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Users must be alert about having their real identity from Google+ replace pseudonyms in other Google services

Google’s work to integrate its Google+ social networking site broadly with its other services could raise red flags for users who want to closely guard their privacy.

It’s valid to raise concerns over Google’s decision to integrate Google+, which carries a real-name requirement for users, with other Google services people have been using with pseudonyms for years, said John Verdi, senior counsel with the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in a phone interview.

Google’s nightmare scenario would be for a critical mass of users to inadvertently green-light Google+ integrations only to later complain that they didn’t know their pseudonyms in certain services would be replaced by their Google+ real name.

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If that were to happen, Google could find itself in a privacy controversy that it can ill afford. The U.S. government has the company on a short leash, having mandated audits of its privacy policies and practices for the next 20 years after a privacy firestorm ignited with the launch of the now-closed Buzz service last year.

Buzz, a microblogging and social networking service, debuted with an integration with the Gmail webmail service that exposed users’ private e-mail contacts publicly and without authorization.

Since launching Google+ this summer, Google officials have been stressing that it makes it simple and intuitive for members to control what they share, with whom and how.

During this initial period, when Google+ has operated mostly as a stand-alone social networking site, consensus has been that, yes, its content sharing and privacy controls work well and as advertised.

However, Google has now started to integrate Google+ with other services, and it remains to be seen whether a critical mass of users will fully understand the interaction, cross-functionality and data sharing between Google+ and other Google services.

Google officials, from the CEO on down, are gung-ho about Google+ and it’s clear that the push to fuse Google+ with other company services will be extensive.

Google has redesigned the interface of the Google Account control panel, whose previous version clearly listed Google services available to users as part of the account, along with links to the services and some of their settings pages. The new control panel lacks that list of services.

Previously found at google.com/accounts, the control panel is now part of the Google+ site domain, another sign that Google+ is becoming the command center for privacy controls and settings across Google services. The new control panel includes a link to the old control panel, but it’s not clear for how long the latter will be available.

The road to propagate Google+ across the Google product line is just starting, and the potential for a misstep at some point seems high, considering that at issue is the online identity of potentially hundreds of millions of people.

In some cases, shielding their real identity is of life-and-death importance for some people, such as spousal abuse victims and political dissidents in totalitarian regimes.

“If Google wants to be the broker in the relationship between pseudonyms and real names, there will be all sorts of ways that that could go wrong across their many services. If you’re a user in Syria depending on your pseudonymity in order to stay alive, that’s not a very comforting situation,” said Peter Eckersley, technology projects director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, via e-mail.

In other words, now more than ever, Google must make sure that it fully complies its famous “do not be evil” philosophy.

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Officials, residents take to social networks to talk about how to deal with impending storm
Computerworld – As people up and down the East Coast of the United States prepare for Hurricane Irene, social networks are being used to get the word out about its path and how best to deal with it.

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Federal agencies, disaster relief organizations and state governments have taken to Facebook and Twitter to warn people about the track of the approaching storm. The organizations are also using social sites to announce evacuation plans and discuss how best to safely ride out the storm.

This should come as no surprise — earlier this week the American Red Cross reported that people are increasingly turning to social networks for information about approaching storms and other natural disasters.

The Red Cross report also noted that people are increasingly using sites like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ to make pleas for assistance during a crisis, as well as to alert loved ones that they’re safe.

And as Hurricane Irene approaches the East Coast, the Red Cross has created a Facebook photo album of people are preparing for Hurricane Irene.

And Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell today used Facebook to warn residents to take “seriously the need to prepare for this significant storm and to ready their families, homes and communities for possible evacuation.” Similarly, Newark, N.J. Mayor Cory Booker posted on Facebook a video of a press conference he held to talk about the storm.

New Jersey Governor Chris Christie turned to Twitter to alert his constituents that he was planning a news conference on hurricane preparedness.

And the New York Times is using Twitter to show a list on Twitter of hurricane-related information and resources. The list includes links to weather forecasts, lists of evacuation centers and bus service changes and delays.

Sharon Gaudin covers the Internet and Web 2.0, emerging technologies, and desktop and laptop chips for Computerworld. Follow Sharon on Twitter at Twitter@sgaudin, or subscribe to Sharon’s RSS feed Gaudin RSS. Her e-mail address is sgaudin@computerworld.com.

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Sprint had been last carrier to not support the standard

Sprint’s decision to strike a deal with LightSquared Thursday was a tacit admission that its early adoption of WiMax has not worked out as well as intended.

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Sprint’s initial reasoning in earmarking $5 billion to build a WiMax network was that it would give the company a time-to-market advantage of at least two years over competitors Verizon and AT&T. But when Verizon began offering its LTE services in 28 major markets at the end of last year, Sprint’s advantage of having the fastest mobile data network in the country evaporated before the company could make any substantial inroads in attracting new subscribers. Adding to Sprint’s woes was the fact that its WiMax partners at Clearwire have run into financial problems, as well as the fact that LTE has quickly become the default standard of the American wireless data industry.

ANALYSIS: Can Sprint realistically support both LTE and WiMax?

In this light, it’s easy to see why Sprint struck a deal with wireless broadband and satellite network provider LightSquared to deploy and operate a nationwide LTE network that will use a 40MHz chunk of spectrum on the 1.6GHz band. LightSquared will pay Sprint $9 billion in cash for hosting the spectrum and running the network over an 11-year period, while also giving its customers access to Sprint’s 3G EV-DO Rev. A network through a roaming agreement.

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From Sprint’s perspective, this deal means the carrier will now use both WiMax and LTE to expand the reach of its mobile data services. Even though LightSquared will be wholesaling access to the LTE network, Sprint will still have the option to enhance its own 4G capacity by purchasing “up to 50% of LightSquared’s expected L-Band 4G capacity” to use for its own services. Since Sprint already has access to significant spectrum holdings through its partnership with Clearwire, the new partnership with LightSquared means that Sprint will have an abundance of spectrum to use and plenty of flexibility in deciding what to use it for.

LightSquared, meanwhile, estimates that it will save itself “more than $13 billion over the next eight years” by having Sprint build and operate the network rather than trying to build and operate a network on its own. In all, LightSquared estimates that the network will cover roughly 260 million Americans by the end of 2015. LightSquared, which used to call itself TerraSky, has been looking to get into the LTE business since last year, when investment firm Harbinger Capital told the FCC that it had bought the company to build out a hybrid network that combined satellite technology with terrestrial technology such as LTE.

LightSquared says that the FCC still has to sign off on resolving “certain interference issues involving terrestrial use” of the spectrum that will be used for the LTE network. Opening up satellite spectrum for mobile data use has been part of the FCC’s efforts to bring mobile broadband to rural areas. In its national broadband plan released last year, the FCC declared that it wanted to free up some satellite communications spectrum for wireless data use, along with some television spectrum and unused spectrum on the 700MHz band.

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Suddenly, Twitter is unnecessary, outdated, overvalued and headed for the ash heap of abandoned social services

Computerworld – The microblogging service Twitter debuted five years ago, and by all accounts it’s one of the great success stories of the social media era.

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Twitter boasts 200 million users and 350 billion tweets per day, and it’s a ubiquitous reference on mainstream TV. Visit Twitter today, and it’s a hive of frenetic activity. Millions of people rely on the service for news, commentary, blog updates and social interaction. Twitter is about to close an $800 million funding round, which values the company at about $8 billion.

Suddenly, however, the service has been rendered obsolete by Google’s new Google+ service, and also by the company’s failure to capitalize on its five-year window of opportunity to innovate its way to indispensability.

It’s only a matter of time before Twitter becomes a ghost town. Here’s why.
Twitter’s Google+ problem

Google launched its Google+ social site about three weeks ago. The site’s perfect storm of social features will sink Twitter.

Google+ has Twitter-like “following,” rather than Facebook-like “friending.” That means you can follow anyone without his or her permission. Google+ has a Twitter-like “feed” or “stream” that presents the posts of the people you follow the moment they’re posted.

Asymmetric following and instant feeds are two of the four core attributes of Twitter. The third is brevity. Twitter famously restricts posts to 140 characters or less. And the fourth is an API that enables other companies to tap into the stream and do interesting things with the flow of tweets.

But it’s only a matter of time before Google+ will have all four of Twitter’s core attributes.

Many Twitter users like short tweets or, more accurately, they like the fact that blabbermouths are forced to be concise. The resulting stream is terse, and skimmable, although many of the best tweets actually link to blogs or articles that are longer and wordier. (Never mind that the reason for the limit was initially to fit the tweets into SMS text messages, a requirement made obsolete by the use of mobile apps.)

The coming APIs from Google will enable third-party companies to present Google+ streams in Twitter-like summaries, with links to full posts. Anyone who likes the shortness of Twitter posts can also get short Google+ posts. Even without those APIs, people are already doing this. Silicon Valley entrepreneur, blogger and venture capitalist Guy Kawasaki, for example, has already built a page he calls “Pluserati,” which presents short versions of the most recent five posts by the biggest users on Google+. By hovering your mouse pointer over the short version, you get a longer version. By clicking, you get the original post.

While Google+ will soon do all the things Twitter does, Twitter can’t support a long list of the things Google+ supports. Conversations, for example. Each post on Google+ can be followed by comments where users can hold a detailed and satisfying conversation about the post. On Twitter, commenting is awkward because when you comment, your comments are not generally seen by the poster’s other followers, but by your own followers, who probably did not see the post. You see a lot of replies on Twitter referencing posts you never saw. For a social service, Twitter is pretty antisocial.

Also on Google+, you can post pictures and videos directly in posts, launch immediately into a video chat, send your posts to nonmembers and even present all your posts marked “Public” as a blog available to anyone with an Internet connection.

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