April, 2009

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8
Apr 09

Facebook Confirms 200 Million Active User Mark

via Inside Facebook:

Just seven months after hitting the 100 million user mark last August and 90 days after hitting the 150 million mark in January, Facebook confirmed today that the site has just crossed another major milestone: 200 million active users.

On average, Facebook has added nearly half a million users per day, every day, since late August. If Facebook were a country, it would now have the 5th largest population in the world (about 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States).

Quite an accomplishment – congrats to Facebook!

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6
Apr 09

NY Mag asks “Does Facebook Own You?”

New York Magazine leads with an interesting piece on data ownership and online social networks by Vanessa Grigoriadis.  I’ve got a quote in there, which builds on some writing I did last month.

This is part of who I am now—somebody who knows that her nursery-school tormentor wasn’t a bully without a heart. It will get logged into my profile, and that profile will become part of the “social graph,” which is a map of every known human relationship in the universe. Filling it in is Facebook’s big vision, a typically modest one for Silicon Valley. It’s too complex for a computer scientist to build. Just as our free calls to GOOG-411 helped Google build its voice-recognition technology, we are creating the graph for Facebook, and I’m not sure that we can take ourselves out once we’ve put ourselves on there. We have changed the nature of the graph by our very presence, which facilitates connections between our disparate groups of friends, who now know each other. “If you leave Facebook, you can remove data objects, like photographs, but it’s a complete impossibility that you can control all of your data,” says Fred Stutzman, a teaching fellow studying social networks at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “Facebook can’t promise it, and no one can promise it. You can’t remove yourself from the site because the site has, essentially, been shaped by you.”

Check the full article.

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5
Apr 09

Greensboro tech community responds to Time Warner

Greensboro, NC is up in arms over the upcoming changes to Time Warner Broadband pricing.  Why?  Greensboro is pretty much a closed market, and Time Warner is the only choice for truly high-speed connectivity.  The News and Record has a story on the change, but the real action is in the comments.  Ed Cone also hosts a lively discussion on his blog.

In other coverage: Roch101 outlines a call for action for Greensboro residents, including calling on the city council to review franchise agreements with Time Warner.  Triad Media Watch posts links to protest sites, as well as links to other Greensboro response.

Greensboro has a lively, activist blogger scene that are gearing up to push back on this change.  As more and more people realize this is simply an anti-competitive, regressive land grab from Time Warner to cut customers off from streaming video sources (Hulu, Netflix, Boxee, Roku, Tv.com, etc.), I expect to see some interesting protest and action.

Update: Joe Killian has an article in today’s News and Record that covers user reaction to the upcoming Time Warner changes.  Time Warner spokesperson Melissa Buscher explains her company’s inadequacy:

“The data caps are a matter of necessity,” said Melissa Buscher, Time Warner Cable’s spokesperson for the Carolinas. The company’s cable infrastructure simply wasn’t built for the high-quality video and audio now available all over the Internet. Heavy users are causing slower speeds for everyone by taking up much of the bandwidth over which information can travel, Buscher said.

Many customers said they don’t believe that explanation.

“I can watch all the high definition television I want through the same cable service, order on-demand movies and watch all day, and they have no problem with that,” said Jennifer Sanders-Melvin, a Time Warner customer who said she’s looking for other options. “But if I want to do the same thing on the Internet, through the same cable, they have to limit what I can use?

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3
Apr 09

New in press

A quick note about some journal issues worth checking out:

The new JCMC features a number of interesting articles, including one on RateMyProfessor.com, one exploring political engagement in social networks, and an extensive study of college student internet use by Steve Jones and colleagues.  The study explores differences by race and gender, and will be a useful reference study for researchers of college student internet users (like me!).  JCMC is free and open-access, so anyone can download the articles.

The new Library Trends has a whole issue devoted to institutional repositories, including one entitled “Innkeepers at the Roach Motel” by Dorthea Salo.  Library Trends lives behind a roach-motel paywall, but I imagine most people who care about institutional repositories will be able to access the journal.

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3
Apr 09

CIO Magazine on privacy in social networks

C.G. Lynch of CIO magazine examines the business implications of the shifting nature of privacy in social networks.  He draws on research that Jacob Kramer-Duffield and I ran last fall:

But it turns out some users have fiddled with those privacy settings, after all. In research conducted by the UNC School of Information and Library Science this past fall, more than 70 percent of 495 college students surveyed claimed to have altered their Facebook privacy settings in some way. Around half of the students also said they limited access to their profile to “friends only.”

The research also indicates that their attention to privacy controls increases with their time on the service. During their first six months on Facebook, only 40 percent of students said they modified their privacy settings. After one year, that number jumped to nearly 80 percent.

It is a great article – I’ve spoken with Chris a few times and he’s an astute analyst of social networks.  The article has good quotes from Chris Kelly, Facebook’s smart Chief Privacy Officer.

As I mentioned in a post last week, Jacob and I are currrently writing this study up for publication.  We presented initial results at the ASIST Annual Meeting, but we hope to get this into journal form so we can share the results more broadly.

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2
Apr 09

Time Warner to throttle NC bandwidth

Fiona Morgan of the Independent posts troubling information about upcoming changes to Time Warner’s broadband pricing.  According to Morgan, Time Warner will begin throttling customers in Greensboro, NC and three other markets nationwide.  According to Businessweek, Time Warner will offer four plans:

Customers will be charged $1 for each gigabyte GB over their plan’s cap. Time Warner Cable offers four cap levels of 5, 10, 20, and 40 GB [per month]. A download of a high-definition movie typically eats up about 8 GB.

The 5GB plan will cost around $30, with the 40GB plan topping out at $55.  By contrast, Comcast does not offer tiered plans, but places a 250GB limit on throughput.

What does this mean, practically?  If you’ve got a Roku, an hour of streaming equals about a gigabyte of bandwidth.  At the low-end plan, if you watch more than 2 movies a month, you’ll get penalty charges.  On the high-end plan, 40 hours of Roku a month (20 movies) will mean you’ll be charged fees.

While I’ve been happy with my Time Warner broadband, needless to say I’ll be dropping the service if they expand tiered pricing.  Ars Technica shoots all sorts of holes through Time Warner’s logic; this is simply a ploy to charge customers more.  How long until we’re back to 1995′s pay-per-minute pricing regime?

Update: The NYT has a frustrating article on the reality of cable internet speed:

Pretty much the fastest consumer broadband in the world is the 160-megabit-per-second service offered by J:Com, the largest cable company in Japan. Here’s how much the company had to invest to upgrade its network to provide that speed: $20 per home passed.

…

The cable industry here uses the same technology as J:Com. And several vendors said that while the prices Mr. Fries quoted were on the low side, most systems can be upgraded for no more than about $100 per home, including a new modem. Moreover, the monthly cost of bandwidth to connect a home to the Internet is minimal, executives say.

So what’s wrong with this picture in the United States? The cable companies, like Comcast and Cablevision, that are moving quickly to install the fast broadband technology, called Docsis 3, are charging as much as $140 a month for 50 Mbps service. Meanwhile other companies, like Time Warner Cable, are moving much more slowly to upgrade.

Competition, or the lack of it, goes a long way to explaining why the fees are higher in the United States. There is less competition in the United States than in many other countries. Broadband already has the highest profit margins of any product cable companies offer. Like any profit-maximizing business would do, they set prices in relation to other providers and market demand rather than based on costs.

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