What information have companies collected about you? Your attention data, behaviors, demographics, clickstream patterns, etc… and more.

Which companies have personal data about you?
Where is it stored? Who has control of it?
Or rather.. who have they sold it to? And what will they do with it?

MANY companies now maintain a large array of personal info about anyone who uses their website or other services. Most companies use personal data to target products, advertisements and other offers to consumers.

Pierre-Guillaume Wielezynski of the World Bank, posted about a future model of user-centric ad-serving where corporations partner with individuals to access their personal information.

About Drupal for Facebook:
(from the Drupal project page)

This set of modules and themes turns Drupal into a platform for developing Facebook Applications.

With Drupal for Facebook, you can harness all the power of Drupal in your Facebook App. If you already have content in Drupal, you can expose it on Facebook.

The Drupal for Facebook philosophy is that the functionality already built into Drupal should be used to create Facebook Applications. Where possible, we use Drupal’s user management, permission schemes, blocks, views, etc. to implement the Facebook App. Experienced Drupal users will find it very straightforward to build a Facebook App. While Facebook developers new to Drupal may want to spend some time on Drupal.org learning best practices.

Hiitch is a desktop social networking platform. It’s open source. You can actually download the source and create you own private social network with others you invite.

I’m still new to Hiitch so I’m still exploring its functionality, but it looks very exciting. I will definitely post updates as I get more accustomed with Hiitch’s social networking functions and others features.

What is ShiftSpace?

This is one of the most interesting applications of social network that I’ve seen in a while. Instead of operating on a completely separate domain, like MySpace, ShiftSpace allows the entire internet to be included in the landscape that forms the ShiftSpace network. This means that ShiftSpace users can interact in real ways with existing viewpoints, discussions, and events that are actually occurring throughout the world. This makes ShiftSpace more relevant than any closed system could be.

The Second Life Insider reported today that the Second Life grid was experiencing large problems:

At 8:00AM SLT (US Pacific) this-morning, with 37,419 users logged into the Second Life grid, something began to go wrong. Reports began coming in of teleportation problems, difficulties accessing inventory, search failures, and difficulties logging in.

In a recent update, Linden Labs claims to have solves the issues.

Update: MySpace scores Coke money by blindfolding users

MySpace has openly displayed a blatant lack of concern for user safety by installing those msplinks.com redirects . In case you need a quick refresher, MySpace has installed software that forces every outbound link (links to other sites) on any MySpace.com pages to filter through the domain msplinks.com. Each link is then redirected to the original destination.

One very dangerous effect of these redirects is evident.
The msplinks.com redirects unquestionably make MySpace users even more susceptible to fraud, phishing, viruses, and other shady dealings.

Some of you may already know that Open Academic first released DrupalED on April 20th. But yesterday they released an improved version (available for download through that link).

You can visit check out a live DrupalED installation to see how it’s set up. It’s podcasts, wikis, groups, FOAF functionality, bookmarks…. plus any other functionality available through the hundreds of contributed Drupal modules.

I’m very excited about this. If anyone has a DrupalED site setup that they want to showcase, please let us know in the comments. Thanks!

Mark Glaser wrote an interesting post that discussed whether social networking sites such as Facebook need to spend money on marketing & advertising. In the post, he states that the growth of social networking sites is ‘friend-driven’. From his post:

And the social networking sites are truly friend-driven and friend-powered. They don’t need to spend money on marketing, because they have the power of friends who cajole other friends to join in, who then tell 10 friends, who tell 10 friends, and so on.

I certainly agree that people enable the value of social networking sites to be fully realized. Social networking doesn’t work without the critical mass of social people.

Application name: FaceDouble
This F8 app is based on an existing website, FaceDouble.com. The service allows you to make comparisons between submitted photos that are look-a-likes for celebrities. You can submit photos from web or mobile.

Facebook directory listing:
http://apps.facebook.com/facedouble

App development time: seven days

Submission process / growth schedule

Submitted to Facebook: Saturday
Approved: Sunday
Adoption Rate: installed by 716 users on Monday (at time of this post)

During the last couple weeks, Facebook’s F8 release has been getting much publicity. Marc Andreessen wrote an analysis of Facebook’s new open platform, and I recommend reading his observations if you are at all curious about the F8 release. Most surprising to me (but completely logical), Marc concluded that widely adopted Facebook apps need heavy funding available during the days & weeks after launch.
Here’s why.

Too far, too fast

As a F8 developer, you must provide your own hosting for your Facebook app. So if you create an incredibly popular F8 app, your hardware needs will skyrocket. Your quick success may result in a denial of service if you can’t afford to immediately purchase additional hardware.