Facebook’s new social graph and other announcements today could tremendously change our interaction with webpages and sites… and i am generally excited about it .. but it turns out that it has serious privacy concerns ..
For example, the biggest problem is with their “auto-logging capabilities” on third-party sites. To illustrate, i happened to go to CNN.com and Yelp.com today - and i was really surprised to see that both the sites knew who i was and showed my friends on facebook who like that page or were on that site. Now that is fine but how did CNN know who i was? It happened to be that i was logged into Facebook.com at the same time. Facebook is sharing login session information with sites that are implementing its social widgets. But hey, i didnt say yelp.com or cnn.com should know my identify just because i am logged into FB. Tomorrow any random site can implement the social API and if i happen to visit that site, it will know who i am!
In fact this gets even worse!. If Facebook was just showing my identifiable information on the third party site through an iFrame or something which didnt let the third-party really have my data, it would still be okay. But third-parties are actually getting your profile information directly from FB. See example of Yelp above (i have smudged some of the profile info ..). If you see the javascript files they load, you will notice (see the blue highlighted text) that Yelp is actually getting all the data about me from FB without having any permission granted to access that data.
Third-party sites should not be given default Opt-IN by Facebook! And what is i happened to press the like button by mistake and that action gets transmitted to my entire friend network in an instant. Every technology should offer ways for users to correct any mistakes - there is non - once you press “like”, its gone to the activity black hole and you cant even retract. This has huge implications which only different users mishaps will illustrate in time
I am excited about the whole concept in general but the privacy issues are quite a barrier for now. Infact now i am going to be doubly careful to notice any facebook “like” widgets on sites - make sure i dont press anything by mistake - this is definitely going to make my experience weird to say the least.
April 22nd, 2010
Grubia.com is a social way to discover and know what to eat and where to eat what you want to eat?
As a foodie, i have had some real information needs which translated into the idea for grubia.
Idea Date: Somewhere around Jan, 2008. After many hours of brainstorming with my co-founder, we nailed this down. We wanted to do something in the online food media space. But we wanted to solve a real need and also build something cool and different (read not another restaurant review site, food blog or recipe site).
Site URL: Grubia.com
Blog: http://grubia.blogspot.com
Motivation: Consider the following scenarios
1. Have you ever been in a situation where you have gone to a restaurant and looked at the menu and wondered, what to eat there? What is good? Perhaps, yes (specially if you go to eat food you are not very familiar with ). You may has asked the waiter/waitress and heard them say, “Oh, everything is awesome here!”. Wow, that surely helps. So you know where to eat, but not what to eat?
2. Similarly, you may have had a burning desire to eat one of your favorite foods (hmmm, i just love the classic north indian dish, mutton biryani).
3. You just walked into some place to grab some food. And it turned out that the place has an awesome cheeseburger. You want to tell the world. “folks, you cant not miss the burger here.” You know where one should eat and what one should order but dont have a place that you can do exactly that.
Existing Solutions Landscape
1. Restaurant review sites - such as yelp.com, zagat.com However, these focus on restaurant reviews and not the review of the dishes being served.
2. Menu listing sites - such as menupages.com. Again, they provide what is available but not what is great at a place
3. Blogs - well they do everything but cant answer the specific question, what to eat at a particular place?
4. Recipe sites - such as ifood.tv which provide recipes but that is not that helpful.
Innovation Factor:
1. Focusing on just the real stuff, food!
2. Crawlers that get the menu and restaurant data
3. Grub ranking algorithms that use several parameters to rank the different dishes across the restaurants so that when you lookup a place, you know what are the three most recommended appetizers, drinks, entrees and desserts
Current Status (as of 08/01/2008):
1. In active development since may, 2008
2. Submitted for techcrunch 50.
3. Interviewed for tc 50. Invite for the demopit
4. Site launched (alpha) on August 20, 2008.
Stay tuned! Will be posting many updates. The site will be launching in private beta in a few days.
August 23rd, 2008