Facebook Archives | Page 2 of 3

Frozen Feeds – A Story About Blog Privacy and How it Applies to Facebook

May 14, 2010 by Ian 4 Comments

When I started blogging in 1998, it was on free services designed for just that thing. I walled my garden, created a “locked” blog, which only my friends could read.

Then, sometime around 1999, more of my friends complained that they wanted to read what I was writing. So I opened up my privacy settings. I got some weird reactions to posts I’d created years earlier, but that was par for the course – you’ve opened up an aspect of your life that was created without the expectation of openness about.

So what happened? My tone changed. That’s what happens. And everyone else? Some of my friends followed suit, and a lot of them stopped posting entirely. We called those frozen feeds – like podfading and other adoption-then-abandonment patterns, it was inevitably the people who hadn’t really bought in who lost out.

Flash forward. Facebook. Privacy issues galore. Part of the issue here is not the action, it’s the archive – just like it was with suddenly unlocked blogs, the expectation of future publicness doesn’t address the fear over past privacy.

Building a new expectation of publicness is not the issue. No one cares about privacy, they just hate being surprised. Services will give, or not give, the option for publicness or privacy as suits their business interests. How can we expect anything different?

This doesn’t apply just to Facebook and Google, or other services. This is about creating expectations, not only about new changes, but also about how your business intends to treat your previous, and future trust.

I don’t care, at the end of the day, if privacy settings are removed from social networks. Don’t like it? Don’t hit publish. But there does need to be a respect for the decisions people have made before the expectation of publicness was ever put forward. If we could only, in all of this privacy kerfuffle, just press a button that said “make everything from this date forward public, and leave everything in my history under the old settings.

And no one has said, in all of these arguments, word one about an “Archive as Private” option.

That’s disappointing.

How To Break a Social Network

February 3, 2010 by Ian 6 Comments

I’ve had to reconsider how I use social networks lately, because I think some of the people who are connecting with me are doing it wrong.

Don’t get me wrong, I love making connections. I’ve met some very interesting people mostly through Twitter and blogs. In some instances, this is clearly fanboy level connection – I’ve subscribed, commented without expectation of a response, followed them on twitter and so on. In other instances, I’ve made new contacts through Facebook and even instant message – which are, or at least have been, my favoured “personal” connection methods.

But some of this needs to change. I need a real sense of home base. I need to shore up the connections I’ve made with meaningful contact.

I’ve also been using Foursquare lately. I check in daily at my workplace, in my mall, at the coffee shops I frequent when I go there. I’m mayor of a couple of places, but I’m by no means prolific. I’ve got a few friends – for some reason, Robert Scoble and Julien Smith even clicked the “accept friend” button, which is cool because I like putting a diverse range of information (not just a volume of information) to the people who intrigue me. I’ve also got a number of local friends on there. But then there are the strangers.

I got a request from a former colleague. Which was neat. But when he checked into my store, I popped my head up and said hello… And he didn’t have any idea who I was. Didn’t have as sharp a memory for people as I do, it turns out.cHow useful is this service, really, if you don’t have ducks in a row enough to recognise someone you used to work with, when you had the presense of spam enough to request they add you on a social network?

Even better was getting a request from Egor Lavrov, an apparent entrepreneur (who I had never hard of before) out of Florida and the Dominican Republic. I hit accept, because I still haven’t decided how I’m using the service, then checked out Egor’s profile, and promptly gagged. The guy has easily a hundred friends. How, in a location-based game/network, are you supposed to keep up with that many people? Especially with people jockeying for points and cluttering the streams? He’s forever checking in and is ALWAYS off the grid! What’s the point of doing this, convincing that many people to track you, and then never giving them any information to work with?

Now note, I’ve got Scoble and Julien, and Dave Peck was actually my first friend on Foursquare (even though I’ve never connected with him anywhere else), so I can’t really speak to diversity of location. But I do have to wonder if people are paying attention to the reasons WHY you friend someone on Foursquare?

Who might you want to follow on 4sq or Gowalla? If you’re on a location-based service, you likely should be friending people you have a chance of meeting, or at least want to keep track of at least a little. Scoble travels, Julien speaks. I track them because I may miss an announcement of where they’re doing their public work – which I’m interested in. My friends, I like to track for obvious reasons. But seriously, why am I going to friend a thousand people there? Friending metrics are useless on location networks. Try again.

How do you filter on LinkedIn? I don’t use LinkedIn thoroughly yet because I’m not that active doing events and outside client work for my job yet. I have it, it’s a semi-static living resume. But I sort of agree with Chris Brogan here, that it’s not a get-more-contacts game. The more accurately you can make your contact list reflect your working life, the better off you’re likely to be. If you want to find me on LinkedIn, go ahead – but it would help your case if you want me to guest post or contribute to your efforts somehow. I will trust me. I love to help. It’s what I do for a living.

Who should you friend on Facebook? Whoever you want. Friending metrics are useless on Facebook, it’s not a collector’s game, but thankfully the platform is flexible enough that whether you’re going for a collection of loose friends, or a tight-knit group of really core buds, it will work for you. I like Facebook. Actually, a lot, much as I prefer Twitter for daily entertainment value lately. If you’d like to connect on Facebook, be my guest – but be warned, it’s filled mostly with useless trivia and the flack that I don’t push out in a more professional demeanour.

Which leaves the biggest contender: Twitter. Praise Be The Tweet. There are a lot of theories on what’s effective on Twitter, but the simple truth is that it’s a very popular, and thus powerful, engine for putting yourself in front of whoever you want in a really simple, expressed way. It’s great for linking, initial contact, on the fly public conversation, and big self-promotional pushes. Collect people, keep it small, follow no one but track a bunch of lists – the possibilities are so flexible that, as much as the followers number still matters to some people, it has no attachment to how you follow, who you follow, or how you interact. If you’re not following me on Twitter already, you’re not one of the cool kids – but it’s not hard to get in, because I have no say in it. Say hello!

So how do you do it totally wrong?

Lots of people will argue with me about it even being possible to use a service wrong, but let me explain.

When I see someone on Foursquare behaving in a way that works better on Twitter, that’s broken. It’s not about behaviour, so much as it is about approach. The language of location networks is locality. The language of LinkedIn is reference and relevance. The language of Twitter and, to an extent Facebook, is conversation. You can’t have a conversation with me on Foursquare – so that fails. You can’t assume relevance on Twitter without digging far further than the profile page, so the LinkedIn approach is of limited use.

At the end of the day if you really want to break a social network, just treat it like the other networks you’re already on.

Photo by Nesster.

What BT’s These Hopeful Machines can teach us about anticipation.

February 2, 2010 by Ian 1 Comment

I’ve been waiting for These Hopeful Machines since – well, since This Binary Universe came out in 2006! I’m always waiting for new BT. ‘m waiting for nis next album now, and I’ve owned These Hopeful Machines just long enough to have listened through the whole thing, #tweetreview-ed it, and loaded up to write this!

Normally, this much anticipation would sour the experience, but it doesn’t. Why? Because the state of technology, and BT’s involvement in it – and my interaction with his personal broadcast – adds so much value that it’s impossible to ignore, but doesn’t remain static enough to be disappointing.

I get excited about things. I’m also a big fan of BT’s – I’ve been listening to him for more than a decade, since before Movement in Still Life came out. Massive portions of The Dowager Shadow have been written while listening to his music, along with a very short list of others. So it’s perfectly natural that I’m also following him on Twitter, grabbed his Tumblr feed for Google Reader, and hit that damned Fan button on Facebook. You’d think I’m either stalking him, or that his feed would eventually overwhelm my needs, and I’d unsubscribe.

Not so much.

BT’s personal style is a perfect extension of his music. He’s a high energy guy, very inspired, moves with his feelings, and it shows. With that kind of genuine energy, how could you not be interested – if you’re already interested in his music?

BT’s been hyping the new album for well over six months. Rose of Jericho came out on iTunes in June of 2009, followed eventually by Every Other Way and Suddenly – and the album itself couldn’t come soon enough. True to his style, THM is a fantastic blend of natural music, super-produced lyric and assorted synthesized sound. There is of course the plethora of jump-beats and echoing, vocal overlay and stutter-editing. This stuff almost has to be taken as read; with six albums and countless other projects under his belt, BT without a stutter is like bread without grain. The technique itself has morphed from being a gimmick to being a form of procedural instrument. Shortly before the album dropped, BT even ran a contest on Facebook to see which fan could do the best imitation of the stutter edit. There’s nothing inherently surprising in THM as an album, but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing new.

Let’s not kid ourselves. Brian Transeau is a geeky dude. This is a geeky album. But with his background in orchestral composition, the numerous film scores he’s produced, and his long history of working with other similarly stunning artists, you can’t expect anything to be as simple as “just another album from a great musician” – there’s always more than meets the ears here. No stranger to collaboration, this album features some giants; Jes Breiden, Rob Dickinson, and even Stewart Copeland from The Police to name some of the top ones I recognized. One of Transeau’s great strengths is his ability to use not just instruments, but people, as part of composition. Voices can produce lyric music, but the edit and blend techniques BT applies are stunning, especially in the album’s leading tune, Suddenly, with Christian Burns playing digital beat box beautifully.

So what does this have to do with anticipation?

Everything.

One of the things I love about BT’s music – something any DJ worth his decks loves – is the breathtaking buildups he’s known for. One of his classics, Flaming June, has one of the best and most played buildups in electronica, second in recognition only, but not back by much, to Energy 52’s Cafe Del Mar. Track 2 of THM, The Emergency, has one of this stunning buildups which sees BT himself layered in standard SATB chorale combination. Again, digital tools providing an entirely new way to make music.

But this is about the wait, right?

If you’re looking, you can see the build-ups in BT’s manner. Everything from a thirty second spot for Facebook fans, right through the twelve minute long epic that is track 7 on disc 1, A Million Stars. He’s the absolute master of suspense-in-motion.

Why else release Rose of Jericho eight months before its album, with no hints about the album itself?

Why else spend countless hours on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr and who knows where else building hype and interest and energy?

Why else invest all of this time instigating a near riot that drove These Hopeful Machines to spot #8 on the iTunes chart within two hours of the album’s launch?

Because – and this is true for everyone, so pay attention if you want to do this right – the end is worth it. That hour and a half I just spent listening to These Hopeful Machines was worth every penny I dropped into Apple’s – and by extension BT’s – pockets for it. And every letter of this blog entry. And every moment of your time reading it.

Anticipation always worth it when the pay off is this good.

Go buy the album. Maybe we can wait together for the next one.

News Flash: People Still Failing the Social Resume

January 26, 2010 by Ian 4 Comments

About once a week, I get invites to be friends with people on Facebook. Some of them I take up – mostly, at this point, they come from people I know. A number do come from people I’ve either forgotten, sadly, or people who have decided to engage me – and please, by all means, engage me! – but it’s not always done right.

Not everyone who reads my blog comments, much as I wish they would. It’s a great way to introduce yourself, I refuse to use nofollow on my links so you get some free Google-juice, and I absolutely do reply. However, because not everyone comments, their other efforts connecting with me might be a little hamprered by a lack of introduction. There are really easy ways to get around this; let me view your profile, find me on Twitter, or send a message with the invite explaining your reasons for adding me. Logical, right?

Ovr the last few weeks, I’ve hd half a dozen people try to add me to Facebook – if you’re reading, I’m sorry, but I had to hit the ignore button for two simple reasons: I have no idea who you are, and your profiles are set to friends only. This is important, because if I can’t find out who you are (and I’m not wasting my time in Google playing with your name because hands-on privacy trumps public-facing information) then I don’t feel like I have any means, reason, or motivation to connect with you.

I want to connect with people. I hate hitting the ignore button, but spending all my time recently removing followings from Twitter because of the unironic use of “MLM” and slap-dash flooding of messages, so anonymous, uninforming invitations are just as annoying – recently, at least – as constant invites from my existing friends to play games on Facebook.

As long as you actually want me to converse with you, and you’re not trying to buff up your numbers, I’ll follow you. I’m a bit loose like that. But that’s not the key point; getting anyone to connect with you isn’t enough, it has to provide some utility to both of us.

I’m just learning about how effective social proofing is. Scratching the surface is enough to understand that there’s huge power in having connections, in knowing the right people – and trust me, if you’re reading this, you’re the right people. Businesses are learning, too, that people who have social proof can be so much more valuable than a trained drone with a degree. There are a lot of networks like LinkedIn, Brazen Careerist, and others which bank entirely on this concept – and they’re winning.

If you do it right, you can use Facebook and Twitter to win, too. But that’s a big if.

There’s no manual for Twitter, because it’s so heavily democratised, that it’s impossible to tell anyone they’re doing it wrong. It’s like telling someone with a Swiss army knife that using the saw to cut their steak is wrong – it’s not, and it shows your ignorance in the saying so. There may be no wrong use of the service, but there are failing methods by which to communicate and make that first impression.

Making the wrong joke at the wrong time is a good example of this. I know I’m guilty of it, and others have said the same. But how we react to these instances is just as telling of us no matter which side of the joke we’re on. When I make bad jokes that make people snark at me, I stop following them. Mark Dykeman recently wrote a great post about how he chose to hold his tongue – good on him for doing so. Esteban Contreras (@socialnerdia) recently direct-messaged me when he didn’t get a joke I made – another totally awesome reaction. Getting past the hiccup is more important than the hiccup itself.

Where it falls apart is people not being mindful of the effect their actions will have on their followings. The author who sniped at me isn’t going to see me reviewing his book any time soon. I made the bad joke, but he did the yelling. The people who invited me to connect on Facebook, but left me no avenue by which to do so (one had even blocked messages from non-friends, double no-no) are also losing this game.

You may not be able to do Twitter wrong. But, as a wise android once said, it’s entirely possible to commit no errors and still lose. It’s all well and good to be aware of the social contract, social media’s effects on business, and attempt to build your own living resume (I really like the CV better, Curriculum Vitae really sounds more fitting in today’s world) through our actions online. But unless you’re going to take a unified approach, make yourself available in a very thorough way, you’re going to find that the walls you create with your conscious sensibility hamper your ability to break out of the box.

Mostly because it’s one you built yourself into.

Photo by Hryck Owian.

Deconstructing Social Media: The Nuclear Option

January 25, 2010 by Ian 11 Comments

As I’m writing this I have 323 followers on Twitter. Last night I had less than 300. This morning I had more than 350 – and then, one by one, the difference disappeared as I deleted used-nonce and pure noise followers. Obviously, Twitter’s request to some services to stop using auto-unfollow has not kicked in properly.

This isn’t a bad thing. Not one bit.

Get this straight. I don’t really care if you follow me on Twitter.My numbers don’t mean a thing – now. I’m just a dude who writes. I’m not a pundit or journalist like Jeff Jarvis, a massive tech god like Robert Scoble, or a marketing whiz like, well, at this point half of Twitter. I’m a participant, not a trend-setter. That’s what I’m about, that’s what I do. So I don’t really care if you follow me. But you’d better damn well bet I’ll be impressed with YOU if you respond to something I’ve said, the way Jarvis, Scoble and a few others have.

I don’t care about follower numbers because until Twitter and blogging and other things of the sort become a career instead of a hobby, I’m always going to win the engagement war against bigger stars in the social media arena. How, do you figure, that is? For the same reason that Liz Strauss and I agree Conan O’Brien won out; he didn’t forget his core audience. There’s no value in the followers metric, at all, any more. If there ever was. I care about conversation.

I can account for eight of my twenty subscribers. I speak to these eight people fairly regularly – half of them are on Twitter, and about the same number reliably hit my blog from the links I post there. Of these, two or three comment regularly. Of all of the numbers, this is what matters to me the most, because I value contribution, even when it’s small. Lots of bloggers say they live in the comments – I dream of one day having a comments section to call home.

Robert Scoble just dropped a bomb about the differing benefits of creating content versus curating content produced by others. It’s one of the best he’s done in a while, taking apart the work of going to a big event, and why following it in broader scope is an important job too. I agree – but doing this work does not help Scobleizer’s engagement. He sits at his screenbank, aggregates, and curates. A necessary job, yes, but it places him even more in the ivory tower others have built for him – it’s entirely his personality. But it makes the idea of engaging him, of insinuating oneself into his circle nearly unimaginable.

Having a massive following is great – hell, if I hadn’t engaged on Twitter, I wouldn’t ever have interviewed Mark Dykeman, Liz Strauss wouldn’t know who I was, and Steven Hodson wouldn’t be putting out perspective on my writing. It’s awesome, all of these people rock.These people are why I win.

Participation is something we can’t lose. Participants are like me, engaged, interested, involved. Meta-curators, the human aggregators, are more like Scoble. They can be very interesting people, but they’re spending so much time outside themselves, in their lists, being the activity more than the action, that the focus of what they do moves beyond participation to something bordering on obsession.

Something to think about. I’m participating – and winning, but that’s me, and my role. Some might be better served by meta-curating, as Scoble is.

Have you given any consideration to what you’re doing with your in-public presence online?

Photo by Brian Auer.