Dear Facebook: You are either evil or dumb. You broke our deal. I could accept you pushing me to make things public, and share my information with developers. Why? Because I could control what you said to whom. My Facebook profile was still my own. I could pick my friends, group them, and determine who saw what. It was a decent bargain: you gave me a friction-free way to keep in touch with my friends and I gave you some data that you could use to target me discreetly.

The bill just signed into law, is, at best a first step in solving the U.S. health care crisis. Rather than solving the problem of rising health care costs, it seems to commit the U.S. government to having to solve the problem without actually laying out how costs will be cut. Larry Smith does a great job of summing up why this is the case.

It’s been a long time. http://www.flickr.com/photos/shanan/73598418/

http://www.flickr.com/photos/josephby/4389332351/ Light reading.

Wow, what a few months. A wedding, a trip to Africa, and a tumultuous return to work that included a last-minute invitation to sit on a panel at the semantic web conference. Unrelated to all of this I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about location-specific mobile applications. Foursquare, Gowalla, MyTown, Yelp! and other apps have people checking in, buying places, and generating a lot of structured data tied to location and community.

Turning to my day job – I’m going to be moderating a panel at Add-on-Con this Friday with Patrick Murphy from Brand Thunder and Adam Boyden from Conduit. We’re going to be talking about how publishers, OEMs, hardware vendors, and others can use browser Add-ons to generate revenue, or otherwise add value to their products. A lot of the buzz will be about Google finally adding extensions to the Beta of Chrome.

foursquare launched their API yesterday (Mashable, Techcrunch). With it, developers can: identify what city the user is in read/write user and friends’ check-in data look up information for a particular location make/send friend requests retrieve venue data perform a local search that includes information from your friends’ check-ins add venues, tips, and to-dos This enables some pretty cool applications. For example, what about an AR app that shows me where all of my friends are?

Culinary hegemony in the Middle East. In Lebanon and Israel even chick peas have politics.

Nicholas Carson explains the Social Gaming Industry in 13 words. Brilliant.

I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at local, mobile applications and how they fit into gaming and local commerce. Michael Arrington biopsied the social gaming economy and found it to be quite ill. Marginal advertisers (and I use even that term loosely) are filling these companies’ coffers with cash from shady lead-gen deals. In other news Facebook announced an updated advertising policy which, amongst other things, will allow them to target users based on the geotags of content that they post.