As most divShare users know, we recently implemented Facebook Connect, not only allowing you to easily access your divShare files using your existing FB account login, but to also create privacy settings within Facebook itself! This is the first service of it’s kind, and fixes one of the fundamental flaws in Facebook, that once you post something, everyone can see it no matter who they are!!! Do you want your co-workers seeing your baby pics?  Do your friends care that you got a new plaque that says “Top Earner, Q1 2009, Mid-Atlantic Region”?  Of course not–now you can set who sees what.

You publish, you control, right? Yep.

Check out this video of the Facebook experience without divShare Privacy controls: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrlSkU0TFLs

However, because of how Facebook’s APIs work, our users have found some considerably slower performance when using their dashboard within FB.  Unfortunately there is little divShare can do about this, but please know we are petitioning Facebook to optimize the data transactions.

Another item of note concerning Facebook… they just came out with their new, much ballyhood Privacy Policies, allowing for more openness.  In our opinion it falls short of what we’d want.  Read Write Web kind of feels the same: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/despite_new_openness_facebook_remains_fundamentall_1.php

Yahoo! is shutting down Jumpcut, their online video storage, editing, and sharing service.  The service was not able to compete with YouTube, and you can be sure their overhead was killing them (just as you can be sure YouTube’s is causing sleepless nights to some over at Google).

Take a look at what The Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher had to say about this at: http://kara.allthingsd.com/20090416/yahoos-jumpcut-jumps-off-cliff-but-you-can-send-your-videos-to-yahoos-flickr/.

Yahoo! is letting Jumpcut customers move their videos over to Flickr, but making them download them, then upload them again.  Sounds less than user friendly.

Just an interesting article in the N.Y. Times we thought we’d share.  These are the types of stories the divShare team passes around during our discussions of the Internet’s growth and evolution.

Should Online Scofflaws Be Denied Web Access?

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that YouTube is draining a staggering half a BILLION dollars from Google’s bottom line:

http://www.businessinsider.com/analyst-youtube-will-take-half-a-billion-off-googles-bottom-line-this-year-2009-4

It’s no surprise that the video giant is consuming so much in hardware and bandwidth resources, but we’ll be interested to see if the really smart guys & gals at Google figure out how to turn the online TV service profitable. After all, isn’t that why we start businesses in the end?