Facebook Archives | Ian M Rountree

Facebook Timelines – First Look

September 27, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

From the site that brought you eight different news feeds in six months, comes a wonderful new toy. A profile dedicated not to what you are, but everything you have ever been. Timelines, introduced last week through developer beta, have been getting a lot of press – but what might they actually mean for your profile?

Here’s what my Timeline looks like at the moment:

It’s fairly spartan for now – I’ve put in some extra information, but largely, the moment you activate your Timeline, the magic… Doesn’t exist. I’ll admit, for the first few minutes, I didn’t see what the big deal was.

What do Timelines do that Profiles didn’t?

One of the biggest features the new profile system enables is called Milestones – you can set one for just about anything. A birth, a marriage, a death – the new system allows you to go back through your life and mark out the things you want to communicate as important to you.

First thing I did? Marked the birth of my son, Liam. Pretty important event in my world.

I’m sure I’ll get around to finding a picture for my own birth in 1982 eventually – but there’s no rush. Milestones aren’t time-sensitive the way status updates are. I can wait until I’ve got access to all the slide shows from the year my family spent in Australia before adding the marker in my profile that says I went there. Next time I travel, I can build a Milestone out of the trip as it happens – and use one of the photos from the trip’s album to do so.

But that’s not all – with the Timelines system, Facebook’s changed how their entire update methodology works.

It’s not listed specifically as a feature, and it’s certainly not obvious, but Facebook seems to be moving away from the pure “timely updates” theory of social networking, toward creating a full life record within their system.

The box you’ll see on your Timeline (and it’s not clear whether this will look similar on your Home screen) does the common Status/Photo/Place combination as usual – but the kinds of milestones you can add seem to suggest a much broader scope to the site.

Sure, we can mention we had a child or got married… But adding a pet? Losing a loved one? Achievements, awards, and health and wellness goals? This isn’t the usual profile-hygiene fare here – it’s a pretty big deal. When combined with the marked difference in how Facebook is now displaying news on your home feed – thanks to this month’s News Feed revamp – it’s clear the network is putting some thought into the kinds of news people want to read.

The same people who religiously review the Obituaries in their local paper might, for example, might be the kind to mark only Milestones in their family’s Timelines as top news, and train the system only to promote big events.

The people who are most interested in music culture may de-prioritize their friends’ news in favor of a particular set of band and artist pages.

Relentless business people? We know what they’ll mark as important, don’t we?

How Timelines might affect your personal brand.

Facebook has never really been good for a personal brand directly from the profile side of the site. Pages, sure – we can optimize them to work with a marketing strategy… But now? Imagine tailoring your milestones and life events to only highlight your professional life. Conferences, speaking engagements, promotions, job changes – the list is endless. You can build your Timeline to reflect a single aspect of your life, and go for as much completionism as you can stomach.

Again, it’s a case of choose your own level of involvement. I’m sure we’ll see a whack of personal branding guides over the coming weeks from some very opinionated voices.

Has privacy on Facebook changed?

Naturally, the changeover to Timelines – and associated App-level permission changes – is causing some concern over privacy. But, then, every change the social network makes to its system and capabilities seems to have that effect. This time, particularly, there’s some concern over apps gaining permission to automatically share what you’re doing. For example, if you authorize the New York Times as an app, you may find mentions of every page you view on that site in your timeline.

This persistent auto-sharing may not be a big deal for some people, but imagine seeing 75 to 100 updates in your stream, from one avid news reader.

Yeah. Not a privacy concern. But I imagine a lot of people will either get annoyed, or immediately shunt these kinds of updates off their feeds – thus destroying any value for the app-makers. Once again, it’s an opportunity for thoughtless publicity (not a bad thing) to turn into obsessive annoyance (a very bad thing). And only your friends list can determine which you’ll end up receiving.

I’m not concerned about privacy on social networks…

Because that’s not what they’re for. By their very nature, social networks are sharing platforms – you don’t share privacy. That’s not the point. Any assumption going against this grain is fundamentally flawed – so why worry about it?

We’re still not very good at dividing our personal and professional lives, or our online and offline lives, or our family lives and public lives. So rather than being concerned that Facebook and other social networks are “stealing our privacy” we need to get better at self-censoring. If you don’t feel comfortable sharing something with the world – it may not be a good idea to put it online. While privacy and restricting options do exist, assuming they’re solid is not a good idea.

In the end, it’s all a game of “Choose Your Poison” anyway.

How you present yourself online is closer to your choice of haircut, than it is your choice of friends. There will be bad hair days on your social networks, and times when it’s so fantastic you worry about being narcissistic. Learn to live with that, and you’ll be fine.

We used to think of Facebook as another photo sharing service. Then it was a microblog alongside. Then it became ten thousand other little parts of our lives.

But now…

What do we call Facebook now, I wonder?

What Happened to Blog Reactions?

April 19, 2011 by Ian 5 Comments

This week’s #blogchat focused on engagement – comments got all the cred.

I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised – comments are great. They exist on your platform, they’re relatively long-form compared to some other reactions (like tweets and Facebook comments), but it felt like the really big, high caliber blog engagement actions were missing.

What happened to blog reactions?

In the hey-days of LiveJournal, one of the biggest signs a conversation was – well, big – would be when someone on your friends list actually entered a post in direct reaction to something you wrote. Not just a comment-length “check this out” notice, but a full on essay-length journal entry eviscerating, deconstructing, or otherwise responding to what you wrote.

It was fairly commonplace, at one point, to follow chains of journal entries ten or fifteen layers deep before finding the initial instigator. Does that happen any more? Not so much.

We’re worried about spam. Not just comment spam – trackback spam.

The same way comments have become a great place for less-than-ethical linking, trackbacks to unwary bloggers have turned into the vogue Den of Thieves to be avoided at all costs. We want social reactions, comments, and shares more than we want other bloggers linking to our specific articles – we want them linking to our domains, which are evergreen, rather than individual articles which are timely and may grow stale over time as information changes.

But is this how we build community? It’s mechanistic, pragmatic, and unsustainable – it furthers no conversation, and encourages blind authority over the communion of conversation.

In our rush for personal authority, we seem to be losing some of our community.

We all want to be the instigator – to get the comments. Yet we all talk about contributing to community and furthering the conversation already in action at the same time – what better way to do that than to react to something in a thought-out, constructive way? We need to remember that adding to a conversation assumes that you don’t have to be the origin of that conversation. Starting new work all the time is like perpetually saying hi. And that gets video-game-esque really fast.

Give yourself some leeway to pick up where someone else left off now and again – and not in the way you pick up where an author left off for a book review. The instigators will probably want to converse with you a little more, if you’re really thorough in adding to their conversations – and your regular readers might find a new resource or two in the mix as well.

What say you? Bonus points if you continue this on your platform instead of mine.

Image by Nigel Howe.

Facebook’s Automated Censorship Kerfuffle

April 17, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

If you’ve been anywhere near where I’ve been over the weekend, you’ll have seen this article on Dangerous Minds about Facebook removing a photo of two men kissing.

From the article:

[…] it seems that the sight of two fully-clothed men kissing was too much for Facebook, or too much for some ~~redacted~~ […] who complained about it.

This is an issue a lot of networks need to face and be willing to take their place on; if a user flags an image as inappropriate on Facebook, it’s up to Facebook’s policymakers to either remove the image for the same of propriety, or leave it up and face action from the person flagging the image.

Facebook likely removed the image for reasons it will never explain – the trouble will come, however, not when it’s a picture of two men kissing, but when it’s a photograph of a couple’s wedding kiss that’s removed for inappropriate suggestive content. Or a parent giving their child a smooch.

This doesn’t just apply to Facebook – all information-storing networks suffer the same trouble. Offending a loud minority with anything means normative action by the network. It’s the only way to go.

Without this, there are two options;

an incredibly strict EULA forcing people to acknowledge that they can’t do anything about things that offend them other than leave the network, or
zero memory on the site itself, to go along with the lack of moderation; this way lies 4chan.

Not every network can handle either kind of strain on it’s social contract, because online networks need to remain an extension of real networks. The unfortunate problem is that, while free speech exists as law in the United States, almost all social networks are now (or have the potential to be) global, and need to allow for the strictest common denominator.

We’re going to see more of this kind of thing in the future, and we’d best be ready for it. More than any other governing force in our lives, our social networks are the best equipped to dole out equality as a commodity; even equality of objection to things we consider of no consequence.

Is this a good thing, or a bad thing?

Make sure you read the full article on Dangerous Minds.

Resetting Expectations

February 6, 2011 by Ian Leave a Comment

In the last week, I’ve read articles in a half dozen places about setting and managing expectations. As I haven’t said much in a while about what this blog is for, why I write, or how I try to make the blog accessible to everyone, I thought it might be time for some expectation setting of my own.

I blog in hopes of creating some conversation and encouraging thought about the things I write about.

Whether it’s making the most of your tools (like turning your WordPress blog into a personal event manager), or making the most of your writing (by enhancing your mastery of the writing voice), I want you to do better work – and, of course, I want to do better work myself. I’m hoping we can talk about that, and find ways forward together. This is part of why I comment on your blog as well – hoping to continue the conversation.

I also want to make it easy to get to what I’m writing.

As such, here are the ways I make my blog available:

I try to post on a schedule as often as possible – you can rely on most of my posts to appear at or around 6am CST, when I’ve written something in advance.

I import to Twitter – @IanMRountree – through Twitterfeed, so my blog posts pop up automatically even if I’m not there to post them when they’re scheduled.

I have, of course, got a feed. Subscribe through a reader or by email to http://feeds.feedburner.com/IanMRountree – there’s an email subscription entry box on the right sidebar if you’re reading this on my site. Getting the feed is a good way to not miss things.

I also publish the feed automatically to Facebook. For years, it’s gone to my personal profile through RSS Graffiti, but I’ve decided to up my accessibility a little and set up a page for my blog. If Facebook is a place you look for news beyond your friends’ updates, please go like my page – it’s available here: Ian M Rountree – Blog

That’s all I’m doing just now. Have I missed anything? Are there places you look for news that I’m not using which would make it more convenient for you to get connected and keep up? Let me know in the comments if there’s somewhere I should be publishing that would help you reduce the effort needed to subscribe.