A recent report highlighted concerns that the US Air Force has over troops using location based apps, with the Air Force posting a warning on an internal web site on the matter.

“All Airmen must understand the implications of using location-based services,” said a message on the internal Air Force network.
The features, such as Facebook’s ‘Check-in,’ Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt “allow individuals with a smartphone to easily tell their friends their location,” it said.
“Careless use of these services by Airmen can have devastating operations security and privacy implications,” said the message, which was posted on November 5, according to spokesman Major Chad Steffey.

The age old adage about Military Intelligence being an oxymoron springs to mind.

Let’s look at the key issues that seem to be getting people hot, bothered and generally up in arms.

Deja vu the first. According to Facebook, at the time of writing they have 500M users. But how many of them will actually use the service, regardless of whether they’ve updated their privacy settings?

Deja vu the second. So you decide you want to use Facebook Places? Only on an iPhone I’m afraid or from Facebook’s HTML5 mobile web site. Want an Android or Nokia app? You’re out of luck, for now. Want to use it outside the US? You’re even more out of luck, for now.

Deja vu the third. So you decide you don’t want to use Facebook Places? It’s a location app so there’s bound to be privacy implications. Granted, Facebook have chosen to go down the opt-out route for location privacy, though you still have to physically use the service, but even the most cursory of web searches for “disable facebook places” yields loads of different takes on the same basic set of actions. Cult of Mac and ReadWriteWeb have great write ups, in non threatening, non technical language for how to ensure Facebook Places never sullies your Facebook stream.

Now take a step back, re-read the three points above and substitute, in order, Google’s Latitude, Foursquare’s, err, Foursquare and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle for Facebook Places. Granted the opt-out vs. opt-in approach to location sharing differs substantially (for Latitude, Foursquare and Fire Eagle it’s implicitly opt-in) but we’ve been here before. Many times. A new location sharing service is launched, people get worried due to media coverage and eventually the status quo is restored and everyone gets on with their lives as before, maybe with an additional bit of location richness added, maybe not. It’s worth bearing this in mind before you buy into the latest media coverage which over-uses the phrase “sparks privacy concerns“.

Update 1/9/10 – turns out I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. After I originally posted this, my daily trawl through my RSS feeds uncovered a post from Jonathan Crowe over at The Map Room blog that draws pretty much the same conclusions over Facebook Places as I do.

A lot of web sites try to capitalise on this, offering earnest entreaties to “make me your home page” … “no make me your home page” … “no, choose me for your home page, I have so much personalised content”.

They’re needy and somewhat neurotic entities these web sites, it’s not like I can have all of them as my home page.

Most of them personalise their content for you, based on a registration setting or some other insight, to give you what they think is the information your looking for.

This is not creepy.

A large amount of web sites are advertising supported and serve up ads which, again, are personalised, either from a demographic, behavioural or geographic point of view (sometimes it’s just from plain old fashioned key word matching with often hilarious results).

This is still not creepy.

But then this morning Facebook told me it wants to be my home page.

Like most people I’ve evolved a filtering mechanism which understands why I’m being asked and which either ignores such pleas or uses the minimal amount of effort and mouse clicks to convey the message “buzz off, you’re not going to be my homepage and don’t bug me again“. I’m politely paraphrasing here you understand.

But when Facebook offers to be my home page because, and I’m quoting here, it’s noticed I use Facebook regularly … that smacks of Big Brother and is most definitely creepy, whichever way I look at it.

… through to New York City.

It’s clever though not particularly sophisticated at this stage; a simple exposure of Wikia’s underlying geo metadata and it probably took very little effort to implement. Facebook appear to treat places as people, hence the exhortation to connect with the place.

For now there’s very little additional geo element present though what is there is probably enough to get people to connect with and like local community places or places they already feel a connection with, their home town, neighbourhood, honeymoon spot and so on. That alone should yield valuable demographic and (geo)targetable information.

This is pretty much a classic case of  picking low hanging fruit for Facebook and a far better exemplar of a place than the somewhat clumsy rebranding of Google’s small business listings as places, though the browse places page seems to suggest otherwise as it’s very POI heavy.

It will be facinating to track how this feature of Facebook develops and matures.

• Omniture Research; which Obama used, apparently.
• Free laptop from Vodafone Business; I’m not self employed so a business tariff is a non starter.
• Everyone plays Mafia Wars; except me and most of my friends.

So when I do actually look at a Facebook ad, it’s because it’s caught my attention, like this gem from the Royal Mail.

You already have the LP, the CD and the MP3 … now get the Collectible Stamp.

A click through yields the latest campaign from the Royal Mail which exhorts us to buy stamps (but not use them, but to collect them instead, at least I think that’s the premise) which reflect the classic albums we already own in a variety of formats (but what about 8 track or cassette tape?).

Given the amount of competition the Royal Mail faces and the fact that 25% of First Class letters fail to arrive on time, I’m not sure whether this latest ad campaign smacks of genius or of desperation.

• Hamburg airport + Lufthansa plane + storm = a flight I’d really prefer not to be on.
• Dennys publicise their Twitter stream only to discover that it’s not actually theirs and Dennys Hsieh in Taiwan gets a lot more attention than he bargained for.
• Geek Joke of the Week: My cat is escaped.
• Pacifica, Stayathomia, Socalistan … Facebook social network connections mapped.
• John McKerrell‘s rather wonderful mapme.at gets place based locating.

Written and posted from home (51.427051, -0.333344)

What? Just like that? Surely not, they obviously meant they’d added it to the list of stuff they really need to fix.

But apparently not.

And I tested it and it worked. Conditioned as I am to the UK norm, this was pretty unheard of, hence the need to write this experience up. So on the Internet, at least, you don’t always get what you pay for, but sometimes you get it for free.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous

So the Posterous FAQ at http://posterous.com/faq says this “We’ll do smarter things for photos, MP3′s, documents and video (both links AND files)”.

Link eh? In the spirit of experimentation let’s try this, firstly from the easy and obvious one … twitpic.com

… and rival yfrog.com …

… and from my Flickr photostream …

… and finally a more challenging one, from my Facebook photo album …

http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3454882&id=757562989

… there’s only one way to find out, so let’s send this to Posterous right now and see what happens; all in the spirit of experimentation naturally.

Posted via email from Gary’s Posterous