Eszter Hargittai and dana boyd just published a new article in First Monday entitled: “Facebook privacy settings: Who cares?”

Facebook Privacy Settings: Who Cares?

“Abstract: With over 500 million users, the decisions that Facebook makes about its privacy settings have the potential to influence many people. While its changes in this domain have often prompted privacy advocates and news media to critique the company, Facebook has continued to attract more users to its service. This raises a question about whether or not Facebook’s changes in privacy approaches matter and, if so, to whom. This paper examines the attitudes and practices of a cohort of 18– and 19–year–olds surveyed in 2009 and again in 2010 about Facebook’s privacy settings. Our results challenge widespread assumptions that youth do not care about and are not engaged with navigating privacy. We find that, while not universal, modifications to privacy settings have increased during a year in which Facebook’s approach to privacy was hotly contested. We also find that both frequency and type of Facebook use as well as Internet skill are correlated with making modifications to privacy settings. In contrast, we observe few gender differences in how young adults approach their Facebook privacy settings, which is notable given that gender differences exist in so many other domains online. We discuss the possible reasons for our findings and their implications.”

ReadWriteWeb has a good summary of the article to:

Study: Youth Not Only Care About Facebook Privacy, They Do Something About It

Stephen

A future view from Jeff Koterba:

Stephen

Gary at ResourceShelf pointed to this study:

OverDrive Publishes White Paper: “How eBook Catalogs at Public Libraries Drive Publishers’ Book Sales and Profits”

Access Full Text Paper (8 pages; PDF)

“OverDrive has produced a white paper on the impact of eBook lending on publishers’ sales and profits. Data presented in this white paper will demonstrate the ability of public libraries to drive sales of print and digital content, with particular emphasis on the following points:

+ Unfulfilled demand
+ Increased revenue
+ Copyright holder retains control
+ Promotion
+ Discoverability”

This echoes the arguments that free MP3 files on the web drive sales of CD’s and songs on iTunes. I think that this could be true of books too.

Lots of stuff to add to the conversation about e-books.

Stephen

Here’s the main chart from OCLC’s WebJunction survey of librarians’ use of e-tools:

Library Staff Report Their Use of Online Tools

You must read the whole postings (it’s not long but there are differences in the usage of some tools by type of library).

Lastly, I have to echo OCLC’s Roy Tennant’s concerns in his Library Journal post:

An Industry In Search of Failure

Stephen

The quality of library videos is going up lately. The bar is being raised.

Check out this one from New Hanover County Library:

The Masters of Library Science Croquet Tournament

Awesome. And even without the video aspect this looks like a great competitive event in the library for teens, seniors or even a staff day!

Stephen

Readers were in the mood for maps this week because they pushed this story about a must-see video of Microsoft’s Street Slide into the most-viewed category. We also continued our exploration of the significant Internet trends of 2010: Internet of Things sensors are chicken; golfers get a hands-on augmented reality experience; and these are the data-sucking mobile Droids you’re looking for. Read on for more.

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Top Stories of the Week

• A Must-See Video of Microsoft’s Street Slide, Better Than Google Street View
• StumbleUpon: The Silent Social Media Success Story
• Analysis: What are the Web’s Top Sources of Referral Traffic?
• Wikileaks Releases 91,000 Afghanistan War Documents Online
• So-Called “Digital Natives” Not Media Savvy, New Study Shows

More coverage and analysis from ReadWriteWeb

The Future of the Cloud: Our Newest Research Report - Free

We’re delighted to announce ReadWriteWeb’s fourth premium report, The Future of the Cloud: Cloud Platform APIs are the Business of Cloud Computing. Thanks to the generosity of our partners VMWare and Intel, we’re providing this report at no cost to you. The Future of the Cloud highlights cloud computing’s impact on IT organizations, and explores both its disruptive nature and the new markets and opportunities it’s creating. It also covers the impact of the transition on IT organizations in areas such as security, data, the new fundamentals of service provision, network architecture and the need to make the cloud part of a long-term systems and technology strategic plan. For more information or to download the report, visit here.

Augmented Reality

• Hands On with Golfscape AR Rangefinder for iPhone
• Social Experiences Growing Popular Among Mobile AR Usage

More Augmented Reality coverage

Internet of Things

• A Sensor In Every Chicken: Cisco Bets on the Internet of Things

More Internet of Things coverage

Mobile Web

• Check In While Checking Out: CardStar Adds Foursquare Integration
• Verizon Smartphones (Droids?) Use More Data than iPhones
• Tests Confirm “Death Grip” Unique to iPhone 4, Consulting Firm Says

More Mobile Web coverage

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We recently launched the official ReadWriteWeb iPhone app. As well as enabling you to read ReadWriteWeb while on the go or lying on the couch, we’ve made it easy to share ReadWriteWeb posts directly from your iPhone, on Twitter and Facebook. You can also follow the RWW team on Twitter, directly from the app. We invite you to download it now from iTunes.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

• Training Your Brain to Increase Productivity
• Maybe Your Customers Don’t Want to Talk to You
• What To Do When You Launch: Before, During, and After

ReadWriteCloud

Our channel ReadWriteCloud, sponsored by VMware and Intel, is dedicated to Virtualization and Cloud Computing.

• SaaS Lessons Learned
• When Does CRM Become a Collaboration Service?
• SaaS Market Grows Spectacularly to the Detriment of the IT Kings

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel ReadWriteEnterprise is devoted to enterprise 2.0 and using social software inside organizations.

• RIM Buys BlackPad.com, Readies New BlackBerry Slider - But Can It Still Compete?
• Augment Reality for the Enterprise - SAP Employee Unveils Prototype
• Android Spyware: Millions Downloaded Thievish Wallpaper App (Updated)

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• How to Create a Web Content Strategy For Your Company
• 5 Critical Web Metrics To Keep a Close Eye On
• 3 Promising Digital Business Card Solutions

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	Posted marianliz: “It is not your turn in any of your active games” = sign that you are not playing enough games #onlinescrabbleaddict #felloffthewagon.
	@kgs there are a lot of books in worldcat #oclcleaks [shifted]
	Posted ALA_TechSource: RT: GameStop Acquires Social Gaming Site Kongregate http://tcrn.ch/aLWAq8.
	Posted michaelreuter: Town Plans Foursquare ‘Foxhunt’ http://yigg.it/8wvdm @yigg.
	Posted digiphile: “Too much sunlight creates skin cancer”-@zephoria. What are the unintended consequences of publicy? http://j.mp/cgtJsy #sn10.
	RT @anildash: Could we use check-in data to make places more accessible via “Ability Maps”? http://2.dashes.com/9R1daE [shifted]
	Posted wawoodworth: The machine is starting to turn for #alaprom at next year’s annual. =D.
	Posted wawoodworth: @shinyinfo That’s a good one! We’ll see what we can do..
	Posted Rick_Bayless: To win a signed copy of my new cookbook Fiesta at Rick’s, enter r Twitter recipe photo contest. Details here: http://bit.ly/a5RCmK.
	Posted jenniferwaller: RT @radar: An audacious and practical goal for augmented reality: @aallan wants to put names to faces. http://oreil.ly/9eqG6j.
	Posted alice_daer: Nerd heaven: Daft Punk’s Tron Legacy soundtrack leaked: http://is.gd/dTf3m (via @halavais).
	Posted SocialTimes: New blog post: Project: MyWorld is the “Placebook” for a New Generation of Social Gamers http://mbist.ro/ctEGIX.
	@thearystocrat you still remind me of the man, but my fav remains C K Dexter Haven. Oh, C K Dexter Haaaaavvvvvveeeennn! [shifted]

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It should be any entrepreneur’s dream come true. But for some startups, a sudden, overnight explosion in growth can nearly bring the operation to its knees.

Such was the recent experience of Blank Label, a Web-based company that sells custom-made, user-designed dress shirts for men. After launching in October 2009, Blank Label enjoyed some modest initial success, selling a few hundred shirts in the first few months of business.

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The online buzz generated by the startup’s unique service was enough to capture the attention of The New York Times and other prominent media outlets, whose positive coverage in mid-May quickly sent a flood of new customers to their site. Immediately following the press coverage, Blank Label’s Web traffic increased by about 4,000% overnight, and conversion rates nearly tripled.

For a brick-and-mortar store, a sudden influx of customers can result in long lines. Online, it can cause servers to go down.

The team knew there was a problem when they started receiving emails from would-be customers asking when their website was going to go back up, according to Danny Wong, co-founder and lead evangelist for Blank Label.

“There were massive problems with the site,” says Wong. “First images wouldn’t load, then pages stopped loading.”

They tried rebooting their web server, but found that the problems only accelerated. A few hours later, they moved their website to bigger, more capable server space.

The technical issues were only the beginning of the headaches.

Before long, it became apparent that the supplier they had hired to produce the shirts was unable to keep up with the sudden demand, despite assurances to the contrary. Orders started shipping late, sometimes with defects. Within a week of the initial influx, Blank Label switched suppliers.

A new payment processor was in order as well, because the one they had been working with was alarmed at the sudden and dramatic increase of orders and decided to end their relationship.

In addition to website stability and production issues, the company’s owners found that customer service was becoming too much to handle. To keep up with the requests, the company had no choice but to hire three customer support staff members, as well as outsource some technical work via oDesk.

Chocri

Another co-creation startup that experienced growing pains is a company specializing in custom-made chocolate bars called Chocri. For them, the scalability issues have been seasonal, as demand for co-created chocolate has typically peaked during the winter holiday season, causing Chocri to sell out of inventory two Christmases in a row. The overwhelming demand has required CEO Carmen Magar to make a number of changes, including expansion of staff, moving into a larger space and reassessing the company’s production practices.

When they first started out, Chocri would produce the milk chocolate, dark chocolate and white chocolate candy bars separately and then recombine orders. “That’s crazy when you make 50,000 bars a month,” says Magar. “So now we make all types at the same time.”

Today, things are mostly back on track at Blank Label and Chocri, although there is still a two-week delay on new orders at Blank Label.

“I always feel like there’s more work to be done,” says Wong, adding that his company is working on further streamlining the ordering process and hoping to speed up shipping times.

If he could offer any advice to budding entrepreneurs and small businesses, Wong says it would be to ensure upfront that technical infrastructure and production resources are prepared for potentially rapid growth.

When all was said and done, Wong’s company had hired four new people, and switched suppliers, servers and payment processors in order to cope with their sudden success.

These days, all it takes is a mention in a few high-traffic news outlets or some social media buzz to bring tens of thousands of people to your company’s door. As some entrepreneurs have learned the hard way, it quite literally pays to be prepared.

Disclosure: Danny Wong of Blank Label has written guest posts for ReadWriteWeb in the past.

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Imagine you were a robot who only knew how to describe the world in four ways: self, other, time, and object. Now imagine you were struck by a bolt of lightning and found your robot brain aware of a whole new column in the spreadsheet…Place. You’d feel like a whole new robot and you’d probably sing a very happy robot song.

That’s what the social web is going through right now, with the rise of location data and services as a viable pivot point for developers to work their magic with. Next week 2nd place check-in app Gowalla says it will launch at least the beginning of something a small but fascinating group of robot magicians has long waited for: a write-capable API.

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Leading check-in app Foursquare has an API, or Application Programming Interface, that developers can already build software on top of that reads Foursquare data and can publish check-ins to Foursquare as well. But competitor Gowalla has had a read-only API, meaning 3rd party apps could display user location data but couldn’t publish back to Gowalla.

Gowalla developer Adam Keys told the company’s developer email list today that unlike previous promises a write-API was coming “next week,” this time he means it. “The good news is that I think I’ve got the foundation in place,” he wrote. “I’m hoping to write up the docs and get *something* out next week, even if it’s not complete API access.”

The Gowalla apps include one thing that Foursquare does not - the ability to upload photos of places along with your check-in. Might that be a part of the new Gowalla API? We certainly hope so.

What Does This Mean?

It means there’s more than one game in town. There’s a very big difference between one hot check-in app you can publish to and two. As ReadWriteWeb’s resident hacker and geofreak Tyler Gillies told me this afternoon, “I think this will really change the game as far as people’s ability to create applicatons that allow you to check into a venue on multiple services.”

The value of a multi-platform check-in app is that you don’t have to choose, you can participate in and see your friends’ activity across services you yourself don’t spend a lot of time on.

At the same time, it means you get to choose. If everyone in the world was on AT&T and they couldn’t call out to Verizon, you’d never leave one service because it would mean you’d lose contact with your friends.

Enter interoperability and you’ve got customer choice, vendor competition and a new wave of innovation.

At least that could be how it turns out with regard to the addition of interoperable Place streams across multiple vendors.

Foursquare today lets a user opt-in to have news and reviews from favorite organizations like the Huffington Post, the Wall St. Journal and the Independent Film Channel pushed automatically to their phones when they check-in near a place that those organizations have annotated. That’s hot and it’s just the beginning of the kind of features these kinds of location apps will be able to offer in the future. Like a robot that’s been struck by lightning.

A service provider or developer can offer software users a lot if they know what the user likes, who the user is friends with and how recent all that data is. Add knowing where people, places and things are and you’ve got a big jump in potential recombination of factors. Not just for location apps themselves either, but in all kinds of apps that use the location data such apps make it easy and compelling to publish.

Maybe even with pictures.

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This spring at Twitter’s first developer conference Chirp the big splash was a forthcoming feature called Annotations. The feature will allow publishing software to annotate Tweets with a wide open variety of metadata, which could then be read and analyzed by other software. Annotations are going to be big, if and when they launch.

At Chirp it was said that the Annotations feature would launch in the second or third quarter of this year. Now the company’s developer advocate, Taylor Singletary, said today on the Twitter developers list that it’s not going to work out that way. “We haven’t yet announced a release date,” he said in response to an inquiry, “and it’s still a ways in the future while we tackle some other projects.”

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We’ve got an inquiry in with Twitter asking what that means, but it seems clear that the company is slammed with technical challenges, has other priorities and wrongly estimated the roadmap for this very important part of the platform. (Update: see below.)

Here’s how Annotations will work. It will allow publishing software to mark-up tweets with any kind of characteristic or namespace (local weather when and where a twit did tweet, for example) and any kind of value - cloudy with a chance of meatballs, for example. Twitter messages are fairly rich with metadata already and incredibly easy to analyze and build on top of, but Annotations would open that up so far the sky’s the limit.

It’s worth mentioning that Twitter’s unveiling of Annotations at Chirp happened around the same time as, and was widely compared with, Facebook’s launching of personalized content widgets and tentacles expanding all over the web, among other things. Facebook shipped its announced project, for better or for worse.

Twitter is Busy

In another email on the same list today, Singletary said that the processing of white-listing applications to ping Twitter’s servers with a production-level frequency was clogged with backlog, growing more critical in its evaluations and being re-evaluated.

Meanwhile, Twitter launched an official recommendation feature today that’s frankly, not nearly as exciting as the kinds of recommendation capabilities that independent developers have built (see Mr.Tweet or Twellow, for example). Hopefully the API for this feature will be turned into more fabulous things. A whole world of independent developers, empowered with the ability to read and write data, will inevitably build cooler things than even the smartest company in the world. It’s one of those laws like a room full of monkeys and typewriters. And it’s the core value proposition of Annotations, too.

Numerous advertising technologies have been rolled out since Chirp as well. Annotations is a hugely ambitious strategy, and the squabbling over namespaces and standards was one that Twitter said it was going to let the market work out on its own. That made some people quite unhappy.

We’ve asked Twitter for clarification on the revised Annotations roadmap and will update this post with the company’s response.

Update: A Twitter spokesperson responded to our inquiry and said that yes, Annotations will launch. “We’ll still launch Annotations. The team that was working on Annotations is currently focused on our number one priority, which is site stability.” No doubt Annotations could themselves pose scalability challenges. They could at least blow our minds, if not a series of related servers.

Below is an image of what each Tweet looks like under the hood right now, before annotations. (Click for full size view.) Each of those fields is powerful, but inflexible and defined by the company. Imagine a new one that’s open to being defined however a publishing tool sees fit. That’s the vision behind Annotations.

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