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Write it out by hand first.

So Facebook got a lot of criticism for their latest privacy changes and having privacy controls that are too ‘granular’, or whatever …

I guess there are two groups of Facebook users, those who don’t care about privacy so much, and those who are confused and fed up with all the changes. The first group is probably bigger, but still there must be a reasonable number of disgruntled users.

The basic problem is that Facebook has quite large costs (can you imagine how many servers are needed for 500m users?) and it has to cover these somehow, so it keeps coming up with fancy-pants advertising schemes, all of which leverage users’ data to some extent, and so come the privacy concerns and the outrage and the angst, etc.

Instead, why don’t they just charge a frigging fee. I’d happily pay $10 a year or so for a Facebook-like service with only two privacy settings: PRIVATE, where only my friends can see my stuff, and PUBLIC, where everyone can see my stuff.

Sure they might not get 500m users and they couldn’t monetise their social graph (whatever that means), but even 5m x $10 = $50m, not a tiny sum of money.

Some potentially interesting Twitter data for sale from infochimps:

For $300 you can buy the dataset containing an hour-by-hour breakdown of the occurence of hashtags, URLs, and smileys in the 1.6 billion tweets created between March 2006 and March 2010. For $250 you can purchase a dataset extracted from those same 1.6 billion tweets with all mentions of stock tokens and related keywords.

Younghee Jung on physical vs digital identity:

Socially and systematically our digital birth is not acknowledged. It only becomes valid when our physical and proven existence is linked to it. Will this change? Will we – digitally or physically – be freed from our permanent residence when so many of us are no longer in a position to claim a permanent residence?

I made this graph today showing the real value per tonne of New Zealand exports and imports by air freight. The real values are calculated using the CPI.

Interesting that the value of imports per tonne are about twice those of exports. A lot of air-freighted imports are probably pharmaceuticals. Also interesting that the real value of exports per tonne has increased about 5x over the past 20 years while the value of imports has fluctuated but not really increased.