However there are differences between Foursquare/Gowalla and Facebook. Facebook has, time and time again, played fast and loose with its users’ information and privacy. The general vibe I get from Facebook is that they’re only providing a service in order to get data from you that they can exploit and/or sell. Over the last year I’ve gradually reduced the amount of information I have on there, the amount of information I add and the level to which I share it. I just don’t feel comfortable with the site – yet, with any social media service, you have to be where the people are in order to make the connections so I keep my account active. I tend to use it as a back-up service to Twitter… somewhere for conversations that can’t be constrained into 140 characters (which is kinda weird of me because, as someone pointed out the other day, my Twitter stream is unlocked so EVERYBODY can see that and do what the hell they want with it).

Facebook Places isn’t available in Canada yet but they HAVE enabled the privacy settings so you can go in there and preemptively set your privacy before it comes North of the border. This is important even if you don’t intend to use the service.

You need to click Account->Privacy Settings->Customize Settings. Then there are three different settings to adjust:

• “Things I Share->Places I check in” determines how widely your whereabouts will be broadcast. Do you want everybody to see where you are? Just your friends? Just a subset of your friends? Nobody at all? The most private you can get with this setting is to click on “Custom” and select “Only Me” from the list box

• “Things I Share->Include me in ‘People Here Now’ after I check in” will cause your presence to appear in lists of people at an establishment/event. Depending on Facebook’s implementation, this might override your “Places I check in” setting and let people outside your friends list see where you are. If you’re interested in your privacy you probably want to disable this setting

• “Things Others Share->Friends can check me in to Places” is super-important. It’s the geo equivalent of having other people tag you in photos. Worse in fact. If someone checks you in as being down the pub in the middle of the afternoon there’s nothing to show that you WEREN’T actually there. At least with a photo other people can look at the photo and SEE that you aren’t in it. If this option isn’t disabled then your whereabouts and your privacy are totally out of your control. I suspect all but the most cavalier of users will want to set this option to Disabled. Even if you never intend to use Facebook Places yourself, you should go and turn this setting off

Good luck and be careful out there.

I love what they’re doing… the idea that so many injuries are ‘accidents’ that just happen is rubbish and has annoyed me for a long time. “No – you crashing into the back of that car at the red light was NOT an accident. It didn’t happen ‘acidentally’. You hit him because you were driving too fast and/or not paying attention” etc etc. If people thought more about what they’re doing, thought about the risks inherent in their activity and took an extra minute or two to counter that risk then things would be much safer.

One of the things that Preventable point out is that the leading cause of death in BC for people between ages 1 and 44 is preventable injuries (notice that… I didn’t call them accidents). 1,200 people a year dead and 400,000 injured in BC alone.

Preventable’s big PR push at the moment is to get people to take care over Halloween. To be honest, Halloween is one of my least favorite times of the year. Probably a result of not having grown up here! It’s not the small children dressed up as princesses and pirates that annoy me. It’s not that I never get invited to the cool parties (this year’s an exception – more about that next week if I can rig up a costume at the last minute). It’s more the gangs of drunken teenagers roaming the streets and setting off fireworks. And yes, alcohol and explosives don’t mix… but they’re a harder audience to get to pay any attention!

Preventable’s been reaching out to the social media community recently. They have a great blog full of information on their website, they’re big on Twitter and yesterday they invited a gaggle of bloggers down to The Network Hub to communicate their message face-to-face (cos sometimes that’s just the best you know?) and hand out treats.

Yes, I went. Yes, I was bribed. Yes, this blog post is (partly) the result of their flagrant attempt to sway my judgment. An interesting evening was had in the company of some great Vancouver bloggers and social media folk. In the interest of transparency I should also point out that I profited from the evening to the tune of two plates of delicious sushi, a couple of handfuls of candy and a reflective trick-or-treat bag which has been passed on to a small child for use trick-or-treating – that’s one 6 year old who’ll be very safe out on Saturday night.

Tweetie on the iPhone

My friend Tyler over at www.tyleringram.com today reviewed Tweetie – a Twitter application for the iPhone. Tweetie looks good – I mean REALLY good. In fact it looks more functional than many of the desktop Twitter applications that I’ve tried.

Unfortunately today was not a good day for the developers behind Tweetie. They released a new version of the software and, as you have to do with iPhone applications, they sent it to Apple for Apple to approve and add to the Apple Application Store so that iPhone owners can access it.

So far so good… except Tweetie provides a live view onto Twitter and Twitter isn’t necessarily a sanitized environment. As luck would have it, at the moment that someone at Apple fired up Tweetie, there was a rude word on the Twitter Trends page. Oh no! You can’t include an application in the App Store if it has rude words in it… and so Tweetie was rejected. Yep, rejected: http://twitter.com/atebits/status/1306229791

Say WHAT? Tweetie doesn’t control that… that’s just Twitter. What’s Tweetie expected to do – filter Twitter for rude words? No other iPhone Twitter application does that. And, if you look at http://cursebird.com/ you’ll see that some people’s tweets would be pretty barren if you took all the rude words out! And what about web browsers? Should they filter their content too or is this only an issue with Twitter clients? Oh wait – that’s web browser singular as Apple won’t allow anybody to install anything on the iPhone that duplicates the functionality they provide out of the box (because theirs is the best, right?). They provide Mobile Safari for web browsing and so you can’t have the choice of another browser. But still – does Mobile Safari filter the internet? No – of course it doesn’t. In Mobile Safari I’m sure you could pull up a page full of rude words, and worse, in a matter of seconds.

Don’t get me wrong here – I’m actually quite an Apple fan. We have a MacBook in the house and, at last count, we’ve bought seven iPods (because strangely they all seem to break between the 12 and 18 month points… but that’s a different rant). Apple have done a lot of good in the computer industry. For people who just want something that works and don’t want to have to get their hands dirty with knowing HOW it works or having to fix things, their products are hard to beat. At times you almost feel sorry for other hardware manufacturers… lovingly designing nice hardware (or not – as is often the case) and then having to put Windows Vista on it. And in the cellphone market the iPhone has really kick-started the idea of the mobile internet. Would we be seeing the frenzy of mobile software development or the shiny new products coming out of Palm and RIM if it wasn’t for the iPhone? I strongly doubt it.

But Apple has always been a company of control freaks. And their increasing success and visibility over the last couple of years seems to have only heightened that tendency. Everybody with an iPhone wants to be able to cut and paste between applications, everybody with an iPhone wants an easy-to-type-on landscape keyboard and everybody with an iPhone wants the ability to leave applications running in the background so they can get some sort of pop-up event notification. But Apple knows best and so you don’t get any of those features, even nearly two years after the iPhone first came out.

To be fair, I suspect the Tweetie rejection maybe be just a misunderstanding rather than a new policy decision from Apple. I suspect Apple handed the new version of Tweetie to someone who’d never seen Twitter before and didn’t understand what they were seeing. Whilst that’s a ridiculous decision, it appears it’s then been compounded by not having the rejection confirmed by a second reviewer. But, misunderstanding or not, it’s an indication of the control over your own computing that you have to give up when you buy into the whole Apple ecosystem – either as consumer or as developer.

Update: of course a couple of hours after their rejection, the Tweetie developers resubmitted the same application and Apple quietly approved it. This doesn’t really solve the underlying problem though – the problem of lack of transparency and control for both developers and consumers. How can a developer write an application when the App Store approval process is a black box with no clear rules? How can a consumer get the best from the device they own when someone else is controlling what is and isn’t allowed on it?

At the time of writing, I have under 30 followers, her twitter account at @juicybags has somewhere around 1800, and she tweets dozens of times a day. She tweets about the things she’s interested in and the things that she does and so her audience is mostly people with the same interests… crafting, moms, nurses, people on Etsy.

Twitter users are probably familiar with the ecosystem of tools & utilities that have sprung up around it: Twitter Grader, Twitter Rank, Twitter Counter… to name just a few. Nearly a month ago a new company started up: http://www.be-a-magpie.com/

The premise is simple… you have a large number of people reading your tweets – why not send them adverts. Magpie will pay you for access to your followers. On the face of it this is nothing more than selling out people who turn to you for advice. How is this different from selling your mailing list for spamming purposes? And many people have seen the launch of Magpie, interpreted it as this and got very hot under the collar about it.

I looked at it when it first came out. They have a tool which estimates how much much money you’d make from letting Magpie send messages through your account. I ran my twitter account through… errr €1.35 per month – that’s about $2 and isn’t going to buy me a new car any time soon.

I mentioned Magpie to my wife and we ran her account through. Wow – €700 a month!

I was still a little reticent about the idea. My wife asked her followers what they thought. Sure, there were one or two “if you sign up for Magpie then I’ll unfollow you” responses but the majority of people either were interested to hear about it or felt that they’d wait & see how it went.

So we decided to see how it goes and signed her up.

Magpie is NOT a plain old spamming service. It doesn’t send out tweets about fake watches and blue pills. Think of it like Google Adsense. They identify keywords in what you tweet about and their advertisers bid on specific keywords. If there’s a match then the advertiser gets to tweet to your followers.

We waited 2 days before they sent their first tweet.

“#magpie ♥ ♥ Do you love music? Then you are going to love this piano ring! ♥ ♥ http://tinyurl.com/5fbtt4 ♥ ♥”

(Interestingly the link is actually wrong – it should go to here, but that’s the fault of the advertiser, not Magpie)

If it wasn’t for the “#magpie” and the little hearts, that could have been a post that my wife wrote. Perfect targeting. And we earned €1.61 from that.

For most of her followers it was the first Magpie tweet they’d seen. Everyone was excited, everybody liked it. In fact it generated a lot of publicity for Magpie, as well as the advertiser.

It was a week before the second Magpie tweet… an Etsy spin-off site called OwnTheHour – again a hit. Good targeting. And more money this time – €2.64

They’ve been a steady stream ever since… sometimes one a day, sometimes a couple of days between them. And now, after three weeks, our total earnings are up to €27 – about $43. A long way from the estimated total. But frankly this is a very good thing. The ads we’ve seen posted under her name have all been fairly well targeted. Not all as good as the first ones, but all close enough that you can imagine them being of interest to many of her followers. I think this means that Magpie are being cautious with the keywords, not sending things out that aren’t a close match for the twitterer they’re assigning them to. Yes, she’s lost a couple of followers but the majority are happy (or at least not UNhappy) to be receiving the Magpie tweets and her follower count continues to grow by a dozen or more per day.

Since it launched, Magpie has added a lot to its feature set. You’ve always been able to vary the rate at which it sends magpie tweets – it feeds its tweets out into your stream according to the frequency at which you post from 1-to-1 (which WOULD be annoying) all the way down to 1 of theirs for every 200 of yours!

New features include an affiliate program… you earn commission from the transactions of anybody that signs up as an advertiser through your affiliate link. You can market this through a link on your website/blog or you can set it to tweet automatically about the affiliate program on your timeline and this second option IS annoying. It annoys me much more than any normal Magpie tweets do and the reason is because it’s unrelated to the normal stream of tweets. It IS just spam, pure and simple: not information that I’m interested in – especially when I’ve seen it a dozen times before.

Another cool thing they’ve just added is the ability to pre-approve Magpie tweets. This is a GREAT feature. Remember I said that the tweets they’ve sent through our account have been pretty well targeted, but one or two have been just “OK”…ish. Definitely not things that my wife would normally have tweeted about… the Jimi Hendrix replica stage coat for instance. I can see why it happened – it came from a site that sells clothing and jewellery. It just shows that you can’t make a perfect match using exclusively automated keyword matching. The pre-approval feature lets my wife save her followers from things she thinks they won’t be interested in. This looks like it should work great – they’ve sent her a whole stack of potential tweets and she’s looked through them thinking about “does this sound like something I would say?” and “is this the sort of thing that my followers and I chat about?”. She says yes or no to each of them and they go back into Magpie’s stack for possible future tweeting. It looks like the system seeks approval when it first identifies a possible match and not when it’s planning on sending out a new tweet as we haven’t seen anything from her pre-approved list actually being tweeted yet.

So our experience has been almost entirely positive. She turned off the auto-promotion of the affiliate scheme yesterday, once she realized how annoying it was. Sure, there is a lot of scope here for mindless spamming but, so far at least, Magpie seem to be fairly good with the targeting. Add in the pre-approval and a bit of sensible consideration from the twitterer for their followers and you have a pretty good platform here.

If you search Twitter for #Magpie tweets you will, admittedly, see a lot of tweets that, to me at least, appear to be low-value advertising about tools for SEO, web-billing, shopping carts etc. But think about it – why are these coming out on the timelines that they’re coming out on? It’s because SEO and ecommerce are things that these twitterers normally talk about. There’s a LOT of professional Social Media folks twittering as a means of developing their personal brand. For these people, I think I agree, maybe Magpie is not a sensible option. For them twittering seems to be about expanding your network of contacts and a certain “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” approach to networking and promotion. For that market, at the level where this becomes part of the job description, I don’t think €4 is really the right sort of money for accepting adverts.

Developers are fighting back – Twitter clients and browser scripts are starting to appear which have the ability to filter out tweets containing “#magpie”. But Magpie isn’t dead and buried – now it has an option to change, or even remove, the “#Magpie” prefix. Not really a good thing, but if you’re pre-approving only tweets that you’re happy to put your personal brand behind, then maybe not that bad a thing either.

As with all things on the Internet, things are moving fast. We’ll just have to see how it evolves.