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The anarchic online community known as 4chan isn’t known for doing things that are cute and heart-warming. In fact, the site is mostly known for posting sophomoric humor and graphic sexual imagery, and when the members of its most popular discussion board — known as /b/ — go after someone, it’s typically to subject them to ridicule and/or make them miserable. But not today. Today, someone at 4chan decided that the Internet should get together and wish 90-year-old WWII veteran William J. Lashua a happy birthday, and by lunchtime, his local branch of the American Legion said that they had heard from people as far away as Sweden.

It’s not clear how 4chan originally came across a photo of Mr. Lashua, but a member of the site posted a snapshot (embedded below) of a flyer that was posted on the bulletin board at the local Legion in Mr. Lashua’s hometown of Ashburnham, Mass. The flyer asked for guests to attend the nonagenarian’s birthday on Sept. 4 at the Legion hall. Whether it was the 4chan member’s call to “make this guy the happiest person ever for a day,” or the fact that Mr. Lashua looks a bit like a real-life version of the grumpy old man from Pixar’s popular animated movie “Up,” the post took off.

From 4chan — which has given birth to most of the Internet “memes” that many users are likely familiar with, including LOLcats and the RickRoll — the idea spread to other social networking sites such as Reddit, as well as Tumblr and even Facebook. A recent check showed that the account someone set up for Mr. Lashua’s birthday had 3,956 “likes” and over 500 comments, most of which were wishing him a happy birthday and thanking him for his military service. Someone on Reddit noted that in contrast to their usual behavior, 4chan members “were giving him nice phone calls and sending him nice notes” and discouraging those who wanted to do something stupid or mean. “They were all being.. well, shucks… awful nice.”

The bar manager at Mr. Lashua’s local branch of the Legion — a woman named Linda who said she knows the 90-year-old well — told me in a brief phone interview that she’d received almost 100 calls from people as far away as Switzerland, Japan and Sweden, and that she planned to put together a collage of all the places that had sent in birthday wishes. She added that a lot of the people phoning had given her the impression that they thought Mr. Lashua didn’t have many friends or family, and that’s why he was advertising for people to come to his party. “But that’s not true,” the manager said. “He has a big family, and lots of friends. It’s still nice to hear from so many people though.”

In addition to putting together the collage for Mr. Lashua, Linda might want to put together some extra chairs as well — a number of 4chan members, Reddit readers and Facebook fans said that they live near Massachusetts and are planning to make the drive there for the festivities. It remains to be seen what the WWII vet thinks of strangers showing up at his birthday party saying they heard about him on the Internet.

Although 4chan is known for plenty of unpleasant incidents, including the recent case involving a teenager who uploaded her videos to YouTube and was targeted by the site, Mr. Lashua’s birthday isn’t the first time the site has engaged in something more positive: 4chan users have been instrumental in tracking down people involved in animal abuse cases, such as the girl who recently threw a puppy into a river and uploaded the video to YouTube. Embedded below is a video presentation that 4chan founder Christopher Poole — known to users as Moot — did at the TED conference about the benefits of anonymity in online communities.

Related GigaOM Pro Content (sub req’d): Why Google Should Fear the Social Web

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Pink Sherbet Photography

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During today’s press event, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced that the iTunes store has sold 450 million TV episodes. How will its newly announced 99 cent rental program change the marketplace, especially with Hulu Plus around? It depends on what’s on offer.

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If there’s one issue that unites major Internet giants like Google and Facebook, it’s privacy. Google tries to offer a new service with Buzz, and triggers a series of privacy land mines; Facebook tries to offer new services and runs afoul of privacy concerns as well, then it changes its privacy settings and (according to some) makes the problem worse instead of better. Why is privacy so hard? Sociologist Danah Boyd, who specializes in the way people use social networks, says in the latest issue of MIT’s Technology Review magazine that it’s because “the way privacy is encoded into software doesn’t match the way we handle it in real life.”

Privacy settings are often binary: show this photo to these people, but not this update, and so on. Check a box, click a button. But the real world allows for many shades of grey when it comes to privacy, says Boyd. If you happen to be in a restaurant having a meal with someone, for example, you both know implicitly that you’re in public and therefore whatever you do is public by default, without having to click on any terms-of-use agreements or read pop-up disclosure statements. At the same time, you can easily lean close to the other person and whisper a word or two privately. As Boyd describes it:

We count on what Erving Goffman called “civil inattention”: people will politely ignore us, and even if they listen they won’t join in, because doing so violates social norms. Of course, if a close friend sits at the neighboring table, everything changes. Whether an environment is public or not is beside the point. It’s the situation that matters.

In other words, we all view privacy differently based on the situation we’re in, the other people around us and our relationships with them, our goals and desires within that particular situation, and so on. These things combine to create a complex web of competing pressures and incentives related to whether we keep something private or not: a web so complex that it makes a mockery of the various tools that most services such as Facebook use to help you manage your privacy. Even the ability to create specific lists of friends who have access to certain things quickly becomes cumbersome, as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged. However, Facebook has to make the attempt because it is being pressured by both users and governments over the issue.

At the other end of the spectrum is a site like 4chan, where founder Christopher “Moot” Poole has pursued a defiantly anonymous approach to community, by allowing almost total freedom for users to post content without any repercussions whatsoever. The result is a kind of anything-goes Wild West atmosphere — as described, coincidentally enough, in another piece in the latest issue of Technology Review magazine. This kind of community also has some positive aspects as well, as Poole argued in a presentation at the TED conference (embedded below). Anonymity can allow people to do constructive things as well as destructive things.

So how do we go about managing our multiple online selves and our constantly shifting spectrum of privacy demands? Some companies are trying to make it easier for users to take an ad-hoc approach to divulging privacy information such as location, for example. A startup called EchoEcho offers a service that allows you to request someone’s location quickly and easily, and they can decide to tell you or not, depending on where they are, what they’re doing, and what relationship you have with them. EchoEcho founder Nick Bicanic says this makes it easier for people to change their minds on who they want to tell, rather than just constantly broadcasting their location to everyone.

As Liz has described, however, privacy isn’t just a technical problem, and it isn’t just a business problem. It’s also a cultural problem and to some extent an educational or behavioral problem. And it’s one that’s likely to get harder before it gets easier.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Why New Net Companies Must Shoulder More Responsibility

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user hyku

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When we first revealed the download links to the new Windows Live Essentials 2011 Beta Refresh, we started off by providing the English version link first. Many of you have asked for the links for the different language versions, and while we provided you with the links, we weren’t able to mention (we were under embargo) that one of the new feature in the beta refresh is to allow users to customise the language of the programs during the install process.

So, how do you do it? The process is quite simple:

1. Go to Start Menu > Control Panel > Clock, Language, and Region > Windows Live Language Setting
   
2. From here you can select the language you want to install. Remember that in the Beta Refresh, only selected languages are available for install, so some may not be available (the installation will fail at around 98% if this is the case).
   
3. Click OK to begin the installation. Remember that you will need to be connected to the internet to download the language MUI files, but if these have been downloaded once already, the language change process is almost instant.
   
4. Restart all of your Windows Live Essentials 2011 applications to see the new languages.

Thanks to Picturepan2 from LiveSino.net for the heads up!

LiveSide.net

Windows Live Gallery is dead! Ok, technically it’s not, but it looks like it hasn’t long left of this world. Yes, yes, I know, we’re basing this on purely one section of the site being cut off and moved/deprecated, but we’ve seen all this before from Microsoft.

But what does this mean for us Live Writer plug-in developers? Well, we all have WLIDs, so putting our plug-ins in our SkyDrive area won’t be a problem, and in fact, for me at least, having plug-ins in my SkyDrive area is nothing new, but I do see a problem with this.

Microsoft seems to be intent on having Windows Live users having zero statistics available to them, it started with them being removed from Live Spaces, carried on with SkyDrive Wave 4 still not having any download statistics about your files, and continues here, with this decision. On Live Gallery, a developer could see how popular certain plug-ins were by looking at the download numbers, however, by moving the hosting of these to SkyDrive, we get the aforementioned problem of no download statistics.

Not only this, but everything will feel a little disjointed, having everyone’s plug-in hosted in their own SkyDrive means it’s not all centralized. What kind of search facilities are there going to be? How easy are the plug-ins going to be to come by? I guess the answer that latter question will possibly be the same as it currently is. When you click the button in Live Writer to go to more plug-ins, it takes you to this link, which I assume Microsoft will change where that redirect URL goes to. Let’s hope it’s that simple.

But it’s this part of the email itself that concerns me (read the full email on Aaron’s blog):

Note: Existing plug-ins currently hosted on Windows Live Gallery will need to be resubmitted using the new process outlined below.

So everyone who has ever submitted a plug-in has to resubmit theirs. Whilst this sounds innocuous, it’s not. As Aaron points out, “Since we have years of submissions there is a chance that you have changed your email address and did not get notified,” so what if a plug-in that is used regularly is made by a developer who no longer has the same address? This means that the plug-in will no longer feature in the “official list” of plug-ins. Gone. Finished with. Hopefully, if this is the case for a developer someone might point out this change so that it can get submitted, but still, it’s a pain.

As a personal thing, it’s also a royal pain for me as I have more than just one or two plug-ins to resubmit, some of which I might have to download from Live Gallery as I have no idea where they live on my computer (oops).

One other question I have for the Writer team would be, is this list just for true plug-ins, or will we be able to submit tools to be included on the list (wlwbackup for example)? I would hope so, if we’re moving away from Live Gallery, now is the time attempt some kind of improvements. But as usual with Microsoft, it all sounds rather vague at the moment and we won’t actually know what we’re getting until we get it.

Overall, I’m not happy with this change, if you’re going to change something, make it better, not worse. Offer more, not less. In the meantime, I now have to decide whether or not I’ll just self host my plug-ins so I can get some stats on them, seeing as though we won’t be getting them from Microsoft.

What are your thoughts on this? Are you a developer who is going to be impacted by this? Will you be resubmitting your plug-in to this new list? Let us know in the comments.

LiveSide.net