Websites these days are advanced; they like to be helpful. For example, many offer to save your log in information for later. One such site is Facebook. And for a while, I assumed Facebook’s gesture (like many others) was there for my convenience — to be helpful. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized it’s something much much more than that.
When you check that box, Facebook keeps you logged in for more than just their site. You’re logged in across the Web with Facebook, too.
Take the Washington Post: as Digg users observed, the site is heavily invested Facebook tie-ins but as a publisher, it is just one example. For example, when you view this article about Wisconsin governor Scott Walker while not signed in to Facebook, you get the following:
The “Network News” box is populated by what looks like the top stories of the day. By contrast, when you’re logged in to Facebook, you get this:
See the difference there? It’s nearly the same “Network News,” but now I see shared articles from Facebook friends.
That one little check box allows for Facebook’s reach to move from beyond its one .com and the content in that domain and instead to many thousands of sites across the Web, and all the content on those pages.
It’s Facebook Connect, but without the obstacle of individual sign-on at each location. If the point of a universal log-in is to reduce friction when accessing (and sharing), this is it. To users, it’s a passive (and easy) way to stay connected within the Facebook ecosystem: sharing articles and sending them back into the algo to be distributed across friends’ News Feeds, populating likes for social ads, parsing the interactions for correlative data about demographic interests or Zeitgeist, etc. All of this, I should say, is fine (at least by me, since I know that it comes with the territory).
The social layer of the Web is here, and to think it’s all aided by that one innocuous check box.
Tags: check box, connect, digg, Facebook, log in, log on, news feed, washington post, zeitgeist
Today, G.E. signed a $1.4 billion wind energy deal in Oregon, while NPR reports on China’s wind program. Paradoxically, the greater wind power in turns increases coal burning in the short-term.
Barack accepted the Nobel Peace Prize today, defending– and in fact espousing– American exceptionalism.
Google announced today that it is helping to battle deforestation with satellite imagery and cloud-based number-crunching.
This move by Goldman Sachs to award so-called “shares at risk” is cunning: it sounds great (and it is in fact a much more fair/logical/long-sighted way of distributing bonuses) but it also affects a whopping 30 employees. Goldman has 31,700. So this does not affect the attitudes/behaviors/risk tolerance of the thousands of traders who are evaluating their risk based on their annual bonus pay-outs just like before. Nor does it affect the complexity or the masked risked that goes into 99% of bankers’ work as they structure financial instruments. It’s a cunning move because it’s hard to criticize outright, but it also really does not get at any way to solve the problems of the financial services sector. (It’s a mentality thing, not something which changes when you reorganize pay incentives for the top 30 guys in your firm).
Chad Ochocinco is changing his name again. In 2010 he’ll become “Chad Hachi Go,” Japanese this time for 85.
Gawker deconstructs Ms. Palin’s latest appearance in the Washington Post, showing why her lack of knowledge is this time apparent in regards to global climate change.
I don’t see a thesis in this article, but it seems from the title that the author is trying to compare will.i.am to Irving Berlin. I’d comment on how (un)persuasively that argument is made but frankly I don’t see it anywhere in here.
Finally, also in the realm of ridiculous, via Ella Chou, apparently a girl at Columbia Law School has been accepting applications from her classmates (requesting resumes and undergrad transcripts)…so they can join her study group.
Tags: barack obama, china, cloud computing, columbia university, deforestation, exceptionalism, gawker, GE, goldman sachs, Google, irving berlin, law school, nobel prize, oregon, sarah palin, slate, study group, washington post, will.i.am, wind
The “Network News” box is populated by what looks like the top stories of the day. By contrast, when you’re logged in to Facebook, you get this:
See the difference there? It’s nearly the same “Network News,” but now I see shared articles from Facebook friends.
