[Sociam-soton] Re: Facebook buys fitness-tracking... (theguardian.com)

[electronic Max]

Ahh, I see that everyone's finally catching up to my Twitter feed - (haha!
I couldn't resist, sorry :)

I had a conversation with Tweeps earlier today about Moves, and lots of
divided reaction. On one hand, people are happy it will survive; on the
other, that it will be used for advertising in FB with an uncertain future.
 The worst case scenario: moves's developer-friendly side gets shuttered
just so that the team can deeply integrate their technology into service
FB's needs,  so that they have all of your private information AND prevent
you from accessing it too.  But I think realistically FB will probably make
a developer API available... maybe.

I'm never happy when innovative companies are acquired; the likelihood that
moves will quit being maintained and be shuttered goes up significantly,
although perhaps not as much as it would have with Google (which is famous
for killing-after-eating). Moves is one of those endpoints we have *solely*
relied upon up to now for high resolution contextual user data for INDX.
 It's time for us to reconsider.

This is key reason that I shy away from services.  You never know when
they're going to go away - and leave you high and dry.  Had a really lively
argument at the Linked Data Workshop this year after the Linked Data
Fragments paper which cited that the major core linked data cloud endpoints
have an average uptime of  ~90%, which makes them entirely unsuitable for
use in deployment. Moves has had a much higher uptime/reliability, but now
we realise how fragile things really have been. As TimBL said at WWW, "we
need to build architectures of autonomy" - so if INDX is going to serve
that need, we can't rely on services like Moves.

So the appropriate reaction to the Moves acquisition regarding long term
strategy is two fold 1) well, we really need a better solution that doesn't
leak all of your private data to some server in Finland anyway, and 2) it
will all probably be integrated into iOS/android by sometime next year
anyway.  3) maybe some OSS hacker who has more time on his hands than I do
will build one.

I am just hoping the door stay open long enough for us to do our CHI
studies this summer.

In other news, Moves is now free again on the iTunes App Store. So, if you
don't mind FB having all of your data, now's a good time to buy!

Best,
Max

On Friday, April 25, 2014, Ramine Tinati <rt506 at ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:

> And also, Nike is stopping Fuelband...
>
>
> http://www.cnet.com/uk/news/nike-fires-fuelband-engineers-will-stop-making-w
> earable-hardware/
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: sociam-soton-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk <javascript:;>
> [mailto:sociam-soton-bounces at ecs.soton.ac.uk <javascript:;>] On Behalf Of
> Luc Moreau
> Sent: 24 April 2014 23:36
> To: Sociam-soton at ecs.soton.ac.uk <javascript:;>
> Subject: [Sociam-soton] Facebook buys fitness-tracking... (theguardian.com
> )
>
>
>
> Facebook buys fitness-tracking app Moves
>
> http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/facebook-buys-moves-fitnes
> s-tracking-health-data
>
> ---
> Sent from Zite<http://www.zite.com/?ref=email> personalized magazine iPad
> app.
> Available for free in the App
> Store<http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/zite/id419752338>.
> www.zite.com<http://www.zite.com/?ref=email>
>
>
> Professor Luc Moreau
> Electronics and Computer Science
> University of Southampton
> Southampton SO17 1BJ
> United Kingdom
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sociam-soton mailing list
> Sociam-soton at ecs.soton.ac.uk <javascript:;>
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/sociam-soton
>
> _______________________________________________
> Sociam-soton mailing list
> Sociam-soton at ecs.soton.ac.uk <javascript:;>
> http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/sociam-soton
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/sociam-soton/attachments/20140425/8d50b506/attachment.html