YouTube, Facebook & friends' videos

YouTube's getting a little more social with Facebook. It's a little buggy as yet, CNET reports, but "YouTube is pushing its Facebook Connect integration further by allowing its users to see the videos that their friends share on Facebook. YouTube users had previously been able to find their Facebook friends on YouTube as well as update their Facebook profile with their various actions from the site." This certainly makes sense. Here's YouTube's version of the story. There's a screenshot of what the integration looks like in Facebook in the CNET article.

Facebook, terms of use & privacy

The biggest news over the holiday weekend besides the economy was the buzz about Facebook's recent terms of service update. Facebook said it was all about consolidating and clarifying "what people could and could not do" on the site (see CEO Mark Zuckerberg's blog), but the ruckus raisers said it was about what Facebook could and could not do with users' content, CNET's Caroline McCarthy reports. I think the update and the ensuing flap are much more about what users can do with and for their privacy - and society getting used to a bottom-up, user-driven, user-controlled medium. Here are two important takeaways on user privacy: 1) If you want to delete your own account and all the personal info therein, you can certainly do so, but Facebook can't automatically delete information you post in other people's profiles (because it's on their wall, not yours); 2) if by using Facebook you "license" the site in effect to own and share your content, its use of your content is subject to how you set your privacy settings, so users need to pay attention to and proactively set those privacy options; and 3) that last point is even more true now that Facebook Connect "allows users to 'connect' their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site" and Facebook of course cannot control or protect user info in other sites. In his blog post, Zuckerberg wrote, "There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with."

New project or era for social Web?

The Telegraph calls it a kind of "passport" for Web socializers. Facebook calls it "Facebook Connect." With it, other sites (e.g., Twitter, SixApart, and 22 others so far, The Telegraph says) can use people's Facebook screenname and password instead of storing separate ID info for those users. They can also offer users "the ability to import their list of friends from Facebook," the New York Times reports. Facebook Connect, which won't completely launch until the fall, isn't the only such "passport" system in the works, though. The Telegraph says its competitors are MySpace's Data Availability project and Google's OpenSocial project (Bebo's thrown in with the latter project). Facebook founder/CEO Mark Zuckerberg was speaking about this, some other new features, and his view of a more decentralized social Web in future at a social-networking developers conference in San Francisco this week. He spoke, the Times reports, of social networking being "at the beginning of a movement and the beginning of an industry.” Interestingly, Zuckerberg mentioned that more than two-thirds of Facebook users are outside the US, according to The Telegraph. See also "Facebook to clean up its apps," by my ConnectSafely.org co-director Larry Magid.