Written on February 14, 2008 – 11:35 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
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Leah Culver is Co-founder and Lead Developer of Pownce.com, a social messaging application. We talk about Pownce growth, the recent ‘going out of closed beta’ launch, Valentines day, the much awaited Pownce API (news!), what Kevin Rose REALLY does at Pownce, her ideas about the Yahoo/Microsoft situation, a strange situation involving Leah, oranges and lots of booze, her (very open) ideas about privacy, her upcoming trip to Amsterdam (she will speak at The Next Web Conference), about Pownce’s popularity in France and the differences and similarities between Pownce and Twitter.
Sit back, relax and enjoy:
Want to know more about Pownce? First, try it out and then read these excellent reviews at Mashable and/or Techcrunch.
Written on February 7, 2008 – 2:51 pm
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
This morning Patrick, Arjan, Babette and me arrived in Geneve for the LIFT08 Conference. We already saw some interesting speakers. For example Genevieve Bell from Intel, who discussed digital deceptions. She told us that when she registered for Yahoo and Flickr, she’d lied about her age and the city she lived in. When she lost her password she wasn’t able to retrieve it, since she had no idea what her registered age was. After discussing some (fun) facts (we tell 200 lies a day) and offering historical context (lying is bad, according to all religions), she concluded that the Web facilitates lying pretty well. We can make crazy avatars that don’t even look like us and children under 13 can just register to social networks if they lie.
Next to gaining access to services and presenting yourself in a cool way, people also lie about things they don’t want to be public. So to sum it up, we lie in order to protect our identity.
Lift captures almost everything that happens, so you can actually watch with us. Check out Bell’s presentation below, or go the special Nouvo Lift page.
Written on January 22, 2008 – 7:12 pm
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten,
Peter Scharr, Germany’s data protection commissioner, leads the EU group preparing a report on how well the privacy policies of the various international search engines comply with EU privacy laws and whether these laws should be loosened or tightened. Based on a what he proposed during a hearing by the European parliament recently it looks like it will be a lot more restrictive than most search engines want it to be. Scharr said that when someone is identified by an IP address “it has to be regarded as personal data.”.
European Commission in Brussels
The implications for search engines such as Google and Microsoft are huge. Google always took the standpoint that an IP address simply identifies a computer and not a user. That may be technically correct but since most people own one computer and access the internet via their own connection they generally have the same IP address and can be identified pretty well. You can read an extensive article about the subject including feedback from Google, Microsoft and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) at Yahoo News.
We asked Christiaan Alberdingk Thijm, online privacy expert, from law firm SOLV (who successfully defended KaZaA in court in 2002 in the Netherlands) to give us his opinion on the matter. He says “The question is what the consequences are of the EU’s approach. If an IP address is personal data, this means that every action online implicates that the data protection legislation is applicable. It will be impossible to enforce legislation with such a result. The better question to ask is whether your privacy is actually being invaded. The processing of data does not necessarily imply an invasion of privacy.”
It will be interesting to see what online services will do if their IP tracking practices become illegal in Europe. They could decide to have different policies for Europe than the rest of the world. But to do that they would have to track IP addresses first which is precisely the reason why they are tracking them now, they say.
Written on December 11, 2007 – 11:28 am
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief
Le Web 3 kicked off with pumping house beats and an excited couple LeMeur: “We’re all changing the world, so spread the word!”. After this enthusiastic start, Le Web switched to a more critical view on the web revolution. Dan Rose (Facebook), Michel Jaccard (attorney), Jarwoong Lee (Daum Communications, South Korea) and Chris Alden (SixApart) talked about the dark side of web 2.0.
Foto by LeWeb
The four gentlemen seemed to agree: the online world is nothing more than a reflection of the real world. Alden:,,It’s the anonymity that brings the ruder side of us out. The companies SixApart is working for, now more and more often ask us to give users a profile. As it turns out, people behave more polite then”.
Online bullying
The government of South Korea is taking this approach to an extreme level. In order to stop online bullying by kids, the government wants to give their children a personal key to access all the available services. Lee doesn’t agree with this drastic way of preventing bullying: “Privacy is more important. Particularly when you consider the risks of identity theft. Moreover, bullying happens on the schoolyard as well. The government therefore should focus on education instead.”
Then all the eyes focused on big shot Facebook. Rose: ,,Half of our 57 million users comes back every day. They are part of 50.000 plus individual networks. Almost nobody uses Facebook anonymously, since our service is based on real world relationships. People won’t become your friend if they don’t know you. So Facebook loses its value when you use a false identity. Therefore, people behave the same way as they do in real life.”
Privacy
Rose also admitted that Facebook made mistakes during the launch of Beacon: “We didn’t listen to our users when they said that didn’t feel like they had control. That contrasted with our normal approach, namely giving users the options to choose who can see their info. Moreover, we did a bad job explaining Beacon. We’ve launched it together with an advertising platform. Therefore users thought it was primarily an advertising tool. It wasn’t designed as such.”
Yet, Rose still believes in the concept of Beacon. “Users still want an easy way to share info with friends. We just have to give them control when we develop a new way.”
User generated content is crap
Lee: “The talks about soccer used to only take place in café’s, now they’re also published on the web. So yes, a lot of user generated content is crap.” Alden didn’t agree, stating that we too often regard Internet as an newspaper. “We think: if information is irrelevant, it’s crap. On the Internet this is not the case, it’s more like a living space. What’s crap for somebody, is relevant to others.” Rose noticed an evolution in ugc: “The first content produced by users were the customer reviews on Amazon. Those were valuable sometimes, however you never knew who had written it. Then bloggers emerged, and we were able to put the reviews in a context. Even though we don’t know them personally. We do know our Facebook friends personal, so their reviews are most relevant to us.”
That’s probably also the reason why on Facebook, there isn’t a lot of spamming going on. The critical discussion ends with a positive note by Rose: “It’s a movement to better content”.
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show of, the future of the Web. (
