Socially Acceptable Media

In recent posts we’ve talked at length about Twitter and Facebook, as two of the more popular social networking sites on the internet they garner a great deal of interest and attention – but they aren’t the only places out there to stay in touch with friends (and make new ones).  In this article we’ll take a look at some of the other social sites on the web.

MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/)

Remember MySpace?  It’s faded in popularity a bit with the rise in prominence of Facebook, but MySpace is still out there.  Being owned by News Corp. could have brought an infusion of cash and talent, but it seems instead to have contributed to MySpace losing a bit of it’s “cool” factor.  Recent visits give me the impression that it’s contracting back to music/band roots; which is fitting because Facebook – while a great landing page for fans – doesn’t allow much in the way of page customization that some artists crave.  In my opinion though, this level of customization also led to the downfall of MySpace.  It was ‘possible’ do alter just about every facet of a page, but you had to be well-versed in both Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) and Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) in order to do it successfully.  Possible, but unlikely; which led to many pages looking like they were drawn in crayon by a five year old.  MySpace did lead the charge though, and should be commended for blazing that trail.

FourSquare (http://playfoursquare.com/)

I found foursquare in the last few months and while I don’t use it often, I do use it whenever I’m out.  Foursquare gives you the ability to “check in” when you’re in a restaurant or bar.  Foursquare is designed to work best when well populated, so that when you’re out and about and check in, any friends who are using the application can find you.  It also serves to provide a history of places you’ve been.  Not designed so much to review establishments, but rather to connect in real-time to other people making it a true social network, bridging the online and real worlds.

Yahoo! Messenger (http://messenger.yahoo.com/)

Yes, Yahoo’s instant messenger application is still out there!!  Several years ago, Yahoo! IM and AOL’s instant messenger (AIM) were the kings of what would eventually become social networking – they were the utilities that people used to stay in touch in real-time vs. email.  I’m talking about Yahoo in the past tense here – so you may be wondering why I chose to include them in this rundown of Twitter/Facebook alternatives.  Within the past few weeks Yahoo released a revamped version of it’s mobile App for the iPhone platform; when I launched it for the first time it “felt” new.  It didn’t feel like an old stodgy platform on the verge of being retired, but rather like an application that was trying to stage a comeback.  The functionality is all pretty much the same, but the user interface is cleaner and leaves itself open to even more improvements.  The next step might be adding location services – since Twitter is just about to roll that themselves, Yahoo wouldn’t be too far behind.  I’m not better on a Yahoo resurgence, but at least they’re still battling!

Social is not private.  That sounds so elementary, doesn’t it?  Why is it then that so many people seem to forget that single, basic tenet when they post something online?

I think a great deal of this duality springs from the nature of computers themselves.  We think of them as machines and as tools.  We think of them as typewriters, and televisions, and DVD players.  Our laptops and cell phones are at our beck and call, dutiful servants of our modern age.

But instead of dutiful servants, what if they were actually agents of our enemies, sent to infiltrate our lives and report back on our most secret dealings?

Here’s the important safety tip for today.  Computers are the agents of our enemies.  We have to begin to take the same caution with our relationships on the Internet as we do with the local gossip.  Don’t say anything you don’t want everyone to be able to find out.  Put in the language of popular culture, Facebook is actually Gladys Kravitz, the nosy neighbor from “Bewitched”.

Here’s a perfect example:  you’re out on your personal Facebook page and let’s say you have the Facebook average of 120 friends (from Lifehacker.com).  You then post a message to a friend’s wall, and then proceed to converse back and forth for a period of time.  You can always go back to the wall and review your conversation, or continue it – but did you know all of your friends, and all of their friends can see it too?  And they can comment on it?  Suddenly, what you had assumed was a private conversation is no longer private at all.  You might as well have been sitting in a coffee shop where everyone could eavesdrop.

Viewing the Internet as a city is much better than viewing your internet connection as a tool.  In a city, you can have movie theaters (YouTube and Hulu), you can have cafes where you can gather with friends (MySpace and Facebook), or you can have broadcast media (Twitter) where anyone who’s listening can join in.  We must remember that just like in any city, anything we say when we aren’t completely certain we’re alone, may come back to haunt us.

What we say isn’t the only thing that can haunt us though.  Where we’ve been, and even who we’ve been, never really fade online.  I mentioned earlier than the Internet can be a theater, a cafe, or a broadcast center – but it’s first and best function is that of a library.  The internet is a labyrinth of corridors and rooms and dusty shelves, where nothing is ever purged.  Anyone with a little computer experience can find virtually anything, about anyone, online.  Curious as to whether that new friend, classmate, or business associate has any secrets?  Go hunt down their MySpace page.  Before supplanted by Facebook as “the” landing spot on the web, MySpace was notorious for creating bad impressions.  Yes – it was a good way to share information with friends, but there was zero privacy, and it was prevalent at a time when no one really thought about privacy.  You would be amazed at what’s still out there.  I used to work with someone who was actually denied another job because of some things posted on his MySpace page.

How do we achieve privacy online?  We need to be very careful about what we post and on comment on.  We should all carefully craft our online personas to reflect exactly how we would want people to see us.  We need to tailor our internet experiences based on who we interact with and how those associations fit with the rest of our lives.

There’s nothing wrong with being social, so long as there’s a private place to come home to.

Over the past few years we’ve seen an almost explosive growth in social media and networking.  In previous articles we’ve looked at Twitter and Facebook – undoubtedly two of the bigger players in the scene – but in recent months we’ve begun to see a widening of path of these types of sites.

In mid-2007 I remember signing up to follow then Presidential candidate John Edwards on Twitter – there were very few followers then, in fact I think it was barely 1000.  As I recall, Edwards was one of the first political figures to embrace the technology – keeping supporters updated on the state of his campaign, and on his battle for the issues.  While the Edwards campaign was doomed, it’s use of technology was embraced by the other candidates.  President Obama, followed the Edwards model and constantly kept his supporters engaged and involved, and using social networking like Twitter, and social media such as YouTube, found a cost effective way to distribute a message – and through link sharing among supporters, caused that message to go viral on the web.  I think that the campaign’s ability to embrace technology allowed them to reach my younger voters where they live – on the web – and could have been one of the tipping points for his candidacy.

In this year though, we’ve seen even more examples of how this aggregation of technology can be its own agent for change.  The most glaring example are the election protests in Iran earlier this summer.  Protesters were using Twitter to report on the protests using their mobile phones and uploading video and still photos to sites like YouTube and Flickr and Twitpic.  In the first days of the protest, Twitter ended up being the source that broke the news of the protests, while conventional media kept trying to play catch up.  I think the moment I knew Twitter had arrived was during these protests when CNN ran a Twitter feed on the crawl across the lower third of their screen.

The health care reform fight in the United States is also taking advantage of this social media aggregation.  For weeks we’ve seen the embarrassing protests at town hall meetings – where people who are placed at the meetings to be disruptive are squelching actual healthy debate; making it appear that there is more of a resistance to the programs than there actually is.  Now however, as the congress prepares to come back into session, the same technology is turning the tables the other way.  Sensible Americans on both sides of the issue are realizing that these disruptive protestors are harming the democracy they say they’re fighting for, and the latest viral media to be shared via Twitter and Facebook are videos of Barney Frank and of Jon Stewart, taking these people to task and daring them to have an intelligent and informed discussion.

As time marches on, mankind finds newer technologies to both broadcast a message and initiate a dialog – scrolls, books, newspapers, radio, and television; every generation seems to develop its own tool.  It makes one wonder if microblogging on Twitter is really all that far removed from the cave paintings of primitive man?