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?

This week we’ll introduce a new feature, aptly titled “Headlines”.  In many cases news stories have varying layers of complexity that lend themselves to blog-length postings.  Many times though, there are just short items or developing stores that, while worthy of note, need to have full comment withheld for a while.  Now, you’ll find some of these stories here.

A Shoppers’ Rebellion at Whole Foods

This week Kevin Sack reported in the New York Times that what amounts to viral anti-marketing campaign was launched against Whole Foods Market.  In the August 12th Wall Street Journal, Whole Foods CEO John Mackey came out against government involvement in health care.  Mr. Sack reports that the Boycott Whole Foods group on Facebook stood at 22,000 members, and the Whole Foods website has logged over 15,000 comments.

Commentary: It seems Mr. Mackey needs to learn that analyst calls aren’t the only time a CEO’s voice is taken to be the voice of the company, regardless of what he’s saying.

Twitter API getting location data

Rafe Needleman from CNET reported this week that Twitter will soon allow geolocation data to be embeedded in tweets.  Geolocation data would allow developers to map the source location of tweets, allowing Twitterers who are nearby to find each other.  Quoting Biz Stone from Twitter, Mr Needleman writes “It’s easy to imagine how this might be interesting at an event like a concert or even something more dramatic like an earthquake.”

Commentary: The downside is that unless there is a feature to defeat this functionality, location anonymity becomes a thing of the past.  So much for saying you’re checking in at the office when you’re actually at the ball game!

Facebook Buys FriendFeed: What Does It Mean?

Writing for PC World magazine, JR Raphael writes on the implications of Facebook’s acquisition of Friendfeed.  Friendfeed is little known outside the digerati but has gained a wider following as result of exposure on Leo Laporte’s This Week in Tech.  While it’s still unclear what this means for either platform, the pedigree of the Friendfeed developers could mean the code is a big win for Facebook.

Opera to Be Performed via Twitter

On August 11th, Time magazine published an Associated Press story about London’s Royal Opera House’s intention to perform an opera who’s libretto is currently being composed via Twitter.  The article provides the link twitter.com/youropera to give you the opportunity to read or contribute.

MySpace buys iLike music app

The Financial Times of London reported this week that MySpace has acquired the iLike music application company for approximately $20 million.

Commentary: This becomes a rather complicated arrangement, because iLike is Facebook’s default music application, but Facebook dethroned MySpace as the king of social networking sites.  If Facebook contiues to use iLike, they will be bolstering their own competition.  If they stop and move to another application, like an enhanced version of Qloud for example, does that diminish the value of iLike?  Or does it drive traffic back to MySpace?  Time will tell.

Promo has pair driving next year’s car today

Sadia Latifi wrote in the Charlotte Observer about Ford Motor Company’s “Fiesta Movement”.  Ford sent out a call for potential agents who would be willing to drive their 2010 Fiesta – which is not yet sold in the United State – for six months in exchange for blogging and microblogging about the car and their experience with it.  In addition to having a car to drive for free, Ford is also paying for gas and insurance for their “agents”.

Commentary: People have always wondered how to monetize Twitter and Facebook – it seems bartering might be the next big wave.

I don’t use Facebook anymore.  I did for a time but came to realize that it simply was not an appropriate venue where I could digitally exist; my personal and professional relationships were just too complex to coexist in such a small space.

Still, in light of this series on managing online identities, I decided to interview someone who seems to fit the profile of the standard Facebook user.  Kate is a professional hair stylist/makeup artist for print, TV, film, and theater.  I presented her with several questions in an effort to get a sense of how and why she uses Facebook:

Do you use any social networking platforms?  (i.e. Twitter, Facebook, etc)

Yes.

Which one do you use most regularly and why?

I use Facebook.  I chose Facebook because it is the easiest and least intrusive of the social networking platforms I researched. It’s easy to post updates to Facebook, and I don’t receive constant communications from Facebook.  I found Myspace to be too cumbersome (I’m not a programmer – I’m a user), and receiving “tweets” all day long would be too annoying and intrusive in my daily life.

How long have you been using your primary social media site?

I signed up with Facebook about a year ago, but have only actively been using it for the past 6 months.

What was your initial reason for joining?

A friend recommended it to me as a means of professional networking.

Why do you continue to use it?  Do you use it for personal or professional reasons?

I do continue to use Facebook.  I use it for both personal and professional reasons.

If you use the site for both personal and professional contacts, how do you manage the blending of information between groups?

Very carefully.  I am fully aware that my personal view may have an impact on how my professional contacts view me.  I tend to steer away from political or controversial updates and statements, although occasionally I do post something that may raise an eyebrow, usually in response to something I find particularly narrow minded or strongly disagree with.  I have found that my personal philosophy tends to me more in line with those of my professional colleagues, so I haven’t received any negative feedback professionally.  I think it’s paramount to keep personal and professional information separated, but I temper that with the philosophy that it’s also good for professional contacts to know a bit about me personally.  It strengthens the professional relationship – so long as the communications aren’t too inflammatory.  Personally:   I have found using Facebook is an optimal way of keeping up with friends, some whom I had not heard from in years.  My personal contacts are interested in what I’m doing (both personally and professionally), and I’m able to manage the separation by using “the wall” for my personal contacts  and conversations and using my public wall to manage both simultaneously.  So far, it’s worked beautifully.  That being said, I think it’s important for those who use this platform to be conscious of who’s viewing their account.  I always keep this in mind when writing.  Rarely have I written something that I felt I just needed to get off my chest.  I reserve those conversations for private gatherings – usually in person.

What has been your best experience using the site?  What has been your worst experience?

My best experience is an overall experience.  I have been given access to professional contacts whom I otherwise would not have access to.  As such, I have expanded my professional network far beyond what it was even 6 months ago. Also, I am thrilled to finally catch up with people I had lost contact with after they had moved to other areas of the country.  It’s nice to see their families and keep up with what’s going on in their lives.  Facebook makes it easy.

My worst experience is a personal one – people who aren’t aware of who may be viewing their postings have said things that are personally offensive to me.  This is good in a way though, you do get to see who people really are, but it has impacted a few friendships.  After reading these offensive postings – I really question the validity of the friendship and whether I want to continue it.  It seems to me, that in some cases it brings out the worst in people.  They can reveal their deepest and ugliest secrets and opinions because they feel anonymous behind a keyboard.  They fail to realize that there are people attached to the viewing eyes on the other side.

As you can see, Kate has managed the delicate balance between personal and professional lives and can use Facebook to the benefit of both.  As she said though, it is important to remember who can see what you post – and to always be aware that the people who read your posts are part of your community and their views and sensibilities should always be respected.

“We all have a face that we hide away forever
And we take them out and show ourselves when everyone has gone.”
© 1977, Billy Joel/Impulsive Music

Most of us are social creatures – in fact, if you’re reading this blog you must have some level of interest in social media or social networking likely belong to one or more sites or groups.  Social media sites are wonderful tools because they allow us to disseminate information to a wide audience very quickly and anyone who follows us will get the message.

But is it that way in the physical world?  Would we want everyone who “follows us”, all of our friends, relatives, and business associates to read the same messages?

For myself, the answer is a resounding “no!”.  It’s also the same for many people I’ve spoken to on the subject.  In “real life”, we tend to refer to this concept as worlds colliding, and such a prospect can have equally disastrous sounding results.  Family members being exposed to business conversations, associates eavesdropping on things you tell your friends, or even a potential employer finding your profile and dredging up everything – all of these could make for a very bad day.

Before the advent of the internet, search engines, and social media; managing these kind of collisions was relatively easy.  We could compartmentalize areas of our lives and makes sure the contents of one compartment never overflowed into another.  Today things are far more complicated.  When we post something to Facebook or Twitter or Friendfeed or any other networking site it’s there for any of our followers to see, and without some digital gymnastics it stays there forever.

Solving this problem is fairly straightforward if you’re just starting out.  If you can identify the compartments in your life, you can tailor multiple online identities to allow you to segregate your contacts.  I have three separate Twitter accounts, two Yahoo identities, and manage three different websites; all done in an effort to keep everyone in their own tidy little compartment.  My professional life, my closed personal life, and my semi-public personas all have their own outlets.

This isn’t to say that information is never shared between them, in fact many times I paste the same tweet to each group.  Also, there are some people who know about multiple feeds and subscribe to more than one.  My primary reason for compartmentalization is to separate my professional/academic life from my social life, and having multiple identities has become the simplest solution.

Deciding to split your personalities after the fact is much more challenging though, especially once you’ve already built a robust network of followers.  For a public persona, you’ll want to leave the follow feature as open as possible so anyone can join without you having to constantly review and approve their requests.  For the more private self, you’ll want to maintain as much control and privacy as possible.  The problems are the people who are on the fence; the friends who are too close to just be professional, but not quite family.  How do you tell someone you don’t want to friend them on Facebook when you have a close rapport with them in real life?

This is where the digital life collides with the psychology of relationships, and where this post ends.  Online or offline, personal or professional, we need to manage all of our relationships with care.  It’s too easy to forget that behind the bits and bytes on your screen are real people with real feelings.  The best way to build lasting relationships in the real world is through honesty and respect, and we should strive to remember that in the digital realm the same ethos applies.

Feel free to add comments on how you might have encountered some of the problems illustrated here, and how you may have found ways to solve them!!

This past week the online social media communities Twitter and Facebook both fell under a denial of service attack.  This attack limited accessibility to those sites for several hours on Thursday.  Twitter announced it was under attack early on Thursday (Aug 06) with a brief statement on their status blog.

Late Thursday afternoon, CNET reported that a blogger from the Republic of Georgia was the target of the denial of service attack.  This is much like trying to kill a fly with a sledgehammer.  You’ll break whatever the fly was standing on, but the odds are your target will emerge unscathed.  As of this writing there is no news on who was responsible for the attack.

For the general public, their primary concern was not being able to access their Twitter feeds or Facebook pages – but what is a denial of service attack, and how does it work?  According to the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, in a denial of service attack, an “attacker attempts to prevent legitimate users from accessing information or services.”  They accomplish this by overloading a server with requests, essentially blocking out any legitimate request traffic.

Fortunately, both sites were able to recover from the attack relatively quickly – both were up and running in about three hours.

What’s disturbing to me though is the continued vulnerability of these sites to attack.  As Twitter adjusts and gets over it’s growing pains and becomes more a part of the mainstream, more companies and individuals will rely on the service.  The same is true of Facebook.  The more people use these technologies, the more accustomed and dependent they become on them.  What might today be a minor inconvenience could be commercially costly a few years down the road.

Twenty years ago businesses used to transmit data directly to other computers.  Modem to modem.  When the Internet opened up to commercial enterprise, everyone saw it for what it was – a quick and effective means of transmitting data from point to point.  Networks were built on top of networks, some secure and some not – but all using the same basic technology.  Now, the Internet is the lifeline of international commerce – not to mention the communication and dissemination of information.  What happens when a denial of service attack cripples banks, investment firms, health care, or the government itself?

To paraphrase a line from former ESPN anchor Dan Patrick, when it comes to Denial of Service attacks: you can’t stop them, you can only hope to contain them.  System security professionals will always be reacting to these attacks because until it starts, there very little one can do to prevent it.  Certainly, hardening systems can dissuade amateurs from hacking – but seasoned professionals – or worse yet – hostile governments or terrorist groups, will always be on the lookout for vulnerabilities.

Humankind seems to thrive on conflict – and to every new land we inhabit, we bring some battle along.  What began with rocks and spears, graduated to swords and cannon on the high seas, to aircraft and missiles in the past 100 years.  The new weapon in the arsenal is familiar to all of us.

In fact, you’re reading this on it right now.