So Barack has done it. He has another four years in office. Let's hope without pandering to get re-elected he can try and play genuine hard-ball with any of the Republicans who mess around in the House or the Senate. After all, the \“\best is yet to come\”:

Angela Epstein has written an article in the Daily Fail complaining about the coming changes in child benefits. In part I agree with her, the fact that one household where both parents earn less than £50,000 can still receive full benefits but a household with one parent working earning more than £60,000 will receive no benefits is absurd. Angela further argues income shouldn't come into it.

On this I disagree, household income should be considered. You may ask why should the children suffer, as she does:

But why should my children lose out, simply because their parents have had the temerity to work hard and earn a good living?

This is where I have a difference of opinion with Angela. I agree that children shouldn't lose out. However, Angela, you are in a position where your children shouldn't. How about you buy one less pare of Laboutin shoes per year, or go on a one week holiday as oppose to two week holiday.

The point is, you have choices to make so that your children don't suffer. A poor house hold doesn't. They can't afford to fully and completely provide for their children. It is absolutely right that we provide assistance for them.

We can have discussion as to how exactly is the best way to means test and their will always be a small number of people who are at the cutoff point and thus feel hard done by. Thats just a fact of life.

But I humbly disagree that child benefits shouldn't be means tested at all.

Recently Facebook decided to expand their Timeline feature. Timeline was introduced to replace a user\’\s wall. It is meant to be a history of a user\’\s time on Facebook. So they started putting posts from earlier on the Timeline. Now when you go onto someone\’\s Timeline and go back a few years you will see posts by them and to them from back then.

This freaked people out. They thought private messages were being made public. This simply isn't the case. No-one is yet to provide categorical evidence that it is. Instead people are finding that these 'private' conversations were actually public.

I think what we are seeing is evidence of a shift in our interaction with social media. Back in 2008 it was really just students on Facebook and we were much more relaxed with how we conducted ourselves and what information was visible and what information was hidden. As Facebook has gotten bigger, and as of June 2012 Facebook has 955 million active users, people have become more careful about the information they share.

Then they are presented with how they acted back in 2008 with this new Timeline feature, and they can't believe they could have been so careless with regards to privacy.

Privacy is going to continue to be one of the key issues. As we enter the Information Age it's going to be more important that we can control what information is shared an what isn't. I don't think this bodes well for Facebook. They don't answer to the users, they answer to advertisers. I draw hope from more open services, like Diaspora or App.net.

Go to the Wolfram website and allow it access to your Facebook data and you will be bestowed with a whole wealth of information. (Be warned! It will ask you to create a Wolfram ID.) It analyses not just your data, but information about your friends.

So, for example, I now know my average post length is 7.66 words. Though there are some longer posts in there as well.[^graphs] With Facebook and awesome being some of the more frequent words in my posts. One thing I found perhaps slightly depressing is that of the 2,058 photos I've uploaded, the most commented on photo has received a measly twelve comments, and it's from four years ago.

Not surprisingly most of my friends are male, 71.2% of them to be exact. There's also a pretty even split between how many are single, and how many aren't. I imagine that will change as we all get older. I also have an impressive geographic distribution of where my friends are from. How cosmopolitan we are these days.

This is all data Facebook has. Every status you've ever made. Every photo you've uploaded. Every page you've liked. Every friend you've made. Facebook has all this information themselves. You can be damn sure they know a lot more than they reveal publicly. That girl's photo albums you like to perv through? Yeah, Facebook know as well. And what will they use all this information for? Advertisements. As the saying goes, if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold.

Many times Facebook has redesigned its site or added new features which are seemingly not in the users interests. Or how about the Facebook privacy policy or terms of service. Whilst these have been getting better over time due to external pressure, they are weighted heavily in Facebook\’\s favour. Pictures you upload are essentially Facebook\’\s to use as they will, from their terms of service page:

you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (IP License). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

They can do as they please with the picture. Literally, they could \“\sell\”\ it to the New York Times to be used as a cover story picture and you wouldn't receive a cent.

This then becomes interesting when one considers recent Facebook activity especially with regards to the much talked-about IPO and subsequent stock price shenanigans. Business Insider have written a very good article about the matter. What's interesting is a letter written by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook co-founder, to shareholders. Quoting the articles summary here's what Zuck thinks:

• Facebook\’\s social mission is more important to Mark Zuckerberg than Facebook\’\s business.
• Facebook\’\s business exists to support Facebook's product development, not the other way around.
• Facebook\’\s CEO is an extremely patient man who does not flinch under criticism.
• Facebook will never care as much about clients and shareholders as it does about its service and users.
• Facebook cares about the long term, not the short term (read: decades, not months).

This contrasts with what was discussed above. First we have this idea that Facebook doesn't care about users, but about advertisers and making money, then we have that actually what Facebook cares about, or more particularly what Zuckerberg cares about, is the users of Facebook. So which is it? Maybe in the long term these two ideas will converge. Facebook ultimately needs its users in order to make money. After all, Facebook is simply a website and could conceivably be killed by The Next Big Thing™.

[^graphs]: This kind of information is displayed in graph form. I can't work out how to embed those graphs here, at least without joining Wolfram Pro.

*[IPO]: Initial Public Offering