By David Malki – Wondermark

It seems they’ll never learn. Yesterday, this pop-up introduced itself to Facebook users across the globe, and it wasn’t to the warmest of welcomes, either. Out of the millions of users who see this pop-up, roughly half can be expected to actually follow through with the indoctrination into new privacy features, while the rest will simply click the comfortable-looking “skip for now” button. Some users logged into their accounts and were never greeted with the pop-up at all, even though the changes had already taken place.

There’s an explanation for that — apparently they’re rolling this out incrementally, and it only seems like a full release because of the site’s massive user-base. Facebook’s Ana Muller explains thusly:

If you haven’t yet seen the three-step transition tool for reviewing and updating your privacy settings, you will shortly. We’re asking all 350 million people who use Facebook to go through this process and are rolling out the changes incrementally to make sure it goes smoothly. Keep in mind that you also won’t see the new Privacy Settings page until you’ve gone through the transition process.

These new changes weren’t a surprise by any means, but were actually known and expected; when Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg recently posted his An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg (I honestly never get tired of saying that, I can’t believe how pretentious that guy is…), he concentrated on the eventual phasing-out of regional networks while only mentioning the privacy update. He pointed to a post from way back in July of this year, which basically talked about Facebook’s willingness to move toward the present privacy-controls as quickly as possible. The whole thing was dragged out and veiled in maybe’s, but it’s happening now.

Is it really so bad?

In short: Yes.

The picture above is a direct screenshot of the new, ultra-simplified privacy options presented to users when they follow through with the pop-up. The settings shown in the picture are the default settings that Facebook has pre-selected for users. The move to push users to inadvertently over-share is so brazen that even the BBC said something about it in a post this morning.

I’m not even about to lie; this blog is and has always been extremely critical of Facebook, especially since breaking the story about Facebook ads and privacy earlier this year. I will, however, be fair in explaining my stance on this new round of changes.

With the sole exception of sharing posts (which I left set to “everybody”), I immediately set all options back to the right-side column. This is a personal preference, and I’ll admit that it’s one largely based on principal and a history with Facebook that’s left a bad taste in my mouth. The reason I’ve gone ahead and left the posts option public is that I usually post things that are open to anyone to see — I don’t generally get very private in Facebook status updates.

That being said, there is an issue that needs attention.

The Actual Settings Are Still Confusing

I watched somebody attempt to configure their new privacy settings without the aid of the pop-up, only to find that they hadn’t really changed at all from the hopeless jumble of confusing mess that’s already known and hated. It turns out that the shiny new simplified version is only for users who follow through with the pop-up, while everyone else is stuck with the same poorly-worded quagmire that we’ve become so accustomed to bashing. Facebook calls these legacy settings “extensive and granular” — I call them just plain shitty.

Read the full, official Facebook blog post here.

I’m one of over 350 million Facebook users. Being extremely generous, I’d be willing to say that one million users both attempt to locate and successfully navigate their way through the privacy settings, and finally affect a desired change in them. That’s being extremely generous, because we all know that the odds are heavily against that there are anywhere near that many people who even know there are privacy settings.

The number of people being manipulated into sharing more information than they’d likely choose is nothing short of mind-bending. The ad-revenue is staggering, and the information gleaned from extensive data-mining is equally astounding. Just something to think about.

Yes, they’ve finally done it. After months of talk about incorporating the mounds of real-time data to which Google has access, they’re finally piping it all into their own search results. The sources they listed are some pretty big names: Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, MySpace, and Jaiku, among others — and that’s not counting the major media outlets they’ve also tapped to glean time-sensitive information.

See the official release for more details.

Annoyingly, of course, all anyone can say about this (aside from it’s about damn time) is that “Bing must be nudging them to be more competitive.” I can’t help but recall the fact that Google was in talks with Twitter regarding real-time search results several months before Bing ever existed.

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg posted An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s official blog. Aside from the hilariously redundant title of the post, there’s not too much fun stuff in this one — but it does put some final affirmation to the long-run rumors.

The main point of the release:

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

Read the full release here.

In case that sounds a bit harsh, it’s because it is, but after reading yesterday’s release from the Oxford University Press, it’s warranted. The release announced Oxford’s coveted Word of the Year to be none other than the now ubiquitous Unfriend, which in and of itself is no matter of contention.

The problem is how they’ve gone and incorporated the word into their once-respectable tomes. They couldn’t simply acknowledge the word for being pervasive and relevant to the times — they had to pander and show how horrid social ineptitude can get in an office full of lexicographers and linguists.

Here’s what the OUP had to say about this joyous event:

Without further ado, the 2009 Word of the Year is: unfriend.

unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook.

As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.”

Did you notice it? Facebook was expressly mentioned not once, but twice. This may not seem so important if you don’t follow the importance of dictionaries, and their historical value, but it is. A dictionary, like Oxford, is inherently sacred in that it acts as a vehicle for our very language. Soiling its pages with proper names of companies that will likely no longer exist in 20 years time is simply irresponsible and disrespects the lexicon.

The definition provided is entirely sufficient without the added “such as Facebook” clause. Including it was wrong. Using it again in the example is gratuitously wrong, and to really make things sad and pathetic, they even link back to Facebook whenever they use the word.

But that’s not all they managed to screw up in this hapless festival of failed tech-hipstering — in showing off their other bleeding edge words of tech, they showed that they not only have no idea what a netbook is, but also that they’ve never used Twitter, or read a history book.

According to these geniuses, netbooks are differentiated from laptops only by their “limited memory,” and the definition for hashtags is so absurdly lengthy that it’s obviously written by a person who learns all they know of Twitter from CNN. They also made a point of reinventing the word Teabagger, and not in the perverted way that one might expect; they pandered to the sickening displays of ignorance and pygmy-mindedness that are new America’s Tea Parties — “in allusion to the Boston Tea Party of 1773.” Apparently the fact that the original teabaggers earned their name 200 years ago isn’t important when it’s so damn trendy these days to be a bigot and idiot.

Responsible reporting starts with what you choose to report, and turning something as toxic as Facebook games into high-traffic news is beyond ridiculous. Slow days happen, but there are better things to talk about than this garbage.

Some more app-pandering filth:

• Top 10 Facebook Applications for Music Lovers
• The Top 10 Facebook Apps [Poll Results]

Take particular note of their “poll” results. The poll in question is a reader-poll, which, by definition, means it’s a few points south of retarded. And on that note…

On Mashable Polls:

They’re disgusting. Take a look, and get a feel for just how ridiculous it is that Mashable pass these off as polls. You get the general idea when you read an article like Windows 7 beating OS X in a reader poll, only to realize that Mashable’s reader base is likely to be along the lines of 80% Windows users. I’d be willing to bet that nine out of ten of those users aren’t even using Windows by choice, but have never used OS X and therefore had no place participating in such a poll to begin with. You’ll see a similar tragedy in a Firefox vs. Chrome poll included in the list below:

• Facebook vs. Twitter
• Favorite social network
• Favorite Facebook application
• Favorite Twitter photo-sharing service
• Firefox vs. Chrome
• Favorite Twitter client
• Is Google losing its focus?
• TweetDeck vs. Seesmic
• WordPress vs. TypePad
• Tumblr vs. Posterous
• Would you store your files with Google?

I haven’t even touched on the obvious load of failure and half-assery that they’re calling the Open Web Awards yet. I’ll save that one for later.

When Facebook Lite launched just under two weeks ago, my immediate reaction was a sigh of relief, followed by the question “how long will it take them to trash up this one, too?” When I asked that question, I fully expected to find out by Christmas. I thought wrong.

It took them eleven days.

That’s right, it took them less than two weeks to begin trashing up Facebook Lite just as its unholy predecessor had been before it. I took note that on the day of release, that they had already placed the ominous “Create an Ad” sidebar, and it looked suspiciously devoid of content.

Now that column appears to have been invaded by what has become the bane of Facebook users everywhere — trashy ad placements. So now that one single, misleading, trashy ad has shown up all by its lonesome, how long will it take for Facebook to populate the sidebar with two of them?

I find your lack of thumbs disturbing…

Allowing the trashy ads into Facebook Lite is one thing, but not bringing the larger Facebook’s only countermeasures along with them is another. Without the seemingly worthless thumbs up and thumbs down voting feature attached to these ads, users are left without recourse and entirely at the mercy of the ad-providers. What began as a refuge from the relentless onslaught of Facebook is almost surely doomed to its namesake’s destiny.

You can say that I’m just making hasty generalizations, but we are talking about Facebook here, after all.

OK, that’s fine. Every company’s goal is to be profitable, but Facebook needs to calm down. We’ve been relentlessly inundated with Facebook, over the last month especially, to the point that it feels like an assault on the senses. Too much is too much, and Facebook passed that mark some time ago. As if it weren’t tacky enough that they’ve been stealing anything they can from (much smaller) rival Twitter, it only took them 38 minutes to publish another blog post exposing their Prototypes, a direct ripoff of Google Labs.

Now, ripping off Twitter and calling @mentions tagging is lame enough, but prototypes? It’s just pathetic, I’m sorry, but call it what it is. These aren’t copyrighted words, they’re generally used in the English language, pretty frequently, and all Facebook is managing to do is come off looking like the K-Mart blue light special of the Internet. Oh, wait, that’s what Facebook actually is.

As if that weren’t bad enough, now they want to incorporate voice and video chat as well. An article, floated on Cnet this morning, seems to confirm that Vivox’s Web Voice technology will be used in an upcoming, and entirely third-party multimedia chat integration that will be site-wide throughout Facebook. The actual code-work is third-party, the initiative itself is and must be driven by Facebook, since integration at that deep a level can only be accomplished with full access to the site itself.

Why is this bad? I’m not about to say that more features and innovative concept-integration are bad. I will, however, say that Facebook doesn’t need them. There is a point when it simply becomes too much. Case in point: Facebook chat, for lack of a better word, sucks. It’s the absolute worst chat on the Internet. Adding voice and video to that worthless service is like putting hood ornaments on a Dodge Neon.

Everything Facebook does is half-hearted and barely enough to get by, and they don’t seem to be that concerned with improving what they push out to their throngs of supporting users. If this all sounds familiar, it’s because this is more or less why everyone hates Microsoft so much. It’s part of why MySpace is a complete failure, and it’s also why Wal-Mart is the single most hated commercial entity on the planet.

Too much, too fast, too low quality.

And when your woefully technologically-inept uncle starts referring to all computers as “facebooks,” you’re going to realize exactly what I mean by all this.

My question is this: Why on earth would anyone want to use full names in their status updates, when everyone gets along just fine with normal, fluid, conversational formatting? If I update that I’m going to a concert with Jim, I don’t necessarily want it to start saying “Going to see Blue Man Crew with James Earl Jones.” Obvious fake example is obvious – that withstanding, you get my point. It begs the second question: What the hell use is hyperlinking the name when it’s already the person’s full name?

- – Begin original post – -

Yesterday it was released that Facebook will be introducing the @mention into its own update streams. My first thoughts were the same as just about everyone else: Nice way to steal more from Twitter, there, Facebook. Then, after thinking about it, I realized that it was really only a matter of time until this happened. The reason the @name phenomenon is so pervasive now may be Twitter, but the usefulness of the trend as it stands in its own right is pretty evident.

A Note Concerning Facebook: I think this is a horrible idea. I find Facebook’s amoebic growth to be appalling, but this is not a rant post (for once). For an all-inclusive Facebook rant on this subject and others, see Kristin.fm’s uncensored blog post.

In the old days we just had handles. I still use the same one I’ve had since junior high school, and now that’s morphing into an @name itself. Twitter is quickly becoming the de facto instant communication medium of the Internet, and with that comes the inevitable tagging of everyone with an associative @name.

Social Networks Are Not Islands.

People used to use an IM client of choice, attached to a network, and everyone else would use the same. It used to be AOL Instant Messenger, but that was slowly overtaken by the hoard of other services until it became simply one of many. This then led to the nearly required use of clients that handle many different networks – modern clients like Pidgin or Adium. That evolution of instant messaging can be applied today with the larger social-networks like Facebook and Twitter.

Tweetdeck now supports nearly full use of Facebook while inside the app, allowing side-by-side streams from both networks. For months now, people have been updating their Facebook statuses by piping their tweets directly over to them. Sending Facebook status updates to Twitter, on the other hand, was not so cleanly accomplished. The new Facebook feature will allow for a streamlined reversal, but only if people use the same @names on both networks. I can guarantee there are going to be many complaints in the tweet-streams about people sending random @mentions at the wrong people due to Facebook-to-Twitter update pipes.

Facebook: Well Over 200 Million Users.

As much as it saddens me to say it, there are probably about as many Facebook users as there are people in the United States who own computers with internet-connections. The numbers are frightening, considering the downward spiral the network is on (now regularly compared to its floundering sibling, MySpace). But these numbers cannot be ignored, and introducing @names in a second major network is going to have an affect.

What happens when the names don’t mix?

Remember when Facebook released the custom URL’s for all users? There was a catch that scared some people when it came time to register their choices:

Think carefully about the username you choose. Once it’s been selected, you won’t be able to change or transfer it. -Facebook Blog

That’s right. So the name-mixing that’s going to terrorize twitterers is not likely fixable. What’s more, is that with this change, within the next month or so, Facebook users are going to get used to the @mentions in their own streams. They’re then going to realize and feel the pain of the Twittersphere when they start seeing the @mentions from Twitter showing up in their Facebook update-streams. It goes both ways, after all.

To make things more annoyingly complicated, Facebook URL’s are based not off of a person’s name, but by a username (read: handle) of their choosing. When we see our friends on Facebook, however, we only see them by their names. So, I ask you, what exactly are people going to type when they @mention somebody on Facebook? Screenshots provided by Facebook (see Mashable post) seem to show some sort of autocomplete feature in play. They do not show the complete @name used.

Given the extreme difficulty in acquiring one’s own true name on Twitter, the future looks to be a messy one for all parties involved.

While on the subject of Facebook’s trying too hard, check out Facebook Lite. It’s a refreshingly stripped down version of what’s become an eyeball-hell.

Soon afterwards, as Twitter attempted to blip back into existence, they posted an update on their status blog explaining that they were in fact under a DDoS attack, source unknown. Nearly every major Internet-equipped news service in the world began to post updates about Twitter’s demise. This irked me, since these people didn’t seem to realize they were basically reporting something about as new as velcro shoes, but it was interesting nonetheless if for nothing but the fact that Twitter has become what it has.

A Gibson Moment

So this afternoon I wake up to the news, as reported cnet’s Insecurity Complex that Twitter was not the only company affected by the attack. That in fact, Facebook, Twitter, Google and Livejournal had been targeted in a seemingly massive effort to blockade a single blogger. The pro-georgian blogger uses the handle “Cyxymu” – the name of a town in Georgia (likely his own) – has accounts at all affected sites, and it was these accounts that the attacks were supposedly targeting.

While the source(s) of this combined attack are as yet unknown, the combined might of all these tech companies working in tandem would probably stand a better chance of discovering it than most governments. Google remained largely unaffected during the outage, but tends to take this sort of thing very seriously. Unlike smaller startups Facebook and Twitter, Google has the financial clout to get results.

While nobody wants to say it outright, the fingers are pointing in one general direction for the source of the attack, and the general consensus is that It’s probably Russian.

UPDATE: The Guardian reports that Cyxymu “said his real name was Georgy and that he was a 34-year-old economics lecturer. He is an active critic of Moscow’s politics in the Caucasus region and was the victim of a similar attack last year that crashed LiveJournal.” They also report that he’s expressed a firm belief that the Kremlin is behind the attacks.

That’s when it hit me. What has likely just happened, is that several cutting-edge technology firms with vested interests in global Internet use have just suffered through collateral damage in a totally foreign, Russian conflict. Naturally, the first thing that came to mind was William Gibson, and his weirdly prescient writings over the last 20 or so years. Cyberwars, Russia, fractured Internets.

How freaking Gibson is that? Is “Gibson” even an adjective? I’m going to treat it like one from now on.

image via goodreads