Report: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Believe In Privacy | Epicenter�| Wired.com

Dr Media here to comment on this "earthshaking" news. Listen why would he care about privacy, ask yourselves. The more interesting question is do people who use Facebook care about privacy, or does Zuckerberg simply mirror, and profit from, their disdain or lack of understanding of the need for privacy. Is it possible that the evolution of the web has lead to a different standard and definition of privacy in the minds of the inhabitants of planet facebook. Clearly the F8 deals are an attempt to make Facebook into a TV network without out programming.

The programming is US, what a great deal, advertisers get to advertise you to yourself and get paid for it. Facebook becomes the network providing the platform for Madison ave to sell stuff, and its stuff you said you were interested in when you posted something to Uncle Phil about his Ford Mustang, or whatever, your favorite wine, weed, shorts, vidgame, etc.

This is the equivalent of having your own personalized billboards along side your own virtual highway through cyberspace.

Burma Shave!

Report: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Believe In Privacy | Epicenter�| Wired.com

Report: Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Doesn’t Believe In Privacy

• By Eliot Van Buskirk
• April 28, 2010 |
• 1:47 pm |
• Categories: People, Social Media

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears to have been outed as not caring one whit about your privacy — a jarring admission, considering how much of our personal data Facebook owns, not to mention its plans to become the web’s central repository for our preferences and predilections.

Also interesting is how this came about: Not in a proper article, but in a tweet by Nick Bilton, lead technology blogger for the The New York Times‘ Bits Blog, based on a conversation he says was “off the record” and which he may have confused with “not for attribution.”

“Off record chat w/ Facebook employee,” begins Bilton’s fateful tweet. “Me: How does Zuck feel about privacy? Response: [laughter] He doesn’t believe in it.”

Ouch.

Zuckerberg’s apparent disregard for your privacy is probably not reason enough to delete your Facebook account. But we wouldn’t recommend posting anything there that you wouldn’t want marketers, legal authorities, governments (or your mother) to see, especially as Facebook continues to push more and more of users’ information public and even into the hands of other companies, leaving the onus on users to figure out itsRubik’s Cube-esque privacy controls.

Facebook has been on a relentless request over the past six months to become the center of identity and connections online. The site unilaterally decided last December that much of a user’s profile information, including the names of all their friends and the things they were “fans” of, would be public information — no exceptions or opt-outs allowed.

Zuckerberg defended the change — largely intended to keep up with the publicness of Twitter, saying that people’s notions of privacy were changing. He took no responsibility for being the one to drag many Facebook users into the net’s public sphere.

Then last week at its f8 conference, Facebook announced it was sending user profile information in bulk to companies like Yelp, Pandora and Microsoft. Thus, when users show up at those sites while logged in to Facebook, they see personalized versions of the those services (unless the user opts out of each site, somewhere deep in the bowels of Facebook’s privacy control center). On Tuesday, four Senators asked the company to only push data to third-parties if users agree to it, a so-called “opt-in” that social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz eschew since it radically cuts down on participation and thus revenues.

Facebook is also pushing a “Like” button, which lets sites put little Facebook buttons on anything from blog entries to T-shirts in web stores.

Clicking that button sends that information to Facebook, which publishes it as part of what it calls the Open Graph, linking your identity to things you choose online. That information, in turn, is shared with whatever sites Facebook chooses to share it with — and to the sites you’ve allowed to access your profile.

It’s an ambitious attempt to rewrite the web as a socially linked network. But many see Facebook’s move as trying to colonize the rest of the web, and keep all this valuable information in its data silos, in order to become a force on the web that rivals Google.

So it’s no laughing matter that the head of Facebook appears not to care about privacy. (We asked Facebook to clarify Zuckerberg’s privacy stance but have yet to hear back.)

For his part, Bilton fired off a number of salvos defending his understanding of the the ground rules which governed the conversation he had. “‘Off record’ means there is no attribution to who it is but conversation can be used in story. ‘On background’ means I can not repeat it,” wrote Bilton. He took over the Times‘ technology blog in the last few months, after a long stint working with its technology-development team.

Unfortunately, he’s wrong about the definitions.

“‘Off the record’ restricts the reporter from using the information the source is about to deliver,” reads NYU’s Journalism Handbook, in one definition of the phrase. “If the reporter can confirm the information with another source who doesn’t insist on speaking off the record (whether that means he agreed to talking on the record, on background, or not for attribution), he can publish it.” “On background” usually means that information can be used, but can’t be attributed to a specific person.

Bilton later responded to our request for clarification, saying, “My source said it was OK to quote them, just not say who they are.” So apparently, this Facebook employee wanted this information to get out, for whatever reason.

Now, the die has been cast: The world knows that a Facebook employee thinks his CEO “doesn’t believe in” privacy, which should scare the bejesus out of anyone with a Facebook account — and that encompasses just about everyone reading this now.

See Also:

Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/04/report-facebook-ceo-mark-zuckerberg-doesnt-believe-in-privacy/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29#ixzz0mR62JFg7

Hi Gang,This article is about how 75% of all on line are engaged in the social network, which means as,i have said in this space before, that people want to connect with one another about things that they consider relevant to them, regardless of how venal it might appear to others. Couple this data with the F8 announcement by Facebook,

and now we're talking Facenet, F8 means that all choices which are tagged, or can be tagged can be related to targeted ads that related to your interests as revealed in your conversations with your friends and your choices. We are all working for Facebook for free to provide data to their partners, nice move.

Social Media Use Becomes Pervasive

Social Media Use Becomes Pervasive

April 15, 2010

- Brian Morrissey, Adweek

New research shows that social media use has become a regular habit for three quarters of the online population.


In a survey of 1,700 U.S. Internet users, Nielsen Online found that 73 percent engaged in social media at least once per week. Engagement was defined as reading a blog, visiting a social network or reading (and/or commenting on) a message board. The research pegs the total U.S. social media audience at 127 million.


The Nielsen study, commissioned by women-focused blog network BlogHer and NBCU's iVillage, found that Facebook is becoming a major attraction for a broad swathe of the population, rivaling the reach of traditional media channels. Of the online population, 47 percent visit Facebook daily, according to Nielsen, nearly rivaling the 55 percent that watch TV. Facebook daily use easily beats out other traditional media like radio (37 percent) and newspapers (22 percent).


In fact, social gaming is a daily habit for a huge number of people.


According to Nielsen's survey, 32.7 million people play social games daily. That is equal to newspaper readership and more than double the readership of magazines in the sample. Social games are polarizing, however, as over 50 percent said they never play them.


For all its buzz, Nielsen found Twitter is still a niche activity for all but a small segment of the online population. Yesterday at its developer conference, Twitter boasted 105 million registered users. According to Nielsen, just 11.4 million (6 percent) use it daily.


BlogHer and iVillage commissioned the research to determine the role of social media in the lives of women versus the general population. It found little differences between the sexes when it comes to social media adoption, with women slightly more likely to tweet and blog while men overindex for watching videos.


Blog reading remains a niche activity for online users, with just 11 percent saying they read them daily. It trailed message board readers (17 percent). BlogHer's audience, naturally, is more inclined to visiting blogs as a habit, with 77 percent reading them daily and 96 percent weekly. The BlogHer audience sample also identified blogs as trailing only search among ad-supported media in purchasing decisions.


BlogHer COO Elisa Camahort said the popularity of social networking is not stealing time and attention from blogs.


"It's like any media progress we've had," she said. "Nothing is killing the other media source. Blogs are still where substantive conversations are happening. It's not on Facebook."

Hi Gang, well now here we have something very interesting . Not that we care what happens to the photo print industry, yet another example of a disrupted industry looking for a home.

No Dr. Media says, whats interesting is how people are choosing to share their intimate photos of their families and other personal things with each other, thats the real message of this piece of data.

Think about it, who do you share your photos with, which photos, how do you decide which ones to which people. Do you show those photos of that cute new office mate to your girlfriend, boyfriend , whatever. How about your parents, friends from work, college, etc., As you reflect upon this, imagine that everyone does this sort of editing . Now when you had prints only you could know, but now, that pic you sent to Sherrie just might end up somewhere you didn't want it to go, oops!

Now how about those photos getting into hands you don't ant them in, agencies, enemies, employers, personnel officers,etc. People and attitudes change, photos don't.

Dr Media says watch this space, folks will start changing how they share things, and with whom.

The technology changes,human emotions, not so easily.

Photo sites see growth through social media

Photo sites see growth through social media

Benny Evangelista, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, April 10, 2010

When Snapfish Inc. launched its Web site 10 years ago, the company was hardly the first online photo service. In fact, the San Francisco firm was behind 126 competitors.
"Almost all of them are out of business," said Snapfish General Manager Ben Nelson. "Zing and PhotoPoint were the leaders at the time. They were considered the 800-pound gorillas."
Today, the Hewlett-Packard subsidiary celebrates its 10th anniversary and finds itself among the leaders in its field, with fellow dot-com survivors Shutterfly Inc. of Redwood City, and Ofoto, which is now Kodak Gallery in Emeryville.
But now, there's a new 800-pound gorilla - the growing consumer trend of sharing photos not by printing, but through sites like Facebook, Twitter and Flickr.
Facebook says its 400 million members upload more than 3 billion photos every month. And a recent report by IDC Research forecast that more than 124 billion photos will be shared through social networks by 2013.
Moreover, IDC says the number of photos printed by that year will dip to 42 billion, about one-third fewer than the 63 billion pictures printed commercially or at home in 2008.
But just as they evolved while consumers made the transition from film to digital cameras, services like Snapfish that depend on printed photos for revenue are adapting with the times by emphasizing there's more to the picture than printing a 4-by-6 glossy.
"Shutterfly, Snapfish and Kodak Gallery are making worthy efforts to change their value proposition to consumers," said Augie Ray, senior social computing analyst for Forrester Research Inc.
"These sites used to be about the cheapest prints," he said. "Now, they're about bound photo books, wall art and keepsake boxes. By changing up the way people think of printing photos, these sites hope to offer something people can't get on Facebook."
In fact, Shutterfly CEO Jeffrey Housenbold said his company, boosted by growing photo book and calendar segments, saw record revenue and profits in the fourth quarter of 2009.
"We think we're part of that social media phenomenon," Housenbold said.
Shutterfly, which remains an independent, publicly traded firm, and Ofoto, bought by the Eastman Kodak Co. in 2001, both launched Dec. 13, 1999, in Berkeley. By the time Snapfish launched, it was already playing catch-up and employees were just happy to make incremental steps "up the chain," Nelson said.

uge changes

Back then, most customers were still accustomed to bringing exposed film rolls into a store to be developed and getting back all 24 or 36 shots as printed snapshots. So online photo services like Snapfish had to persuade those photographers to mail the film in for processing and printing.
"It wasn't until the holiday season of 2002 when digital revenue overtook film for us," Nelson said. Palo Alto's Hewlett-Packard, which also depends on one of its primary products, printers, for revenue, acquired Snapfish on April 14, 2005.
Today, only a tiny fraction of customers' still mail film for developing, he said.
When consumers embraced digital cameras, they were also freed to take as many shots as they wanted without worrying about wasting costly film, so the nature of sharing those photos changed. And the combined rise of social media and mobile devices made it easy to instantly share photos by uploading them to Facebook or through Twitter links to services like TwitPic.
"Today, between hard drives, memory cards and online sharing and storing, the need to print is decreased," Ray said. "If you print photos, you can only share them one at a time in real-time, whereas by uploading photos to Facebook, you can share them with all your friends and enjoy a discussion that can occur over days and weeks."
Although only about 15 percent of photos are printed into 4-by-6 snapshots, consumers are printing more photo books, personalized cards and stationery, which have more lucrative profit margins for online photo services, yet remain an untapped market, Housenbold said. He also said Shutterfly members are creating 15,000 to 25,000 new "Share Sites" each week to share online photo albums of events such as weddings.

emand still strong

Nelson said Snapfish has seen a 500 percent growth in prints and 700 percent increase in photo merchandise since 2005, when the social networking era began to take off. Snapfish, which has processed 10 billion prints in its decade in business, has a partnership with Yahoo Inc.'s Flickr, while Snapfish members can also share their albums through Facebook.
For its anniversary, Snapfish is rolling out a new program to help customers make money from photos or graphic designs used on personalized greeting cards, mugs or other products. The program is similar to the way professional designers and publishers pay for hobbyists' photos or graphics posted on sites like Flickr or iStockphoto.com.
This month Facebook made a move to beef up its photo-sharing activities by acquiring Divvyshot, a San Francisco startup with technology to group high-resolution photos of one event that are uploaded from multiple users.

rowth expected

Still, Chris Chute, manager of digital imaging research for IDC, said he doesn't believe Facebook will "cannibalize" profits from photo printing firms. He forecasts the market for creative products like photo books to continue growing.
"The only cannibalistic scenario is if people stop printing at all, and I don't think that's going to happen," Chute said. "I see a multilayered future rather than a zero sum game."

E-mail Benny Evangelista at bevangelista@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/04/10/BUJV1CRD6O.DTL

Action, Attitude Might Help Prince of Persia Break Game-Movie Curse | GameLife | Wired.com

Hi Kids, here we go, good cast, good star, good director, challenge, is it a good script with a compelling story. Well past evidence is that Hollywood thinks Gamers will just show up to see their favorite heroes in the flesh. They don't understand the embedded mythological story of the vidgame , versus the mythopoetic vision of the film experience. These are related but appeal to different aspects of the Self. Is there a difference between play , book, and film, of course, well then why not movie and vidgame. Lets see if Newell an experienced director can merge the mediums enough to get the gamers.

Dr. Media

A Prince With Humble Origins

Long before Jake Gyllenhaal took on the role, the first Prince of Persia was Jordan Mechner’s brother David.

“I was right out of college, spending a summer at home,” Mechner says. “I had an Apple II, so I took my brother out into the parking lot of our old high school and made him run, jump and climb, and that video was the basis for the game.”

The date was Oct. 20, 1985. We know this because the 21-year-old Mechner kept an astonishingly comprehensive journal, which he has since posted online. While he was still an undergraduate at Yale, Mechner was already earning royalties off a best-selling action game that he had created, called Karateka. He wanted his next game to have the same essential story elements — a youthful hero, a princess in danger, an evil lord — but on a grander scale, like a “Disney movie,” as he wrote at the time.

Nearly four years later, the original Prince of Persia game was released for the Apple II. Mechner’s rotoscoped animation, based on his brother’s acrobatics, was smoother and more lifelike than anything gamers had experienced before. The 1989 game became a smash hit, ported to nearly every operating system and game console at the time. And Mechner began pitching the idea of a Prince of Persia feature film.

The idea didn’t gain traction at first, and the series faded from the limelight after a failed attempt to translate the gameplay into 3-D. But in 2003, Mechner worked with Ubisoft to bring the series back to life with the critically acclaimed Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The success of this new game was key, he would say later, to getting Disney and producer Bruckheimer excited about the idea of a film.

Bruckheimer’s production company hired Mechner to write the screenplay, keeping the series’ creator intimately involved with the making of the film. (Three other scribes share writing credits on the final version of the script.)

Mechner “came up with a good story and worked really hard on it,” says Bruckheimer.

Years later, Mechner arrived in Ouarzazate, in the deserts of Morocco, where the movie was being filmed. “I saw hundreds of extras and camels and horses out on a ridge, and realized that all these thousands of people had come to the desert in August because of this little Apple II game that I made 20 years ago,” he says.

Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time game during lunch breaks while shooting the film, coming up with new ideas for his performance.
Photo: James Merithew/Wired.com" title="_mg_9199" width="660" height="440" class="size-full wp-image-22650" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; ">

Jake Gyllenhaal played the Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time game during lunch breaks while shooting the film, coming up with new ideas for his performance.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Prince of Parkour

The videogame movie curse isn’t lost on the star of Prince of Persia.

“The risk of trying to do a videogame movie well is intriguing,” says Jake Gyllenhaal.

In his San Francisco hotel suite overlooking the Moscone Center where WonderCon takes place, the Brokeback Mountain star perches on a window ledge and ruminates about his time in the desert.

“There are movies and genres of movies that are made over and over again that are guaranteed to be somewhat successful, that people are going to see them. Whereas with videogames, there’s a lot of resistance because people are so intimately involved. There have been so many failures that I think people are putting them off to the side and saying, that’s not possible,” he says.

To prepare for his role as the prince, Gyllenhaal built muscle mass and learned parkour, the French sport of running, jumping and negotiating obstacles that’s about as close to being in a videogame as you can get in the real world. But he also spent a good deal of time playing Sands of Time, focusing on the main character.

“What I liked about him is that he had this attitude in the game,” Gyllenhall says. “Not that he was a complainer, but he never really liked to fall. It was always a pain in the ass for him. If he got cut, he’d be like, ‘Argh, God!’ The fact that he put that spin on it: ‘Really? You just cut my fuckin’ arm off?’ I like that attitude. Eye-rolling when something doesn’t go your way, but not in an obnoxious way.”

In the film, as in the game, the prince comes across the Dagger of Time, which allows him to control the flow of time. He has to work together with Princess Tamina (played by Gemma Arterton) to gain control of the all-powerful Sands of Time.

“In the games, you have the prince fighting with the woman, and you have this natural sense of romance,” he says. “Both are always abrasive with each other, which is in the movie. That tit-for-tat, she’s-a-bad-ass-and-he-can’t-deal-with-it, that sexual tension is the same.”

But mostly, Gyllenhaal was playing the game to get inspiration for the many stunts he performs: The Sands of Time movie is filled with gamelike moments like wall climbing and high-flying jumps.

“When I was in the middle of shooting at lunchtime, I’d play that game, figure out the moves that he could do and try to incorporate them into the stunts that we were doing,” he says. “I would bring the stunt guys into the trailer and be like, ‘Can we do this? Can we pull this off?’ And they’d be like, ‘Yeah, we could try it.’ And then like a week-and-a-half later, I’d be up on a harness, and be like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ And they’d be like, ‘You asked, man!’”

Gyllenhaal performed many of the stunts himself, which he says caused no end of distress to the people around him.

“Whenever there wasn’t a wire, they were very worried,” he says. “Not that I wouldn’t make it, but the landing is scary.” The “father of parkour,” David Belle, was on hand to work with Gyllenhaal.

Although Bruckheimer says that Gyllenhaal’s eagerness to perform daring feats made the editing process much easier, he was careful to not let him go too far. “I didn’t want him to get hurt,” Bruckheimer says. “You have an actor who is very physical and does a terrific job, but he’s still got to come back to work the next day. A stuntman, unfortunately, if he gets hurt, you can put another one in there. But you can’t replace Jake.”

Prince of Persia director Mike Newell knows all about pleasing fans of a franchise. He's the director of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Photo: James Merithew/Wired.com" title="_mg_9228" width="660" height="440" class="size-full wp-image-22655" style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; padding-top: 0px; padding-right: 0px; padding-bottom: 0px; padding-left: 0px; border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-bottom-style: none; border-left-style: none; ">

Prince of Persia director Mike Newell knows all about pleasing fans of a franchise. He's the director of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Photo: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

Character Drama

“The little guy in the game is not really a character,” says director Mike Newell. “He’s got to be made a character for the feature.”

The director of Prince of Persia is not a gamer, as illustrated by the fact that he is a member of the dwindling group of people who still refer to videogame protagonists as “the little man on the screen.” But the 68-year-old director of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire knows something about living up to the expectations of millions of hard-core fans, without sacrificing the integrity of the final product.

“What I did with the Harry Potter is I chucked out about two-fifths of it. I didn’t do whole swaths of it,” he says. Warner Bros. was mulling the idea of splitting the mammoth book up into two movies, but Newell says he knew that the story was only enough for a single, shortened, film.

“I felt easier in some senses with [Persia] than I did with Harry,” Newell says. “The character in the game was much, much less fleshed out. In Potter, it was a straight translation from novel to screen. With Prince of Persia you had to make it absolutely new because you weren’t going to put that little kind of action-man character on the screen. It would be disastrous if you did. There wouldn’t be enough to support the audience’s interest,” he says.

“You’ve got to do enough action, enough running on walls and falling in the knives and that kind of stuff, but that’s not why you’re making the movie. You’re making the movie because there’s a terrific story, and because the characters are compelling,” he says, rapping the table in front of him for emphasis on that last point: If the characters are weak, nobody will care about all the fancy parkour.

While the film is filled with moments that deliberately recall the high-flying, heart-stopping action that is central to the videogames, it’s Newell’s job to make sure that they come across as real, not campy.

“As soon as there are moments where somebody does something, and turns, as it were, and winks at the camera — gone. You’ve broken all suspension of disbelief,” he says. “There were moments like that, and we vigorously attacked them during shooting. If it creeps in, then you’ve got to cut it out in the edit. You must not have that sort of smartass nudge-wink at the camera.”

If the Prince of Persia movie does turn out well, a great deal of it will be thanks to Jordan Mechner’s passion for games and movies — including classic swashbuckling, Arabian Nights films.

“The Prince of Persia has always been a swashbuckling hero in a tradition that goes back to Indiana Jones, Errol Flynn,” Mechner says. “He’s not just a warrior, he’s an underdog. He fights with a sword but lives by his wits. He’s got a vulnerable quality, and I think Jake really captures that.”

I have just one last question for Mechner: If Sands of Time takes off like a certain series of movies based on a theme-park ride, could a Karateka film be far behind?

“Stay tuned,” he says with a smile.

See Also:

Read More http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/04/prince-of-persia-movie/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+wired%2Findex+%28Wired%3A+Index+3+%28Top+Stories+2%29%29#ixzz0kSlS3eRN

Action, Attitude Might Help Prince of Persia Break Game-Movie Curse | GameLife | Wired.com