Seeking to keep the peace in its popular online hangout, Facebook Inc. has overhauled a new advertising system that sparked privacy complaints by turning its users into marketing tools for other companies.
When you business is humans, it's best to treat them as such.
If you didn't catch it in the New Yorker, take some time to read Dangerous Minds
"The fact is that different offenders can exhibit the same behaviors for completely different reasons," Brent Turvey, a forensic scientist who has been highly critical of the F.B.I.'s approach, says. "You've got a rapist who attacks a woman in the park and pulls her shirt up over her face. Why? What does that mean? There are ten different things it could mean. It could mean he ''t want to see her. It could mean he doesn't want her to see him. It could mean he wants to see her breasts, he wants to imagine someone else, he wants to incapacitate her arms—all of those are possibilities. You can't just look at one behavior in isolation."A few years ago, Alison went back to the case of the teacher who was murdered on the roof of her building in the Bronx. He wanted to know why, if the F.B.I.'s approach to criminal profiling was based on such simplistic psychology, it continues to have such a sterling reputation. The answer, he suspected, lay in the way the profiles were written, and, sure enough, when he broke down the rooftop-killer analysis, sentence by sentence, he found that it was so full of unverifiable and contradictory and ambiguous language that it could support virtually any interpretation.
Astrologers and psychics have known these tricks for years. The magician Ian Rowland, in his classic "The Full Facts Book of Cold Reading," itemizes them one by one, in what could easily serve as a manual for the beginner profiler. First is the Rainbow Ruse—the "statement which credits the client with both a personality trait and its opposite." ("I would say that on the whole you can be rather a quiet, self effacing type, but when the circumstances are right, you can be quite the life and soul of the party if the mood strikes you.")
And it continues on, listing more tricks and how they dupe the hopeful. As we all ache for answers, it's good if we remember all the ways we can be fooled as well.
via Rough Type
To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy.
The essay is a terrific one, and brings up many important questions, but I think it's a mistake to typify these two markets as not having parity, or that it's somehow unfair that some people get money and some "only" get attention. The reality is, there is a healthy exchange system across the two markets as effective as those that change money between two countries' currency. Value is fungible.
The people who can monetize their output do... they host their own blogs, monetize as they see fit (typically adnsense) and they can use the SN's as traffic generators, if they wish. Pretty good trade.
But most folks could never get traffic to their blogs, for a variety of reasons: they don't post often enough, they don't post well enough, they don't post on general enough topics or simply no one knows they are there. For these folks, posting regularly (if not exclusively) on a SN is critical to building an audience that can eventually support advertising or serving an audience they will never monetize: friends and family.
Despite geek love of RSS, it's not really made for ordinary humans. Even the much lauded Google Reader is hard to use. Period. Again: hard to use. Facebook: easy to use. Easy to post, easy to consume. So if you want to get your message about your cat's tenth birthday out to the small group of readers who want to know, they it's a viable way to go.
In return for all that effort, Facebook/MySpace/etc gives them room to post every inane thing that pops into their heads, play scrabble, rate friends likes and dislikes and a million other things that takes up bandwidth and doesn't increase profits. This is barter. The Social Networks are betting that the things they can monetize will outweigh the things that cost them. Users are betting that the fun and potential fame is worth giving up some privacy. We make the same bet when we review something on amazon, rate something on Netflix or blog on Blogger. Everyone is betting that they are getting more than they are giving, or at least it's a wash. When it gets uneven, the users leave or the company goes under.
If you have been following the latest hubbub about Facebook, you know that the scales have been tipped toward corporate yet again as Facebook tries to turn cat fanaticism into financial strategy. Moveon.org, a political organization is trying to mobilize the typically indifferent-to-exhibitionist audience to action, and many of the geekarati are telling them to get back ending the war and leave us alone.
Personally I'm always in the odd place of being in favor of two typically opposing systems: I'm for more government regulation to check corporate greed, and yet I trust our free market to sort most things out without intervention. Typically the market moves faster than government, and so government mostly can ignore matters or pass legislation after the fact (for those who cannot learn form history). But not always. My biggest fear with the free market system is irretrievable damage will be done in the name of profits before it can self-correct, such in the case of global warming. There really are things you can't undo.
The SN privacy question falls on the edge of that question. Once your information is out there, it can't be gotten back. We all know this first hand because of spam. You can't un-enter your email into the wrong form, and once you've made a bad decision that address will forever be full of printer ink and penis enhancement offers.
So what will come first, bottom-line effects from the recent backlash or legislation protecting privacy?
Or maybe I should ask, will they come at all?
Parc Forum is candy for those of us who own our own schedule, and this latest series is no exception: it's all social media all the time. Ross Mayfeild was the inagural awesome speaker. Garrett Camp is not par, but he's doing a solid job of telling a case study of learnings from StumbleUpon.
He notes that interface design and interaction design is important. I wish people would stop saying this as if it was a surprise. Ah well. And apparently he recently read "Don't make me Think" so thanks, Steve.
popular urls get a lot of corrections, less popular not. suggestion to cross with deli.ciou.us, they aren't doing that now
And he ends 20 minutes early. and I was 15 minutes late... dang, it was just starting to get good!
Recently Bokardo.com noted and annotated the new Google best practices. I followed his link and found a strange engineer-ese document full of treasures. I started reading it, then started commenting on it, then life intervened and here we are, a month later but hey... it's not like this stuff has changed that much.
Here are my thoughts on the best practices.
Josh: "my interpretation: provide value within 30 seconds"
Tanya Rabourn wisely said, in an answer to my LinkedIn Question about Social Design Challenges
"Designing for when there is "no there there." The users supply the content. However, the site needs to make sense and be compelling to those initial users who arrive when things are a bit sparse (otherwise you have no chance of it growing of course). In addition, a new user who joins the site (at any stage of that site's growth) should be able to understand how it works and see the site's value. They have to be motivated to do that initial work to become a part of the site before they've made a number of connections (or contributed content). Frequently those two types of experiences are overlooked in favor of imagining every user experience being that of a long-time user on a mature site. But if those initial experiences aren't pleasant, the site won't ever reach that stage."
Google is wise in noting this is true of *all* applications, not just social ones. But it is particularly problematic, as Tanya points out, for applications are shaped by the users. It's a chicken-egg problem, and there are multiple approaches to solving it. Joshua stands by his general principal of provide value *without* the network as well as with; i.e. Deli.cio.us is a bookmark tool without the network, a discovery tool with it. Another approach is "seeding" or inviting a small group of highly productive individuals to use for pay or love (or a mix of both.)
Google recommends
With Social Applications, you should first ask yourself first "what are the use cases" and "what is my context"? This tells you where to put the effort in your design.
I think: This is pretty reasonable (please read the entire paragraph on the Open Social page). The last item caught my eye, though. If you use facebook, you are well aware how collections are very much representations of who you are. For better or worse, in these modern times we are our stuff. Have you reconsidered showing your Netflix queue publicly, because you don't want to be defined by your need to see Alien vs. Predator or The Pillow Book? Then you know what I mean.*
Allowing people to display their loyalty via Band Badges, Bumper Stickers and color/font changes is obvious, but people represent themselves in who they select as a top friend (I don't know Don Norman that well, but I may want him front and center as part of my professional persona) and what book they'll admit to having read (please don't out me for finally reading The Long Halloween!.) Not only should you allow self-expression via lists, you have to realize lists are primarily self-expression and make them editable. No one wants too much truth in their profile.
Annotation: Reading Facebook's Privacy Default I came across this
When Blockbuster gives you the popup asking if you want to let your Facebook friends know about your rental, if you do not respond in fifteen seconds, the popup goes away ... and a "yes" is sent to Facebook. Wow, is that not what should happen! Not responding far more likely indicates confusion or dismissal-through-inaction than someone thinking "I'll save myself the click."
This is particularly mortifying because that movie will be on your profile, representing you. You might not even want to admit you rent at Blockbuster, pretending publicly you only go to the little indie rental shop across town. The price of confusion should not be shame.
Josh: Let people personalize their widgets
Yeah, that too. Who wants an ugly widget on their profile?
There are two kinds of updates you want to see: them and me. It's obvious that you want to know what's going on with your contacts. What's less obvious you want want to know what's happening to you. Not only who wrote on my wall but also who's looking at my profile? We all have egos, and stroking those egos keeps you coming back.
In a funny way, it's a bit like parenthood. Sure you have the diapers and the expense and they daily horror that you are going to ruin someone's life, but you also have the love, buckets and buckets of love too big for your body to hold, from the moment they smile at you in the morning to the moment they collapse on you at night. Lots of things in life are scary and hard. But do you want to stop living?
I think: After the previous diatribe, you know I believe in allowing communication in order to build community. And while it's quite right to recognize that your social network could use some slicing and dicing in order to be managable, let's be courageous enough to recognize the communities provide social bonds and emotional treats that encourage return visits. Again, it's about love folks. Nothing is as sticky as love. Enable love.
And as Josh has so frequently and wisely pointed out, the reverse can be said: make sure your mapping includes truly useful things to do with those maps, or why would anyone bother? I played with Dopplr briefly, and while it is nice to know who's visiting my town I get the same effect with way less overhead from twitter. Adding people to a social network is not only work for me, but I also have the guilt of imposing myself on my freinds. You had better make it worth it. (I'm looking at you, Spock.) Otherwise make it an optional aspect of the tool, the way Slideshare has, and focus on the functionality.
As a final word, it's hard to see what's truly meaningful to people when you are sitting around with a whiteboard. You can't understand people with best practices. Getting out and doing some old fashioned ethnography, going to visit people in their homes and offices, taking the time to get under people's skin, is one way to really understand what people want from social applications.
Or you could just wing it, use this list, and hope to get lucky.
* I haven't even been able to figure out if The Pillow Book is porn or art. All I know is Ewan McGregor is a very lucky man.
Okay, more asking questions on LinkedIn time. This time it's
"Has blogging affected your professional life, and how?Has blogging brought you notoriety, gotten you clients, respectability, a job? Love to hear if all this writing is helping (or hurting) folks. "
I only posted it two hours ago, and I'm already getting terrific answers. For example, Michael Angeles said
Excluding my first job out of grad school, every job that I've taken, including my current full time job, has been because of blogging. I can't say enough about how writing a blog is one of the best things you can do for your career. I get way more in return than I put into blogging.
I'll be writing up a summary once it's closed...
And getting my feet under me. I'll resume my irregularly scheduled updates shortly...
