social-networking

There are 38 posts tagged social-networking (this is page 4 of 4).

Thoughts about privacy and social networks

Could we be moving into a stage of civilization where not to share our thoughts and experiences with the entire world will be seen as antisocial behavior? For those who invest time in social networks, this is already somewhat true. Those who only re-tweet or share what others have said, without adding anything of their own are exposed to criticism, and I’ve read of twitter software that helps to spot those who only retweet or post links.

Although it would require research in order to prove it, I have noticed that friends in social networks tend to reward expression of emotion and particularly the revelation of what has traditionally been regarded as personal information or private feelings.

Facebook – as the network that initially encouraged interchange with real life friends – has been instrumental in getting people to speak about themselves openly – mainly because members felt somewhat protected within the network’s walled garden. Now Facebook is making incremental shifts towards encouraging its members to share information more publicly. It is encouraging greater openness among its members, by leading them to share more about themselves to more people.

We may already be reaching a time when all of this publicly available information will permanently determine an individual’s chances in life of receiving a good education or career. And while it may still be possible to opt out of social networks, this may not be the case fairly soon, as much of our interaction with people and colleagues is transferred online. There will simply be no place to hide.

Everyone has heard horror stories of Facebook members who have lost jobs, lost out on renting apartments, been expelled from school, ruined their marriage, or even lost their lives as a result of being too open about themselves on Facebook. Lately there was the case of a woman whose insurance claim for depression was challenged because she appeared to look happy in photos she had posted.

However, such cases blur what is actually happening, by presenting examples of behavior that can be easily avoided. In fact, the analysis of data from social networks is becoming much more sophisticated.

There is no way to be a member of a social network without impacting personal privacy. From the moment we join, we begin to construct our social graph: Who are our friends and how many of these do we have? or, in the context of twitter, who do we follow and who follows us? How do we interact with these friends and followers? Do our friends hold us in esteem? How many times are we retweeted or listed on twitter? Do people tend to comment on our posts, and do we comment back? Are we charitable in our comments? Do we show good judgment or intelligence? What groups have we joined? What applications or games have we added, and how long do we spend with these? What websites do we visit? Do we click on ads? Do we spend money online? There is a mine of information here, stretching back years. Combined with the matrix of other information outside, such as medical records, credit card records, and the rest, everything that could be of interest to an employer, a bank, or a government becomes knowable.

What kind of influence will all this have on us and on our society? Will the knowledge that personal information is publicly available influence us to cultivate a fabricated public personality in order to help us in our careers or relationships? I think there will be some of this happening. But I also see this as just another stage in society’s move towards greater personal openness.

Whereas in the past it was much more necessary to hide behind a façade, keeping sexual predilections, religious beliefs and many other matters private, there is a greater acceptance of diversity than before. As interaction with social networks become gradually more prevalent, and everything that is worth knowing about us is literally out in the open, we will learn to live with this fact more easily.

A better facebook interface

One of the problems for Facebook’s interface is that people post at an unequal rate. Those who post a hundred messages a day drown out those who post just occasionally, and this happens despite attempts to balance things. A solution to this would be to introduce an alternative “friends” view which would present just the latest update from each friend and, when clicked, would expand all that person’s other posts. The arrangement could be according to the last person who posted appearing first. However, our “top 20” or “top 40” friends (whoever many fit comfortably on the first page) would always show first, regardless of the number of messages they post. That would prevent the frequent posters from crowding out best friends who post infrequently.

The above suggestion would make it possible for those who like to post as frequently as they do on Twitter from feeling restrained by Facebook etiquette and it would make it unnecessary for Facebook users to block frequent posters. It could be an alternative view to News Feed and Live Feed – but I think it would be popular. And it should be “sticky” – i.e. persistent between Facebook sessions, once chosen. If I recall correctly, Flock browser’s facebook view already presents a friends list with latest status message from each friend.

Tagging would fix Twitter and make it more useful

Nova Spivack likes to differentiate interest networks, like Twine, from social networks like Facebook. The problem is that people also use social networks to follow their interests, especially as in the case of Twitter. The result is that if we want to follow, say, Dave Winer’s thoughts on RSS, we also have to follow his interest in baseball. Microbloggers like Robert Scoble have begun to create separate Twitter accounts for their aggregation of Links and comments. Others use hash tags. But most simply continue to send all their tweets to the same into the unified stream. If Twitter had a tagging option, we could fine-tune the service to follow only Steve’s RSS related tweets, and Robert wouldn’t need to make all those different Twitter accounts. Twitter would suddenly become much less noisy and more useful. The same formula should be adopted by other social networks.

Confused by all my networks

I admit to testing tools just for the fun of it; so I find myself hovering between a dozen different networks, without much commitment to any of them.  Some of these I treat as news sources.  Facebook is the only one I look for any kind of social connections, but I tend to be stingy about them too.  The problem with this lifestyle of tasting different services is that my networking world becomes distorted in favour of geekdom, a domain to which I don’t really belong.  Some of the services I like best, such as FriendFeed and Twine, have readerships that incline heavily towards technical people.  I am still trying to figure out which of these networks I feel most at home in, and what I want to accomplish there.

I have just read some interesting, if terse, notes that came out of the SXSWi event, Beyond Aggregation — Finding the Web’s Best Content” [Louis Gray posted an interesting blog post after this same event:  Finding the Web’s Best Content – Do You Want it New or Trusted ] A panel of experts discussed their methods.  For me, I find a mixture of RSS news feed reading, supplemented by FriendFeed to be the most useful.  If I want to learn more about a subject, or what people are saying, I try a search on socialmention.com.  I don’t have the time or the patience to wade through reams of twitter tweets.

The next question is what to do with all the information I gather.  The first step, I think, is to get it organized in something other than chronology, so for this it makes best sense to use one of the social bookmarking sites – I use Delicious.

There is a serious question about the value of link sharing.  So many people are already sharing, and have greater expertise than me in every field.  I’m a dabbler; I don’t have the time to read everything about all the subjects that interest me, and other people who specialize in each knowledge field, are better at aggregating content for it.  Lately I have been thinking that the best approach may be to gather various stories about a given subject, then contribute towards the conversation by placing the most authoritative articles together in my blog, together with my own thoughts.   Besides mentioning these articles in the text, I will gather the links together prominently, so that readers can go directly to them and not listen to my blather.  In order to preserve a unique voice, I will speak mainly from my own experience.

In the last few days I have begun to reduce my linksharing across various networks.  In order to be efficient, it isn’t sensible to cross-post to various services.  I seem to have gone back to delicious for most of my bookmarking (rather than Twine).  Delicious enables finer control over the placement of the information, and their website also works very fast.  But most people, including me, seem to treat delicious just as a great reservoir of information.  I also want my links to enter a chronological “river of information”.  I like Friendfeed best for this.  I have decided to put into Twitter (using FriendFeed as the lever) only my original material.  On Facebook I have stopped sending all the Friendfeed information to my profile and news feed.  It can be found under the FriendFeed tab of my profile.  When a link seems particularly relevant to my facebook crowd, I can send a link directly to FB.

I have yet to consider the changes that have come to Facebook today (new privacy settings that enable profiles and newsfeeds to become public – see links below) and the other modifications that may change the way that people use Facebook.  But I will leave that to think about that another day.  For now, I have opened up my privacy settings.

Links:

Blogged with the Flock Browser

On news feeds and link sharing

Lately I have tried to become more systematic in the way I use and process the vast amount of information that is available on the web.  I realized some time ago that it isn’t enough to rely on chance and occasional browsing to pick through that information, but to depend on bookmarking and storing of newsfeeds.   One obvious illustration of the necessity of newsfeeds is that most newspapers do not keep yesterday’s news on their homepages.  So if you miss a day, important articles have already been buried.  But by subscribing to the newspaper in an rss reader, the articles are still easy to find a few days later.

Recently I have read articles that advise abandoning newsfeeds and relying on Twitter.  That doesn’t work for me – Twitter is too intense.  But, on the other hand, I have found that Twitter offers a way to serve up its content also through RSS, and that’s a lot better.  By doing a Twitter search on a certain term, I can then store that search in my newsfeed aggregator.  That way, I will never miss a Tweet on that term.  A variation on this is to use the search engine Socialmention, which checks other microblogs and media sources too.

I use Flock browser, with its built in aggregator to collect my newsfeeds.  As with Google Reader and other aggregators, it’s possible to create folders, such as “technology” or “politics”, place the relevant sources in those folders, then see all the stories in a mashed up stream.

I have also been considering, once again, about how best to share links to stories I find interesting.  I want to share them across various networks without making a separate share for each network and, preferably, without duplicating stories.  That means adopting a relay system, and this never works in an optimal way.

Today I decided that old and trustworthy Delicious just might have the best way of doing this.  There are a few advantages.

1. It has a very large user base.
2. Many other services allow import to and export from Delicious.
3. The service happens to be built in to my Flock browser again, allowing synchronization between local and remote bookmarks.
4. Delicious has some neat features: its simple tag organization, the fact that it tells you how many other people have posted links for the same article, and the ability to find other readers interested in the same subjects.

When I post to Delicious, the post is picked up by Facebook, and placed in my news feed.  The same happens with Twitter. Both of these are relayed through FriendFeed.  Delicious also has a feature that collects all links from a certain day and makes a blog post of these.  I will see how this works.  The only odd-man out of my social networking constellation now is Twine – a topic-based network that I very much like.  Twine recently started to allow import of bookmarks to its service, but I haven’t tried this yet.  It would be better still if it permitted import of links via one of the other services, rather than the extra effort of re-linking every story through its browser bookmarklet.

Blogged with the Flock Browser

Social network relay tag

If you are a member of a number of social networks and don’t want to manually update all of them, you start looking for a workflow that will enable cross-postings or relay of information, in order to reach these various services without having to spend too much time with them.  But this can cause issues of duplication, such as when two different aggregators place the same item in Facebook.  I never really sat down to carefully work out all the connections between the various networks that I use and, as I discovered, even four or five different services create endless complexity.  What’s more, it is unlikely that there are two people who use exactly the same set of services, so googling to find a solution isn’t very successful in this case.  Eventually, after making four or five pages of pencil notes, and doing lots of erasing and re-writing, I figured out a method that will probably work better. 

I understood that the basic services I need to consider are blog, status blog, links and photos.  Other kinds of information are less important for me, since I deal with them less.  My basic publishing sites for these kinds of information are currently my blog/lifestreaming site, Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, Twine and Picasaweb.  These services support varying degrees of interoperability and sharing.  For instance, it’s easy to get information into Facebook, but harder to get it out.  Twine is a network based on interest groups around hyperlinks, but when Twine links are aggregated through other services, they link back to Twine, rather than to the  original articles.  Friendfeed aggregates everything, and can pass on information selectively to Twitter. 

I discovered that I have to deal with each publishing category differently, but when I had hit upon the right method, this could save me a lot of time.  For instance, for links I can take a news item aggregated by my rss reader, then email the link simultaneously to two different services, which will then relay the link through my networks.  For my photos on picasa, I can publish both to picasaweb and to Facebook (using picasa’s facebook plugin). 

Like lots of things in IT, a little time spent setting up a workflow program saves lots of work and annoyance down the road.  In this case it’s hard to attain a perfect system, but possible to devise one that works reasonably well.

When betas kick the bucket

Richard Stallman recently railed against “cloud computing”. The Guardian’s Jack Schofield also warns against its dangers:

“Look, if you have data online, you can lose access to it at any second, through hacking, an idle whim, a simple mistake, or some financial or even natural disaster. In fact, calling it “the cloud” is a good metaphor, because it’s insubstantial and easily blown away. It’s not Google’s fault, it’s the nature of the beast. “

If this might be true with big companies like Google or Yahoo (see another Schofield article about what can happen to your email), it is even more true of startups that offer tempting beta services. One of these was Zude (an innovative social networking service), about which I have written before. When I came back from my summer vacation in India, Zude had vanished without a trace – well almost:

zude

Interested what had happened to them, I checked back through my emails to see if I had missed a message from the company. Not a peep. Then I looked through Google’s news and blogs searches, Technorati, and elsewhere. Complete silence. None of the writers who had written so enthusiastically about the advent of Zude had anything to say about its demise. The only reference I found on the entire internet was a comment appended to a Mashable article “ZUDE = closed. Not surprised…” (from August 18).

I’d spent just a few weekend hours playing with Zude, and didn’t visit the site very often. Others had invested a lot more time and effort, and I’ve no doubt a few of them felt cheated. Whether it’s absolutely the end of the story for Zude, I have no idea. But this should be a cautionary tale for all of us who spend a lot of time with web services, small or large. Afterall, web giant AOL recently announced the close of its blogging service, AOL Journals, by October 31. Anyone who happens to miss that message will find all their content vaporized.

Social Networking

On the advice of Joanna (who thought it could be useful for Neve Shalom / Wahat al-Salam), I signed up for Facebook. My only previous experience with social networking was with social bookmarking (delicious and ma.gnolia), which I related to more as a way of storing my bookmarks for access between different computers, than for the value of sharing them.

Well, now I am a member of Facebook and two new networks that approached me just this week – peace.TV and “Peace and Collaborative Network Building” which, unlike Facebook, are networks with a specific niche.

I’m a little sceptical about the whole phenomenon. First of all, I found certain aspects of the Facebook sign-up to be distasteful. As soon as you have made an account, you are asked for your email address and email password, so that Facebook can sniff through your addressbook to find other facebook members. Fortunately, it is possible to opt out of that – I mean, why would I trust Facebook with my email password and give it access to my addressbook? Secondly, some of the questions that appear in the user profile are prying and juvenile, while others that would make sense for networking – such as what languages you speak – are left out.

Like email and other tools of our era, social networking seems to carry rich possibilities for time-wasting and plenty of possibilities for abuse. On one network I am already friends with a child rights advocate in Tamil Nadu and a Christian crisis counselor for troubled youth in America. I have no objection to being their friend, of course, but I wonder what interest, if any, they have in me, and what would happen if one day I showed up on their doorstep with a beaming smile, “I’m your friend!”

But all that is minor. I can imagine much worse abuse, like companies who profile us by databasing the information there, spammers who harvest telephone numbers and email addresses, as well as identity thieves, stalkers, private detectives, and government agents. I wonder how many of these will pop up among my “friends”? And if someone asks to be my friend, am I going to say no?

The phenomenon of social networking can only grow and already there is a company, Ning, which allows you to create your own social networking site for free and “within minutes.” Wonderful. That means we can expect many more invitations to join social networks in the near future.