USA in the Top 4 countries requesting the most data and content removal from Google and YouTube

This is the first time that Google publishes the number, per country, of government requests for data or content removal directed to Google and YouTube.
As stated in the results, the numbers maybe skewed as one request may concern dozens of urls, but the results are still interesting and slightly puzzling.

If it is no surprise that China bears a question mark, the names of the Top 4 countries who have requested way more data or content removal than the rest of the pack is less anticipated:

1- Brazil (291)
2- Germany (188)
3- India (142)
4- United States (123)

At the bottom of the list, one can find France, along with Sweden, Norway or the Netherlands with less than 10 requests. Accounting for the population size difference, the US government sends Google over 4 times more requests than France does.

An inquiring mind can't help wondering what this means in regard to the USA vs. France (and the rest of the world) approach to internet content and things like freedom of speech, laissez-faire etc. Or alternatively, it could show how much high level raw data, without context or details, can be misleading.

Ndlr: Hadopi is still so wrong for so many reasons.


Source: Government requests directed to Google and YouTube

Facebook’s Alternative Internet Vision And Its Search Implications

Greg Sterling at SearchEngineLand.com attended the F8 Facebook developer event yesterday and reports interesting details on Facebook's vision of a social internet:

The vision articulated by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Bret Taylor, formerly of Google and Friend Feed (acquired by Facebook), is of a more social internet, where relationships between people and things replace links between pages. The vision represents a shift from a Google-centric internet comprised of billions of unrelated documents and sites to a Facebook centric one where social relationships and affiliations are the connective tissue in a vast network. [...]

There are three social plugins: Like, Activity and Recommendations plug ins. The most important of these is the Like button. This was widely anticipated.

Publishers and developers can add a Like button to any page on any site. Adding that button effectively turns it into a Facebook fan page.

Here’s the official description: ” [The] Like button offers users a lightweight and consistent way to share the things and topics that interest them.” For example Yelp, one of the launch partners, is adding a Like button to every local business profile page.

By clicking “Like” (and being logged into Facebook) you transmit that you like a business, in this case, back to your profile and feed. But you might equally Like a band (on Pandora) or Like a news story (on CNN) or a movie (on IMDB). Those Likes become part of your identity and in turn part of the data available to other publishers and sites in the “Open Graph” that Facebook envisions.



In the future all that public identity information, including Likes, will become available to Bing and maybe Google. Likes will also be enshrined in a specific area on your Facebook profile.

You must still authorize the sharing of your digital identity and public information with publishers. I asked Facebook about the following scenario: A user on Yelp “Likes” a sushi restaurant; can Urbanspoon later access my Yelp Likes (e.g., that sushi restaurant) to personalize Urbanspoon? The answer is yes.

In the Open Graph Urbanspoon can get access to my Likes on Yelp and any other site on which I’ve clicked the Like button. But Urbanspoon still needs my permission and authorization to access that data. This wasn’t entirely clear from the presentations or press conference. I had to talk to multiple people to gain clarity on the permissions and privacy issues.

The other social plug-ins, Activity feed and Recommendations feed, help make third party publisher sites more “social” in a couple of different ways, by showing me what my friends like or are doing on those sites. Again, all the sharing of information needs to be authorized by the user. It’s not entirely clear that Facebook users understand all the privacy settings on the site. And it’s far from clear that they’ll understand the implications of the new expanded sharing announced today. Facebook in my mind has the burden of explaining it to them.

For their part I think Facebook executives believe they have built in sufficient controls and privacy safeguards. I think they also perhaps incorrectly believe that ordinary Facebook users understand all the privacy controls.

The two other announcements, the Open Graph Protocol and Graph API, are strictly for developers/publishers. These tools make it easier for them to implement a Facebook log-in and integrate social features into their sites (the term “Facebook Connect” is going away but the functionality will remain). Facebook said that more than 75 partners were participating already and Mark Zuckerberg predicted that there would be “One billion Like buttons on web within 24 hours after launch.”

There was also brief discussion of a social toolbar that could sit at the bottom of any website and offer a range of social functionality to users. Facebook had been expected to announce a location API or geotagging. That announcement didn’t come but it is likely coming in the near future.

One skeptic at the press conference characterized this as Facebook’s effort to “colonize the web.” I wouldn’t go that far, but these tools and capabilities expand Facebook’s potential reach and influence across the internet. I bet that publishers will broadly embrace and implement these tools, for whom the benefits are very tangible. Facebook Connect has been broadly embraced because it offers clear benefits to publishers. These new tools go further to make any site much more social.

Facebook will eventually be sitting on a mountain of secondary data or metadata: favorite restaurants, places, musicians and many more categories of information. All this data will be structured and associated with its millions and millions of users. What it does or doesn’t do with that information and data will also be interesting to watch. Facebook executives denied there was any associated monetization scheme in the wings. We’ll see.

The phrase “semantic metadata” was mentioned several times throughout the keynote. And the vision of a web of connected identities and associated data leads to some interesting possibilities — even search opportunities.

However, the vision here is a network of discovery tools and information that operate higher up in the funnel than search: what are my friends doing, where are they eating, what do they recommend? This clearly doesn’t eliminate the need for search. But it does represent an alternative way in many cases to discover information.

Yet the mountains of data that Facebook will gain could improve Facebook search results and potentially the coming, new and improved Bing integration. At a simple level, if Facebook knows the most “Liked” sushi restaurants in New York and those liked by my social network it can show me that information in search results. That hypothetically makes Facebook search much more social and more of a “recommendations engine” than Google at this point.

But this is all speculation on my part right now. Because Facebook doesn’t have a really good search experience it remains less “useful” than Google. But it is possible to imagine a much improved Bing integration combined with data and metadata gleaned from millions of profiles and “Likes” across the internet — making Facebook a more personal, more social and much better “discovery engine” than it is today.

Source: Greg Sterling for SearchEngineLand

France has e-gov services! Well, on paper, where it should have stayed...

The busiest State Department in France (after the -no- Work one, needless to say) is the Health Insurance one (CPAM)who takes care of establishing people's rights to public health care and of the processing of the reimbursement requests.

A little while ago, to cut costs, the Government decided to close some of the centers where you could go to apply for a Social Security card or ask questions or submit your reimbursement requests. The remaining centers are not open full time due to the lack of man power (hu, remember they just closed centers!). To compensate, the Government decided to jump on the e-services band wagon and opened a website where people could login, access their files and see the status of the reimbursement requests they had submitted.

Sounds like a good idea, right? Well on paper, it is. However, this is a perfect case of how the poor design of a website can actually make life harder for its users and in this case turn interacting with the Health Insurance State Department an experience Kafka could have written about.

It is like if this site, highly transactional by nature since it's aimed at allowing health care insured and the government to interact and solve problems, had been consciously designed to keep the end user from getting any help. This is beyond poor usability, it is intentional sabotage or plain stupidity. Since it has been this way for a few years without any attempt to improve the efficiency of online interactions, it is probably stupidity and complacency. A hint that the situation could turn ugly for France CPAM customers is French vocabulary doesn't include words like "user centric" or "usability"...

Here are a few examples that would make any user experience specialist gasp in disbelief:

- There is no linkage between physical interactions with your local CPAM outlet and your web file: papers you submit physically or conversations you have with real people are not reflected in your intranet, and emails exchanges you have with face-less employees are invisible to the physical ones. 360 view of the customer somebody? Another concept to add to French dictionaries and minds.

- You have to use a web form to send a question to the face-less service. Fine. Except that a 1 000 characters limit makes it harder to explain your situation than to take the GMAT. It's Twitter meets Kafka. The result? The answer you get asks you for more details.

- So you submit a question online, sweating to condense it in 1 000 characters or less, and you wait on average 7 working days (vs. the 3 promised) to get an answer, via email. Chances are, the answer asks you for more details.

- The email you get are ones, so you go back to your little CPAM intranet to answer. Surprise: the email you just received is nowhere to be found. There is no email/communications archives.

- You go to the web form to answer the email you received and are now faced by a New and Bigger problem: how can you re-explain your problem, mention the email answer you received AND answer the questions it asked you in less than 1 000 characters? At this point, you are beyond sweating: you are drinking heavily. (I suspect it's part of the e-gov strategy to make you die quickly and avoid giving you retirement money, but it will be another post).

This surrealist situation can last a few months/years, during which the government can make interests on the money it owes you...

So, me, the absolute internet believer, had to actually print all my documents and go to the post office to send my file, certified mail, to the CPAM. I am not even sure this will get me anywhere as I don't have a case file number to give them, nor do they provide an address where to send inquiries.

Next time I go to their offices, I take my Flip cam with me and record the conversation!

I don't know when my problem will get resolved, but I am frustrated to see the administration misusing the web to abuse their customers. And I don't mention the potential human drama behind having to deal with the French Health Insurance Sate Government - CPAM: money problems, health issues, deaths....

In conclusion, the main risk facing e-government services is complacency:

1- The government has a monopoly and therefore no incentive to actually be efficient or helpful. After all, the "customers" are prisoner and loyal. Therefore it is easy to ignore their need and complaints.

2- Putting up a website, no matter how much worse it makes people situation, is a perfect way for the government to scale down on phone support and physical outlets, while touting that it is providing online support. I won't even ask how people with limited means/education can attempt to use this so-called support.

3- It would be about time the French Government, and France at large, "get" how online services work and recognize that building a website "experience" requires special skills and processes. It takes a little more than a sudo art director and a developer. Or you may just wait for the next revolution to wake up!

The French are known to be too bored to be concerned with any kind of efficiency but come on, we are talking about Health Insurance concerns and money. It is just a shame to use the web as a way to avoid making payments and deflect any kind of accountability. Without mentioning that most people will probably just blame the tool, the web, not the government and that will allow this vicious circle to go on.