aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South
Saturday, May 03, 2008
Study: Most Facebook apps are silly, pointless
I defend Facebook, I think Facebook is all well and good, but Facebook is not for me. Why should it be? I’m a 53 year-old man!
But when I read that most Facebook apps are silly and pointless I have to wonder if Robert X. Cringely wasn’t right when he said that he was beginning to think that Internet social networking is another CB radio....
...destined to crash and burn.
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Scrabulous update
In the ongoing saga of Scrabulous, the unauthorized online version of Scrabble that has found many fans on Facebook but has upset Mattel and Hasbro (who own the rights to Scrabble), it appears that RealNetworks and Mattel have finally put out an official version of Scrabble for Facebook—but the problem is that it’s terrible. As the NY Times reports, “Facebook Scrabble takes a long time to load, does not always quickly update to show recent moves, and the words the game will accept do not reflect standard Scrabble dictionaries, or even the English language.” While it’s nice to see that Scrabulous still hasn’t been forced offline, it seems odd that the authorized version is so terrible. It still probably would have made the most sense to just do a deal with the brothers who created Scrabulous (and there are still rumors that a deal has been discussed, but without a decent resolution), but if that doesn’t work, the way to compete is with a better product. Putting out a product that’s not very good isn’t likely to win over many fans.
More from the NYTimes, Read/WriteWeb, and GigaOM.
Monday, April 07, 2008
Prison Talk
I live in a town with six state prisons. Recently I joined the advisory board of one of them, the YDC (Youth Development Center). Their Internet access is strictly limited and, I learned, the large majority of inmates receive no visitors.
For the families and friends of those who do receive visitors, Prison Talk is a community website that sounds like it may be an invaluable resource.
Yesterday’s NYTimes Magazine:
Prison Talk, a big board with nearly 150,000 members and 2,500 regular readers a day ...caters to what turns out to be an underserved consumer niche: family and friends of the incarcerated. Prison inmates, whose Internet access is extremely limited, also turn up periodically, usually seeking pen pals through a third party. The site, which costs nothing to join, was founded seven years ago and has drawn around 3.5 million messages, including poetry, small talk, business deals, memoirs, sermons, laments, photo albums and ideological screeds. Like the sprawling American prison system itself, the board has come to constitute a robust social reality - albeit one whose contents can’t be searched with Google or other engines, since Prison Talk is closed to the unregistered.
The board’s activity is propelled by the frustration and enterprise of lonelyhearts who crave contact while fighting boredom and despair. The postings, including those from former inmates, dramatize the widespread effects of imprisonment as vividly as any book since the 2000 exposé “Newjack,” Ted Conover’s chronicle of his year working as a corrections officer in Sing Sing, the maximum-security state prison in New York. And even Conover couldn’t offer the sheer volume of fine-grain logistical detail and jaw-dropping incongruities that surface on Prison Talk: topics on the site include marrying someone in prison; raising children whose parents are imprisoned; loving lifers; curing dry winter skin; preparing for executions; and having fun (jokey guards, nightly dance-offs) behind bars.
The posts themselves are by turns rueful, salacious, puzzled and pleading.... Prison Talk promises support without judgment, and in accordance with the site’s bylaws, uncooperative members are banned. (The site also counsels members to be circumspect with information that might be used against inmates or jeopardize their appeals.)
David Frisk, an aerial photographer and home-automation expert, started Prison Talk in 2001 to helped convicts’ loved ones navigate the prison system. Frisk hatched his idea in a jail cell: he served time in the early ‘90s in a medium-security federal prison for pawning a rifle while on probation for auto theft. Like anyone working online, he has since developed theories about revenue streams. Small but constant banner ads, targeted for his audience, run along the top of Prison Talk.... Frisk, who is known on the site by his screen name, Fed-X, has been accused by detractors of exploiting a vulnerable and largely female membership by encouraging dependence; soliciting contributions as if the site were a charitable cause and not an ad-sponsored business; and promoting dodgy ventures like a print magazine that some subscribers say they never received…
Most Prison Talk members, however, seem fiercely loyal to him, and say they feel deeply beholden to Prison Talk itself. Many of them virtually live on the site, concluding their posts with tickers - countdown widgets, like the ones used on pregnancy and weight-loss boards - showing how much time is left in their chosen inmate’s sentence....
A small band of board activists, led in part by a Prison Talk member named Judy Wickliff, has recently used the site to plan a latter-day Boston Tea Party to protest the disenfranchisement of American prisoners. “No incarceration without representation” is their slogan. In July they plan to bombard legislators with mailed tea bags and a list of proposed reforms to the criminal-justice system. It could be said that Prison Talk is steadily documenting and even galvanizing a subculture, if it weren’t for the February report from the Pew Center on the States that one in 99 people in America is now in prison. Let’s call it a culture, then.
Via Sentencing Law and Policy.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
10% of FBook Folks Are Xooglers
The NYTimes says Google’s status as the coolest place to work may be waning, Facebook is now the place to work.
Justin Smith at Inside Facebook did some digging:
Since there’s been a lot of press lately about Googlers jumping ship for Facebook, I thought I’d search Facebook’s network to see how many folks at the company used to work at Google. As it turns out, over 40, or almost 10% - and mostly engineering or product people.
He’s compiled a list
Tuesday, March 11, 2008
The idiocy of the mob
To all those claiming that Sarah Lacy should have been able to tune-in to the chatter and hear the feedback in the room, I’d encourage you to get real and remember just exactly what world we’re living in:
In The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet (Yale University Press, 2007), [Daniel J. Solove, of George Washington University] relates the sad story of the “Star Wars Kid.” In November 2002, an awkward and pudgy Canadian teenager used a school camera to record himself acting like a character from Star Wars, wielding a golf-ball retriever as a light saber. Some months later, some students at his school discovered the recording, and one posted it on an open file-sharing network. Within days the image of a geeky teenager playing Star Wars became the hit of the Internet.
Millions of people downloaded the video. Soon many of them used their computers to enhance it, adding costumes, special effects, even opponents for the young man to slay. Hundreds of versions still haunt the Web. Many Web sites posted nasty comments about the teenager’s weight and appearance. Soon his name and high school became public knowledge. By the time YouTube debuted in 2005, the Star Wars Kid was a miserable and unwilling star of what media activists and analysts like to call “user-generated culture.” The real-world harassment drove the kid’s family to move to a new town. He had to quit school. The very nature of software, computers, the Internet, and Google made it impossible for the young man to erase the record of one afternoon of harmless fantasy. But the technology was not at fault, Solove reminds us. It was our willingness to shame others and our ease at appealing to free-speech principles that justified such alarming behavior.
No one made any money from that or the other events that Solove offers in his new book. The problem of humiliation occurs outside the familiar political or commercial spheres. In another notable case, Solove describes the “dog-poop girl,” a young woman in South Korea who refused to pick up after her dog when riding the subway. Justifiably berated by those who shared the car with her and her dog, the woman found her life turned upside down after being publicly and globally shamed by one of those passengers, who posted photos of the incident on the Web. Solove asserts that while the woman certainly deserved criticism, and even traditional measures of local shaming, to enforce the reasonable norm of cleaning up after one’s dog, the level of vitriol and harassment that she suffered was unreasonable and disproportionate to the crime.
RELATED: In a recent ON THE MEDIA interview about his new book Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky said, “The things we’re unleashing into society by having this kind of new group capability are not entirely positive.”
SXSW Zuckerberg keynote takeaway
The first thing I have to say is I come away liking Zuckerberg more than I have since all of the last year’s Facebook stumbles. The second thing I note is the irony that it was a woman, Kara Swisher, who has led the charge against the “Toddler CEO” and it is a woman, Business Week’s Sarah Lacy, that fumbled the interview that humanized him for me again.
The irony is that Swisher first came to my attention with her book, aol.com, about Steve Case. And Lacy’s now writing a book on Zuckerberg. So I was pleased to see Swisher come to Lacy’s defense today:
I could not agree more with both Michael Arrington of TechCrunch and Valleywag’s Owen Thomas, an unlikely and motley trio we three, when I say: Leave Sarah Lacy alone.
MyBlogLog founder Eric Marcoullier told Wired.com that he thought sexism might have played a role in the SXSW audience reaction. I have to say that I agree. I immediately remembered a very ugly bit of misogyny last year around Kathy Sierra.
If you think my comparison is overwrought, I’d grant you that it may be; but is it really any more so than the reaction to Sarah’s interview?
I am known to admire Jeff Jarvis. It’s all well and good for him to sit there and say of Sarah’s interview that, “It wasn’t tough. It was a privilege and she was blowing it.”
Well, you know what? It is a privilege and it is tough.
It strikes me that that’s why big deal people are jumping out of buildings and that criticism is fair and legitimate but she deserves some of the empathy that Jarvis has for the “shy and nervous” Zuckerberg and the hostile audience.
Zuckerberg’s a smart 23 year-old but he has no business being valued at 15 billion bucks and I question the system that’s put him there. The whole self-important jargon-filled show that seriously thinks they’re going to bring peace to the Middle East by enabling people to communicate and connect on Facebook echoes the last bubble if you ask me.
Here’s the keynote…
Friday, March 07, 2008
Who remembers CB? Will we remember Facebook?
Do you remember Citizens’ Band radio? Though established by the Federal Communications Commission in the 1950s, CB radio didn’t become an overnight sensation until the 1970s when Moore’s Law brought down the cost of radios to where it was economically viable to buy them solely for the purpose of breaking speed-limit laws. President Nixon, who liked to wear a blue suit and keep a cozy fire burning in his White House hearth year round no matter what the outside temperature or impact on his (our) air conditioning bill, had decided we all should drive 55 miles per hour or less to save fuel following the energy crisis of 1973. So, being true Americans, which is to say cranky and prone to complain, we en masse set out to break this new law using as our primary tool CB radio technology to warn us where Smokey was or had recently been or whether there was an eye in the sky. Criminals bound by a criminal code, we flaunted CB license restrictions (you were supposed to use your Federally assigned call sign from that license you were also supposed to have but never got) and operated under handles like “Thunderchicken” and “Boot-licker.” I was “asciiboy.” CB radio sales went from zero to tens of millions of units in under two years—the highest rate of technology adoption ever seen in the U.S. before or since. Soon there was CB lore and a CB culture. CB was everywhere. When not breaking the law with it we were using CB as a huge social network to find the cheapest gas, the best hamburger or even a date for the prom. And then, quick as it started, CB was gone, worn to the bone from overuse and abuse and left to the truckers as it should have been all along. What killed CB radio was that moment when its annoyance factor exceeded its utility—a utility already driven down by low traffic conviction rates and the eventual understanding that if everyone were a speeder then most cops wouldn’t stop anyone.
I am beginning to think that Internet social networking is another CB radio, destined to crash and burn.
Social networking has a lot of problems as both a business and a cultural phenomenon. To start with there is generally no true business model. This can vary a bit from application to application but most are vying simply for eyeballs and hoping for Google ads to pay the bills until Time Warner or News Corp make them an acquisition offer they can’t refuse. That might be okay for Facebook or MySpace and maybe Linked-In, but there are more than 350 general-purpose social networks out there and I will guarantee you that no more than 5 percent of those will be still operating two years from today. [READ ON]
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Social Networks, predators, & neglecting the real problem
Techdirt reports on yet another study demonstrating that social networks aren’t breeding grounds for sexual predators:
Over the past few years there has been a huge number of grandstanding politicians claiming that social networks like Facebook and MySpace were breeding grounds for online predators, who were trying to entice children. They’ve been pushing for new laws, basically so they can get into the papers along with some quip about how they are out there protecting “the children.” Of course, it turns out that the entire premise is faulty. A few years back we pointed to a study that showed the problem was entirely exaggerated. Very few kids were approached by predators and most who were could easily brush it off, so long as they had been educated about the risks. Now there’s a new study out going even deeper in noting that sexual predators are unlikely to pretend to be teenagers using social networks, but rather are very upfront about who they are and what they want. In most cases, the victims knew that they were chatting with an older person, and believed that they were in a legitimate relationship, rather than being tricked. Once again, this suggests that all the hype and new laws being proposed to deal with the “problem” of predators on social networks are misplaced. The focus should be on basic education. Teach kids to have some “internet smarts” and they’re probably going to be just fine.
While I agree with the education conclusion, what I find tragic is the truth that most of the victims knew that they were chatting with an older person.
The real crisis is these kids need adults to engage, appropriately, with them on the topic of sex. Now that I have a young person living in my household (regular readers will recall that my nephew lives with us) I know just exactly how overwhelming the challenge of that can be.
So if you care at all about the facts… if you have kids—or just honestly care about them—and want to make a difference and help address these issues, here are some important resources:
A danah boyd post from a May 2007 panel of social scientists, Just The Facts About Online Youth Victimization.
Stephanie Booth reacts to MySpace removing the profiles of 29,000 convicted sex offenders: Online Predator Paranoia.
Monday, February 11, 2008
Facebook phones
Not yet. But soon. In the meantime, these plugins make your phone Facebook aware:
CityWare, was launched last summer. If you get close enough to another person who is also running the plugin on their phone, you are provided with a link to their profile the next time you login to Facebook. It was developed as part of a research project also called CityWare, partly funded by HP, Nokia and Vodafone.
Kostakos is working on more plugins, one of which really brings social networking and phones together.
Called Little Bird, it gets your phone to update you with information from your friends’ profiles whenever you meet them. “When you walk into a room, a message on your phone tells you what events your friends in the room are attending in the near future,” explains Kostakos.
Via Andrew Sullivan, “Online cruising just took a quantum leap forward.”
On deleting your Facebook profile
It’s easier than you might think. An email statement from Brandee Barker at Facebook in response to my post last night reacting to the piece in the NYTimes:
“There are two different ways to remove your information from Facebook. The first is to deactivate an account. Once a user deactivates the account, his or her profile becomes inaccessible on the main Facebook service, and the data is kept by Facebook only to allow easy reactivation. The second option is to delete the profile altogether. When a user deletes his or her profile, personal information—such as name and all email addresses associated with the account—is deleted from Facebook servers. If a user decides to join Facebook again, he or she would need to create a new profile. We are working to better explain the simple deactivation process, and to ease the deletion process for those who want their personal information removed from our servers. Additional information can be found on the Facebook help page at http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=5”
Next thing you know we’ll learn that Mark Zuckerberg makes a habit of going to restaurants with his girlfriend.
Sunday, February 10, 2008
Facebook: breaking the lifetime contract
The NYTimes has an article tomorrow noting that “users have discovered that it is nearly impossible to remove themselves entirely from Facebook, setting off a fresh round of concern over the popular social network’s use of personal data.” For the occasion, I repost quitting Facebook the evil way.
You can deactivate a Facebook account, but not delete it.
Free Infidel walks us through quitting Facebook the evil way:
Many of us, who value our privacy, think this is disgraceful and arrogant. Facebook seems to think it owns us. But why worry? Just make sure all the information they have about you is false. [...]
First, a little more about this business of deactivating an account. If you choose this option, Facebook tells you that you can reactivate at any time simply by logging back in. There is no simple option to have them erase all your details from their databases permanently. Steven Mansour, in his post 2504 Steps to closing your Facebook account, did seem to get them to do this, though it took a lot of effort and meant emailing Facebook directly. But note how Facebook’s final message simply said “We have processed your request” without actually saying - unambiguously and in writing - that the account and all the information that once resided in it had been fully erased. And how would you check?
And so he says we should spend about six months gradually changing our links, our friends, our politics, and our profile. We should also install apps we find annoying and write nonsense on our walls. Finally, change our name:
This is a little trickier as Facebook insists on ‘verifying’ the change. Or so it says. I requested a change of name to something that is, frankly, rather unlikely. A couple of days later, the change was made with no further enquiry from Facebook. So far, only one of my friends has noticed that I’ve changed my name and moved to another continent. That said, searching Facebook for my real name still turns up my profile, albeit with the new name. So the account is obviously associated with both names.
Even after all that, your original information may not be gone forever. “Even though you’ve replaced it, it may be somewhere in Facebook’s databases.”
But what if they catch you? Jack, in comments:
I did exactly what you suggested here in September. I tried filling my Facebook account with meaningless and false data, because I knew there was no way to delete the account.
Sadly (and evil) here is what Facebook did. They “deactivated"Â� my account, because they said that I added people who I did not really know.
I wrote to them to ask them to please reactivate the account, but they said no. My reply after that never got another response from them. [...]
Long story short… all my personal real data is still in Facebook… and they refuse to erase or delete it.
And Steve:
“shouldn’t you also be tainting your Yahoo, Myspace, Orkut, Flickr, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Upcoming, Dopplr, Blogger, etc etc accounts as well?”
And Arik comes closest to what would be my chosen Facebook solution:
You want a facebook account. You want some true but random noise around you. You don’t want to disappear or be fake, because everyone else has that same amount of noise about them. Since anonymity is no longer an option, you want to be part of the noise and be as similar to others as you can, never sticking out.
LATER: Facebook explains it’s easier than you think.
Wednesday, December 19, 2007
Content creation by teens grows: girls lead
A new Pew report finds:
Content creation by teenagers continues to grow, with 64% of online teenagers ages 12 to 17 engaging in at least one type of content creation, up from 57% of online teens in 2004.
Girls continue to dominate most elements of content creation. Some 35% of all teen girls blog, compared with 20% of online boys, and 54% of wired girls post photos online compared with 40% of online boys. Boys, however, do dominate one area - posting of video content online. Online teen boys are nearly twice as likely as online girls (19% vs. 10%) to have posted a video online somewhere where someone else could see it. [...]
There is a subset of teens who are super-communicators—teens who have a host of technology options for dealing with family and friends, including traditional landline phones, cell phones, texting, social network sites, instant messaging, and email. They represent about 28% of the entire teen population and they are more likely to be older girls.
Saturday, December 15, 2007
Facebook Questioning: Coming Out the Facebook way
A potential suitor I had scoped out for my nephew changed his “interested in” status on Facebook today. Having my nephew living here has given me some insight into how young people come out these days in this rural southern college town… They change their “interested in” status on Facebook!
Simple as that sounds, right now my nephew has declared his “interested in men” status. And also that he’s “engaged to” a female friend.
There’s plenty of room for mystery in these declarations. They change with a frequency that baffles people of my generation.
My nephew has no clue about the Beacon debacle.
Beacon, you will recall, is the ad program that sends word of your web purchases from sites like Fandango and Overstock.com to be listed in your Facebook news feed.
The company’s young billionaire-to-be CIO, Mark Zuckerberg, has bungled it so badly that some have seriously called into question the future of the company.
That and the story on the lawsuit brought by former Harvard classmate associates questioning the provenance of Facebook - which has elicited further fumbling on Zuckerberg’s behalf - have convinced me that those questions are legitimate.
Earlier this week AdAge’s Simon Dumenco had a fun column suggesting other apps Facebook users will “love” one day. Here’s the first one:
FACEBOOK QUESTIONING
Are you a closeted homosexual in a small Southern town? Facebook Questioning will automatically suggest to those friends and colleagues who are able to “read between the lines” that maybe you’re “questioning” your sexuality. It does this by comparing Beacon data with thresholds of what’s considered “normal” heterosexual behavior by marketers. “The purchase by an unmarried, middle-aged male of more than two movie-musical soundtracks or DVDs per quarter doesn’t necessarily mean that he’s gay,” says a Facebook veep. “But it will raise a rainbow-colored flag within our algorithm and might even help certain in-denial Facebook users with their own voyage of self-discovery. After a while, we believe that our users will fall in love with Facebook Questioning.”
So my nephew’s been reluctant to pursue that nice young man I’ve been encouraging him to get to know better 
because he had listed his status as “interested in women.”
Well this morning, my nephew tells me, he changed his “interested in” status from women to men. And listed that he’s “engaged to” a well-known openly gay local pleasure-seeker.
My nephew’s considering his next Facebook move. A poke? Some writing on the wall? Give a virtual gift? Ahh, youth…
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
danah boyd on Beacon
She sees the opt-our requirement of Facebook’s new ad approach as a dangerous precedent:
For all of the repentance by Facebook, what really bugs me is that this is the third time that Facebook has violated people’s sense of privacy in a problematic way. I documented the first incident - the introduction of the News Feeds - in an essay called “Facebook’s Privacy Trainwreck.” In this incident, there were no privacy adjustments until public outcry. The second incident went primarily unnoticed. Back in September, Facebook quietly began making public search listings available to search engines. This means that users’ primary photos are cached alongside their name and networks on Google. Once again, it was an opt-out structure, although finding the opt-out is tricky. Under privacy settings, under search, there is a question of “Which Facebook users can find me in search?” If you choose “everyone,” that includes search engines, not just Facebook users. The third incident is Beacon.
In each incident, Facebook pushed the boundaries of privacy a bit further and, when public outcry took place, retreated just a wee bit to make people feel more comfortable. In other words, this is “slippery slope” software development. Given what I’ve learned from interviewing teens and college students over the years, they have *no* idea that these changes are taking place (until an incident occurs). Most don’t even realize that adding the geographic network makes them visible to thousands if not millions. They don’t know how to navigate the privacy settings and they don’t understand the implications. In other words, defaults are EVERYTHING.
Like most companies, Facebook probably chose the “opt-out” path instead of the “opt-in” path because they knew that most users would not opt in. Even if they thought the feature was purrrfect, most wouldn’t opt-in because they would never know of the feature. Who reads the fine print of a website notice? This is exactly why opt-out approaches are dangerous. People don’t know what they’ve by default opted-in to. They trust companies and once they trust those companies, they are at their mercy.
SEE ALSO: Quitting Facebook: the evil way, Facebook: from media darling to devil and Zuckerberg/Facebook chronicles (continued).
Monday, December 10, 2007
Quitting Facebook: the evil way
Apparently you can deactivate a Facebook account, but not delete it. Free Infidel:
Many of us, who value our privacy, think this is disgraceful and arrogant. Facebook seems to think it owns us. But why worry? Just make sure all the information they have about you is false. [...]
First, a little more about this business of deactivating an account. If you choose this option, Facebook tells you that you can reactivate at any time simply by logging back in. There is no simple option to have them erase all your details from their databases permanently. Steven Mansour, in his post 2504 Steps to closing your Facebook account, did seem to get them to do this, though it took a lot of effort and meant emailing Facebook directly. But note how Facebook’s final message simply said “We have processed your request” without actually saying - unambiguously and in writing - that the account and all the information that once resided in it had been fully erased. And how would you check?
And so he says we should spend about six months gradually changing our links, our friends, our politics, and our profile. We should also install apps we find annoying and write nonsense on our walls. Finally, change our name:
This is a little trickier as Facebook insists on ‘verifying’ the change. Or so it says. I requested a change of name to something that is, frankly, rather unlikely. A couple of days later, the change was made with no further enquiry from Facebook. So far, only one of my friends has noticed that I’ve changed my name and moved to another continent. That said, searching Facebook for my real name still turns up my profile, albeit with the new name. So the account is obviously associated with both names.
Even after all that, your original information may not be gone forever. “Even though you’ve replaced it, it may be somewhere in Facebook’s databases.”
But what if they catch you? Jack, in comments:
I did exactly what you suggested here in September. I tried filling my Facebook account with meaningless and false data, because I knew there was no way to delete the account.
Sadly (and evil) here is what Facebook did. They “deactivated” my account, because they said that I added people who I did not really know.
I wrote to them to ask them to please reactivate the account, but they said no. My reply after that never got another response from them. [...]
Long story short… all my personal real data is still in Facebook… and they refuse to erase or delete it.
And Steve:
“shouldn’t you also be tainting your Yahoo, Myspace, Orkut, Flickr, Twitter, Pownce, Jaiku, Upcoming, Dopplr, Blogger, etc etc accounts as well?”
And Arik comes closest to what would be my chosen Facebook solution:
You want a facebook account. You want some true but random noise around you. You don’t want to disappear or be fake, because everyone else has that same amount of noise about them. Since anonymity is no longer an option, you want to be part of the noise and be as similar to others as you can, never sticking out.
Friday, December 07, 2007
See Spot Blog*
Started as simple photo-sharing site in 2004, Dogster is now a popular online meeting place for pet owners. From the Fashion & Style section of yesterday’s NYTimes:
Think of Dogster as Facebook for canines. There, my dogs (along with 346,639 other four-legged members, as of last week) had their own profile pages that listed their likes and dislikes, personal mottoes — Otto’s is “Are you going to finish that?” — and best tricks (“catching seedless grapes in mid-air").
So what if my dogs could barely type, much less upload photos of themselves wearing Santa hats?
We live in an era where there is a social network to cater to any niche group you can think of, including infants whose parents create Facebook profiles for them and then expect the godparents to pretend to correspond with the babies. Why shouldn’t pets arrange play dates online or blog about their health issues?
* I’m wondering how many of you will understand what the wordplay in the title of this post is about. For those who don’t… when I was a small child the standard grade school reading texts were the (now classic) Dick and Jane books.
The main characters in these books were the children Dick and Jane. Prominently featured was their dog Spot in paragraphs I remember like so:
See Spot.
See Spot walk.
See spot run…
Such paragraphs have been parodied by the Simpsons and can now found on t-shirts like this:
C:/DOS C:/DOS/RUN RUN/DOS/RUN
Apparently the books were effective. And still are.
Thursday, December 06, 2007
Zuckerberg/Facebook chronicles (continued)
Zuckerberg posted a mea culpa yesterday; Kara helpfully translates it for us:
I would surely like to zombie-bite those annoying reporters, the whiny privacy advocates and those cut-and-run advertisers, who obviously don’t understand my $15 billion worth of genius. I wonder if I could find a way to blame the Winklevosses.
Fred thinks the Zuckerberg spanking is “ridiculous and smacks of jealousy...”
His approach to opt-in v opt-out is appealing and he forgives Facebook’s missteps on the grounds that they’re dealing with a very hard problem. But I wonder, isn’t this slip-up just like the newsfeeds blunder?
It seems they don’t learn from them and these missteps are all of a kind. They let the critics shape the perception of the feature/function when what they should do is get out their with their users and shape that perception themselves. They either underestimate or just don’t trust their users to get it.
Jay Meattle says the RIP Facebook prognostications are premature. Unique visitors jumped 20% in November. Still, he concludes:
It’s generally a good idea to put users first, then investors. I hope the good people at Facebook HQ wake up quickly.
Well, yes.
To that end, no doubt, Facebook now forwards messages. Michael Arrington says, Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.
Before tonight, Facebook just sent an email saying that a new message was received, forcing me to click on the message and log into Facebook before I could actually read it.
Tonight Facebook changed that policy. Suddenly, Facebook messages are actually forwarded to my outside email address, letting me read it and decide if it’s important enough to click on to Facebook and respond.
This is great. It’s frickin wonderful, even. And Facebook clearly did this even though it reduces page views from people clicking on those messages just to see what they say.
No word yet on whether that changes the Facebook self-destruction Cory Doctorow foresees.
RELATED: The story as told by the NYTimes.
Wednesday, December 05, 2007
Facebook: from media darling to devil
Kara Swisher’s been consistent in her Zuckerberg bashing - “from one of our very first posts, questioning (we think fairly) the unproven business underpinnings of the hot social network, the juvenile nature of its much vaunted third-party widgets, the insanity of its $15 billion valuation, its inane legal fights and the problems with its worrisome ad efforts” - but now, says she, a mob is forming:
The mainstream media and blogosphere, which recently were feting him, have now turned and ire has been growing over Beacon, which seems to be focusing everyone on the inexperience of Zuckerberg and the challenges facing Facebook.
She quotes Josh Quittner’s RIP Facebook?
A lot of people say that Facebook has jumped the shark. That’s flat out wrong. In fact, Facebook is now being devoured by the shark. There’s so much blood in the water, it’s attracting other sharks. And if Facebook’s not careful, one of them is bound to come along and finish it off. I’ve never seen anything like it in the annals of fast-rising tech companies that fail.”
The really weird part of this story is that there’s absolutely nothing wrong with Facebook. It works as well as it ever has, and many of the people who use it (my kids for instance) are unaware of the worsening situation about its privacy-invading Beacon social ads scheme that tracks people’s web-surfing habits even when they’re not on the site. That’s bound to change. The market is fickle, something better is in the wings, and as soon as it arrives, the alienated and angry mob will race to it. Delphi’s errors begat Prodigy and its errors begat AOL, which was crushed by the Web. [...]
What’s surprising here is the speed with which this thing is coming undone — and the ease with which it could have been avoided. What’s harming Facebook - perhaps to a terminal degree - is enormously bad PR.... It could have all been avoided with a smart adult running things. Facebook has no old hands in its corner, no advisers to tell the kids how to behave. Netscape had its Jim Barksdale, Google (GOOG) its Eric Schmidt. This company has no one babysitting it. And watching it now is like watching an unattended child play with a pack of matches in a wooden house.
Facebook has turned all the people who rooted for it into a lynch mob. In the space of a month, it’s gone from media darling to devil. The most interesting thing about Facebook right now is who will replace it.
Robert Scoble chimes in:
This story is NOT going away Even if this particular story goes away, there’s a bad taste in our mouths because Facebook tried to do something that clearly wasn’t for the users. When David Weinberger, one of the authors of the Cluetrain Manifesto, says that you have a real PR problem. [...]
ANYTHING would be better than the way that Facebook is handling this.
This is what happens when a startup gets a controlling PR belief system. Steve Jobs can pull that off. Not many companies can.
Facebook’s PR machinery is hiding its head in the sand and hoping this story goes away.
Hint: it’s not.
The other day in a conversation with a group of tech-savvy students we imagined where the next Google might come from. I bet you can guess what we’ll be imagining today.
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Faculty, friending and Facebook
I’m not faculty so my relationship to students is slightly different; but only slightly. From The Chronicle:
The old guy in the corner at a college party can come off as creepy. The same goes for a faculty member on Facebook, the online hangout first populated by students.
“Facebook was created as a place for students, not for professors,” says Steve Moskowitz, a sophomore at the State University of New York College at Oneonta. Students should be able to express themselves freely there, he says, without worrying what some professor will think.
One way to do that is by joining groups. Their names, often clever, mark identities like bumper stickers. Mr. Moskowitz formed the group “Gee, I don’t think I want my professors on Facebook anymore.” Its icon is a lecturer crossed out with a big red X.
But like it or not, professors are logging on. The number of Facebook users is doubling every six months, and adults, including professors, are the fastest-growing group among them. Some want to track down students who no longer respond to e-mail. Many are curious to see for themselves the addictive gabfest. As they sign on, they are negotiating the famously fraught teacher-student relationship in new ways.
This has been my practice:
Most faculty members on Facebook keep their profiles professional - nothing racier than would be posted, say, on an office door. The consensus on friending seems to be: Accept students’ requests but don’t initiate any.
That’s one of the guidelines for “Faculty Ethics on Facebook,” a group started by Mark A. Clague, an assistant professor of musicology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “Since there’s an uneven power dynamic, giving the power to the students to control the relationship” is good policy, he says.
And this:
For all its pitfalls, Facebook can prompt meaningful exchanges. Some professors look up students who e-mail them with questions or are scheduled to come to office hours. What the professors learn, they say, makes them better advisers. Comments that students have posted - concern over a bad class presentation, for example - can provoke a thoughtful conversation. One professor knew to go easy on a student when he saw his status change from “in a relationship” to “single.”
The company lost me when it opened up to anyone. Questions about Zuckerberg and his recent exploits turn me off further. You have to wonder how long the Facebook fad will last.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
Facebook has the social graces of a hyperactive 6-year-old
Facebook’s “platform" strategy has sparked much online debate and controversy. No one wants to see a return to the miserable days of walled gardens, when you couldn’t send a message to an AOL subscriber unless you, too, were a subscriber, and when the only services that made it were the ones that AOL management approved. Those of us on the “real” Internet regarded AOL with a species of superstitious dread, a hive of clueless noobs waiting to swamp our beloved Usenet with dumb flamewars (we fiercely guarded our erudite flamewars as being of a palpably superior grade), the wellspring of an endless geyser of free floppy disks and CDs, the kind of place where the clueless management were willing and able to—for example—alienate every Vietnamese speaker on Earth by banning the use of the word “Phuc” (a Vietnamese name) because naughty people might use it to evade the chatroom censors’ blocks on the f-bomb.
Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: “So-and-so has sent you a message.” Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn’t telling—you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren’t helpful messages, they’re eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote “Hi again!” on your “wall.” Like other “social” apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, “I know something, I know something, I know something, won’t tell you what it is!”
Zuckerberg hoisted on his own pertard?
Remember the very thorough article by Luke O’Brien from 02138, an independent magazine aimed at Harvard alumni, that convinced me along with probably pretty much everyone who 
read it that Mark Zuckerberg is not telling the truth about the creation of Facebook?
There are some ugly stories in there that have the ring of truth to them. They are buttressed, no doubt, by the 02138 posting of a series of court documents in a downloadable format.
On Thursday Facebook unleashed a massive legal fury at 02138 after discovering that those documents included Mark Zuckerberg’s Social Security number, the full name of his girlfriend and the address of his parent’s house in New York.
The documents have been redacted and reposted. “It was a regrettable error and we have fixed it,” said 02138 executive editor Richard Bradley.
Kara Swisher’s been watching and commenting on the irony of Facebook’s privacy concerns, “given that Facebook is embroiled in a controversy over advertising practices it has unveiled recently that some think are violations of Facebook users’ privacy.”
A Massachusetts judge denied the Facebook take-down request. As questions about Zuckerberg mount:
[H]is company is under intense fire for new ad programs it recently introduced, especially one called Beacon, which can track your purchases on some external sites and send the information back to your Facebook profile’s news feed.
While it made some changes in Beacon last week, Facebook has not given users a global opt-out of the controversial marketing system in which the social network is seeking to link behavior and advertising more tightly for supposedly bigger payoffs.
Of course, after more bad publicity, rising user ire and inevitable advertiser pull-out from the program (Coca-Cola has already headed for the hills, according to reports), it’s a good bet that Facebook will be forced into an opt-out for all solution.
But, I am guessing given what as to be simple stubbornness on the part of Zuckerberg, another few rounds of devastating publicity for Facebook.
Let’s just say that this is not a good thing for a company that recently got a $15 billion valuation after $300 million of investments by Microsoft and last week, as first reported by BoomTown here, Asian billionaire Li Ka-shing.
There is little question in my mind-and it has to be going through the minds of all Facebook employees and investors-that all this should be considered a major fumble on the part of 20-something CEO Zuckerberg, whose judgment on how to handle both Beacon and in waging the pointless lawsuit against 01238 seems deeply flawed at best.
More on that key issue for Facebook here in BoomTown next week.
It looks like I’ll be reading more of Kara in the coming days.
RELATED: Henry Blodget parses the NYTimes’ Louise Story who asked Zuckerberg about Beacon and found “a gap between what Facebook said and what it did.”
Blodgett says the Facebook spokesman’s attempts to explain what Zuckerberg really meant only made matters worse. “Time for Facebook to look in the mirror and realize that it’s not a quirky little start-up anymore.”
LATER: Fred Wilson sees it all as Backlash but quotes Umair’s more evil than evil post:
Like I’ve been pointing out - the real strategic problem is that Facebook is a faux revolutionary. There’s little but evil in its DNA. It’s not concerned with making things better, exploding yesterday’s orthodoxies, etc - it’s just concerned with domination, control, subordination and other obsolete massconomy games.
I’m not opposed to behavioral targeting either, Fred, but a global opt-out wouldn’t kill it.
The questions around Zuckerberg are what bug me. If there wasn’t similar scrutiny around Google at this point in its rise (and I’m not so sure there wasn’t) could it be that Sergey Brin and Larry Page had cleaner more appealing “DNA” than Zuckerberg?
Thursday, November 29, 2007
Assumed consent is evil and maybe illegal
If it’s not already it should be:
Facebook applications can be based solely on direct sales. Companies like Overstock.com allow--or should I say encourage--Facebook users to purchase from their website through their application without ever leaving Facebook.com. The problem is that purchase information is being shared. After making a purchase, the Overstock.com app displays a small box in a corner of the browser interface following a transaction. This box alerts users that information will be shared with other Facebook users unless they click on it to negate that information form being shared. The box fades away after a half minute or so, after which consent is assumed, and all your friends can see what you bought.
I’m no lawyer, but that sounds kind of “iffy” to me. And, even if it is a legally binding procedure, it certainly isn’t going to do much for customer satisfaction! There are, evidently, other large e-commerce sites with similar or identical interfaces, and my instinct is that Facebook and these large companies will solve the problem quickly. It makes a good example, however, of social media gone awry. The term “social” does not automatically imply that sharing is the default; part of being social is having the choice to share or not share. Purchasing things, especially during the holidays, often involves gifts, and the surprise of a well-chosen gift to a friend (who may well be in your Facebook world) is as social as it gets.
Hell, I think the non-leaky clickthrough should be illegal. Of course I’m going to hate “assumed consent.”
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Facebook founder’s old friends now foes
Kara Swisher says, “Don’t miss this very thorough article by Luke O’Brien from 02138, an independent magazine aimed at Harvard University alumni, that looks 
very closely in its current issue at the controversy (and lawsuits) related to the founding of this year’s hot Silicon Valley start-up, Facebook.”
From the piece:
Mark Zuckerberg may not yet have the stage presence of, say, Steve Jobs, but give him time; he has plenty of ego and ambition, and he is quickly developing a mythology. A confluence of intelligence, naïveté, and hubris, Zuckerberg can be both brilliant and immature. A self-styled revolutionary who speaks often of “trying to make the world a more open place,” he is sometimes smug and often comes across as brash. He once handed out business cards that read: “I’m CEO … bitch.” [...]
It’s no surprise that Zuckerberg is increasingly compared to Gates, an earlier generation’s high-tech billionaire and Harvard dropout. But geek style and enormous net worth aren’t all that Zuckerberg has in common with Gates: Like the Microsoft co-founder, he has had to weather allegations that his greatest achievement is the result of ripping off the ideas of others. Now, Zuckerberg finds himself ensnared by several lawsuits, none more potentially damaging than that brought by three Harvard grads in the wake of Facebook’s 2004 launch. The recent graduates charged that Zuckerberg stole the idea for Facebook from them, and they have spent years in court trying to prove it.
The media have mostly glossed over ConnectU Inc. v. Facebook Inc., now unfolding in a Boston courthouse. Most articles depict the case as either a cash grab or a blip on Facebook’s march to global domination. But interviews with people familiar with the lawsuit, and a close examination of court records, suggest that, at the least, the case raises troubling questions about the ethics of this new billionaire.
The plaintiffs are three Harvard grads: Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, twin rowers currently training for the Beijing Olympics, and Divya Narendra, who since graduation has worked in finance in New York and Boston. In 2002, the three friends dreamed up an online social network called Harvard Connection (subsequently renamed ConnectU), later asking Zuckerberg to finish programming it. Instead of fulfilling his end of the bargain, the plaintiffs say, Zuckerberg stole their ideas and source code to build his own competing social network. “We got royally screwed,” Narendra says in a deposition.
At this moment 81% of the respondents to their weekly poll say that Zuckerberg is not telling the truth about the creation of Facebook. I’m one of them.
Friday, November 09, 2007
The Wisdom of the Clouds
Social weather? Who ‘da thunk it:
WHAT IS THE IDEA? I COULD BORE YOU WITH BUZZWORDS SUCH AS AGGREGATION, PREDICTION MARKETS, AND THE WISDOM OF THE CROWDS, BUT THE REAL POINT IS TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THESE TYPES OF THINGS IN ORDER TO GIVE YOU SIMPLE AND ACCURATE WEATHER IN A WAY THAT YOU CAN BOTH USE DAY TO DAY, AND ALSO PROVIDE A WAY TO MAKE IT A MORE INTERACTIVE AND INTERESTING EXPERIENCE.
FIRSTLY, THE SITE WILL COMBINE AS MANY POSSIBLE SOURCES OF WEATHER FORECASTS AS POSSIBLE. NO ONE SOURCE IS EVER RIGHT ALL THE TIME, SO THE IDEA IS THAT IF YOU AGGREGATE THEM TOGETHER, YOU DON’T NEED TO CHECK SEVERAL SOURCES AND YOU GET A SAFER, MORE ACCURATE FORECAST. IF YOU ALSO TRACK ALL OF THESE SOURCES AND CHECK THEIR ACCURACY OVER TIME, YOU’LL BE ABLE TO ACTUALLY SEE WHICH ONES ARE MORE ACCURATE THAN THE OTHERS.
SECONDLY, YOU CAN PREDICT THE WEATHER YOURSELF. WHEN YOU MAKE PREDICTION FOR A PARTICULAR TIME AND PLACE, THE SITE WILL GO CHECK ALL OF ITS DATA SOURCES AND RECORD WHAT REALLY HAPPENED, AND GIVE YOU A SCORE BASED ON HOW RIGHT YOU WERE. IT COULD TURN OUT THAT A RANDOM PERSON IS A BETTER PREDICTOR OF THE WEATHER THAN A PROFESSIONAL METEOROLOGIST OR ORGANIZATION. THAT PERSON COULD EVEN BE YOU. SINCE THE SITE WILL BE TRACKING THE ACCURACY OF ALL OF THIS, YOU’LL BE ABLE TO SEE WHO IS MORE RIGHT, AND FOLLOW THEM.
THIRDLY (IS THAT EVEN A WORD?) THE SITE WILL GIVE YOU INFORMATION ON THE REAL REASON YOU CHECK THE WEATHER: TO FIND OUT WHAT YOU SHOULD WEAR. AS PEOPLE SUBMIT WHAT THEY ARE WEARING, IT GOES INTO THE AGGREGATION OF WHAT EVERYONE IS WEARING IN ORDER TO SUGGEST TO OTHER PEOPLE WHAT THEY SHOULD WEAR.
Monday, October 01, 2007
Social Network v Social Tools
Steve’s talkin’ sense:
Mashable reports that iWon is about to add a social network to its site. This raises two points: 1. iWon is still around and 2. Mathematically, adding an iWon social network will officially mean that every frickin’ site now thinks it has to have one. This is getting silly. I now have more social networks than I have actual friends.
... I’m not a social network curmudgeon. There’s a value to these things (especially if you own one) and they are the backbone of Web 2.0. But enough already with them. If you’re not going to reinvent the social network, don’t add to the crowd. It’s as though clueless web execs heard that social networks were big, so they decided “Hey, let’s buy one at Circuit City.”
Social tools on the other hand are extremely valuable, and every site can benefit. Local news sites should have sharing tools, mashup tools and other social interface mechanisms galore. You can’t add too many social tools. Let people embed your video on their damn blogs, for crying out loud.
