August, 2007

Noticed — 1 Comment
31
Aug 07

Blog Day

Did you know it was Blog Day? Me neither, until a kind commenter left a note. Now, I judiciously avoid any of these viral blog things (sorry if I’ve offended anyone in the past), but I deem Blog Day significantly un-viral so I’ll play along. What I’m basically supposed to do is tell you about five blogs I like. Here goes:

This Old Network – Terrell Russell. My SILS and ClaimID partner-in-crime, his posts always evoke contemplation.

Lorcan Dempsey’s Blog – A must-read in my circles, for very good reasons.

Tiara.org – Alice Marwick – It’s always a joy when one of Alice’s posts shows up in my reader.

The Academic Productivity Blog – Great stuff for academics too easily distracted by YouTube and Wikipedia.

120 Minutes Playlists – This guy finds videos from 120 Minutes on YouTube and posts them to a Tumblr blog. Why I need the Academic Productivity blog.

Honorable mention:

The Scobleizer – His posts about Facebook are just priceless. Faceslamm!

Noticed / Thoughts — 3 Comments
31
Aug 07

Facebook’s next big change?

Via Alla, I’ve come across some posts discussing the introduction of “social zones” into Facebook. Justin Smith of InsideFacebook (an invaluable resource for following FB, if you ask me) covers it as such:

I just received a tip from top application developer Trey Philips that Facebook has added two new undocumented functions to its API Test Console this evening that appear to reference an as-yet-unreleased feature called “Friend Lists.”

The two new API methods are:

  • friends.getLists
  • friends.getListsMembers

Based on these method names, “Friend Lists” could be buddy lists that you might use to organize your friends. For example, “Work Friends” or, say… “Top Friends”.

Justin reads the tea leaves and decides that FB is going to compete into Myspace and Slide’s territory by adding “top eight” type applications. Well, I like to read into the tea leaves too, so here’s my completely un-informed, un-leaked and speculative guess: I think Facebook is going to allow us to roll our own networks.

By allowing users to create their own networks (say a network for your church, or family, or non-FB-approved place of work), FB would introduce an important, situationally relevant social vector that they’ve long underserved. Let’s face it – we don’t really organize purely at the regional, school or employer level; there’s a great bit more nuance in the way we come together. By allowing us to create our own networks, we develop a way to cut across Facebook without substantially disturbing the ecosystem.

Of course, FB would have to institute some controls to prevent negative outcomes. They’d probably limit how many networks you can join, how many people can join a roll-your-own network, and introduce some new privacy controls. In doing this, FB would compete directly into Ning’s territory, as well as giving tens of millions of other people a new reason to join. Seeing as FB is so devoted to the 35+ demographic, you can just imagine parents saying “I can join Facebook but only be part of my Family’s network? Sounds great!” And to this extent, as FB’s mission is to connect people to other people they know, this would clearly be within scope.

Of course, it’s all speculation….

Hacks / Noticed / Software / Thoughts — 1 Comment
30
Aug 07

Outing fakesters with an address book

If you’ve tried to add new contacts on Facebook, Flickr or LinkedIn, you’ve likely been prompted to provide your Gmail/Hotmail/AOL email credentials. Using these credentials, these sites will cross-check your contact lists with known users on their site, in an attempt to hook you up with people you already know.


While the notion of sharing your authentication credentials with a third-party sort of blows my mind (too many years as an Admin, I suppose), as 80% of us use the same password across all sites (I just made up the 80%), it probably wouldn’t be too hard for Mr. Twitter to guess your Hotmail password if he really wanted to.


No, actually what interests me is how one could use this information leak to out fakesters. The approach is pretty simple – add a couple hundred email addresses to your contact networks in Gmail/Ymail/Hmail etc, upload to a site, and see just who pretends to be who.


This raises a question: Just when did it become fair play to share my email address? When I created a Twitter account, I provided my email for verification – but I didn’t assume that a third-party would be able to correlate my email to my Twitter identity simply by uploading an address book. What’s the big deal, you say? Let’s take the case of Fake Steve Jobs. What if Fake Steve were to create a Twitter or Facebook profile and use his “real” email address for account verification – his gig would have been up a long time ago.

Why does this matter? If you’re going to be a fakester, use Mailinator, right? Valid point, there will always been advanced technical countermeasures. What troubles me is how we trade the functionality of this handy “feature” for a reduction in privacy – and I’ve yet to see anyone really question it. If I provide a service with my email address, it has generally been my right to control who sees or does not see that email address. With these new “contact” functions, I lose control. My identity information is in the public, ready for anyone with an address book to discover.

So what if you are a fakester on Twitter or any of the other sites that employ these address book searches? Unless you’ve bulletproofed your identity by using a completely throw-away email address that you’ve never used anywhere else, it’s likely your identity could be compromised.

As Web 2 is ego-centric, anonymity/pseudonymity in consistently painted in a negative light. By embracing – and not questioning – these information leakages, we’re reinforcing this mode while perpetuating the fallacy that “there’s nothng to hide if we’re not doing anything wrong.” This is an erosion a privacy, and a new form of surveillance.

Thoughts — 1 Comment
29
Aug 07

Facebook Platform Engagement and Political SNS

As we know, Facebook Platform is dealing with some serious spam/abuse problems. This is compromising the Facebook experience – even Facebook’s generally rock-solid technical infrastructure is paying the price (yesterday FB logged me in and out about 30 times, in addition to being offline). To address a part of this issue, FB is changing its ranking algorithm for its application directory to reward engagement. This is a good step, and I hope they also follow this logic down to the newsfeed; I don’t care about every application my friends try out, but rather what applications they enjoy and actually use.

This somewhat tangentially relates to an interesting post from Greg Bloom over at TechPresident. Greg challenges some of the metrics of SNS and widgetized engagement in the political sphere, and he brings up some great points – here’s a snippet.

There is an opportunity here. For months now I’ve been getting on the losing side of arguments about the utility of the Change.org and Facebook Causes app – I’d pan them because they have adopted a narrow fundraising paradigm that doesn’t seem to me to fit right, but I’d lose these arguments because I never was able to verbalize what exactly these political activism applications should encourage. I don’t think I’m going to lose that argument any more! It sucks to be reminded that you’ve raised zero dollars to stop global warming—and may I say that it must somehow suck even more to be reminded that you’ve raised a cool ten dollars to stop global warming—but if I could show my friends how many politicians I’ve told to do something about global warming… well, I just might shoot my mouth off at politicians all day.

So much of what’s exciting about this aspect of social networking is still in the realm of the hypothetical. The robustness of these interactions will depend upon some pretty fine technical points (like, when I post on a Senator’s wall, how widely will that message be distributed through my friends’ feeds? What if the message gets deleted from the politician’s page – is there a way so that my network still sees that I posted it in the first place?) Presumably, staffers will keep their bosses’ profile pages sparkly clean; presumably, once they realize how disruptive these walls could be, many politicians would take them down entirely (although many others would learn to embrace it). On the other hand, future “political action” apps will surely augment the process and make the Facebook interactions between constituents and their elected representatives even more dynamic.

I hope to respond to Greg’s post on TechPresident – you can read the full post here.

Hacks / Software — 7 Comments
29
Aug 07

Practical Unit Structures

The beginning of the new school year always cuts down on writing time a little, so rather than posting another droning essay, I thought I’d share a few ideas that I’ve been thinking about lately.

Idea one: Web designers, Linearize online addresses. When you place an address on a website, it should be formatted as follows:

123 Main Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27514

rather than:

123 Main Street
Chapel Hill, NC 27514

Why? It is much easier to cut and paste the former, rather than the latter into Google/Yahoo/Live maps. The latter form of the address is optimized for letters and envelopes, while the former is optimized for online consumption.

Idea two: Let me schedule my cell-phone ringer. Everyone carries a cell phone to class – the students, the teachers, etc. I want to be able to program my class schedule into my cell phone, and for those times, I want my phone to vibrate, not ring. The problem I’m trying to solve is not remembering to turn my phone to vibrate – I can usually do that – but rather remembering to turn my phone back from vibrate to ring. If I can Bluetooth a video from my phone to my laptop, why can’t I schedule my ringer? It seems so elementary, but it is missing completely.

Teaching — 3 Comments
24
Aug 07

This Semester’s Course – Online Social Networks

I’m teaching my first course this fall – INLS 490.151 - it’s a course of my own construction exploring online social networks. Building a syllabus was an interesting (and somewhat nerve-racking) experience, but I’m pretty happy with the way it turned out.

If you’d like to check out the syllabus, you can find a link from the course website. I’m using a wiki to host the course materials, and we’re going to hold our online discussion inside a Facebook group I’ve created for the class. I’m pretty interested to see how that works out; I’ll likely write a little bit about it at the end of the semester. Unfortunately, no Facebook apps for course management appeared in the past few weeks, but I’m frankly pretty happy with the functionality of Groups (though I wish there was a way to upload items to groups). In addition to Facebook and the wiki, we’re using tagging to send resources back and forth.

Feel free to let me know if you have any ideas, suggestions or recommendations – this is my first time teaching so I know I’ve got a lot to learn!

Research — 4 Comments
21
Aug 07

Freshman Political Orientation, 2007 edition

It’s hard to believe, but today marks the first day of classes here at UNC. That means summer’s over, and it’s time to pull out a few of my familiar Facebook tricks. One of my old favorites involves looking at the political orientation of our incoming Freshman class.

Click image to see full-size version

This year, I was able to observe the political orientation of 1855 of our Freshmen out of the ~3800 (based on 2006 numbers) who enrolled. Granted, this is a Facebook convenience sample, but I don’t have much reason to believe any group systematically over- or under-represents.

So what do the stats tell us? While the largest portion of students are Liberal, there’s strong representation in both the moderate and conservative blocs. This data gets particularly interesting when we compare it against the past two years; while the conservative bloc remains substantial, in 2007 we see a (statistically) significant shift away from incoming freshmen identifying as conservatives. Here’s the data by year:

Political Orientation 2005 2006 2007
Very Liberal 4.85% 4.75% 5.23%
Liberal 33.05% 33.58% 32.29%
Moderate 27.77% 27.77% 27.01%
Conservative 26.44% 26.46% 22.37%
Very Conservative .86% 1.14% 1.56%
Libertarian 1.56% 1.39% 3.02%
Apathetic/Other 5.67% 4.89% 8.52%
Margin of Error 1.36 1.28 1.63

In case you’re interested in seeing the original posts, here are my studies from 2005 and 2006. I’ve included the margin of errors for comparison across studies; each year I’ve had to tweak my methodology to adapt to FB, but I’ve always counted the same essential element.

Considering the political climate, it certainly isn’t surprising to see lower affiliation with conservative causes; what is interesting to me is that the “Liberal” or “Moderate” block hasn’t picked up new supporters. To this extent, I believe we’re seeing an exodus from conservatives unhappy with their party, and largely without a party to support.

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