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Are Microsoft breaking the contract too?

Plus it isn’t just limited to Spaces. By default, Windows Live Messenger contacts can see items in your “Whats New” feed (aka News Feed) and vice versa. Sound familiar huh?

Activity from your Space shows up in other users feeds by default. You have to explicitly turn this stuff off, just like in Google Reader. You also have to specifically state that no Messenger contacts can get access to this attention data.

Its not just Favorites though. SkyDrive, the hosted storage service from Microsoft allows you to keep files in the cloud with two settings - private or public. By default, those marked as public show up in the feeds of all Spaces/Messenger contacts.

How does any of this differ to the Google situation? This is a clear effort to reverse engineer the Messenger social graph for the benefit of the Spaces social graph, when in reality for many people there is a difference between the two.

I got why facebook was bad with Beacon immediately and so did most of the people I told - they were monitoring what you did on other sites and telling your friends about it. This to me is clearly about permission.

I think I must have a misunderstanding about the gmail / reader issue because to me it is. Gmail has the ability to autofill email addresses for you (I love that ability) and it does this by storing details of anyone you send an email to in the contacts database. Google Reader has a shared function that allows you to publish a public shared feed of interesting blog posts. Until recently the shared feed was public but you had to send the unique URL to people, now anyone that you have sent an email to who also uses gmail can access your feed.

So to me the problem is that Google had a feature that was public but because it was complex to use people assumed privacy - Google made it easier to use and those people that had assumed it was private now found that because the assumption was invalid they had now published all of their shared items to all the people they had emailed.

I do not think this is a privacy issues with Google sharing your data with someone else - I think it is a lack of understanding by Google that people had made this assumption and a lack of understanding about how some people were using the shared item feature.

I’ve explained this story to others and can’t get anyone who cares about it in the same way they did about Beacon and Facebook.

I am afraid that perhaps I have missed something in the story and I look forward to finding out the whole story.

However if I haven’t can you please concede that this is should be considered a lack of judgement by the Google Reader team on how people are using the feature than it is a general lack of respect for permission by Google.

I love the Gillmor gang and your posts but your obsession with the Google Reader issues really is beginning to ruin some great discussions.

Again I will accept my mistake and you can ignore the above if Google is now showing Pepsi and Levis all the details of my shared item activity.

@ AI - “I love the Gillmor gang and your posts but your obsession with the Google Reader issues really is beginning to ruin some great discussions.”

I agree completely. I am far from a Google apologist but Steve seems to be using this sole (and not that significant) issue as a means to completely devalue any merit the company has when it comes to the user contract, and as a base for his new-found Microsoft love. Some of the comments have been eyebrow raising to say the least. I mean, *Microsoft* of all companies! It must be the Ray Ozzie appreciation clouding judgement. I kid, I kid.

Also, Shared items are shown to contacts you have actually chatted with in Google Talk, and not solely Gmail “contacts”. While I am not excusing the lack of foresight on the Google team, there is a subtle difference between the two, especially in that Gmail has the auto-add algorithm.

You seem to argue that Microsoft Live sharing features equate to Google violating the user contract. Apples and oranges. Are you saying that Microsoft did violate the contract? Then you have an analogy. Try again.

If you don’t care about user contracts changing under you, then I don’t think you’ll get much of an argument. A silent gesture, yes . . .

Scott / Wills,

Novell is partnering with Microsoft to build a Silverlight for Linux. The plan for non-Windows support was envisioned from the beginning. The distinction of who writes the code is immaterial.

Google made a boo-boo in this instance but it pales in comparison to Beacon. And speaking as someone who grew up in the Microsoft era, I find it incredible to think that anyone believes that Google has dug themselves a deeper hole than Microsoft when it comes to having the trust of their users. I’m sure that 98% of Google users still think of them as the company with the motto “do no evil”, who gives them lots of cool free software. Contrast that to people’s sentiments about Micro$oft.

Maybe MS learned from Hailstorm and are now privacy’s staunchest advocates. But maybe Google learned from their stumble too.

I wish Steve would give us some input on this - I guess there is something we are missing - otherwise I don’t understand why he keeps harping on about this!

Once again, lack of respect for the user. Maybe Microsoft can steal a march on Google after all.

the observation concerning the importance of time, however, is very good …

time not location has become the resource that needs to be measured more consistently with the cost of access and/or bandwidth use … there is a there there, there and there … and if it isn’t someone will provide it … there

additional variables :: a balance between what is *believed* to be “privacy” (delimited by the potential or cost of ID theft — perhaps in a SLA or EULA or an insurance provision relating to same - for valuation or liability limitation purposes) and what can be characterized as either “piracy” or “marketing” of intangibles (whether by statute such as the Patent Act or the Copyright Act or even consent decree such as the ASCAP & BMI arrangement for performance of music or some other as yet to be determined attribution for value creation) … this can apply to aesthetics or functionality of the network, the application or transport layer, packet flow and the underlying protocols to support efficient AND/OR effective “trusted transactions”

pricing access in terms of the cost of bandwidth or the computational expense to maintain access-based rules (to drive a particular but related transaction[s]) is bounded by how to gain the “trust” of the user (could be as “insignificant” as trusting a 5 dollar bill is indeed authentic, based on observation - right or wrong, or as detailed as verification from a certification authority for both parties to a given exchange) and more significantly how to get the user to pay (payment may also be subsidized by advertising or subscription or some other commitment of value in exchange for value to be returned to the provider) …

the enabler that is lost in all of the discussion are the means and practices of how quickly payment options have been deployed and how quickly transactions can be had in real time or close enough to real time … will technology move as fast as payment (another potential variable) and can there be observations of present value if the windows for expected economic activity be reliably predicted while the rest of the content to be sold later has been paid for (catalog that was once newly released material)

payment providers can compete with network providers in an observable sense >>> what is the complexity attributed to consummating a given transaction? what about, in terms of computation and by extension bandwidth or time …

that being said, it is quite instructive that any return on investment for a given intangible requires better measurements or transparency, not only for the advertisers or aggregators, but for the end-user as well … time deficits exist for all market participants, real or perceived

recognition and trust are fungible and time-driven models simply enable even higher valuations for given network use … especially in a time-deficit economy

GREAT PIECE!!