A US airman and Redditor asked about the possibility of Bastion on on physical release – and was rewarded by the developers. Read more…
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Would you cut Facebook a privacy pass if it paid you?
Rightly or wrongly, Facebook catches a lot of flak for impeding on privacy by selling user information to advertisers and generally enabling too much sharing. But would users care so much if Facebook gave them a cut of the profits it generates by selling their data? Think about it like Plink’s new loyalty program that rewards consumers with Facebook Credits for eating at certain restaurants, only in reverse.
I suggested this Thursday as a possibility for empowering users across the web, generally, but Facebook (and maybe Google) actually seems like the perfect company to pull it off. Facebook wants more than anything for users to share as much information as possible, because the more information it has, the more money its ads sell for. That’s why it’s always adding somewhat creepy new features, tweaking its privacy settings and, occasionally, resetting the defaults to maximum-share mode.
All of this gets privacy advocates and even Facebook users in a snit, though, because it’s pretty much a one-way street: Facebook gets more money, while users get, um … more Facebook? Everyone knows that users pay for free services by providing their data, but clearly some are starting to sense we’re reaching limit of that model still being a good deal for consumers.
“Like” Starbucks, get a nickel
So, why not encourage sharing and discourage privacy complaints by giving users a piece of the revenue pie? The more they share, the more Facebook pays them. It’s actually not such a crazy idea, and it will be even less crazy if the group of Facebook users currently suing the company over violating their rights to publicity wins its case. The plaintiffs want a piece of additional money Facebook thinks it can get from selling “Sponsored Stories.” To quote from their complaint, quoting Facebook CEO Sheryl Sandberg:
On average, if you compare an ad without a friend’s endorsement, and you compare an ad with a friend’s [Facebook] ‘Like,’ these are the differences: on average, 68% more people are likely to remember seeing the ad with their friend’s name. A hundred percent—so two times more likely to remember the ad’s message; and 300% more likely to purchase.
This is where the Plink analogy comes in. Its new service automatically credits users’ Facebook accounts with Facebook Credits when they use their credit cards at certain restaurants. It encourages consumers to eat at certain places by rewarding them.
Facebook could conceivably encourage users to engage in particularly beneficial types of sharing by rewarding them. You “Like” a company’s page, you get a nickel (or, likely, a more-complex formula). If it doesn’t want to deal in cash, which might be impossible economically, Facebook could start frequent-flyer-style ecosystem for Facebook Credits. Users earn Credits for sharing and redeem with retailers across the web, maybe even via a “Pay with Facebook Credits” option on third-party sites (assuming that’s legal).
I can tell attest to the power of that type of program. Legal databases LexisNexis and Westlaw compete to win future professional users by providing points to law students for frequently using their products, as well as for completing occasional “fun” (but not really) research challenges. I used them more than I otherwise might have just to earn points, and I got some sweet merchandise from partner retailers in return for my trouble.
As long as the pay-with-data model continues to get more lopsided in favor of websites, web users and consumer-rights groups will continue to get more upset. If the alternatives are make users pay or have someone else enforce strict privacy regulations, why not try something completely different? Maybe that way, when the government comes knocking, Facebook’s users will have its back.
Zebra image courtesy of Flickr user macinate.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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Creating Files through BlobBuilder
As Web sites transition more and more into Web applications, working with files in meaningful ways is becoming increasingly
important. Starting with Platform Preview 2, IE10 includes support for the File API,
enabling developers to read and slice files on the client. Platform Preview 4 adds support for
BlobBuilder, a way for developers to create new files. IE10 also has two new methods that allow the user to save
blobs to their computer, enabling great end-to-end experiences when working with client-resident data.
Over on the IE Test Drive, we have a fun piano
demo showing off BlobBuilder and File API capabilities. When you press notes on the piano, the site constructs two files:
an mp3 music file and an SVG file of the musical score. You can see how the size of both files change each time you press a note.
Press the play button to listen to your song, or download either the music file or the SVG score file by pressing the links
just above the piano keys. In the rest of this blog post I’ll go through how the demo works, focusing on the capabilities
of BlobBuilder and File API.
BlobBuilder Capabilities
BlobBuilder, like the name implies, is a way to build blobs on the client. The main method to do this is append. The append function accepts
three data types:
- Blob objects
- Plain text
- Array Buffers
The piano demo creates the mp3 file by appending blobs together, using one blob for each note. The demo creates the SVG file
of the musical score by appending text that contains the SVG source.
getBlob is another method available on the BlobBuilder object which returns a blob object containing all the
items previously appended. Here is a very simple example that uses BlobBuilder to create a text file:
// The BlobBuilder constructor is prefixed in all browsers.
// Use MSBlobBuilder in IE, MozBlobBuilder in Firefox, and
WebKitBlobBuilder in WebKit-based browsers.
var bb = new MSBlobBuilder();
bb.append("Hello World!");
var blob1 = bb.getBlob("text/plain");
One thing to note about the getBlob method is that when you call getBlob in IE10 and Firefox, it will clear out the contents
of the BlobBuilder object, so the next time you call append it will be as if you were appending into a new BlobBuilder object.
WebKit does not currently clear out the contents of the BlobBuilder after calling getBlob. Consider this example:
var bb = new MSBlobBuilder();
bb.append("Hello World!");
var blob1 = bb.getBlob("text/plain");
bb.append("BlobBuilder is great");
var blob2 = bb.getBlob("text/plain");
In all browsers, blob1 will contain the text “Hello World!”. However, blob2 will be different. In IE10 and Firefox,
blob2 will contain the text “BlobBuilder is great” while in WebKit-based browsers it will contain the text “Hello World!BlobBuilder”. This discrepancy is still
is great
under discussion in the Web Applications working group.
Getting Blobs via XHR
The File API makes it easy to access files selected by the user, something I demonstrated in the
Magnetic Poetry demo. This is great when you want to incorporate the users own data into your site. However, in the
piano demo, I needed the note files to be built into the demo. When you want to work with blobs but you want to supply the
data, you can use XHR.
New to IE10 is the XHR responseType property. The responseType property supports four values: blob, array buffer, text, and
document. In the piano demo’s initialization method – getBlobs() – you’ll see the following:
var req = new XMLHttpRequest();
var url = 'PianoNotes/AllNotes2.mp3';
req.open('GET', url, false);
req.responseType = "blob";
req.onload = function () {
/* ... */ };
req.send(null);
One thing you may notice is that the demo only makes a single XHR request. It only downloads
one file which contains all the notes used in the demo. However, when you press a key in the demo, only a single note
plays and the site appends only a single note to the mp3 file. To make that work, after downloading the file containing
all the notes, the site slices the file using the File API slice method and extracts 24 individual notes. This is a great
performance savings versus having to download 24 individual files.
Creating the Music File
Once I have a blob for each note in the demo, creating the mp3 file is easy. Each time you press a key I call:
musicBlobBuilder.append(noteBlob);
In order to update the file size, I get the blob and then get the file size.
var musicBlob = musicBlobBuilder.getBlob("audio/mp3");
// display musicBlob.size
Lastly because I know that the BlobBuilder object was cleared out when I called getBlob I just append the blob back in:
musicBlobBuilder.append(musicBlob);
Creating the SVG File
Each time you press a key in the demo, you see a note added to the musical score. The musical score is drawn by a single
SVG element contained within a div with an id of “scoreContainer.” Each time you press a key, script runs which adds a note
to the SVG element and then the SVG file is created by appending the source:
svgBlobBuilder.append(document.getElementById("scoreContainer").innerHTML);
var svgBlob = svgBlobBuilder.getBlob("image/svg+xml");
// display svgBlob.size
In this case, I don’t refill the svgBlobBuilder because I want to start with a clean slate the next time the user presses
a key.
Saving Files to Disk
The last part of the demo is saving the files to disk. When you press the “Music File” and “Musical Score File” links on
top of the piano keys you will be able to save the file though an experience that feels just like downloading a file:
Note that the notification bar is not available in the Platform Previews. Instead, a save dialog is presented.
Each link calls either saveSong() or saveSheetMusic(). Looking into each of these methods will reveal that they use the msSaveOrOpenBlob
function:
window.navigator.msSaveOrOpenBlob(svgBlob, "MusicScore.svg");
msSaveOrOpenBlob and msSaveBlob are two methods available in IE10 which let sites ask the user to
save a blob to their computer.
Calling msSaveOrOpenBlob will provide an option on the notification bar to open the file in addition to saving
or canceling. Calling msSaveBlob only provides the option to save the file or cancel. Though these functions
are not yet included in any standard, we believe they are extremely useful for writing end to end scenarios with blob data
and hope that they might become a standard at some point.
Creating the Piano demo was a fun experience and I’m excited to see how you will use BlobBuilder. Let us know what you think!
—Sharon Newman, Program Manager, Internet Explorer
Wi-Fi Alliance: There’s nothing “Super” about white spaces broadband
The Wi-Fi Alliance, the keepers of the Wi-Fi brand, have come out swinging against the characterization of white spaces broadband as Super Wi-Fi. The Alliance issued a press release Friday saying it likes the tech, but the name will lead to “substantial user confusion.” While it fell short of filing a lawsuit over trademark infringement, the threat is there.
But who could the Wi-Fi Alliance sue? The term first appeared in press released issued by the FCC in 2010 to describe white spaces broadband. Most vendors in the space call it white spaces, and although the folks hosting the Super Wi-Fi Summit might have a problem. I can see how the phrase white spaces broadband — which describes using the airwaves between the digital TV channels for sending packets — doesn’t really have the same consumer zing as Super Wi-Fi, but the tech has more problems than a blah or infringing name.
Despite yesterday’s news of the nation’s first Super Wi-Fi white spaces broadband network launching in North Carolina, its ability to become a widespread source of broadband access is under threat. There are bills in Congress that look to make it hard for companies to use the white spaces spectrum for broadband and without a wide-scale adoption the cost of equipment to provide and access such networks would be fairly high. Even though white spaces networks need scale in order to drive down costs, the technology has moved from being marketed as an “anyplace” wireless broadband extender to a rural wireless broadband product.
So maybe the Wi-Fi Alliance shouldn’t get too upset over this just yet. It’s possible most people aren’t going to be calling white spaces broadband anything at all. And that’s a far bigger problem.
Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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