by Alex Evans | Jul 27, 2007 | Influence and networks, Off topic
WatchMojo.com has a useful analysis of the new Facebook Platform (the thing that’s recently caused your Facebook newsfeed to be overrun with invitations to add applications of one kind or another). Among the striking statistics cited recently by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, they note that Facebook claims:
– the 25 and over age group is the fastest growing segment on the site
– subscribers are growing 3% per week, or 100,000 new users per day
– average pageviews per person: a whopping 50 (!)
– 50% of registered users come back to the site every day.
– Facebook is generating more than 40 billion page views per month. That’s 50 pages per user every day.
– 6th most trafficked site in the U.S.
– More page views than eBay. Says they are targeting Google next.
So? Well, the consensus among tech bloggers is that Facebook’s masterstroke with the new Platform is that it turns Facebook into the omnipresent intermediary accompanying ever more of us through an ever increasing proportion of the time we spend online. In other words: “Many folks are starting to worry that Google’s omnipresence is making Standard Oil or Microsoft look like the Muppet Show… if that is the case, then they better be careful what they’re asking for with Facebook’s latest push.”
Still, on the upside, some of the initial privacy concerns about how Facebook Platform will employ users’ data seem to have eased a little. The American Civil Liberties Union has a short analysis that gives Facebook credit for allowing users to set their own privacy settings, and notes that while application developers have access to users’ data, they’re still bound by both contractual obligations and technical means to respect privacy. But, Facebook can’t screen all developers for trustworthiness – so:
Users should be more vigilant than ever about controlling access to personal information now that responsibility for keeping such information safe can now fall to an array of individual developers instead of a single company.
Our favourite application so far? The Friend Wheel.
by Alex Evans | Jul 26, 2007 | North America
Readers will already be aware from news coverage that US Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales’s testimony at the Senate didn’t go so well earlier this week (here’s the NY Times coverage if you want it; since then, Democrat Senators have issued a subpoena to Karl Rove and recommended that Gonzales be investigated for perjury).
But most of the coverage didn’t do justice to the sheer awfulness of it, according to Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, who reproduces the following list of highlights from the Washington Post’s coverage. It’s really funny, and really, really bad.
(more…)
by Alex Evans | Jul 26, 2007 | Middle East and North Africa, North America
We haven’t tended to engage much with Iraq on GlobalDashboard, in my case largely because I’m not sure I have much to add – though I’ve long felt that Democrats calling for withdrawal don’t seem to have much of a strategy underpinning their position. But when two serious experts on completely opposite ends of the political spectrum say the same thing on the same day, then it’s at least worth a listen.
First up, Bill Clinton’s National Security Adviser, Sandy Berger, had this to say in an FT piece on the 23rd, co-authored with Bruce Riedel at Brookings:
A clear US commitment to a complete, irreversible withdrawal from Iraq may now be the only way to develop a regional concert of powers that could work with Iraqis to try to stabilise the country and cauterise the conflict.
The continuing US and British occupation is a roadblock to that co-operation. The galvanising impact of a decision to depart unequivocally can be the last best chance at preventing the conflict from boiling over beyond Iraq to the whole region. How we design and implement our departure is our last significant remaining leverage.
Meanwhile, our favourite grandfather of fourth generation warfare, Bill Lind, has a piece in the 30 July edition of the American Conservative entitled “How to win in Iraq”, which he previews on his blog:
The central strategic question is, how can a state be re-created in Iraq? There is no guaranteed answer; it may not be possible. What is guaranteed, however, is that the United States cannot do it. The problem is legitimacy. To be real, a future Iraqi state must be perceived by Iraqis as legitimate. But anything the United States, as a foreign invader and occupier, creates, endorses or assists automatically thereby loses its legitimacy.
What the U.S. must therefore do is get out of the way. When elements in Iraq move to re-create a state — and those elements must be independent of the current al-Maliki government, which, as an American creation, has no legitimacy — we have to let them try to succeed. There is, in turn, only one way for us to get out of the way, and that is to get out of Iraq, as rapidly as we can.
by Alex Evans | Jul 26, 2007 | Conflict and security
Rachel Morarjee has a good feature in the FT today with gloomy news on Afghanistan. Especially alarming, she writes, is the decision by donor agencies to channel aid towards provinces with more instability, or higher opium cultivation rates – predominantly in the south of the country. Moral hazard? You bet:
This approach overlooks the massive development needs in comparatively stable areas and [according to Anja de Beer, head of the Agency Co-ordinating Body for Afghan Relief] “creates perverse incentives – for provinces to create insecurity to attract resources”.
This unbalanced distribution has had observable effects on the aid effort. There were more attacks on aid agencies in the north and west than in the south during the first quarter of this year, the majority of them criminal, according to statistics from the Afghanistan NGO Security Organisation. Only 12 per cent of the attacks on aid agencies nationwide occurred in the south, where 40 per cent of the incidents linked with the insurgency took place.
by Alex Evans | Jul 25, 2007 | Conflict and security
Global Dashboard contributor (and my brother) Jules Evans has a superb piece in this month’s Prospect magazine about Stoicism and cognitive behaviour therapy.
The article’s based on his recent interview with Albert Ellis, the originator of CBT, who died yesterday (see also the obituary in today’s NY Times): it’s the last interview Ellis gave before he died. A must read.
