Disqus - Latest Comments for alexfiles

Re: Intelligence Community Continues Using Facebook for Recruiting

Alex — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 14:13:11 -0000

Clearly they're missing part of their audience, because I haven't seen these yet ;-)

Seriously, I would guess these are some of the most-clicked ads ever, regardless of the audience.

Re: The Impact of the New Design on Applications

Alex O'Neal — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 16:48:55 -0000

Personally I am much less likely to add any new apps, as the controls for customizing access to different parts of my profile are no longer readily available at the start of the process and there's no guarantee the app I add will include them.

Re: Detect Narcissists on Facebook

Alex O'Neal — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:44:00 -0000

In a world where many of us join because others in the workplace have joined, I would think there are better approaches to this question. If we assume the question to be valid (which I'm not at all sure we can), better items to check might include:

- The number of comments left on other people's posts
- Whether they have any altrusitic apps
- Whether they blast posts/apps to all their friends, or only select appropriate friends

There are probably more options than this. Quality of photo and number of friends is so dependent upon the nature of their Facebook relationships that I can't see it as being relevant to the question of narcissism,

Re: Conflicting Numbers Over Facebook Redesign Arises

Alex — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 13:34:38 -0000

There's no numerical conflict here. The total number of users (100 million +) and the number of users visiting Facebook since the new design went live are two different numbers. We can estimate 50 million have actively visited from the 30 million/60% they offer.

Re: Electronic Arts Launches Scrabble, Starts Buying Installs

Alex — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 19:14:49 -0000

I definitely think they have a chance. Not only through the legal option David mentions in the above comment, but because many users have a bad taste in our mouths from the early months of Scrabulous. Server and functionality challenges were the norm for months, followed by unpleasant associations with people using the game for purposes other than scrabble play. If the new version provides a better UX, I'll definitely use it over Scrabulous.

Re: Senate Begins Discussing Privacy Implications of Online Advertising

Alex O'Neal — Wed, 09 Jul 2008 17:09:54 -0000

Kelly's "critical distinction...between the use of personal information for advertisements in personally-identifiable form, and the use, dissemination, or sharing of information with advertisers in non-personally-identifiable form" does not really protect users.

Many times such protection takes the form of assigning an "anonymous" tag to a user, which doesn't hide them at all. Take the classic example of "anonymous" AOL searcher 4417749, quickly identified by two New York Times reporters as a 62-year-old widow in Georgia in 2006. Simple data mining of search, application, and other pseudo-anonymous non-profile data can get finely granulated results, right down to a given individual. You don't even need a unique identifier (such as no. 4417749) to identify a specific human.

Surely a privacy executive at Facebook understands this.