WAIL in Electron,

Google doesn’t use the facebook API to scrape facebook; they just scrape it.

This fall, my colleagues and I released gobo.social, a customizable news aggregator. Gobo presents you with posts from your friends, but also gives you a set of sliders that govern what news you see and what’s hidden from you. Want more serious news, less humor? Move a slider. Need to hear more female voices? Adjust the gender slider, or press the “mute all men” button for a much quieter internet. Gobo currently includes half a dozen ways to tune your news feed, with more to come.

He sees civil liberties eroding through free services based on user data.

Facebook is an illusion of community that actually erodes community

At the moment, several projects in the space are working to adopt new supplementary protocols, with the intent of building better bridges between one another. The proposed development might end up looking like this:<img class="progressiveMedia-noscript js-progressiveMedia-inner" src="https://via.hypothes.is/im_/https://cdn-images-1.medium.com/max/1600/1*3pEK-Fwq7bNOVcnXfVdNuQ.png">Diaspora at this time has no plans for new protocols, having just significantly upgraded its own. postActiv intends to adopt support for Diaspora federation in a future release. Mastodon just released support for ActivityPub, and Pleroma , Socialhome and GNU Social are thinking of adopting it. Nextcloud is also notably getting into the federation space, and Hubzilla and Friendica will likely both support the ActivityPub protocol as extensions.

For the past 100 years we have been chasing visions of data with a singular passion. Many of the best minds of each new generation have devoted themselves to delivering on the inspired data science promises of their day: intelligence testing, building the computer, cracking the genetic code, creating the internet, and now this. We have in the course of a single century built an entire society, economy and culture that runs on information. Yet we have hardly begun to engineer data ethics appropriate for our extraordinary information carnival. If we do not do so soon, data will drive democracy, and we may well lose our chance to do anything about it.

"Practically and emotionally, leaving Facebook feels like you’re leaving the internet. Worse, it feels like you’re leaving the world, unplugging from friends, news, and the daily stimulus that drives your day."

“If we just reward content based on raw clicks and engagement, we might actually see content that is increasingly sensationalist, clickbaity, polarizing, and divisive,” she says. A social network that rewards only clicks, not subscriptions, is like a dating service that encourages one-night stands but not marriages.

“Social networks enable malicious actors to operate at platform scale, because they were designed for fast information flows and virality,”

Zuckerberg’s conference room (called the Aquarium) and Sandberg’s (called Only Good News)

Simultaneously, authority over the algorithm shifted to a team of engineers based in Seattle. Very quickly the module started to surface lies and fiction.

“We traced the creation of the Facebook accounts to IP addresses at the Apple store a block away from the MySpace offices in Santa Monica,”

If Facebook didn’t start offering a better deal to the publishing industry, Thomson and Murdoch conveyed in stark terms, Zuckerberg could expect News Corp executives to become much more public in their denunciations and much more open in their lobbying.

whether News Feed should be modified to better deal with some of the most complex issues facing the product. Does it favor posts that make people angry? Does it favor simple or even false ideas over complex and true ones?

As often happens when outsiders meet with Facebook, people used the time to try to figure out how they could get more followers for their own pages.

Facebook decided, too, that it had to extend an olive branch to the entire American right wing, much of which was raging about the company’s supposed perfidy.

But it’s hard to argue that this wasn’t an editorial decision. It may be one of the biggest ever made.

Facebook has long seemed to think it has immunity from those debates because it is just a technology company—one that has built a “platform for all ideas.”

When new recruits come in, they are treated to an orientation lecture by Chris Cox, the company’s chief product officer, who tells them Facebook is an entirely new communications platform for the 21st century, as the telephone was for the 20th. But if anyone inside Facebook is unconvinced by religion, there is also Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act to recommend the idea.

Starting Tuesday, any time someone uploads a photo that includes what Facebook thinks is your face, you’ll be notified even if you weren’t tagged.

Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. These big five American vertically organized silos are re-making the world in their image.

Political and interest-based advertising should be under much stricter scrutiny than, say, the advertising of T-shirts or hair products.

It’s very difficult, and in many cases impossible, for researchers to independently look at behavior on the platform.

filter

Facebook could also offer an optional filter that would keep any post (or share) of an unverified account from showing up. I’d use that filter.

countering misinformation, hate speech and propaganda — can take is to abandon the focus on emotional signaling-as-engagement.

As they stand, and especially with algorithmic reinforcement, “reactions” and “likes” are like megaphones for echo chambers and news outrage.

Perhaps a future with great user experience in AR, VR, hands-free commerce and knowledge sharing could evoke an optimistic perspective for what these tech giants are building. But 25 years of the Web has gotten us used to foundational freedoms that we take for granted. We forget how useful it has been to remain anonymous and control what we share, or how easy it was to start an internet startup with its own independent servers operating with the same rights GOOG servers have. On the Trinet, if you are permanently banned from GOOG or FB, you would have no alternative.

The internet will survive longer than the Web will. GOOG-FB-AMZN will still depend on submarine internet cables (the “Backbone”), because it is a technical success. That said, many aspects of the internet will lose their relevance, and the underlying infrastructure could be optimized only for GOOG traffic, FB traffic, and AMZN traffic. It wouldn’t conceptually be anymore a “network of networks”, but just a “network of three networks”, the Trinet, if you will.

What has changed over the last 4 years is market share of traffic on the Web. It looks like nothing has changed, but GOOG and FB now have direct influence over 70%+ of internet traffic. Mobile internet traffic is now the majority of traffic worldwide and in Latin America alone, GOOG and FB services have had 60% of mobile traffic in 2015, growing to 70% by the end of 2016.

It should also greatly increase the human oversight of ad targeting systems — specifically, oversee algorithmically generated categories (rather than basing them solely on user-inputted interests). Political and interest-based advertising should be under much stricter scrutiny than, say, the advertising of T-shirts or hair products.

Facebook should allow users to sort their news feed chronologically by default on all platforms, rather than rely on an algorithmically sorted News Feed.

It would be interesting if Facebook offered a “vintage Facebook” setting that users could toggle to, without News Feed ads and “like” buttons.

The key is for Facebook to be upfront about technical challenges, open about its mistakes and willing to answer the tough questions honestly. If it does that, it will continue to earn the public’s trust.

Companies would need additional levels of verification, and should have a label and scrutiny different from those of people. (Whistle-blowers and dissidents might need to use a different platform.)

What if there were a “trust emoji”? Or respect-based emojis?

keep us addicted to the social network.

At Reddit, I was able to effect positive, lasting change (at least according to this research) to content quality and interaction quality by building a diverse executive team.

“two masters” dilemma,

Instead of measuring clicks and likes, what if Facebook optimized for how much value an article or video or game gave us weeks or months afterward?

Worthy, beautiful goals, but easier said than done when Facebook is also stuck delivering ever-increasing profits and making its platform serve the needs of advertisers.

The single most important thing Facebook must do is come clean. Tell us what you know. Tell us what you know but can’t share. Tell us what you don’t know. And tell us what you don’t know that you don’t know

six degrees of separation

connected teenagers  had decreased feelings of well-being. T

Google in my experience knows that there are ambiguities, moral doubts, around some of what they do, and at least they try to think about it. Facebook just doesn’t care. When you’re in a room with them you can tell. They’re’ – he took a moment to find the right word – ‘scuzzy’.

So Facebook knows your phone ID and can add it to your Facebook ID. It puts that together with the rest of your online activity: not just every site you’ve ever visited, but every click you’ve ever made – the Facebook button tracks every Facebook user, whether they click on it or not. Since the Facebook button is pretty much ubiquitous on the net, this means that Facebook sees you, everywhere. Now, thanks to its partnerships with the old-school credit firms, Facebook knew who everybody was, where they lived, and everything they’d ever bought with plastic in a real-world offline shop.[4]​4 All this information is used for a purpose which is, in the final analysis, profoundly bathetic. It is to sell you things via online ads.The ads work on two models. In one of them, advertisers ask Facebook to target consumers from a particular demographic – our thirty-something bourbon-drinking country music fan, or our African American in Philadelphia who was lukewarm about Hillary. But Facebook also delivers ads via a process of online auctions, which happen in real time whenever you click on a website. Because every website you’ve ever visited (more or less) has planted a cookie on your web browser, when you go to a new site, there is a real-time auction, in millionths of a second, to decide what your eyeballs are worth and what ads should be served to them, based on what your interests, and income level and whatnot, are known to be. This is the reason ads have that disconcerting tendency to follow you around, so that you look at a new telly or a pair of shoes or a holiday destination, and they’re still turning up on every site you visit weeks later. This was how, by chucking talent and resources at the problem, Facebook was able to turn mobile from a potential revenue disaster to a great hot steamy geyser of profit.

Note that the company’s knowledge about its users isn’t used merely to target ads but to shape the flow of news to them.

What Facebook does is watch you, and then use what it knows about you and your behaviour to sell ads. I’m not sure there has ever been a more complete disconnect between what a company says it does – ‘connect’, ‘build communities’ – and the commercial reality.

Particular segments of voters too can be targeted with complete precision. One instance from 2016 was an anti-Clinton ad repeating a notorious speech she made in 1996 on the subject of ‘super-predators’. The ad was sent to African-American voters in areas where the Republicans were trying, successfully as it turned out, to suppress the Democrat vote. Nobody else saw the ads.

Nothing influences people more than a recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.

A version of Gresham’s law is at work, in which fake news, which gets more clicks and is free to produce, drives out real news, which often tells people things they don’t want to hear, and is expensive to produce.

The mission to ‘connect’ turns out to mean, in practice, connect with people who agree with you. We can’t prove just how dangerous these ‘filter bubbles’ are to our societies, but it seems clear that they are having a severe impact on our increasingly fragmented polity. Our conception of ‘we’ is becoming narrower.

No human enterprise, no new technology or utility or service, has ever been adopted so widely so quickly.

Google and Facebook lobbyists try to stop new online privacy protections

Inside Facebook's plan to eat another $350 billion IT market

How do we reassert humanity’s moral compass over these alien algorithms? We may need to develop a version of Isaac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics” for algorithms.

Recently, Facebook tried to introduce Beacon, a program that would broadcast particular purchases on a user's news feed. This kind of covert advertising, what Ari Melber calls "social advertising," was soundly rejected by users (22). While the messages were touted as innocent recommendations, in actuality they served up commodification and commercialism at the expense of homemaking. By analogy, consider the effect of inhabiting a house with a subclause, more or less unbeknown to you, that allows marketers to publish your purchases as endorsements.

The digital social networks that have quickly become ubiquitous have made visiblemany of the patterns underlying existing academic personal and professional relationships,and the ways in which reputation and reliability circulate in these structures. Social andintellectual networks have long constituted the professional contexts of scholars, but digi-tal networks representing some subset of those contexts have exposed more of what takesplace at the margins of those networks.

Marketers would prefer to have their own predictive marketing platforms, helping them collect and activate their own proprietary data. Enterprise technology companies want that future as well. They want to be the ones to sell and provision those tech platforms, integrating and packaging them with all of the other systems they sell into the enterprise, from CRM to call center management to finance and sales force automation. Quite naturally, they worry that it will be easier for Google and Facebook to add their own CRM and related systems than it will be for them to replicate Google and Facebook’s digital marketing system.Agencies? They just want to keep themselves in the middle. Whether as consultants, media brokers, system integrators or owners of syndicated data, agencies just want to stay relevant and find ways to reverse their declining margins.

Meta, with the stated intent of making the “AI-powered research search engine…free to all in a few months after enhancing the product.”

Facebook has built its neural net so it will work on the phone itself.

“Facebook today cannot exist without AI. Every time you use Facebook or Instagram or Messenger, you may not realize it, but your experiences are being powered by AI.”

And Now IBM Has Havyn

The ubiquitous social network not only allows advertisers to target users by their interests or background, it also gives advertisers the ability to exclude specific groups it calls “Ethnic Affinities.”

Maybe Rethink the Cult of Virality?

Banning Ads Is Nice, but the Problem Is Facebook’s Underlying Model

Minimum Image Size The minimum image size is 200 x 200 pixels. If you try to use an image smaller than this you will see an error in the Sharing Debugger.

student-directed learning system

“He Put Garlic In His Shoes Before Going To Bed And What Happens Next Is Hard To Believe”

So its really 1894 to 2100- correct -without the Supers. She didnt cross the threshold, the author needs to be corrected.

Here’s a presentation at the 2013 Personal Democracy Forum that provides a little more context for our project.

He realised that if Internet.org took hold in India, Facebook would be the gatekeeper to the web for hundreds of millions who had no idea what the internet was, or what it could do for them.

He assured the children inside, and the villagers outside, that their connectivity problems would be fixed before his next visit.

It feels like a carefully crafted downtown, full of many different things but where building codes have enforced a standardization of design.

Telegram's server-side software is closed-source and proprietary. Pavel Durov has said that it would require a major architectural redesign of the server-side software to connect independent servers to the Telegram cloud.[50]

I'm talking about optimizing the economy for the velocity of money rather than for the conversion of money into capital. It's going from a growth model to a flow model. Why are we, for instance, taxing capital gains at almost nothing but taxing dividends and earnings so high? That's a tax policy that is meant to favor the extraction of capital and to punish the exchange of things.

No molestarás, intimidarás ni acosarás a ningún usuario.

RCTActionSheetManager.h

Yet ad-based financing means that the companies have an interest in manipulating our attention on behalf of advertisers, instead of letting us connect as we wish. Many users think their feed shows everything that their friends post.

another layer not controlled by the content owners

The West End farmer's Market was THE place to be on Easter well, is the place to be every Sunday for that matter. Swing by

A client-side Javascript SDK for authenticating with OAuth2 (and OAuth1 with a oauth proxy) web services and querying their REST API's. HelloJS standardizes paths and responses to common API's like Google Data Services, Facebook Graph and Windows Live Connect. It's modular, so that list is growing. No more spaghetti code!

Java, RestFB and Facebook authentication

socialauth

Java Facebook Login with OAuth Authentication