• What data does Facebook publish about you? (boingboing.net)
• Facebook privacy hole ‘lets you see where strangers plan to go’ (Charles Arthur/Guardian) (techmeme.com)
• More Facebook Privacy Concerns (lockergnome.com)

Here is the interview of Zuckerberg:

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(via Cloudera)

Five years from now the internet will be dominated by Chinese-language content.

Today’s teenagers are the model of how the web will work in five years – they jump from app to app to app seamlessly.

Five years is a factor of ten in Moore’s Law, meaning that computers will be capable of far more by that time than they are today.

Within five years there will be broadband well above 100MB in performance – and distribution distinctions between TV, radio and the web will go away.

“We’re starting to make significant money off of Youtube”, content will move towards more video.

“Real time information is just as valuable as all the other information, we want it included in our search results.”

There are many companies beyond Twitter and Facebook doing real time.

“We can index real-time info now – but how do we rank it?”

It’s because of this fundamental shift towards user-generated information that people will listen more to other people than to traditional sources. Learning how to rank that “is the great challenge of the age.” Schmidt believes Google can solve that problem.

Chinese-language content, no differences between distribution channels and real time information are some very interesting topics which I really have to dive in. If you feel interested then have a look at the video of the interview:

(via ReadWriteWeb)

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Google Grippe-Trends (Google Flu Trends) ist nun auch in Österreich verfügbar. Auf der extra dafür eingerichteten Website kann man den derzeitigen Verlauf der Grippewelle in Österreich, sowie in viele anderen Staaten verfolgen.

Google bietet auch die Möglichkeit, die zugrunde liegenden Daten für eigene Zwecke herunterzuladen. Für jeden, der sich dafür interessiert, wie das Prinzip dahinter genau funktioniert verweise ich hier auf einen Artikel von Google (Detecting influenza epidemics using search engine query data), der in der Zeitschrift “Nature” veröffentlicht wurde. Der Artikel steht auch als PDF Dokument zur Verfügung. Weitere Informationen zu diesem Thema können auch direkt bei Google bezogen werden.

(via blogdrauf.de)

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