Widgety Goodness – Lunchtime

First off, a fantastic morning; interesting, engaging and hugely enjoyable. A huge thanks to the WG team.

This’ll be a quick one, as I’m attempting to scarf down a wagamama noodle soup while writing this. There is the promise of the slideshows from today’s brilliance to refer to when I come back and rewrite and/or add to all of this.

Some initial thoughts:

Russell Davies is now on my godlike genius list. He’s funny too. I enjoyed what he had to say about the ‘Uncanny Valley’ and the analogies that can be drawn between that and our response to personalised advertising. Namely that too-personal advertising freaks us out. More on this later.

He says, and he’s right, that if even Amazon can’t be relied upon to get it right (friends will have seen an indignant post of mine on Facebook about being shown a WHOLE PAGE of topless calendars not so long ago) , then who can?

I like the term “Darwinian Disco” to describe the new landscape of the internet. The idea that web-based applications will continue to evolve and to grow (and yes, to die) is hugely appealing. It also implies that the web is an eco-system, and that platforms and apps will grow to find their own spaces in which to thrive. All to a funky Satuday Night Fever soundtrack. Groovy.
Privacy is a thorny issue in social networking, and it doesn’t get much thornier than implied permission, integral to something like a Facebook app which scans your friends and their locations and serves up content based on that information. The argument goes that this is dynamic content – it’s not held anywhere and can’t be accessed by anyone other than the user looking at your page at that time. the argument also goes that users don’t care about privacy if what they’re getting is useful.

I disagree. To me, this system is a little bit like inviting someone over for dinner because you enjoy their company, and them assuming that this entitles them to rifle through your address book (or your knicker drawer) – but that’s OK, because only they will see it, and they won’t remember any of it anyway. It doesn’t wash.

It may well be the case that the legislation surrounding data protection and privacy has no precedent to deal with dynamic data creation, but there is a question of ethics here and I’m not entirely convinced that the ethical implications have been sufficiently thought-through. I actually have the offending app on my Facebook account, and I’m going to delete it this evening. This user *does* care about her privacy.

Final thought: It is not possibly eat noodles quickly and type at the same time.

More later…