What are retailers doing about the cookie law?

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Posted 29 May 2012 13:01pm by Graham Charlton with 5 comments

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The cookie law deadline arrived on Saturday, and we haven't quite seen the pop-up apocalypse that some had predicted. 

This may have had something to do with the ICO's last-minute revision of its guidance, but its more likely that many simply aren't prepared to risk harming their business models when it's unclear how the law will be enforced. 

While news websites like the BBC and Mirror have added some sort of status bar or pop-up, retailers have taken a different approach to compliance. 

(I'm certainly not looking to 'out' websites here, so I'll be looking only at those which have taken some action).

Online retailers and the cookie law

There was understandable concern amongst online retailers about the cookie law. Let's face it, who wants to add any barriers between a customer and a purchase?

However, there aren't too many signs of compliance (strict compliance anyway) from most retailers. After all, if the ICO keeps moving the goalposts, and there's no guarantee that action will be taken, why would you? 

It seems that the most common solution is to add a more prominent link to the cookie policy, and list the cookies and trackers used on each site. 

This goes along with the spirit of the directive in that it informs the customer, though not many retailers seem to be asking for consent, implied or otherwise. 

The ICO has written to 50 websites to ask what steps they are taking towards compliance. There are a few retailers on there (Amazon, eBay, Next...) but not as many as you might have thought. 

Of course, that's because it's vital that Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council is compliant. And it is: 

Here are a few examples of cookie info from retailers: 

John Lewis has added a more prominent link to its cookie and privacy policy. While it doesn't stand out that much, it is in an area of the page where users are more likely to see it:

The retailer presents detailed information about the cookies it uses, though it doesn't allow users to change settings on site, instead pointing people to browser settings:

M&S takes a similar approach:

I expected Amazon to ignore the directive, for the moment at least, but it has added a link to its footer: 

Other retailers, including Mothercare, ASDA, House of Fraser and TopShop have done the same, but the majority I looked at have done very little in terms of messaging. 

One example of more prominent messaging comes from Best Western, which takes a humourous approach:

Should retailers bother to comply with the directive? 

Since the ICO has moved the goalposts and isn't going to be too strict about compliance, it's no surprise that many retailers have done little, or the bare minimum. 

As the ICO will wait for complaints before taking action, and that action is most likely to be a letter, the threat of a fine seems a long way off. Therefore, retailers are likely to have plenty of warning before any enforcement action is taken.

If this is the case, and since interruptions to the user experience can mean lost sales, there is little to compel retailers to comply fully with the EU directive. 

 

Why Facebook Is Still The Perfect Startup (Slides)

Facebook had another tough day today in the public markets, with shares now trading at around $28 after debuting less than two weeks ago at $42.05. Good timing, then, for a new slideshow report out today from the boutique French consulting firm faberNovel, which encourages us to look at the bigger picture, and why, in its words, Facebook is "the perfect startup."

The mammoth slideshow (after the break) is an annual thing for faberNovel, which picks one company to tackle each year — others have included how Amazon controls e-commerce, how Apple dominates, and what could go wrong with Google. Like those before, the one out today on Facebook is a deep-dive into the company, and it looks not just at the origins of the social network, but what sets it apart from other attempts at global social networks — and other startups. (And by the way, faberNovel sees all this drama and attention on the IPO as just "one point on a startup trajectory." Some investors may not feel quite the same.)

In 94 fairly packed slides (no Kreiger approach here), there is a huge amount of data, occasionally usefully visualizing some of the biggest challenges the company faces. (Example: Facebook's monetization issue. It is getting ten times more traffic than YouTube, but only one-tenth the revenue of YouTube's owner, Google.)

A little later, looking back at Facebook's different tests with advertising, faberNovel makes a good argument for how a lack of success with more traditional models has contributed to it being such an innovative company. Specifically, around new, social ad formats (that's slide 34), even if some of those formats have yet to pay off when compared to how much time users spend on the site.

"Facebook has no choice but to change the game's rules," faberNovel explains, which is perhaps the crux of why it has done so well.

What caught my attention the most — possibly because of all the news of the past week swirling around Facebook and its mobile plans — was faberNovel's take on Facebook's mobile business.

Facebook already has a huge amount of users on mobile (more than 400 million of its 901 million active users are accessing by mobile), but it could quite possibly get squeezed out of mobile altogether because of Apple and Google's own control of the ecosystems, and the fact that eventually other and better mobile apps will come along.

That has left Facebook with no choice but to beef up with acquisitions, more features and its own beginnings of a mobile platform. Specifically, faberNovel believes the App Center could really become a game-changer and the lynchpin for how Facebook begins to "own" its users on mobile devices.

FaberNovel then takes this one step further and proclaims that, with its large mobile user base and variety of services, "Facebook is a new breed of telco."

It even idly wonders if the company could, one day, even operate its own ad-hoc Mesh network to put the final piece into the puzzle. Is that a speculation too far? In a world of $100-billion-plus valuations for largely free services, perhaps anything is possible.

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faberNovel is an innovation agency specialized in designing and realizing innovative projects. faberNovel builds on emerging technologies, methodologies or practices to create new products. Some companies such as JCDecaux, RATP, RMN, Volkswagen, Orange, and Pages Jaunes (Yellow Pages - France) rely upon the agency. faberNovel’s team combines the necessary talents and passion to turn their clients’ wishes into market realities: Idea > concept > prototype > product/service > success!
 We know that: 1. Innovating is doing,...

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Facebook is the world's largest social network, with over 845 million monthly active users. Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz, Chris Hughes, and Eduardo Saverin to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks. The original...

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The great newspaper paywall debate continues

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Posted 29 May 2012 09:28am by Patricio Robles with 1 comment

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For many newspapers, the decision to erect a paywall has been a decision of last resort.

And for a seemingly good reason: despite the obvious need to generate the type of revenue that advertising often can't provide alone, asking the consumers of your content to pay for the privilege can be a difficult undertaking.

Case in point: when John L. Robinson, a professor at Elon University, asked the students in his class if they would pay a fee to use Facebook, all agreed they'd pay $1/month for the world's largest and most popular social network. A smaller number indicated they'd be willing to pay $5, none said they'd pay $10.

Robinson's story may be anecdotal, but chances are most of us would expect the results he reported from his informal, statistically insignificant poll to be fairly representative of the population at large.

After all, today's consumer has been conditioned to love -- and expect -- free.

Which creates a worrisome question for newspaper execs: if university students wouldn't pay more than $5/month to access the most popular social network in the world, a service that many consider to be an indispensible part of their social lives, can a newspaper realistically expect to charge much more than $5/month for its content?

"Perhaps not" might be the logical answer, which is why Robinson says that the creation of a newspaper paywall is like "using a Band-Aid on a bullet wound."
But is he right?

Outside of the United States, some newspapers are doing better than one might have expected with the paywall model. Piano Media, for instance, has achieved promising results in Slovakia and Slovenia, and is reportedly set to take its model into a larger market in the very near future.

According to Piano Media's Tomas Bella, who I interviewed last year, one of the keys to getting consumers to pay for newspaper content in Slovakia and Slovenia was to "break a 'will never pay' barrier." The jury, of course, is still out on whether the revenue from inexpensive subscriptions can be enough to support the type of news organizations that were built when the newspaper commanded far more dollars from advertisers.

In the United States, however, at least one big investor is apparently confident enough that they can play a meaningful role to put his money where his mouth is.

Last week, Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway purchased the bulk of Media General's newspapers for a nine-figure sum. Most of the newspapers in Media General's stable are moving to a paywall model, which Buffett seems to believe is big part of the future of the newspaper business.

As Poynter's Andrew Beaujon notes, the Oracle of Omaha stated earlier this year:

[Newspapers] have been giving away their product at the same time they're selling it...and that is not a great business model. When they put papers up on the Internet and you get free, you're competing with yourself. And throughout the industry you're seeing a reaction to that problem and an answer to it. … You shouldn't be giving away a product you're trying to sell.

Buffett may be right that newspapers made a big mistake in embracing free, but that doesn't answer the billion-dollar question: now that the genie is out of the bottle, can the paywall help contain it?

The good news for newspapers is that new media upstarts intent on disrupting the business of news gathering, particularly at the local level served by the kind of newspapers Buffett is most interested in, have thus far proven to be expensive, less-than-fruitful ventures. This doesn't mean, however, that newspapers can count on the money being there.

So what are newspapers to do while this plays out? It would seem that newspapers wanting to survive are still going to have to reorganize themselves to fit the economics of the present while they wait to see if their new paywalls deliver a slightly better future.

Midnight Pool 3 - mini-review

Pay attention, everyone, for this is how to do a game wrong, horribly so. Every single thing that Gameloft could have done wrong is here - with bells on.

Oh, ok, the splash screen's pretty...

... but it's all downhill from here onwards. Let me get a few things straight: I'm a computer pool afficianado - this game is marketed directly at me. I've put thousands of hours of gameplay into Micropool over the years.... Trust me, if I like a pool game and I want to buy it, there's really no hurry. Maybe give me 30 days of trial? Too long? OK, I accept that - this is a game, after all. OK, maybe just put in the 'quick play mode' and lock out everything else? After all, that works on many other game genres. No? Hmmm.... what about putting in a time limit, i.e. you can play for ten minutes, after which you have to restart the demo version?

Err... no. Gameloft has limited the trial here to 180 seconds, i.e. 3 minutes. And - get this, this includes the game setup time. In other words, take too long over the setup screens or get distracted for even a minute and you basically can't play more than a couple of shots. Period.

How is a player supposed to get the hang of the interface and to evaluate the game if it's only possible to play a handful of shots? How is anyone supposed to get addicted enough to the title that they then want to part with real money for it?

And, while we're here, here's mistake number 2 - the version in the Nokia Store is only a demo and there's no full version to buy there. Instead, you have to pay by premium SMS direct to a specific handset. Reset your phone later? Change to another model? Tough - you've got to buy the game again.

OK, on with the game. The usual pool variants are represented here and the setup screens are, in fairness, quite comprehensive:

There's a fair set of built-in tutorial screens too, though the jaggedness of the text should, by this time, have tipped you off that Midnight Pool 3 is written in Java - uh, oh, mistake number 3. Java's not best known for smooth sports games. Oh, and by the way, 'Versus' is just 'pass to a friend' play, there's no online component here.

Your shots in the game are executed using a golf-game-like power meter. There's the same concept of aiming error being introduced if you strain too much and go for 100% power:

The artwork throughout is not bad, though presumably lifted from a version of the title on another mobile platform - I doubt too much effort was put into the Symbian Java port:

Once under way, Midnight Pool plays in landscape mode, with reasonable use of space, though on 3.5" screens the balls are really very small and you'll find any kind of visual 'feel' impossible:

As you'd expect, each shot is lined up with the touchscreen and then nudge controls let you fine tune the aim. Lines give you an idea of where you're aiming and roughly where the object ball will go. It works, but on the phone screen it's all a little small and fiddly - and the nudge controls aren't usually 'fine' enough:

Now bear in mind that this is all implemented in Java. While there are some fine Java applications, I haven't seen many which involve fast, smooth graphics. The animated 'power bar' is jerky and hard to use to play a shot with any skill, and, after striking the cue ball, the balls jerk around the table in unrealistic manner. 

Artwork time again, there's (believe it or not) a full clipart back story to Midnight Pool 3 - come on, Gameloft, just let's get on with the game, hey?

Ah yes, the game. Rather than sticking to just the usual pool gameplay and mechanics, Gameloft has opted to put in all sorts of gimmicky power-ups. No, no, no, this is a terrible idea. Pool is a game of skill, and you're adding so many bits on to help new users that it devalues the core game:

In all my ranting, I've lost count of the number of 'mistakes' made here, but you get the idea.

As a pool simulation, Midnight Pool 3 is fiddly, gimmicky and unsatisfying. As a game, it's bloated and the demo is far too severely crippled.

In short, don't get your hopes up for this title. And Gameloft, don't get your hopes up for any sales - you'll get zero takers on the strength of this demo.

Run, don't walk, and buy the superb Micropool instead.

Groupon Picks Up Breadcrumb For A Little Point-of-Sale Magic

Groupon just announced via its blog that it has acquired Breadcrumb, the creators of an affordable point of sale system and iPad app that targets local restaurants.

While the terms of the deal have not yet been disclosed, Groupon has made a run of acquisitions over the last six months, and this move is likely one being made half for talent and half for access to the startup's client roster. That being said, we're hearing from sources close to the deal that the acquisition price was in the $10 to $15 million range, with a sizable retention pool for founder Seth Harris along with the sales and support team that will be staying on.

The move comes as the daily deals behemoth looks to create more defined inroads with local mom and pop restaurants in accordance with its post-IPO mission to become "the OS for local commerce" — adding Breadcrumb and its technology to the fold is a step in that direction.

The Breadcrumb buy is the latest in a slew of startup talent and tech acquisitions Groupon has made since going public last year — as far as we can tell, its eighth acquisition since November. In March, Groupon added FeeFighters to the fold, which followed the likes of Mertado, Adku, Campfire Labs, Hyperpublic, Kima Labs, and Uptake into Camp Groupon. And, again, all of those acquisitions have come since November.

After all the grumbling surrounding Groupon's high valuation and blockbuster IPO, it seems that the company has been quietly ignoring detractors and is — at least by its own standards — on somewhat of a hot streak. Not two weeks ago Groupon beat estimates in its second quarterly earnings report since going public, seeing $559.3 million in revenue in Q1 2012, up 89 percent year-over-year, as well as increasing the total amount of money collected from customers for Groupons sold to $1.35 billion, up 103 percent, as Frederic reported.

As a result, analysts have been far more positive on Groupon than they have in the past, thanks to acceleration in revenues at home (North America revenue grew 33 percent Q/Q) and a decline in marketing spend (down 25 percent Q/Q). While the company is spending money and really putting a lot of focus into growing abroad (see more on this here), the unsung hero of this positive outlook really seems to be Groupon's reinvestment in technology — a lot of which is owed to its recent talent and tech acquisitions.

As CEO Andrew Mason said in his recent letter to shareholders, in total, Groupon has made 11 acquisitions in the last year, and the plan going forward is to integrate all of these acquisitions into a "platform for local commerce."

Groupon's initial value centered around its being a marketing tool to connect consumers and merchants, but as Mason said at the time, the company's mission (as part of phase two) is to "move upstream and serve as the entry point for local transactions."

The acquisition of Breadcrumb fits squarely into this mission, as the point of sale (POS) solution allows local merchants to cut the cord, take orders table-side and update their menus as they go using Breadcrumb's wireless technology built for iOS. The solution is designed to be flexible, allowing merchants to add or remove devices from their network easily, and easy enough that merchants can set up themselves and have it up and running in the same day.

On top of that, Breadcrumb allows merchants to download their venue data and do with it as they please, keeping physical records or running their own reports, on top of speedy device registration.

To sustain its upswing, Groupon needs to become an end-to-end commerce solution for local merchants, from marketing and scheduling, to integration with smart point of sale systems, to offer tracking, analytics, and better ways for merchants to retain customers (and find new ones) — both on the Web and on mobile. It's a tall order, but one that could create an actual valuable service for merchants — not to mention the fact that it comes with a lofty price tag, in that local commerce is a multi-trillion-dollar business.

As for Breadcrumb users? Judging by the company's statement, the startup (and app) will continue to exist and operate both "for new and existing clients," but obviously this means that Groupon now has access to the startup's client list, and Breadcrumb gets to reach a wider audience.

What's more, we're hearing from sources that Breadcrumb founder Seth Harris will be staying on, running Breadcrumb at Groupon as part of a newly created company called Groupon Pospitality. Groupon will be putting the Kima Labs team (which they acquired in February) on the project to take over development, according to sources.

Breadcrumb was designed in collaboration with mobile content development company, Two Bulls, and the startup's founder, Noah Harlan, who co-conceived the app along with Harris.

The startup's website is currently down, but you can find it here.

Find Groupon's announcement below:

We are excited to announce that Groupon has acquired Breadcrumb! The team behind Breadcrumb shares our passion to build affordable and intuitive products that make it easier for local merchants to manage their business. We're thrilled to welcome founder Seth Harris and his team to the Groupon family – Seth boasts more than 12 years of hospitality management experience, making him uniquely empathetic to the tight budgets and unique needs of business owners in the food and beverage industry who often struggle to find technology products that will work perfectly for them.

Breadcrumb will continue to serve new and existing clients and we look forward to offering their product to our existing merchant partners. Also, for Groupon merchant partners that use Breadcrumb's point of sale system, we'll be able to significantly improve the process of redeeming a Groupon.

Updating in realtime

Veteran Central: A Career-Oriented Social Network for Vets

After spending nine years on tour with the Navy, Michael Barrett found that adjusting to civilian life — especially finding a stable and well-paying job — was a tough and arduous process.

"It's a difficult transition, because we don't have a profession to speak of," Barrett explains. "We're handicapped in that regard, and we're less marketable in the work world."

While entrepreneur Jonathon Lunardi was researching veteran suicide with his brother-in-law, Paul McDonald, he became familiar with Barrett's sentiments and saw a need to help veterans bridge the gap and become successful in the civilian world. Together, Lunardi and McDonald started Veteran Central, a job resource and development network exclusively for veterans. Lunardi, now the company's CEO, told Mashable that the startup focuses on job placement and tools for young, blue-collar veterans.

"The older generation has had time to build their networks and to reintegrate, but the younger veterans come home and they don't have that network," Lunardi says. "They're plopped down somewhere in the United States, and they're trying to connect to the local community.

Lunardi and Barrett, on board as the company's director of sales, spoke to Mashable about scaling their startup and encouraging companies to consider a veteran to fill their open job positions.

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How It Works

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Veteran Central's mission is twofold. Lunardi and McDonald work on building the young startup's professional and psychological resources for veterans and supporters, while Barrett focuses on providing important, relatable content for veterans to respond to.

"I had a completely different image of what it was going to be like when I got out of the military while I was still serving, as do most guys still serving on active duty," Barrett explains. Back on American soil, "I realized that I was [experiencing] the same difficulties that a lot of my peers were."

Veterans who join Veteran Central (which has 1,200 registered users) gain access to Barrett's anecdotal podcasts and outreach towards the greater military community — and those so inclined can submit their own original content. While a large portion of the material on Veteran Central focuses on job-seeking and navigating the professional world, there is also material about coping with the psychological impact of war and reintegrating into daily life with friends, family and significant others. But Lunardi says that above all, veterans come to the website to look for employment.

"We have site greeters on the website who talk to all of the people who come on the site, and we've been told by them that the number one topic they are asked about is jobs," Lunardi explains.

And those jobs are available through the company's peer-reviewed and vetted job board. Job postings are free and open to all businesses looking to employ veterans, and Lunardi says that each job opening is carefully researched by a team of volunteers. When a job is deemed prime for veteran employment, it's made available to the greater Veteran Central network. These jobs also have a distinctly blue-collar feel — work in industries such as construction and trucking — that would be conducive to the skill-set of a young veteran without a college degree. Lunardi says that while the company does not have exact numbers on the amount of listed companies that actually hire a veteran into their workforce, they are planning to build out a feedback mechanism.

"We want to email everyone who has posted a job and ask them if they've found a good candidate through our job board," Lunardi says.

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Plan of Action

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In the future, Veteran Central is eying to create a two-way culture for integrating veterans back into the American workforce. Lunardi says that he wants to generate content — by businesses, for businesses — that's focused on the best practices for hiring and managing a veteran. There are also plans for a mobile site to enable veterans to access jobs on the go. And far down the road, Lunardi says he wants to expand Veteran Central to include healthcare and family resources, thus offering a more comprehensive toolset for veterans.

"Veterans struggle with finding out who to trust," Lunardi says. "We want to be a beacon of light in the veteran community, and you're going to find content and resources from people that care about veterans."

To expand the website's growing network and increase its impact, Veteran Central is now working with the Military Channel, the Department of Veterans Affairs and other veteran-oriented companies.

"We want to really prove to ourselves and the veteran community that this is a valuable tool to use, and they should tell others about it," Lunardi says.

But in the end, it's all about speaking up for those who have dedicated their lives to serving in the military. And, Barrett says, every little bit counts.

"We ask that for Memorial Day that everyone does something as insignificant as go onto the website, or post a job on our job board," Barrett says. "We want to help make sure that this is not a problem any more."

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Social Media Job Listings

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Every week we post a list of social media and web job opportunities. While we publish a huge range of job listings, we've selected some of the top social media job opportunities from the past two weeks to get you started. Happy hunting!

• Social Media Manager / Director of Love at Kapture in New York City
• Director of Digital Media at University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, Mich.
• Product Manager – Local Business Products at Yelp in San Francisco

Push Level Agreement

So now we're in for an apparently unlimited amount of blaming Facebook for just about anything that needs a scapegoat. Take the story that crossed whatever we call the wires these days about how social readers are being destroyed by some tweaking of the Facebook engine. I followed all the links on Bruce Francis' Cloudblog story and now realize this is actually about Facebook social readers. But the net seems to be: don't trust your friends when they have something to share with you.

I thought this was already well known, starting and ending with Digg and its tyranny of the crowd. Trending topics for me is another way of saying here's what to find out enough about to ignore everything else until something new happens. All you need to know about this is to see how many unfilled programming jobs there are out there that involve dedupping.

I'm not looking for a social reader in any case. What we really need is a social limiter, a version of the Beatles' favorite studio tool, the Fairchild limiter. I once sequestered myself for months at the Band's ShangriLa studio in Malibu, where the producer who ran the place had assembled as many Fairchilds as he could get his hands on. These babies were like some velvet glove you could wrap around guitars, vocals, even drum tracks — and out would come this warm glowing sound bursting with overtones, that felt better than what went in.

Translate that into a stream that discarded the latest rehash of a trending article, the latest numbers why RIM is screwed, why Facebook is the worst IPO in history. How about a size-shrinker that offers some visible clues as to the amount of actual information in the few truly interesting headline grabbers. How about some metrics on what actually is the amount of information we're looking for per inch. The Fairchild limiter didn't limit the music; it expanded its impact and clarity.

Social reader is really a misnomer, though. What's social is the path travelled to the push notification that triggers your awareness of the next thing to absorb. And I'm the reader, not some app on Facebook or anywhere for that matter. More and more, I'm the detective, intuiting what I don't see in the space between the lines, the posts, the tweets. Now that House is over, we only have his mantra to employ: the relentless odyssey in sea rch of completely irrelevant revenge for some dimly perceived slight that suddenly explodes in insight based on a random piece of dialogue. Remember: everybody lies.

Take Facebook. Supposedly the IPO was rigged to protect the house, as in every other form of legalized and otherwise gambling. The interior logic of the show was that because Facebook has 900 million subscribers, they by definition are inevitably going to be profitable, maybe more so than their competitors present and future. I actually feel that's kind of right, but have much less clarity as to how I personally can profit by the insight. For example, if everybody who invests $1000 can flip it ten minutes later for $1100, at what point do you run out of suckers?

But just because the stock dove, then recovered, then dove, then barely got back to square one, doesn't mean we don't still have that same intuition. Waiting until Monday, Tuesday, even Wednesday and Thursday's half bump, and Friday's mini-dive, does nothing to change our minds about the big picture. 900 million, it's like Sam's Club, isn't it? Who's gonna do better anytime soon? So we didn't do the flipitydip… it'll just take longer. Meanwhile, the patient, this means us, is in a coma.

OK, let's blame Scoble then. Doc Searls does a wonderful job of that in his new Techmemed post, but he somehow misses the point that Robert represents a fairly good bellweather of what actually is going to happen, namely that Facebook will succeed at whatever the hell it is experimenting with right now. Maybe the last minute warnings about mobile cluelessness are true, but I doubt it. My wife's iPhone is off the hook with Facebook alerts from family, friends, and such. It's not mobile they don't get, it's push.

That's the big secret Wall Street is struggling with, that push is the monetization model of mobile. Who cares what the UI is, or what the advertising surface is. The moment a push hits your screen, it comes down to a binary decision: do I want to know more, or do I already know enough. To make that decision, we need social metadata to help out. Who said this, who retweeted it, who @mentioned it, and how are these signals parsed to prioritize the queue.

This is why micro-communities like Path and FourSquare persist. Their signal to noise is scoped by the care with which we follow our peers and the precision of the resulting clarity of pushes. In a world of push, the most valuable signals are the ones that don't interrupt, don't repeat, don't strangle the message in a sea of marketing. Push is about permission, which turns advertising into information on request and marketing into paid subscription.

Push requires a PLA, or Push Level Agreement, where we populate our social channels with enough signal from which to derive educated guesses about our intentions and intuitions. Yes, Facebook has plenty of data, but little understanding of how to leverage it because we're not allowed to tune the inference algorithms. Metadata farming requires not just permission but incentives for broadcasting rich metadata and priority context.

This is why Google + Circles are so brain dead. Yes, they let you know who you are broadcasting to. But no, they don't let us know who you're broadcasting to. I can't intuit the effect a post has on the implicit group, so I can't tell how important it is to know about in the push queue. Since you're not telling me how important you think this is, why should anybody else weight it? There's little incentive to create those signals, and the end result of a push notification of a Google + item is to perceive it as an interruption.

Push is the cloud's security blanket. It implicitly says, those who trust you will be trusted by you. Everybody else loses. Push capital punishment is to go to the Settings page and turn off an app. SocialCam may be the first if they don't watch out. I like the early days feeling of the app, but I'm not sure the trust signals coming from its users are visible enough for me to understand. Photo apps are only push friendly to the extent that they don't go viral, which seems contradictory unless you believe that push is the new money. I do.