Cool discussion of Web 2.0 by ThoughtWorks crew

I spent a lot of time on the road to & from the Twin Cities in the last few weeks, so I used that chance to catch up on some old podcasts and explore some new ones. A really nifty discovery this weekend was a panel discussion on Web 2.0 by the smart folks at ThoughtWorks. The discussion is led by Martin Fowler. Fowler goes through Tim O’Reilly’s seminal “What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software” from 5 years ago, where O’Reilly lays out what he believes to be seven defining principles of Web 2.0. Fowler and the panel discusses each of these seven principles, looking at how they’ve held up over time. While the panelists didn’t think that all had held up equally well, in general O’Reilly had successfully identified many of the key trends. One might think this conversation is pretty esoteric, but I think it would be understandable and valuable to anyone looking to better understand what the web has become (and is still becoming). Definitely recommended!

It’s interesting to see in what ways various organizations do and don’t “get” these changes. Sadly, the U in general and the Morris campus in specific, for example, aren’t generally real on top of things when it comes to modern web technology. What’s particularly frustrating is the U’s unwillingness to work with and empower their users to help generate and manage content and value. Big Web 2.0 successes like Google and Amazon, Twitter and Flickr are all about leveraging user generated content. The U has its little fits in that direction (the U of M wiki, the UThink blogs), but they’re always peripheral to the life of the University, always in the back alleys instead of on the front page.

The ThoughtWorks discussion runs about an hour, and they divided it up into three chunks for podcasting. Unfortunately they haven’t released a new podcast since last July, so it appears that I’m late to the party and the party may be over. I look forward to listening to their other podcasts, and I certainly hope that they start making new episodes sometime soon.

If you’re interested you can find all their podcasts on the ThoughtWorks What We Say page through either RSS or iTunes.

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Facebook a creepy peeping tom neighbor?

An evening on the computer

Apparently Facebook is collecting even more information about us than we thought:

A Computer Associates security researcher is sounding the alarm that Facebook’s controversial Beacon online ad system goes much further than anyone has imagined in tracking people’s Web activities outside the popular social networking site.

Beacon will report back to Facebook on members’ activities on third-party sites that participate in Beacon even if the users are logged off from Facebook and have declined having their activities broadcast to their Facebook friends.

I can’t say I’m surprised – the entire design of Facebook has consistently been geared to extract as much information as possible from their users, and they haven’t exactly been sneaky or subtle about it. Still, a depressing wake up call for all those folks who are blithely spilling their lives all over social networking systems.

They don’t provide much in the way of technical details. However, as the wonderful Web 2.0 world moves us farther and farther away from the web as a collection of simple text pages with HTML tags thrown in for pretties, there are more and more ways that we can be tracked and subverted. We can certainly do more (I do love Flickr, and Google Calendar is a joy), but we expose ourselves to increasingly more risk as a consequence.

Caveat emptor.

(Apparently Facebook has turned off Beacon, although my suspicion is that Beacon is just the tip of Facebook’s data collection iceberg.)

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