The Evolution of Privacy on Facebook

About

Facebook is a great service. I have a profile, and so does nearly everyone I know under the age of 60.

However, Facebook hasn't always managed its users' data well. In the beginning, it restricted the visibility of a user's personal information to just their friends and their "network" (college or school). Over the past couple of years, the default privacy settings for a Facebook user's personal information have become more and more permissive. They've also changed how your personal information is classified several times, sometimes in a manner that has been confusing for their users. This has largely been part of Facebook's effort to correlate, publish, and monetize their social graph: a massive database of entities and links that covers everything from where you live to the movies you like and the people you trust.

This blog post by Kurt Opsahl at the the EFF gives a brief timeline of Facebook's Terms of Service changes through April of 2010. It's a great overview, but I was a little disappointed it wasn't an actual timeline: hence my initial inspiration for this infographic.

Data

The data for this chart was derived from my interpretation of the Facebook Terms of Service over the years, along with my personal memories of the default privacy settings for different classes of personal data. The population sizes are statistics from Google, the Facebook Data Team, and wild guesses based on what seemed reasonable to me.

I welcome data corrections, so please leave a comment below if you have better numbers to share.

Types of Personal Data

Facebook's classification system for personal data has changed significantly over the years. I tried to capture what I thought were broad topics that have remained relatively consistent. But they might need some explanation.

* Likes: a person, band, movie, web page, or any other entity represented in Facebook's social graph that has a "like" button. "Likes" started with status updates, but have now grown to encompass pretty much everything. In Facebook Newspeak, they're a "Connection".
* Name, Picture: self-explanatory
* Demographics: Your age, sex, birthday, and other basics
* Extended Profile Data: Your family members, city, place of birth, religious views, favorite authors, schools attended -- anything that is an entity you can list a relationship to in your profile.
* Friends: The people you've friended
* Networks: The personal networks you've set up on Facebook (e.g. colleges & universities or companies).
* Wall posts & Photos: Self-explanatory.

Audiences

Audience sizes are based on averages and my own extrapolations from those averages.

The meaning of "network" has changed a lot on Facebook. For this infographic, I've interpreted to be an average network size, plus (later in the timeline) all "friends of friends"
Implementation

The audience scale is logarithmic, so that we can compare audience sizes of 100 and 1 billion. I also did a big no-no and mapped the audience size to the length of the slice, not its area. I don't feel too terrible about this, because the area comparison is already distorted by the log scale. Plus, frankly, the linear scale just looks better.

I built this sketch using Processing.js. You're welcome to download the source. Sorry, no Internet Explorer.

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Add SocialBookmarks in your Wordpress Theme

In this short tutorial, we’ll be adding buttons to our WordPress theme to allow visitors to easily submit the current article to social bookmarking sites like Delicious, Reddit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Twitter and Facebook.

All of these sites provide a simple way to create these buttons. For example, to add an article to Reddit, the URL is: http://www.reddit.com/submit?url=THE-URL&title=THE-TITLE. As you can see, we just have to fill in the URL and the title for the submission.

More info: - http://webdevelopment.made-from-india.com/

Obama promises Sarkozy a rose garden

He will reach out, finally, to President Nicolas Sarkozy after more than 12 months of scarcely disguised froideur between the French and American leaders.

Eight other European leaders have been invited to the White House before President Sarkozy, who is said to be too excitable and too unpredictable for Mr Obama?s taste. The French president, jealous at being upstaged by another, young and energetic world leader, has made a series of barbed or patronising remarks about President Obama.

In particular, President Sarkozy once liked to compare the self-proclaimed success of his own pell-mell reforms with the alleged caution and slowness of President Obama?s first year in office. Irony of ironies, the French presidential visit, often postponed, is happening today and tomorrow when the roles of the two men have been reversed.

President Obama is on the crest of a wave after pushing health care reform through Congress and agreeing a nuclear disarmament deal with Russia. President Sarkozy is in the political dumps ? including an all time low opinion poll rating of 30 per cent yesterday ? after a humiliating defeat by the Left in the French regional elections last weekend.

Mr Sarkozy needs the American trip to be a success – and needs to be seen to get along with Mr Obama – as a first step towards rebuilding his shattered aura of invincibility in France. President Obama appears to be ready to oblige him.

President Sarkozy and his wife, Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, have been invited to a cosy dinner in the White House tonight with the American first couple. If the weather permits, the visit will end with an elebarate joint press conference by the two presidents in the White House rose garden on Tuesday.

On most issues ? such as Iran or Israel-Palestine ? they see more or less eye to eye or will agree to differ. President Obama would like France to increase its front-line contribution to the war in Afghanistan. This would be deeply unpopular in France and is therefore beyond a weakened President Sarkozy?s power to deliver.

President Sarkozy would like the US to move further and faster on climate change but can hardly press the issue after dropping his own plans for a ?carbon? tax.

The history of the awkward Obama-Sarkozy relationship began even before the American leader was elected in November 2008. As part of his campaign to denigrate the legacy of his predecessor and former mentor, Jacques Chirac, Mr Sarkozy reached out to the lame duck President George W. Bush. He even implicitly criticised Mr Chirac?s decision to oppose the US-British invasion of Iraq in 2003.

The French leader therefore found himself less than popular with the new Democratic team which occupied the White House in January last year. He was furious when President Obama refused his invitation to lunch at the Elysee(acute on middle e) Palace after the commemoration of the D-Day landings in Normandy last June.

?This was unprecedented and spoke volumes,? said one diplomatic source in France. ?Obama couldn?t abide Sarkozy?s style and what saw as his child-like need to be always seen next to him.?

Over the next few months, President Sarkozy appeared to go out of his way to present himself as a more radical, and succesful, leader than Mr Obama. Criticised for launching a half-dozen, incomplete reforms, Mr Sarkozy said in December: ?I see that Mr Obama, for whom I have great esteem, and even great friendship, has placed all his bets on one reform. That has not made things easier for him.?

In November, Mr Sarkozy pointed out that Mr Obama has already ?lost three elections? since taking office. He bragged that his government had faced only one mid-term test, the European elections, and ?we were the winners?.

The former French foreign minister, Hubert Vedrine, suggests that the difficulties between the two men are partly personal but partly driven by Mr Obama?s lack of interest in Europe.

?Obama has no reason to feel close to Sarkozy,? he said. ?For one thing, he cosied up to George W. Bush for ideological reasons. But secondly Obama does not regard France, or Europe, as a priority.?

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Evaluating Logistics Outsourcing

Outsourcing, because of it being relatively young in the business or trade scene, is subject to a lot of research and evaluation. As a business, you can outsource practically everything from economics and accounting, management, human resource/hiring, customer service and logistics.

There are many reasons as to why companies suddenly want to start outsourcing some or most of their departments, and just as many are companies who would like to start an outsourcing business of their own. Most of the time, the reason is cost reduction and the desire to increase operational productivity. However, for logistics outsourcing, a big reason is to upgrade their IT capabilities at a fraction of the cost, or to be able to react quickly in a change in the normal freight and shipping environment, specifically if the shipper would want to change routes. When logistics is outsourced, a situation like this can be acted on quickly and efficiently, rather than going through several different departments simple to address the issue.

Businesses are largely becoming global and shipping companies are experiencing rapid growth. The best way to increase profitability while still being able to maintain the service quality your customers have come to depend on is logistics outsourcing. Third-party logistics outsourcing providers can assist you in different aspects of your business and most custom fit business solutions to effectively solve your problem. Logistics outsourcing is a sound financial step to take when you are evaluating the process by which you serve your customers. It is also a great way to start globalizing your business and making it truly worldwide.

Off Shore Outsourcing India

The outsourcing phenomenon has picked up momentum only in the past decade with the advent of the internet. Ever since undersea fibre -optic cables have been laid out, it has helped in boosting internet connectivity across continents. Cheap access to the worldwide web has helped in the growth and evolution of a knowledge economy which has resulted in a redistribution of wealth across the globe.

People who have been using computers for many years would re-collect that sending a file even 1 Mb in size used to take a whole night, now the same can be done in a jiffy. The wave of outsourcing became a flood when sending large amounts of data through the internet to another corner of the world became a breeze.

Another factor, which contributed to the growth of the outsourcing phenomenon, was the realization that India had a large talent pool of English speaking professionals who could deliver high quality work at low costs. Companies in the western world realized that sending work offshore proved to be a profitable proposition as the response was even faster than vendors based in the home country. Not just India, other countries in the eastern hemisphere also benefited from this realization.

Offshore outsourcing phenomenon is not just a flash in the pan but is here to stay for the long term. Several factors have contributed to the growth of this phenomenon. Foremost among them being the high quality of Maths and computer science graduates being churned out by Indian universities. Unlike the west, where the education system focuses on creativity and innovation; India's education system lays a heavy emphasis on absorption of mathematical concepts and rote learning . The net result being that India's logic -oriented graduates are adept at problem solving and number crunching while the west still retains its edge in marketing primarily due to an academic ecosystem which nourishes creativity and innovation.

Globalization has also had a major role to play in the offshore outsourcing phenomenon. Rising cost pressures forced companies to rethink their cost structures and business models which resulted in a globally distributed supply chain and work force. Work all over the world now goes to that location where it can be done best and at the lowest cost. On the basis of this cardinal macroeconomic principle, one can say that India will continue to retain its leadership position in the offshore outsourcing space.

Outsourcing Web Design - A Cost-Effective Alternative For Small and Mid Sized Businesses

If you own a small business, a startup, or even a mid-sized business, you may find the idea of hosting a website exciting indeed. However, you may also discover that the costs of designing a website and actually putting it up on the Internet may be beyond your budget if you consider local options. However, with the advent of outsourcing, you can rest assured about the cost factor while expecting the same quality of services.

For businesses whether large of small, the question of outsourcing design unquestionably comes up at one point or the other. With the emergence of quality web design companies offshore, many companies around the world are looking at outsourcing design as a viable option.

Having a presence on the internet is crucial for many companies today. The simplest option to maintain a web presence is via a website. As the costs of professionally developing and maintaining a website can go beyond the company's budgeted resources, it is considered very practical to outsource web design these days. The internet has become a very flexible medium to facilitate outsourcing of design and development presently.

The speed of communication using features like email, live chat, and file transfer have made it very easy for developers located in one part of the world to communicate with their clients present miles away. The advantages of outsourcing web design presently out weigh the drawbacks that many companies opt for outsourcing their web design to web designing companies offshore.

Along with the cost factor, outsourcing can also improve the quality of the design. In many cases, better web designing skills come at higher prices locally, but these can be offset by the cheaper costs offshore. With some experience and understanding, offshore outsourcing firms are now able to offer similar quality levels as local companies. Besides, firms who outsource web design offshore have access to the global level technical skills at comparably lower rates.

Small businesses can save money on things like webdesign and utilize resources for promoting their businesses locally. In this manner, companies can look to competing evenly with their competitors at much lower costs. Further, with the spare resources, small and medium sized companies can access opportunities like marketing their website online with techniques like SEO and PPC.

With the limited resources that small and medium-sized businesses have, outsourcing can help them divert the spare resources to establishing their brand online. Compared to traditional advertising, online advertising can be most favorable as more and more people are now accessing the internet as a normal routine.

These are some of the benefits to it. These days, countries like India have a solid base in offshore IT and website design services. Many outsourcing companies can easily handle outsourcing projects in design and development. So, you can also consider the option to outsource web design to India at competitive costs. Numerous companies in India today provide skills and technology that is on par with world standards. Consider the best companies and you will find the decision to outsource web design to India worth the money you spend.

Impact on business and outsourcing industry of India

Kudos to the new president of US , Barack Obama, of Democratic Party, for his outstanding victory in presidential elections over John McCain of Republican Party. This race for presidency is stated to be the largest ever media focused election. It also saw some very dramatic ups and downs and even withdrawal of candidature much talked barrister of US and Hillary Clinton the wife of Bill Clinton, the ex-president of US.

Much have been written and talked in every sphere of business and political bureau that the new election will have good and bad impacts on the India. Outsourcing industry of India is in panic since , the statements of Obama have had been twisted by media and intellectuals in such a manner that a havoc got created that outsourcing work to India will be curtailed.

The negative sentiment of such interpretation has also impacted the stocks of TCS, Wipro etc especially when due to meltdown of US economy, entire worlds economy was shattered and Indian stock exchanges were no exception to it.

On careful study of all the speeches so far given by Obama, nothing specific has been found which can conclude that outsourcing industry will have to see dark moon.

Rather, Obama has stated in his statements that India and China are going to boost the economy of USA. If this single statement is analysed then it means there will be growth in mutual business relationships between India and USA . If such is the statement of Obama where he is considering India amongst one of economy partners , then an imagination of grey days for outsourcing sector of India is not sustainable .

This all started with the speech of Obama that had two statements
“US tech firms have thousands of jobs, but not enough talent at home” “tax sops will not be given to companies that outsource work out of the country”
But at the same , he has openly given a statement
"I will start giving them (tax breaks) to companies that create good jobs right here in America"

So going by the employment factor being generated by Indian companies in US, there seems that the worry of outsourcing industry is useless. At the most , worst to worst , the companies which are not creating employment for US citizens may face the mar of any policy if made against outsourcing companies.

The compulsion of US to outsource work is also an admitted fact by Obama by the remark that "………..,but not enough talent at home” . Hence, to carry out growth , the US companies will be requiring talents as talents are not there in US. The above fact is also substantiated by the recent statement to press by IT tycoon and Microsoft founder Bill Gates that “

“Recently , I was introduced with five best talented person of Microsoft and Four were Asians “
So, the compulsion of US should be rather a matter of growth for Indian Outsourcing Industry. As told to PTI, NASSCOM President Som Mittal has stated that "We are not sure whether he had meant outsourcing in the software sector or the manufacturing sector. But I don't think the software exports will be affected or slow down...

At the same, it should be noted that Indian major outsourcing companies, say Infosys, TCS and Wipro, have major revenue to the tune of 70 % coming from US. This was the reason that the Indian software and services exports segment grew by 29 per cent in F.Y 2007-08 than what it had in F.Y 2006-07.

In overall scenario and going by the given circumstances, US cannot afford not to outsource work to India and if stops then in that case, from where it will generate the talents to cater the needs of its industry which requires talent for growth. Even, if Obama had in his mind to check outsourcing to India , he will have to revisit his views after knowing the naked truth of over dependency of US companies over India for outsourcing in IT sector.

On the contrary , Indian Healthcare and Pharma companies have every reason to cheer over the victory of Obama in US as he has pledged to strengthen global fund. This fact has been attested by Bill Gates who on 4th November 2008 was in India and reacting to Obama has said to have stated that his win will help strengthening the global health fund and improve healthcare in India and abroad as well.

As regards to other industries, be it power sector also, the impact will not be negative after the new governance in US

The author is a business editor of www.made-from-india.com

Kudos to the new president of US , Barack Obama, of Democratic Party, for his outstanding victory in presidential elections over John McCain of Republican Party. This race for presidency is stated to be the largest ever media focused election. It also saw some very dramatic ups and downs and even withdrawal of candidature much talked barrister of US and Hillary Clinton the wife of Bill Clinton, the ex-president of US.

Much have been written and talked in every sphere of business and political bureau that the new election will have good and bad impacts on the India. Outsourcing industry of India is in panic since , the statements of Obama have had been twisted by media and intellectuals in such a manner that a havoc got created that outsourcing work to India will be curtailed.

The negative sentiment of such interpretation has also impacted the stocks of TCS, Wipro etc especially when due to meltdown of US economy, entire worlds economy was shattered and Indian stock exchanges were no exception to it.

On careful study of all the speeches so far given by Obama, nothing specific has been found which can conclude that outsourcing industry will have to see dark moon.

Rather, Obama has stated in his statements that India and China are going to boost the economy of USA. If this single statement is analysed then it means there will be growth in mutual business relationships between India and USA . If such is the statement of Obama where he is considering India amongst one of economy partners , then an imagination of grey days for outsourcing sector of India is not sustainable .

This all started with the speech of Obama that had two statements
“US tech firms have thousands of jobs, but not enough talent at home” “tax sops will not be given to companies that outsource work out of the country”
But at the same , he has openly given a statement
"I will start giving them (tax breaks) to companies that create good jobs right here in America"

So going by the employment factor being generated by Indian companies in US, there seems that the worry of outsourcing industry is useless. At the most , worst to worst , the companies which are not creating employment for US citizens may face the mar of any policy if made against outsourcing companies.

The compulsion of US to outsource work is also an admitted fact by Obama by the remark that "………..,but not enough talent at home” . Hence, to carry out growth , the US companies will be requiring talents as talents are not there in US. The above fact is also substantiated by the recent statement to press by IT tycoon and Microsoft founder Bill Gates that “

“Recently , I was introduced with five best talented person of Microsoft and Four were Asians “
So, the compulsion of US should be rather a matter of growth for Indian Outsourcing Industry. As told to PTI, NASSCOM President Som Mittal has stated that "We are not sure whether he had meant outsourcing in the software sector or the manufacturing sector. But I don't think the software exports will be affected or slow down...

At the same, it should be noted that Indian major outsourcing companies, say Infosys, TCS and Wipro, have major revenue to the tune of 70 % coming from US. This was the reason that the Indian software and services exports segment grew by 29 per cent in F.Y 2007-08 than what it had in F.Y 2006-07.

In overall scenario and going by the given circumstances, US cannot afford not to outsource work to India and if stops then in that case, from where it will generate the talents to cater the needs of its industry which requires talent for growth. Even, if Obama had in his mind to check outsourcing to India , he will have to revisit his views after knowing the naked truth of over dependency of US companies over India for outsourcing in IT sector.

On the contrary , Indian Healthcare and Pharma companies have every reason to cheer over the victory of Obama in US as he has pledged to strengthen global fund. This fact has been attested by Bill Gates who on 4th November 2008 was in India and reacting to Obama has said to have stated that his win will help strengthening the global health fund and improve healthcare in India and abroad as well.

As regards to other industries, be it power sector also, the impact will not be negative after the new governance in US

The author is a business editor of www.made-from-india.com