A Tumblog By David

nostrich:

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but how much is a title worth? If the story that proceeds is any indicator, a title is worth over 6700 words and months of research. It all began Friday when the New York Times published an article “How Companies Learn Your Secrets“. It was an extremely long article which discussed how large companies like WalMart and Target collect data about your individual consumption patters to figure out how to most efficiently make you happy. It was a great piece but there was one problem: it didn’t have the title it deserved.

The original title was “How Companies Learn Your Secrets”. Kashmir Hill, a writer at Forbes, realized this and quickly developed a condensed version of the article with a far more powerful title: “How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did“. It cut out the crap and got to the real shocker of the story. As of the writing of this story, the New York Times article has 60 likes and shares on Facebook versus 12,902 which the Forbes article has. The Forbes article also has a mind boggling 680,000 page views, a number that can literally make a writer’s career.

Forbes did some journalism this weekend.

parislemon:

At first glance, this sounds really bad. I mean, really bad. The Wall Street Journal essentially sets it up as Google (and other, smaller advertising players) purposefully circumventing the web browsing privacy controls on the iPhone in order to track users’ browsing habits.

And when they got caught, Google stopped doing it. Which is usually not a good sign.

But my initial reaction is that John Battelle is right. This is much more nuanced than a simple black and white argument. Mobile Safari does have stricter privacy controls than other browsers, which is likely a very good thing for most users, but it also benefits Apple because it essentially destroys Google’s business. 

And it’s a business that you could argue is helpful to some people for a number of reasons (all the free services Google is able to provide as a result, for example).

I just don’t believe this is as big of an “evil” Google thing as WSJ may have us believe. But having said that, if this really is mainly about Google+, that’s very poor form on Google’s part. You can argue that Google web ads are useful in certain situations and that data Google gets from cookies on the web makes them better. But the whole +1 junk is forced at best. 

One thing is certain: Apple is not going to like this one bit. This seems like the kind of thing Steve Jobs would have gone ballistic over. This will undoubtedly escalate the war between the two sides.

Update 2/17: Not Tracking, Just Lying

It’s a complete introduction to using Tumblr. Now I need to spend some time curating links to top examples of how hacks are using it. Hmm.