Socially Acceptable Media

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.

“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.