Web News

Yahoo Gives You More Options to Opt Out of Personalized Advertising

Yahoo today announced that it will allow its customers to opt out of customized advertising on Yahoo.com. Yahoo made this announcement in a response to the an inquiry by U.S. Congressman John Dingell (D- Mich.). Just yesterday, Google had announced a similar opt-out program for its DoubleClick advertising network. Yahoo's opt-out program won't take effect until the end of this month and will be an enhancement of Yahoo's current privacy policies with regard to customized advertising.

There have always been privacy concerns around personalized advertising, though the topic only recently became more of a mainstream issue when the U.S. Congress started an inquiry into the implications of this. As part of this inquiry, Congress asked 33 online advertisers if they offered the option to opt out of these customized ads.

Yahoo goes to great length in its letter to defend customized advertising and explains why advertising on the net is so important, not just as a way for Yahoo to make money, but also because it allows Yahoo to offer free tools to consumers and small businesses.

In the letter, Yahoo also stresses that it does not customize advertising based on potentially "sensitive interest categories" and specifically mentions searches for adult sites and sexual health information.

For advertisers, customized ads are obviously a far more effective way of reaching potential customers than regular ads. However, the real question will be if users will indeed chose to opt out of customized advertising. Yahoo's letter mentions that only 75,000 people visited its current opt-out site in July, which is a very small number when compared to Yahoo's overall reach.

Most mainstream users probably don't worry about the privacy implications of these customized ads too much. And those who do worry about it probably already run some form of ad-blocking software and have opted out of online advertising altogether.

Overall, this seems like a great publicity move by Yahoo, even if most users won't make use of the opt-out feature.

Use Twitter for Work With Twellow

Does Twitter Have a Role in the Workplace? A Directory Project Thinks it Can Help

Did you know that there are more than 100 people who work in the Oil and Gas industries who use Twitter? There are more than 400 people on Twitter who say they work in a field related to accounting, 115 professional language translators, 75 people who sew or are tailors and 33 people in the Air Force. How well is your industry represented on Twitter? Wouldn't you like to find those people to connect with them?

Twellow is an automatically generated directory of Twitter users, organized by occupation. It offers to help users quickly ramp up productive use of the popular microblogging service by finding people with common interests. New features were unveiled on the service today that will make it even more useful.

Do you or would you like to talk about work on Twitter? ( surveys)A service of news organization WebProNews, Twellow grabs publicly available Twitter messages, then looks at the bio fields of the users who published them. Those bios are analyzed for a variety of keywords that are then used to categorize the users by occupation or interest. Twellow says it is actively developing ways to search for users on other social network by occupational category as well.

Today Twellow rolled out an easy way to log-in to their service and associate your profile there with your accounts on other services. For example, nonprofit consultant Ian Wilker (see below) has associated his Twitter account with his accounts on places like Delicious, FriendFeed and LInked in via Twellow. That's useful for context, richer communication and forming further connections.

We think this kind of simple keyword parsing for categorization has a lot of potential. Twitter in particular is a great way to communicate quickly with groups of people, but it's particularly valuable if you can add people with common interests to your network. Twellow is an important service that's worth spending a few minutes with and keeping track of for the future.

You can find RWW writers in conversation on Twitter here.

Facebook Didn't Want to Sue StudiVZ

According to a report in the International Herald Tribune, Facebook tried to acquire the popular German social network StudiVZ. When those negotiations ended without a deal, Facebook decided to sue StudiVZ instead for copying Facebook's look and feel. According to the article, StudiVZ's owners, the German media company Holtzbrinck Gruppe, wanted to sell, but for far more than the $134 million it originally paid for StudiVZ in 2007.

Facebook definitely has a point when it says that StudiVZ is basically nothing more than a copy of its own service. While StudiVZ might use a different color scheme, everything else a user would see is pretty much identical, though the recent changes in Facebook's layout can't be found on StudiVZ (yet?).

StudiVZ came to market not long after Facebook and there is obviously no doubt that StudiVZ's founder were heavily influenced by Facebook. Today, Facebook only has about 1.2 million users in Germany while StudiVZ has about 10 times as many.

Facebook, of course, completely ignored the international market and didn't even offer sites for Germany, France, or Spain until earlier this year. This gave others a chance to acquire users, even if they had nothing more to offer than being a Facebook clone. Today, StudieVZ almost looks antiquated when compared to Facebook, yet it has a loyal user base that is not going to switch services very quickly.

The best parallel to this story is probably that of German auction site Alando - a blatant Ebay clone. Alando, too, quickly became more popular in Germany than Ebay and Ebay was eventually left with no other option than to just buy Alando. Suing StudiVZ is not going to make Facebook any more popular in Germany and given how slowly users migrate between social networks, Facebook's best option is probably to just pay a bit more for StudiVZ now and then reap the benefits in the long run.

Poll: What Should Be Done About The "I Am Rich" App?

By now you've surely heard the story about the "I Am Rich" app that sold in Apple's iTunes store for the ridiculous price of $999.99 (U.S.). What you may not have heard was that there were eight people who actually bought the app - six in the U.S. and two Europeans. So far, there only appears to be one person who bought the app in error, if a certain screenshot circling the net is to be believed. But what about the other seven? Did they know what they were getting into? And, if so, was Apple right to remove the app from their store?

The "I Am Rich" app was not a scam. It did nothing and it clearly stated as such its description at the iTunes app store. The app simply displayed an image of a glowing red ruby that "always reminds you (and others when you show it to them) that you were rich enough to afford this." When activated, the app displays a larger, glowing gem. According to the author, Armin Heinrich "it's a work of art with no hidden function at all."

But the clear description of its uselessness didn't convince at least one of the app's buyers not to purchase. Instead, he believed the app was a joke. According to a screenshot of an App Store review circling the net, a customer with the screen name of "Lee5279xx" complains that when he and some friends saw the app, they jokingly clicked "buy." Unfortunately, he had forgotten that his wife had "iclick" activated on the laptop, so he actually bought the app for $999. Of course, he immediately called Visa but they couldn't do anything until they talk to the vendor, and, at the time he wrote the complaint, Visa had not been able to reach either Armin Heinrich or Apple.

Now the I Am Rich app has been added to the mysterious Apple blacklist which also includes NullRiver's NetShare tethering application and a harmless movie listings app called BoxOffice. All three apps have been pulled from the store with no explanation as to why. Apparently, not even the developers know why, either. According to an interview with the LA Times, Heinrich states "I have no idea why they did it and am not aware of any violation of the rules to sell software on the App Store."

Obviously, the customer complaint may have something to do with its removal. But that's just one of the seven customers - who are these other customers and how do they feel? If they knew what they were doing and bought the app (yes perhaps as a joke, but knowingly so) and have no regrets, then what's the problem? Why remove the app from the store?

Assuming that the one customer complaint is real, (which seems likely), how should this problem be handled now? Should the developer have to refund the money? Technically, he did nothing wrong. His app performed as promised. Should Apple then be responsible? After all, aren't they the ones responsible for vetting the apps in advance? Perhaps they should have never let it into the store to begin with. Or should the customer just bite the bullet and pay up?

Let us know what you think in this poll:

Should "I Am Rich" App Customers Get Refunds? ( polls)

Three New AIR Apps To Bring Facebook To Your Desktop

If you love both Facebook and Adobe AIR, then you're going to love these three new AIR apps for your desktop: Facedesk, Zebr, and Flair. Facedesk is a standalone application that lets you use Facebook without having a browser window open. Both Zebr and Flair are notification programs for receiving alerts about Facebook status updates, wall posts, messages, and more. The last two are a bit more useful, but true Facebook addicts might want to try all three.

For those who always have Facebook in a browser tab, the Facedesk application may hold some appeal. Essentially, this AIR app does nothing more than take the Facebook web site and place it into an Adobe AIR app. However, with Facedesk outside the browser, you can easily switch to it via Alt+Tab in Windows or Cmd+Tab on Mac. Beyond that, there isn't much to the application, but it was fun to check out nonetheless.

The more useful of the two Facebook AIR apps is definitely Zebr. This AIR app reminds me of Twhirl for Facebook status updates. From Zebr, you can keep tabs on your friends' status changes as well as update your own. In addition, the app also keeps you updated on incoming messages and wall posts. When you're not using it, you can minimize Zebr to your system tray to keep it out of the way - alerts will still display as they come in. Zebr is available from their application page on Facebook.

Flair, like Zebr, is an app that keeps you in touch with your Facebook friends throughout the day without you having to login to the web site. Flair will alert you when you're poked, someone writes on your wall, or adds you as a friend. However, unlike Zebr, you are not alerted to friends status' updates. Although Flair does alert you to various items, in order to interact with Facebook - like, for example, to add new friends - you'll still need to login to the Facebook web site. Flair also minimizes to the system tray when not in use.

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