Thursday, March 02, 2006
Web 2.0: Big Brother Is Us
Web 2.0 seems to be the big Internet buzzword and I'm pretty sure no less than 1000 definitions have been offered. I'm throwing my cute definition into the hat today: Big Brother Is Us.
Last year went by particularly quick for me and I spent at least a few hours trying to account for time, especially tying personal events to dates. I remember hearing a story about 10 years ago that the Amazon.com CEO took a camera with him everywhere so he could take a picture every day to help him with this. So, a few months ago, I realized that I could use the little trail of breadcrumbs I have left all over my Web 2.0 applications to help me figure this out. While this was helpful to me, as is often with profound insights, this left me with a slight sense of dread.
The most popular of the Web 2.0 applications are popular because they have an almost zero concept of privacy. The user is left with having to make decisions about his privacy for every action rather than having suitable defaults or profile choices. So, among application developers, there is a lot of pressure to remove or obscure privacy options from users. Thus, we have Web 2.0 applications.
Last year went by particularly quick for me and I spent at least a few hours trying to account for time, especially tying personal events to dates. I remember hearing a story about 10 years ago that the Amazon.com CEO took a camera with him everywhere so he could take a picture every day to help him with this. So, a few months ago, I realized that I could use the little trail of breadcrumbs I have left all over my Web 2.0 applications to help me figure this out. While this was helpful to me, as is often with profound insights, this left me with a slight sense of dread.
The most popular of the Web 2.0 applications are popular because they have an almost zero concept of privacy. The user is left with having to make decisions about his privacy for every action rather than having suitable defaults or profile choices. So, among application developers, there is a lot of pressure to remove or obscure privacy options from users. Thus, we have Web 2.0 applications.
# posted by herestomwiththeweather @ 3/02/2006 04:55:00 PM 
