Myspace and Facebook have won. Second Life has lost. Myspace and Facebook proved that while people love anonymity on the Internet above all, they want to show off, they want to share a lot about themselves. And this is even more the case for the worlds 50 million bloggers, a few of whom are anonymous.

Now if hundreds of millions of people around the world want to promote themselves and sometimes share the most intimate details of their lives, why is it that there´s so much fuss on the internet about privacy? My take of this is that most people are not privacy freaks, nor do they live in fear of others finding out about themselves. If they did they would be all with secret identities somewhere in Second Life or other sites that promote anonymity.

Last week Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, wrote an article in the Financial Times asking the United Nations to work on a set of global guidelines on privacy.

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I am an investor in Technorati and I am sorry to see that Dave Sifry left the day to day management of the company.  I am also sorry to see that now “authority” as a concept has been taken out from the home page of Technorati and relegated to www.s.technorati.com a hack that few know.  Now if I was advising Technorati this is what I would say.
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El Mundo, Spain´s largest news web site, announces today that Chueca, Madrid´s gay neighborhood is 90% cover by Fon WiFi signal.  I personally want to thank the leaders of the Gay Community of Madrid and the Gay Press Zero for believing in Fon and making this a reality.  Moreover I would like to invite all of those who visit Madrid to hang out at the Fon WiFi HQ in Chueca and enjoy the neighborhood with their laptops, PSPs, DS, iPhones, Nokias, Sony Ericsson´s, HP´s, HTC´s or whatever WiFi gadgets they may have!

On the way back from Beijing I had a chance to fly with Neil Goldman, a co founder of Capital IQ who is now both a fund manager and a philanthropist.  Neil shared with me that he supports of Hatzalah.   Coming from Fon a global WiFi network built by the people and interested in all efforts that involved citizen participation (see my previous article on Couchsurfing) I thought that the idea of training regular citizens to save lives was quite powerful.  The basic idea of Haftzalah is that without much training all of us can save lives and while it would be ideal of course that only very well trained medical personnel saves lives it so happens that many times by the time qualified medical personnel arrives it is just too late.  So Haftzalah trains anyone in Israel, say a marketing manager at a tech company, to save lives.  And she may be at a meeting explaining how to launch the latest Web 2.0 service but when her phone rings, she drops everything a la Superman and goes to save lives, at least until the MDs arrive.  One of the biggest life savers is in the use of defibrillators.  As the Hatzalah web site describes:

AUTOMATIC EXTERNAL DEFIBRILLATOR
These machines automatically detect heart rhythms and can shock a patients heart back into beating.

My father died of a heart attack when he was only 49 in an intercontinental flight and I certainly wish that there had been a defibrillator on board and regular citizens trained to deal with them.  I was also pleased to see that this concept was extended to the US and it is somewhat similar to that of being a Red Cross Volunteer but even more grassroots.

Nina who works with me pointed out this site called Couchsurfing. Its like a Fon but of couches. With Fon you share a little WiFi out of your window with those who pass by and then they share with you when you go by their home. With Couchsurfing it gets more intimate. You share your couch with those who pass by and they share their couch with you when you travel. Even though I am not sure I am ready to share my couch(es) with those who pass by my home I loved the idea.

I am not a US citizen but I lived in the US for 18 years. I now live in Spain. As CEO of Fon, the largest WiFi network in the world, I frequently travel around Europe, Asia, and America. In my travels I have had a chance to compare countries along a lot of different categories. Indeed during long international flights I started a comparison chart between Europe and USA along around 50 different categories that were meant to define which part of the world had better quality of life. These included issues such as access to education, quality of health care, criminality, unemployment, level of red tape, income per capita, job opportunities, innovation rates, tolerance and other random categories. Interestingly the result was pretty even between Europe and USA: there were around 25 categories that USA scored better and a similar number for the EU. My conclusion was not that the EU was better than USA or viceversa but depending on what is important to you you would choose one over the other. And I chose Europe. Now having said this there was one issue in which Europe had the upper hand and that was the quality of the Police Forces and the justice system in general. For reasons that are not clear to me USA has much higher incarceration rates than Europe. Indeed USA has more people behind bars than Madrid has inhabitants, about 4.4 million vs 5.7 million. But not only USA has abnormally crowded prisons (if incarcerated people were included in unemployment statistics USA would lose its advantage in employment vis a vis Europe), but USA has a Police Force that is particularly rude in the treatment of its citizens. During a visit to Southampton, Long Island I was shouted at by a policeman for a minor traffic violation (driving at 42 miles an hour in a 30 mile zone). When I got off the car to apologize I was almost handcuffed. The “hands on the wheel” diatribe was so bad that it made me wonder how US citizens put up with Police Forces that so frequently abuse individuals. I don´t mind getting a fine but I do mind being treated like a dangerous suspect when any security officer with common sense would not consider me in a bathing suit a real threat. Moreover not only are US Police Forces rude but they are corrupt as well. When I was telling a friend how I was shouted at in Southampton she metioned that there is a well know way to be treated well by US Police Forces and that is to pay them off. But as opposed to giving them cash on the spot the system, and it seems to be a very well accepted system nationwide, consists in making significant payments to the Police Charities and obtaining badges that say that one is a contributor to the Police Forces. Indeed so interested are US citizens in trying to get a better treatment from their police forces that many fall into various scams. My take as a frequent visitor to the States is that this system is shameful and that Police should both stop being rude to average citizens and certainly stop taking what in other countries would clearly be called a bribe in the form of charitable donations.