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Even Closed Facebook Groups Aren't Private

Image via CrunchBase

Facebook announced Groups this week to "make it easier to share things with a small group of friends." After all, it is great to connect with co-workers, industry contacts and family members on Facebook, but each social network is different--my mom doesn't care about this new Android phone and my boss doesn't need to know about my sister's dog in Australia. Facebook Groups go a long way toward solving this problem. Just don't kid yourself that Groups makes sharing on Facebook any more private or secure.

Read more on PCMag.com

Ditch Mobile Apps, Invest in the Mobile Web

Even as participants at this year's ThinkMobile Conference showed off their latest Apple iPad apps, they expressed a deep exasperation at the effort and cost required to build separate applications for every mobile platform. After all, the iPad is just the latest in a long line of mobile platforms that developers and content providers must support in order to reach new audiences, a range that now includes the iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Badu, Symbian, and, if one feels charitable, Palm's webOS. Meanwhile, everyone I spoke to said that the future was really in mobile Websites based on open Internet standards. So what is the hold up?

ThinkMobile is MediaBistro.com's bi-annual mobile conference, which, in the interest of full-disclosure, is a media partner of the PCMag Digital Network. (The program was also curated by PCMag.com contributing editor, Jamie Lendino.) The idea is to bring leaders in the technology and media spaces together to build better mobile products. Right now, that seems to involve trying to build half-dozen apps for marginal platforms and hoping a unified mobile Web eventually takes hold.

Read the full column on PCMag.com....

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Old Spice, Fast Company, and the Fallacy of Social Influence

The last few weeks saw two attempts to game the messy business that is social media influence: one by forward-thinking business magazine, Fast Company, and the other by a venerable packaged goods manufacturer, Proctor & Gamble. As a regular reader and fan of Fast Company, it's clear that the magazine should have the upper hand in this. Unfortunately, its Influence Project comes across as literal, artificial, and self-serving. P&G's Old Spice commercial, other hand, seems certain to become a landmark in interactive advertising. All because the Old Spice Guy brought the funny.

Read the rest of this column at PCMag.com...

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Facebook: Privacy Enemy Number One?

Facebook's notable announcements this week range from a holistic vision of a seamless, semantically-enabled Web of human relationships, to a simple "Like" button, which will soon be omnipresent on the Internet. The moves are ambitious, giving even fast-moving rivals like Twitter reason to worry. Still, the simple fact that gets lost in the rush towards ubiquitous social connectivity is that Facebook users still don't know what they are sharing, with whom, or why it matters. In short: Facebook remains a privacy minefield.

Read more on PCMag.com

• Facebook Privacy: 8 Ways to Protect Yourself

Confessions of a Foursquare Junkie

My job pretty much guarantees my status as an early-adopter of new technologies, but I am relatively new to the Foursquare phenomenon that is sweeping digerati circles. In part, that's because the app was just released on the Palm Pre a few weeks ago, and unless you can use it on your phone, Foursquare is pretty useless. Now that I have it, I fell into the predictable pattern I follow with all new technologies: curious discovery, frantic addiction, and finally the desperate search for some intrinsic usefulness. This is usually when a wearied cynicism sets in, along with a deep regret for all the time I have wasted on another useless technological distraction. Not this time, though. As the numerous announcements at Mobile World Congress this week confirm, the mad dash to deliver location-based services is just beginning. Continue reading...

Google Buzz: More Social Clutter or Less?

Just about the only surprising thing about the Google Buzz launch this week was the name. (I could have sworn "Buzz" was already taken.) No, Google knows we are all spending a huge amount of time using social networking applications and that we are using them for everything from sharing baby pictures to making sales contacts. If Google wants to stay in the business of selling our eyeballs (i.e. advertising), it has to keep us on their sites. The surprising thing for me is that Google genuinely believes Buzz will make social networking simpler. Not bloody likely. Continue reading...