Google's new personalized recommendations engine, hotpot, has been launched. But the content of this specific launch is not what interests me, in writing this post. (Not that I have anything against recommendations engines. A close friend of mine has been trying to develop such engines, and I've been somewhat aware to the importance and complexity of this issue even before hearing his complaints).
What caught my eye was the design chosen by google to protect the privacy of a person giving a recommendation. I haven't tried it myself, but according to a reliable report, hotpot (actually google places, hotpot being a new feature of this google service) requires a different profile and has a different friends list. This is intentionally done, according to a reply from google, quoted in that report: "We have done this to ensure that users have control over how their reviews appear to the public".
And this, in turn, sheds light on a basic difference between facebook and google. One of the reasons google buzz was accepted with a lot of objection, in my mind, was the fact that Gmail is a real-life service. It is used in one's regular real life, just like cellular phones and other communication media. Facebook may serve as a real-life friendship service, but it is more virtual in nature, and also gives the infrastructure for a lot of virtual, not regular real life, communications. As a result, when the regular real life, and the virtual real life collided, in the introduction of buzz, people got scared. Google got the message, and hence this separation of identities.
As far as I understand, at the moment, Facebook does not offer such an option, and actually cannot offer it, as it stands in distinction to the your-friends-define-you axiom, which stands at the basis of Facebook's concepts.
One has to wonder which approach would prove more appeasing to the evolving network-society.
What caught my eye was the design chosen by google to protect the privacy of a person giving a recommendation. I haven't tried it myself, but according to a reliable report, hotpot (actually google places, hotpot being a new feature of this google service) requires a different profile and has a different friends list. This is intentionally done, according to a reply from google, quoted in that report: "We have done this to ensure that users have control over how their reviews appear to the public".
And this, in turn, sheds light on a basic difference between facebook and google. One of the reasons google buzz was accepted with a lot of objection, in my mind, was the fact that Gmail is a real-life service. It is used in one's regular real life, just like cellular phones and other communication media. Facebook may serve as a real-life friendship service, but it is more virtual in nature, and also gives the infrastructure for a lot of virtual, not regular real life, communications. As a result, when the regular real life, and the virtual real life collided, in the introduction of buzz, people got scared. Google got the message, and hence this separation of identities.
As far as I understand, at the moment, Facebook does not offer such an option, and actually cannot offer it, as it stands in distinction to the your-friends-define-you axiom, which stands at the basis of Facebook's concepts.
One has to wonder which approach would prove more appeasing to the evolving network-society.
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