Here’s the deal. If you say you’re going to allow yourself a lie-in, you’ll be up at 6am. Wide awake. So that’s what I do on weekends now. I’m pretty easy to trick like that.

I made this thing. It’s a Facebooks page for this here website. A friend brought it to my attention that RSS is too nerdy for some people, but Facebooks is OK. So I guess I’ll use that to syndicate this for people on the Facebooks. If you like what I’m doing here, it sure would make me happy if you liked me officially. Because I like you so much, I’ll make it real easy. Here’s a button for ya (not in your RSS reader):

And here’s a photo of some food I ate. What a morning.

Privacy is really important, no doubt. The boundaries between what we consider private and public are constantly changing as the availability of vehicles for sharing become easier to access. However, they’re not changing as much as you think.

As a for instance; I write on Twitter (and, subsequently Facebook) things that I would talk about with my friends at the pub. I am probably in a minority here, but everyone freaking out about privacy online is jumping off the deep end for a substandard reason. If you restrict what you say online to things that you don’t mind people knowing about (does this seem obvious to anyone else?) then your privacy isn’t really at stake. I don’t mind people knowing how old I am or what city I live in or who I’m married to. I understand that this is valuable information to some people, but it’s also information that I’m comfortable to have in the public domain. Similarly, I quite like my music and film taste to be public, because there’s a chance that I could be on the receiving end of targeted ads that could broaden my horizons.

The important thing to bear in mind is that privacy is a huge word and it covers everything about you. If you drew a set diagram of privacy and security in this context, security would be a relatively small subset of privacy, and it’s the only thing that’s really worth concerning yourself with. If I say on Twitter that I just ate an enchilada, that’s me shrinking the size of my privacy set, but it doesn’t decrease my security set, so I’m not worried. It’s not really surprising to me that Facebook are trying to make money out of the information that people give to them, but I trust that they’re not in the business of dangerously impinging on people’s privacy – that sort of thing would easily earn them a reputation and that’s not good for business. Similarly, if 5% of their user base ruins their lives because they got tagged in a drunken photo and lost their job/spouse/medical licence/whatever, that earns Facebook a bad reputation and that’s not good for business.

The key isn’t to just abandon ship and become a Facebook martyr – it doesn’t solve anything. If you really care, educate your friends. If someone shares something inappropriate that you think isn’t going to do them any favours, tell them and tell them why you’re telling them. If you’re uploading photos and is unflattering/incriminating, think before you upload it and, if you must be a jerkoff, don’t tag the culprit.

Finally, most reputable social networks have privacy settings. Study them. Understand them. Check that they work. Go to some of your stuff, copy links and sign out. Can you still access this stuff? Create a control account and check if that can access your links. If not, you’re safer to trust. Most importantly, read terms and conditions. No-one reads terms and conditions, but you absolutely should. They’re often written in pretty archaic legalese, but persevere and understand. If there’s something you don’t like, you’re justified in leaving (do remember, though, that granting a website a licence to publish the things you upload is not the same as relinquishing copyrights and IP rights).

Disclaimer: I’m not expert on this, but I can exercise some common sense, and I urge everyone to do the same. I am also an idealist. Life’s too short to run around worrying about everything all the time, so I conduct myself with caution and common sense so that, in the event I do get bitten, it won’t be too devastating.

We’re all agreed that the bigger a company gets the more evil it gets, but why is this? The two highest-profile (to me) and most recent are Facebook and Google. Remember when Google just wanted to show you ads on its search engine related to what you physically typed into it? Those were the good times. Now it wants to read your email (GMail), control your computer (GoogleOS), know what you’re doing when you’re not using Google products (GCal), be your mate (Buzz – seriously, wtf), know exactly what you’re looking at online (Chrome, Google DNS), look at all your pictures (Picasa), give your leg a tumour (Android) and even attach its phoneline to your house. I get justifying this to shareholders – “Imagine if we could read everyone’s email – we could put ads right there in people’s inbox!”, “Imagine if we powered everyone’s computer – we could show ads on their desktop/screensaver/bootscreen based on their internet usage”, and everyone gets a nice, shiny free product to play with.

But are these products really free? I mean, sure, you don’t put your credit card details into these things and there’s not a person sat monitoring everything you do and laughing when you put on some goat porn, but if you’re using Google DNS or Chrome then you can bet they have a record of someone at an IP you used doing it. And if you’re logged in to a Google product as well, you know all it takes is matching those IPs together and we’ve got a name and a face. So now, every time you turn on your Googleputer, there’s no reason NOT to show you a Google Ad for the latest installment of unmissable goat porn on your Google Desktop – you WATCHED it, so you must want to watch more! It stands to reason that when I have an email about Viagara in my inbox, I want to see ads for it too.

To me, that doesn’t make these products free. Sure, I use GMail, but only because I can hook it up to my mail client and forego the ads, I use the search because it’s fast and integrated with almost everything and I use GCal for work, but think about the type of data you’re giving companies access to before you actually use these “free” services. If you don’t know what DNS is, but you know Google’s is pretty fast – find out what DNS is before you tell a company EVERY SINGLE WEBSITE YOU VISIT, NO EXCEPTIONS. If you like the sound of a free operating system, think about what it means to give a company access to ANYTHING you do on your computer. I’m not saying this is the case, but if you don’t want to pay for an OS; there are plenty of amazing, free ones around.

Google has quickly learned from twitter that knowing about your users as in where they are or what their name is, or what someone said in an email isn’t worth nearly as much as knowing every little thing about our lives. Where you’re going to eat, what you ate when you got there, what you’re reading, what you recommend, what movies you like, where you work, what you do whilst you’re at work, all of that makes anything you’ve got with a screen and a Google product on the potential to be a tiny billboard for any type of thing that can be programmatically deemed applicable to you – and it’s not independently moderated – if someone finds out you like the sound of an iPad, you aren’t going to be getting legit ads on where to get one, you’re going to be getting shitty “GET A FREE IPAD IF YOU JUST GIVE US YOUR CREDIT CARD DETAILS AND MAIL US YOUR FIRST CHILD” ads. You’ve seen Google text ads, right? You might even use a plugin in your web browser to block them, so why open yourself up to have them put all over your life?!

It’s hard to blame Google for this, and they’re not the only ones. I mentioned Facebook; they’re getting just as bad, and they’ll probably end up worse, and this is why. You willingly tell Facebook EVERYTHING. Date of birth, who you’re related to, stuff you like, your employment history, political views, music taste, everything. You then proceed to give it up-to-the-minute information on all the stuff that’s catching your attention now. You’re a fickle idiot, and so was I until this all occurred to me. What’s potentially worse about Facebook is that you’re telling all of this stuff to them, giving them all your secrets, and they’re giving this data to anyone who knows a web developer. When you install an application, I bet you don’t read what they get access to – those little cancerous quizzes have access to “your Profile information, photos, your friends’ info and other content that [it] requires to work”. Do you really like quizzes enough to tell Johnny Nobody all that stuff about you? I don’t.

So, what’s the point in this? Mark Zuckerberg says that “privacy is no longer a social norm“, and I agree. Everything that you can write down about yourself can be leveraged to try and sell you something. Fair enough, it could be something that you might want, but I want that ball to always stay in my court. If I want to buy something, I’ll look for it. Eric Schmidt says that “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place“. This is utter bullshit. You’re entitled to have secrets and you should have secrets. Maybe don’t tweet about them, or post them on your Facebook wall, but they’re not secrets if you’re doing that. What Mr. Schmidt is saying there is “if you have a secret and you use one of my company’s products, I’m going to use that secret to get some scammer to try and sell you shit”.

Now, I’m not against avertising. It can be pretty useful. However, Google used to just be a box to search stuff in. Then it was a box to search stuff in with ads on it, then it was an online equivalent of everything you used to do on your desktop computer. Now it’s all that stuff from before, plus it’s got its own backup of the internet, and soon it’ll have phonelines. It’s always changing the game, and it keeps all that stuff it had from before. No matter how they decide to change the game up, they’re always going to know everything you’ve ever told them, whether you know they did or not. Same with Facebook. So, think about what you’re telling websites about yourself and who might end up knowing that stuff and, if in doubt, walk outside with your eyes closed and tell the first person you bump into what you were going to tell that website – if you’re comfortable with them knowing it then you’re OK!

There’s a lot of talk at the moment, in the twitter community (if it can so be called) about twitter’s business model. Since I started caring about how premium accounts could affect my experience with the site, I began thinking about how I would monetise the site.

The key factor to this, in my opinion, is that it always seems to be approached from the angle of “how can we least irritate the users of this site, but still gain money from their use of it?”. This, to me, is a fundamental flaw in the logic. You are much more likely to successfully monetise a site if people actually benefit from what they’re paying for. It’s obviously easier to do this by offering perks to paying users in the same vein as flickr or vimeo’s increased bandwidth/storage space limits, but you really have to rack your brain for a decent model when it comes to most of your users having free accounts.

Untargeted advertising is awful. It’s intrusive, mostly irrelevant and makes designers cry. Google tried to combat irrelevance by keyword matching content of sites or, more controversially, emails. It almost worked, except for the fact that it somehow didn’t. No-one clicks Google text ads unless they’re specifically trying to generate click revenue for a site. This means that the advertising has failed. It’s not a scalable or future proof way to monetise a site, so it’s out. No untargeted ads.

Facebook have recently been really picking up the game with respect to advertising. I mention that I like movies and music on my profile. I talk to my friends about web development, gaming, social media, photography and more and I get small ads (which are obviously Facebook-approved and sit inline with the design of the site (I don’t want to get into Facebook’s design. That’s a whole other can of worms)). They also offer me the ability to vote-up or down an ad. I’ve not seen the movie Slumdog Millionnaire, and I have no interest in doing so, so I vote the ad down and don’t see it again. Brilliant.

Now, if I were a sensible businessman, I would take these ratings and apply them to conversations I have with my friends about movies. If one of my friends mentions that they like movies, and maybe even give as much detail as sharing similar film taste, my voting-up an ad would make it more likely to appear in their ad rotation. Brilliant. That, to me, is the way that targeted advertising should be done. Friends talk about things together, they recommend things, they get adverts that logic dictates they might like. They’re not all going to be winners, but it’s a solid foundation that, with enough data and participation, could provide a self-perpetuating engine for revenue generation that all the owners have to do is assign keywords to and release to the wild. Yes, a lot of programming has to go into this sort of thing, but the rewards are potentially phenomenal. Especially with the userbase that Facebook has.

So, where does that leave twitter? I don’t have any statistics, but I see a lot of businesses have adopted twitter. I’m a particular fan of indie Mac developers and I exercise this enthusiasm by following their updates on twitter. I’m a bleeding-edge kinda guy and I like to know when new stuff is coming out that I can play with. What if you were to apply the same model to twitter? You already have the interaction between consumer and business right there, but it lacks the audience in some cases, so we make it special.

Say every twitter user has their own tag cloud (for those of you who don’t read any other blogs, a visualisation of word density/popularity comparative to overall volume) to target ads to. I mention the word “Mac” or “Apple” (probably) on a freakishly regular basis and so do a lot of my followers/followees. I, therefore, see a valuable type of advertising which has a special kind of (purchased) tweet with a wider scope. Say the good people a PotionFactory want to send out an ad, they hit up twitter, buy a “penetweet” (I should TM that it’s so good), associate some keywords and BAM, anyone who follows PotionFactory sees the ad. Anyone who’s friends with someone following PotionFactory who has a high enough keyword density of any number of the keywords PotionFactory bought when they bought the ad sees it. It appears inline with their tweets, it doesn’t say the word “sponsored” on it or anything tacky like that, it just sinks down with the rest of the tweets (or maybe stays up longer for a premium (not too long, though)) and everyone goes about their day.

So, there you have it. An unintrusive, targeted advertising engine built on the contents of people’s tweets, who they follow and who their friends follow. It easily fits in a tiered model (different tariffs give you access to more keywords, lower concentration of keywords for ads to be shown to users) and is far better, in my opinion, than the arbitrary character-limit-increase-based model that I’ve seen floating around recently!

I’d love to hear any readers’ thoughts on this, as I know most twitter users will have floated around their own ideas, if only internally.