Lately facebook has been taking a lot of flak over user privacy regarding the changes they’ve implemented to their API and how easy it is for 3rd parties to access user’s private data … or more to the point, how much pain users have to go through to hide their personal data.

My personal opinion is that, yes, facebook is being a bit of an arse about the whole issue. At first they were promising everyone a walled garden free of outside scrutiny where you can behave just like you were locked up in your little dorm room having fun with a few mates.

And people got used to that.

For example you’ll never see anyone complain about the fact their tweets are public, or that whatever they post on their blogs is public, or flickr or forums or irc and a miriad other services. The whole online world is … public. And nobody bats an eyelid.

Then facebook becomes slightly more public.

Public outrage!

Villages, internet and old women peeking out of windows

The fact of the matter is that facebook was never private even though it promised to be. In fact I’ll wager it’s more private now than it was ever before!

Wait what?

It all boils down to rumors and basic human behaviour.

if you’re worried about looking like an idiot, don’t be an idiot when someone is looking

Now I’m not a psychologist or sociologist or anything like that, but because I’m a computer scientist I like to pretend I can understand anything algorithmically complex – like people.

Also I’ve talked to one or two people who have lived in a small enough village to explain this effect to me.

When you have a small population of people living in a confined area everybody knows a little bit about everybody else. It doesn’t matter who you are or how many friends you’ve got. Someone will always know what you did last summer or how drunk you got on that party on Friday and not to mention what big of an arse you turned out to be when you dumped that poor girly.

Everybody! Will! Know, When. You, Fuck Up! They just will.

But when you live in a big city, it’s a little different. Suddenly there are so many people on so big an area you hardly know anyone. Most of us don’t even know any of the people living in the same building we are. If you’re lucky you’ll have a vague idea of what profession they’re in.

This gives us a super huge expectation of privacy and we’ve grown so used to being anonymous and unknown that we want this notion of privacy to extend into every little facet of our world.

So where lies the problem?

The problem is when these city slickers reach the online world. It looks anonymous. It smells anonymous. And it certainly likes to talk anonymous. No names. No identity. Nothing

Hoorah! I can make a total idiot of myself and no-one will know! yay

Well no, not really. Google and a bunch of other things are tracking your every move, every keystroke almost. They do this to make more money off of you through targeted advertising and some other unimportant stuff.

We’ve gone full circle, suddenly the online world behaves a lot like a village. Everybody knows everybody and so on.

So why such an outcry over privacy issues?

Well, because us city slickers don’t really know how to handle this kind of information. We’re not used to knowing so much about people around us, we’re not used to always having a pair of eyes on our back through the curtains of the window across the street.

That’s why we do strange google searches of people we want to hire, we research people we want to date, we … I don’t know, we basically dig up every little detail of anybody we encounter and think is important enough.

We want all that info.

But we can’t handle it.

A long time ago people in villages learned that being drunk at a party 20 years ago does not reflect poorly on a man today. The rest of us still need to figure that out so there won’t be cases of people not getting hired due to an obscure image found online or a drunk photo posted on their facebook etc.

Until then, for fuck’s sake people, if you’re worried about looking like an idiot, don’t be an idiot when someone is looking!

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The pace of the world today seems to be on the fast forward button. The information we get and process daily exceeds what we actually remember and as such we constantly read information selectively, only the ones that are important to us, others we quickly put in the back of our minds and dump maybe just for a later reference or discard all together as we do not think it will be useful for us.

The news we used to read in the newspapers at breakfast has already shifted to reading the latest blogs and news sites on your laptop while drinking coffee. That is just the first morning input, to see the world happenings in our field and around us while we have been asleep.

When we get to work, we usually open our Twitter and other Social media networks and see what our peers shared with us. Usually we get a lot of same articles recommended to read. Well if I am already reading TechCrunch or ReadWriteWeb it can be assumed I am on top of the web tech scene. But even though I read it daily, that does not mean my friends do and sometimes there is an article really worth spreading around and it pops out on every little blog or network you can imagine.

That article can be remixed with different titles, opinions and links through the url shorteners, so you never actually know if it is the same. You go and click on it, but then you see you already read it, probably like 3 times. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could filter all the mentions of the article in just one mention. Going from having 5 retweets, 3 blog posts about the topic and possibly 2 email forwards, to just having 1 mention which combines all the other 10 streams. Filtering unneeded data and condensing the info for you and as such saving you time.

Currently we use RSS feeds, Google Reader and all sorts of channels to gather what we want. We try to organize it into categories, folders, but all that does not filter the actual data, but just rearranges it into boxes that we process at some time. Depending on our habits, we read different articles in the morning or during work and it changes also on the day it is.

So the true question is how to shift our attention from categorizing and parsing all the news ourself to letting the computer do that for us, learning from the connections between the news we read what our friends give us through the social networks and combine the nodes into a “growing” environment of smart information targeted at us, but also still giving us the discovery part of new things as we do not want to be trapped in the box.

Tell us your opinion on how far are we from lowering our information overload?

The preona team would also like to wish you a Merry Christmas with best wishes and some nice quality time with your families over the holidays.

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The Synaptic Web has been around for a while now, the nearly two months are an age in internet terms, but it hasn’t been known for as long as the semantic web and the real-time web. They’ve been around for eons upon eons and are thus far better understood.

This is why we don’t know much about what the Synaptic Web is supposed to be, why I don’t know much about it, Khris Loux might, Eric Blantz perhaps, Chris Saad maybe, they coined the term after all, came up with the concept even. But outside of creating a lovely article on the subject over at synapticweb.org there hasn’t been much news on the matter.

However this doesn’t stop us from being among the first implementors of synaptic algorithms. Don’t think we just plunged into this head-first after hearing the buzzword though, we’ve been at it for a while now. Hunting for an elusive algorithm that understands users and content and the way information flows between sources. The phrase was just icing on the cake when we heard of it – finally a name to use.

But this brings us to an important question. Why would you care? Sure the whole thing is developer porn. But what’s in it for you, the user?

Web2.0 didn’t really bring you anything but a bunch of beta stuff. The semantic web went by largely in the background, Zemanta being perhaps the most for-the-user of the whole movement. Social networks are merely a logical next step from what we’re used to in the real world. And the real-time web is just flooding you with information every few seconds instead of a few times a day.

So what the hell can the synaptic web do for you?

For the first time in … a very long time … we are finally on the brink of changing the way humans look at information forever. Finally something that helps everybody and isn’t just a cool gimmick.

They Synaptic Web is the only possibility for people to get all the information … in manageable and orderly fashion.

Think about it for a moment. All the information. Manageably!

You will actually be able to read everything your friends say and won’t be flooded by the stream because there’s a gatekeeper helping you out. It’s like having a personal information butler that reads all the boring stuff and then points out what’s really interesting and cool.

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