Articles about Cloud

This week, Dutch group Forthehack launched PleaseRobMe, a site meant to expose the danger of location-based social networks such as Foursquare, BrightKite, Gowalla, and Google Buzz. Basically, PleaseRobMe says that every time someone posts his location in a location-based social network, that person is publicly announcing that he is not home, which could be taken to mean, no one is home.

To illustrate the point, PleaseRobMe rephrases public Foursquare posts to say, "@Username left home and checked in X minutes ago..." and then presents that person's current map location in a Twitter alert.

Continue reading →

Today, Google Gmail customers are seeing a promised round of software changes whose purpose is to make Google Buzz users more aware of their privacy options, and to give them a more obvious way to back out of Buzz. These changes come a mere nine days after the social networking product's rollout as an element of Gmail, although some have already claimed personal damage, and have already begun legal action.

Before we went to that extreme, Betanews tested the Buzz changes on accounts where Buzz was already set up. There we noticed the promised Buzz tab has been added to Gmail settings, where as we expected, the user is given the option to withdraw the lists of other Buzz users she's following from her public Google profile. This is effectively a copy of the option from Buzz setup that Google only made prominent after its first round of changes at this time last week.

Continue reading →

The office of Canada's Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that she has contacted Google officials by telephone, in an informal inquiry regarding its Google Buzz social networking service. Although Comm. Stoddart's office acknowledges the changes the company has already made, and is continuing to make, since Buzz's rollout last February 9, she says she asked a conference of Google officials why they released Buzz service to Canada without any advance notification to government regulators there.

Stoddart's office has not reported the nature of Google officials' response, or whether they responded at all. The phone call does not appear to be, at least at this point, the full-scale investigation implied by a CBC News report yesterday. But a statement issued by Stoddart's office in response to Betanews' inquiry this morning indicates that she may have told Google that, had they consulted with her first, she might have noticed the potential for privacy issues, enabling them to make changes prior to launch.

Continue reading →

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer closed this morning's preview of Windows Phone 7 Series at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona by saying he wanted to diffuse some of the buzz that would inevitably be generated. This after the company intimated to reporters during last January's CES that Windows Mobile 7 would be introduced this week, then later urging them to issue a correction on the name.

But he left developers in a bit of a quandary, many of whom are now thinking, what do we do now? The Windows Mobile 6 and 6.5 SDKs are still being actively distributed, even though WP7S will run applications through an entirely different model. In the end, the new system may end up being more about the Xbox, Bing, Zune, and Office brands than even Windows, which is represented now almost in name only. Windows Phone 7 Series is not, as Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie once suggested, Windows on a different scale.

Continue reading →

A Google spokesperson confirmed to Betanews this afternoon that a second round of privacy changes, the nature of which was revealed last Saturday evening, is still being developed, and may yet go live "in the next couple of days."

Among those changes will be a more obvious way to turn Buzz off (no pun intended), a feature that remained obscure after the service's first round of privacy changes last Thursday. At that time, Google chose to un-hide an option that new customers may easily have ignored: to not only build a list of followers from existing Gmail contacts, but to publicize that list on the Buzz user's public profile. Depending on what other Google services the customer may have been using, that profile could possibly have been visible to anyone, including non-Buzz users.

Continue reading →

In today's viral, social media-driven world, it never seems to take long for things to get ugly. This is especially true for Google Buzz, which became a lightning rod for privacy-related criticisms almost as soon as it went live last week.

My advice to the critics: Don't get your panties in a knot.

Continue reading →

Since the launch of Google Buzz last Tuesday, we've been hearing more analyses from professionals and bloggers warning of a possible showdown of sorts between Google and Microsoft in the social space. Buzz is Google's social connection with its Gmail; but Microsoft already announced last year its own social connection with its mail platform: the forthcoming Social Connector plug-in for Outlook 2010, due for release with the rest of Microsoft Office 2010 this June. The latest release candidate for Office 2010 was distributed to private testers earlier this month.

Social Connector promises to transform Outlook 2010 into a live network teeming with contacts who share not just e-mail, but chats and texts through Windows Live and documents through SharePoint. Messages received from a "live" contact will be adorned with that person's availability, location, and a record of recent activities. Though LinkedIn has already signed on as Microsoft's first third-party partner, connectivity with Facebook -- probably distributed by Facebook, not Microsoft -- appears likely. So much of the same kind of functionality folks are seeing with Buzz, will likely appear in Outlook as well, although slanted more toward professional tasks rather than personal friends and acquaintances.

Continue reading →

Already sensing that too many potential users were attributing the "evil" moniker to Google (in the absence of actual evil in the world), the company yesterday made adjustments to its Google Buzz sign-up procedure. In Betanews tests, we found Google's altered dialog box is much more descriptive about the repercussions of setting up a public profile. It uncovers a critical choice about what you share with others publicly, that had been buried beneath an Edit link, by copying it up front where everyone can see it.

The danger involved with a new user setting up Buzz without being mindful of its default consequences, is that her public profile can be automatically filled with the names and profile links of Gmail contacts she communicates with most. Betanews tests this morning indicate that changes Google has made to Buzz setup appear to reduce that danger somewhat:

Continue reading →

For all its success in turning mostly free Web-based services into lucrative rivers of cash, Google's been a miserable failure in the social networking space. While Facebook marched from a Harvard dorm room to a global army of 400 million users and Twitter became the short-form darling of politicians and celeb-utantes alike, Google threw one project after another at the wall (Orkut and Wave, anyone?) and hoped at least one of them would stick long enough to gain traction.

They never did. Orkut may be huge in Brazil and India, but it's virtually invisible everywhere else. Wave disappeared into the ether after its much-hyped public launch last September. Less ambitious steps toward creating a more social online experience (like baking Google Talk into the Gmail interface) similarly vanished from the tech culture radar almost as soon as they appeared.

Continue reading →

Music identification software Shazam is indispensable. When users hear a song they don't know playing in a commercial, over the radio, or on the PA at a club, and they want to know what the song is, all they have to do is fire up Shazam on their smartphone, let the app "hear" the song, and it identifies it.

As useful as it is, Shazam has kind of been a one-way street: It identifies (or "tags") the song and then links the user out to other services. For example, the user can then purchase the song, go to YouTube to watch related videos, or go to the artist's MySpace page, all where applicable. But up to now, the app ended there, and the list of songs a user has tagged didn't get used anywhere.

Continue reading →

With Google already the center of controversy worldwide over how it uses the information it gleans from its search users, red flags were almost certain to be sent up over Google Buzz, announced Tuesday. It's the company's new social platform for sharing bits of Twitter-like communication, and it's built rather cleverly on its existing Gmail platform.

The red flags concern how Google leverages Gmail to create a pre-established social network for Buzz users. Unlike a fresh, new social network that asks incoming users to build their lists of followers from scratch, Buzz starts out by collecting a list of folks who appear to be doing the most communicating with the incoming user via Gmail.

Continue reading →

Making good on a promise delivered just about one year ago, Facebook announced today that its popular chat feature can now be accessed through any Jabber (XMPP)-compatible desktop instant messaging software, including AIM, iChat, Pidgin, Adium, and Miranda.

Users can simply connect their Facebook account with their instant messaging client of choice and they can then chat with Facebook friends without having to stay logged into the social networking site.

Continue reading →

Rather than create another new destination social network like Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare, Google today announced that it has added social networking and location-based features into Gmail, Google Profiles, and Google Maps with a new service called Google Buzz.

Late last week, rumors surfaced that Google was debuting a new "Social Gmail" this week, and that really is kind of what Buzz is. With it, you can post status updates and share links, photos, and location-based updates with your Gmail contacts, and the content being posted by your contacts is automatically ranked according to your interactions with that contact. Ultimately, it's a lot like FriendFeed but with a Google flavor.

Continue reading →

During the few comments he was asked to make during his testimony before the House Telecommunications and Internet Subcommittee earlier today, NBC Universal President and CEO Jeff Zucker was asked by Committee Chairman Rep. Rick Boucher (D - Va.) whether Hulu -- a video Web service co-owned by NBC -- intentionally blocked the ability of Boxee's media center application for PCs to replay Hulu videos. Rep. Boucher's question was by way of ascertaining whether a combined Comcast + NBCU entity would routinely block competitors' access to programming it generated.

Zucker responded: "What Boxee was doing was illegally taking the content that was on Hulu without any business deal. We have several distributors...of the Hulu content that we have legal distribution deals with, so we don't preclude distribution deals. What we preclude are those that illegally take that content."

Continue reading →

Popular gadget blog Engadget has been forced to turn off comments for an undetermined period because the posters have gotten a bit overzealous with poor-form commentary.

In the post announcing the temporary ban today, Editor-in-Chief Joshua Topolsky said, "What is normally a charged -- but fun -- environment for our users and editors has become mean, ugly, pointless, and frankly threatening in some situations... and that's just not acceptable. Some of you out there in the world of anonymous grandstanding have gotten the impression that you run the place, but that's simply not the case."

Continue reading →