Tag: internet

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Remaining Digg.com assets sold for $500k to Betaworks

Digg.com, the social news site, has sold off it’s brand, technology and website for the bargain price of $500k to Betaworks, who are looking to revive their own news sharing site with Digg’s technology. Previous parts of Digg were also recently sold – The Washington Post bought half of Digg’s staff for $12 million, and LinkedIn bought patents from Digg for a reported $4 million.

All together, that not a bad sum, but back in 2008 Google was rumored to have offered $200 million to buy them out, an offer which they refused.

It’s incredible how fast companies rise and fall in the internet world. AOL was at one point the largest ISP worldwide and now all but disappeared. Netscape was the choice of Internet browsers and webserver software was widely used – now long gone. Yahoo is also possibly on the brink of disappearing, now largely irrelevant as the world around them has changed faster than they’ve been able to keep up with. It’s an interesting and fast changing world out there, and as technology continues to evolve and change, there’s going to be plenty more companies who are are the top right now, slowly disappear over time.

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The ‘Social Enterprise’ according to salesforce.com

I had the chance to go to the saleforce.com CloudForce/CloudStock event in SF yesterday. I went primarily to attend the tech sessions on using Heroku and Amazon AWS, but it was interesting to sit in the keynote session and hear the salesforce CEO Marc Benioff give his sales speech on why Social Media is big for business. In a nutshell, here’s my summary of what social means to business (from the view of salesforce.com):

  • Social Media has exploded in popularity. It’s massive.
  • Integrating the way you do business with Social Media allows you to connect with your customers/clients and their needs, wants, likes, dislikes – accessing a goldmine of marketing information and the potential to building ongoing/interactive relationships with your customers
  • Integrating social media concepts within the enterprise brings benefits of growing communities within the company, increasing inter-team/group/department interactivity, increasing group collaboration and access to current/relative information and events in real time

As a consumer, I’ve often had the opinion that I don’t want company x knowing what I ‘like’ on Facebook, or what videos I’m watching on YouTube. Hearing Benioff and other salesforce.com customers talk about the profound beneficial changes that Social Media is bringing to their companies, it was interesting to hear why this is an important trend for doing business in today’s world. Information is key to succeeding in business, and it’s obvious why businesses ‘want in’ on the social media scene to use this data for their own advantage. Whether all consumers want businesses they interact with to have access to their personal likes, dislikes and online activity though is another story.

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PSA to users of the Internet: All sites track you. There is no privacy on the internet.

The recent story in the WSJ about Google ‘bypassing Safari security settings’ is getting out of hand in the media. What they don’t seem to be focusing on is the other side of the argument, not that company X bypassed browser Y’s security settings, but browser Y’s security settings apparently don’t work.

There hasn’t been any forced attempts to break security in any particular browser, Google is just taking advantage of the way these settings work. Others do the same too, it’s not just Google. And let’s put this is perspective: ALL WEBSITES TRACK YOU (to some degree or another).

There needs to be some resetting of people’s expectations of privacy on the internet. Unless you’re taking extreme measures involving anonymous proxies and encryption, then the reality of it is that there is no privacy on the internet. All sites track you by some means because it’s how they make their money. Sites don’t offer you the use of their services for free because they’re charities or see it as a public service that they should do so, they’re offering you services for free as a way to get ads in front of your eyeballs. Taking this a step further, if they can provide information on your surfing habits to advertisers so that they can target ads specifically to you and increase the chance that you’ll a) click an ad, and b) make a purchase, then that information is even more valuable and advertisers are prepared to pay for this information. This is why you are tracked.

Most if not all websites have a privacy statement linked from the footer of every page on their site. Other sites that require a sign up will have lengthy terms and conditions which you must agree to by signing up and for using that site. Maybe it’s time more people started reading these to find out what sites on the internet typically do. Most people apparently would be surprised.

If you want or even expect privacy, then please disconnect your internet connection. In today’s world you’re not going to find any privacy on the internet.

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