National Geographic got it very wrong when they implied that there would be polar bears in Finland. I guess they had heard the urban legend about polar bears walking on the streets of Helsinki.

We all knew this day would come. 36 days after the first Blog Readability Test performed by a fellow webometrician and reported on his blog, Webometric Thoughts has declined to Junior High School level, whereas Oh, what a tangled web we weave… has risen to a more prestigious High School level. I don’t think this comes as a surprise to anyone.

Facebook is dividing peoples opinions on the web, again. Robert Scoble was alpha testing a new feature of Plaxo Pulse which retrieves names, e-mail addresses and birthdays of your friends on Facebook. Well, Facebook didn’t like that at all and closed Scoble’s account, just to reopen it the next day. The story was covered on many blogs, like TechCrunch, Mashable, Loren Feldman on 1938 Media and Jimmy Guterman on O’Reilly Radar. Some say that Scoble’s actions were corporate espionage and others are defending openess and questioning Facebook’s reaction. There have even appeared Facebook groups like the “Keep Robert Scoble off Facebook”-group with over 200 members and the “Facebook re-open Robert Scoble account !!!!!”-group with almost 500 members.

This raises two questions: 1) who owns your infromation on Facebook and 2) who can use it. Facebook has clearly stated that they own the data and nobody can use it. From a webometricians point of view this is not good, far from it. Webometricians often use web crawlers to retrieve link data and content from various sites researched. Now, Facebook is apparently off limits.

I understand very well that Facebook wants to protect their data. The user data they have collected is the reason why Facebook has been estimated to be worth 15 billion USD, which in my opinion is a ridiculous figure. But who owns your phone number and your e-mail address when you post it on Facebook? Facebook says they do. So the real question is, do you want to give Facebook your phone number and your e-mail address?

I have one prediction for 2008. Some major player on the web will screw up user data in a way that really gets peoples attention. This will hopefully increase peoples awareness about what it really means to publish something on web, and that one should be very aware of the potential risks with that. Then it’s up to everyone to choose whether they want to give their personal information to some company that may use it as they please.

Many national newspapers and even more blogs have wrote about the year 2007 as the year of Facebook. A columnist in HBL wrote in her today’s column about Facebook as a great way to keep in touch with ones friends. She especially loves the status updates that can tell her what her friends are doing at that precise moment. But everybody doesn’t love Facebook, some are against it. A television news reporter stated a couple of weeks ago that she will never have a profile on Facebook because she prefers to meet her friends in person. Well, she got it all wrong. I don’t think for minute that Facebook will replace or is replacing face-to-face meetings, rather the opposite. Facebook might even bring people together. A couple of years ago there were (and still is) popular services to find old classmates and old army mates. These, and many more, can now find each other through Facebook. But what then? We find some old and new friends and then we get overloaded with information about which applications they are using or with all the status updates.

Maybe this is how the majority of people see Facebook. As a neat way to find old friends and to learn about what they are doing. Maybe this satisfies some kind of voyeurism. But while concentrating on status updates and vampires and hugs and christmas trees and … two important things have been forgotten: the potential of applications in Facebook and the rights to content on Facebook.

Even though the most used applications are kind of fun and recreational (read: useless) there are some applications that truely show the potential of Facebook as a platform. Companies write applications for marketing and branding. Libraries write applications with which users can access the libraries catalogs. Facebook could be seen as a web within the world wide web. But is this an image of the future we want to see? I hope I will never have to do access my online bank through Facebook.

And the second thing that nobody talks about is the property rights to the content users post on Facebook. This is clearly stated in the terms of use, but who reads those? In the very long terms of use we can read that by posting any content anywhere on Facebook we agree that Facebook may copy, store and distribute that content and use it for any purpose they want. Facebook is currently the most attractive (to investors) web site because it stores huge amounts of user data that can be used for targeted marketing. The question is will the overload of information and all the adds on the pages push users away from Facebook or is it so much fun to receive virtual hugs or plants or vampire bites and read all the status updates that more users will come. Currently it looks like the latter is more accurate, but I hope the year 2008 will be the year of user awareness.

I hope that in 2008 users will finally become more interested and aware about what it means to post a photo or write a comment on some web site. After that, it’s up to you what you will do on the web and what kind of personal information you will share with millions of people on the web.

QR codes are according to Wikipedia “two-dimensional bar codes created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994″.  New York Times wrote about QR codes in early 2007. An addcampaign for the movie 28 weeks later used QR code on a billboard in London and on their web site. An image search on Flickr gives 584 images tagged with “qr code”. Other webometricians have also blogged about QR codes, which is a reason why I’m a bit reluctant to write about them, but I think QR codes have a lot of potential and it is a shame that they are not used more, especially in Finland. Many of Nokia’s mobile phones can read QR codes, but yet QR codes are not used at all in Finland. QR codes are bubbling under and they may be a hot topic of 2008 and I wish Finland will be leading the way, again.

Here’s my (copied idea) contribution to increase the use of QR codes in Finland: