Facebook overexposes videos

Originally posted 07/05/2011 on lubbockonline.com

Jason Kincaid of TechCrunch reports that Facebook suffered a privacy glitch in it's Videos feature for about a week, but it's fixed now. He explains:

Unfortunately, those controls haven’t been working as they should: for the last week it’s been possible to see a full listing of your friends’ Facebook videos, including the name, thumbnail, description, and people tagged in each clip — regardless of whether or not you were supposed to have access to the videos.

You couldn't actually see the videos, only the title and description and a thumbnail, but that could be enough to cause some embarrassment. It's important to understand that in the complicated, connected world we live in glitches and breaches will happen. But Facebook has a more than it's share of snafu's, and it's hard to believe they couldn't have fixed this issue in less than a week. Facebook is king of the hill in social networking, but if they don't watch it they could find themselves being replaced. It's happened before. At one time IBM was king of the technology world. They are still big, but they were supplanted by Microsoft. Microsoft may be in the process of being supplanted by newer companies that understand the connected world better. Facebook could find themselves in the same situation, but in the lightning fast world of the internet, Facebooks dominance could be measured in years instead of decades.

Google closes the door on an open standard?

Is it licensing?

Peter Bright at Ars Technica reports that Google is dropping H.264 video support from it's Chrome browser. You might not think that would be a big deal. It was announced Firefox wouldn't support H.264 and hardly anybody blinked. But Firefox isn't Google.

Peter points out that Googles stated reason - to support open formats - doesn't hold water. H.264 is an open standard. What it isn't is a free standard - the licensing is capped at $6.5 million a year. But Google has a video codec of it's own, WebM. It may not fulfill the traditional definition of an open standard, but it's free. And cost effects even as rich a company as Google - but maybe not quite in the way Peter believes.

Or Infrastructure?

Jason Perlow, a ZDNet contributor, believes there is another reason Google wants to drop H.264. The cost of using H.264 is negligible for Google. But Google has properties that dwarf the cost of H.264 licensing. Chief among them would be YouTube. H.264 is widely supported, but Google's removed of H.264 support has raised the concern that H.264 support may be dropped from YouTube next.

According to Jason the real cost of supporting H.264 is in the infrastructure required to support it. Servers, storage space, and the bandwidth required to support multiple video formats are not cheap. Being able to get rid of one could put a significant dent in those costs. Getting rid of one that also has 6.5 million in licensing puts an even larger dent.

That's understandable, but it could effectively scuttle the efforts to simplify video on the web. HTML5 has a new tag, the VIDEO tag, that is supposed to work like the IMG tag - the type of image doesn't matter, and neither would the type of video. But it won't work if the browser won't support the video format. It may not work if the largest distributor of streaming video on the web doesn't support the standard.

It's amazing that a company that claims to promote open standards could be responsible for scuttling one online.

Bullies video beating, post on Facebook

Another case of Facebook being used by bullies is being investigated, this time in Schenectady, NY. But instead of using the site to bully other students, the bullies made a video of the beating they gave another student and posted it on Facebook.

Other students visiting the Facebook page said they would like to see the girl in the video beat up at school. The police are investigating, and given the schools history, I don't think they'll go lightly on the bullies. In the 2008-09 school year four girls committed suicide, and two of them were probably being bullied when they did it.

This case is different than the usual Facebook bullying you hear about. The girl wasn't abused by messaging and wall posts, she was beat up, video'd, and more students said they would like to see her hurt at school. While it's easy to create an anonymous Facebook page, most camera's today put identifying information on the video, so the students who beat her may get a surprise visit from the police, even if none of the students who visited the page used their real names on their accounts. And I'm glad. This is one time that I wouldn't mind if Facebook was even more dismissive of users privacy than it already is.