Posts Tagged: facebook

Noticed / Thoughts — 4 Comments
5
Mar 09

Facebook and the Death of Networks

InsideFacebook reports on the coming “opening up” of Facebook:

After Facebook’s press event yesterday announcing public profiles and the real-time home page “stream,” I briefly chatted with Mark Zuckerberg about the future of sharing on Facebook. Essentially, Mark said things are headed toward a hybrid model in which some information shared by users can be private and some information shared by users can be public, depending on users’ preferences.

This direction means users will need to think in new ways about sharing on Facebook. Historically, sharing on Facebook has been managed through Facebook’s robust privacy settings, with most of the default settings being set relatively strictly (usually limiting access to most information to others in your school or regional networks). Now, Facebook users will also have the option to easily share some information much more openly – even completely publicly for the whole world (and search engines) to see if they so choose.

While Zuckerberg said Facebook is still working on the user interface that would make such sharing settings robust and easy to use, these changes are going to have significant implications for the nature of sharing on Facebook.

Perhaps.  One of the stories that doesn’t get talked about much is the massive shift towards privacy in Facebook in the last few years.  In studies I’ve run, and in data I’ve seen, there is (and has been) a clear migration towards friends-only profiles in Facebook.  In my opinion, this is the result of 1) increased awareness and comprehension of privacy risks 2) context collapse and 3) the aggressive nature by which Facebook manages the community.  As I’ve written previously, Facebook’s users have adapted to this new reality, and accordingly enforce a high level of information control.  We’ve studied online community long enough to know that users won’t change practice simply because the community has new features.  To that extent, we shouldn’t expect Facebook’s move towards openness to radically affect the community.

I see this move as the death of regional networks. Facebook’s initial genius was to segment schools by network.  Schools are unique; they are closed communities full of individuals who interact daily, who share a strong common bond.  Because of this very strong group identification, Facebook users felt comfortable sharing and disclosing to other members of their school network.  When Facebook opened to everyone, they attempted to replicate this success by introducing regional networks.  As one might imagine, regional networks are vastly different from school networks.  There is no verification for entry, the networks are much larger and much less cohesive, and the group effects are meaningless.  Regional networks were simply an arbitrary segmentation so Facebook could keep up the master-plan nature of its community.

Fast-forward to 2009, and a few things have changed.  Primarily, lots of people have Facebook accounts.  Unlike college students who are heavily focused on interacting in their local, university network, older users operate without a focus on location or geography.  You don’t care about what network Bob from First Grade uses, because the nature of interaction isn’t about browsing Bob’s profile – it is about establishing a friend connection.  For older users, Facebook is much more about point-to-point use than browsing interaction (and if anyone wants to lament the “devaluing” of Friendship, they should consider how the system forces people into friendship to accomplish informational goals).  This nature of interaction has largely rendered regional networks and their privacy functions meaningless.

This takes us back to the original question – will all this new openness radically affect Facebook?  No.  Facebook’s contexts collapsed a long time ago.  Facebook is already open.  Users factor this openness into what they say and do, who they friend, and the privacy settings they maintain.  Sure, publicity seekers will like this new openness, but there may be a reverse incentive for other users.  This semi-openness may make users more findable, forcing more awkward friendship negotiations and context collapse, leading to reduced sharing of information (the lifeblood of Facebook).  This shouldn’t be taken as a criticism of Facebook, but just as a reflection of the social realities of a massive online system with real-world implications.  If everyone in the world was on the same listserv we’d behave the same way.

Upsides for Facebook?  This is a great chance to become a huge peer content-distribution network.  Take photo galleries.  If Facebook stepped their game up a little in photo galleries (hosting multiple size photos, offering printing services, etc), it could easily compete into the territory of Flickr, Kodak or Snapfish (Note: Why FB, with their 11 Trillion photos, hasn’t done this meaningfully yet is beyond me).  There are many valuable products that Facebook could provide via the public profile, any number of which are monetizable and provide real value (i.e. not just network value).  This would mark a serious legitimization of Facebook as a business – sort of like an inverse Google.  In the case of Google, you spread yourself over all of their services.  With Facebook, the individual would be the center of the network, and their profile could be a place for search, hosting, file sharing, chat/videochat, photo hosting, blogging, microblogging, and so forth.  As unglamorous as it sounds, there is still a huge market to be people’s webpage.

Noticed / Research / Thoughts — 10 Comments
18
Feb 09

How Facebook Should Address User Rights

Earlier today, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook would be significantly revising the new Facebook terms of service.  He writes:

Going forward, we’ve decided to take a new approach towards developing our terms. We concluded that returning to our previous terms was the right thing for now. As I said yesterday, we think that a lot of the language in our terms is overly formal and protective so we don’t plan to leave it there for long.

Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we’ll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms.

Of the changes, Michael Zimmer writes:

Consider their declaration that “We won’t use the information you share on Facebook for anything you haven’t asked us to.” Ok, well, I never asked to be opted into an automatic News Feed, nor did I ask to be a part of Beacon, but Facebook used my data for these purposes without my informed consent. Will they do it again? Will a more robust behavioral targeting system be implemented? Will I have asked Facebook to use my proifle data for that purpose?

Zimmer’s comments reveal the fundamental conceit of this discussion – what is “our information” in Facebook and where does it begin and end?  Put another way, it is easy to imagine a photograph we upload as “our information.”  But what about the pokes we send into the ether, or even more abstractly, the deltas between our logins as recorded by Facebook’s servers.  All of this is “our information,” and all of this information would be coveted by marketers.

I would like to argue that the idea of owning one’s information in the context of third-party systems is impossible.  “Our information” is used, reused, extracted, archived, analyzed, recombined, logged and backed up in so many ways by third-parties, the idea of actually owning it (meaning we could “remove” it at our discretion) is an impossibility.  More practically, if we did own our information, we would be able to do just as Zimmer states – opt out of Newsfeeds, control how our information flows through Facebook.  I don’t forsee this happening any time soon.

To Facebook’s credit, I believe the terms update actually reflected this reality of information ownership dilemma.  There are so many derivatives of information, the company couldn’t reasonably promise ownership.  Information almost inherently shape-shifts in technical systems; this information-derivation “problem” affects everyone from Google and Yahoo to the lowliest blog.

How can Facebook address this issue?  First, Facebook needs to move the discussion away from this overarching concept of “information.”  Facebook cannot truthfully promise ownership of all of our information, at least to the extent is passes a “removal” test.  Second, Facebook needs to study user perceptions of information in the site.  For example, HCI literature shows us a number of gaps between “observable” information and systems- or backend-information.

A user may consider her pictures as information, but they may not consider their attention data as information.  By understanding the user’s conception of information, it can more accurately craft a terms of service that reflects user’s needs.  Facebook is ultimately responsible to its users.  While policy wonks may deride a system that does not promise “absolute” control, Facebook should focus primarily on user conceptions of information and start building the policy out from there.

Facebook should also adopt the following practical suggestions.  First, Facebook should place a reasonable lifespan (eighteen to twenty-four months) on information users identify as important.  Facebook should delete my pictures within two years from the time I remove my account.  Simple as that.  Second, Facebook should work with a few policy and ethics organization to create a Facebook code of information ethics.  A few members of this organization would comprise an external board that could review and approve that new features are in-line with the code of ethics.  Finally, Facebook should hire an ombudsman.  The ombudsman should be hired for a contractually-tenured period and be given a blog on a third-party server.

Mark Zuckerberg talks about Facebook as if it was a country.  If Facebook were a country, it would more accurately resemble North Korea or China than the United States.  Facebook must move forward aggressively to institute better corporate and ethical governance.  Facebook is in a very critical phase, where a new audience is flooding in.  Investments made into protecting user rights will be recouped many times over.  However, if Facebook does not act aggressively, or it simply pays lip service to the problem (e.g., just creating a Facebook group), they stand to alienate this increasingly older, more rights-aware audience.

Noticed / Research — 2 Comments
16
Feb 09

25 Things and Social Motives

The 25 things meme on Facebook has garnered a good bit of press coverage lately.  I spoke to Pat Reardon of the Chicago Tribune about the phenomenon:

This reciprocity is a new, more democratic wrinkle in the autobiography game, especially useful on Facebook, where a “friend” isn’t necessarily someone you know well. These notes help friends learn about one another. In addition, they address a problem that has long plagued an American society in which people often move from one place to another.

Stutzman points out that many people older than 25 are using Facebook and these 25-things notes to reconnect with people from their past. These short autobiographies can provide a quick overview of the writer’s life.

“Maybe Facebook is filling a need we’ve never been able to fill before, enabling reconnection with the people we left behind,” he says.

Among recent adopters of Facebook, reconnection is a dominant activity.  As compared to college adopters who connect with their existing friend networks, older users are using Facebook to reconnect with friends they’ve left behind during life transitions.  In a sense, Facebook is enabling an ongoing virtual class reunion for recent joiners, something Classmates.com has long used as a profit center.

Regardless of age or recency of adoption, it is my opinion that social information gathering is a core activity driving use of a network.  College students use Facebook to conduct a fleshing-out of the identities of people they are meeting (i.e., they’re background checking new friends).  Recent, older adopters are engaging in the same behavior – they’re just fleshing out the last 25 years in which they didn’t keep contact with the connected individual.  Seeing pictures of the kids, reading the life story – these informational motives for use are just as strong among older users as they are among college students.  At the center of this phenonenon is a core social motive – people care about one another, and want to learn about/engage with one another.  Social networks afford us new ways to address this social motive at computational scale.

This analysis begs the question: what happens when we’ve reconnected with everyone?  As I wrote last year, Facebook is riding a network cascade, in which a certain segment of the population is incented to create a profile and articulate connections in the network.  Facebook can expect months of solid growth, and users can expect ongoing stimulation as individuals further out in their social networks reach out for reconnection (i.e., you’ll be looking at baby pictures of increasingly random ex-friends for quite some time).  But when it is all said and done, when we’re all connected, what happens?

To answer this question, we might turn to existing technologies that are used for connection and reconnection.  We’ve used the telegraph, telephone, email and IM (among many, many others) to create, restart and maintain relationships with people we care about.  We’ve all had the email or telephone reconnection with an old friend – after you have the getting-reacquainted conversation, is it really practical to re-integrate the individual into your life?  More often than not, it simply isn’t practical (especially if geographic distance is a factor).  This doesn’t take away from the wonder of reconnection and the warm feeling it produces – it just means that mediating technologies don’t change everything.  Our everyday needs and processes exist higher up in the hierarchy of needs, and reconnection and maintenance of an extended social network is time-consuming.

I say this not to take away from Facebook, but to view the current phenomenon through an historical lens.  We should note two key characteristics that differentiate a social network as a reconnector.  First, due to video/pictures/applications, an individuals profile can be much more information-rich than previous technologies allow.  Whereas you used to have to send pictures in the mail or email, one can browse endless galleries on a social network site.  This increase in “social presence” potentially affords a new, deeper connection for people reconnecting (and it certainly makes the process more efficient).  Second, newsfeeds have dramatically changed the nature and magnitude of reconnection maintenance.  A phone-call or email reconnection is 1 to 1, intentful and requires effort.  Watching old friends’ status messages a posted galleries breeze by in a newsfeed is a completely different experience.  This raises two questions: 1) Does the lack-of-intent of newsfeed maintenance negatively affect the sense of connection afforded by the technology?  2) Is there a point in time in which we’d rather be finding out information about our present cohort, i.e. do we eventually know “enough” about our reconnected friends?  You might be able to tell I’m working on some research in this area!

I mentioned Classmates.com earlier in this post.  It strikes me that reconnecting users of Facebook are using the service very much like the Classmates.com model.  Of course, the Classmates.com model is broken – it affords minimal meaninful social interaction, the site is frustrating, the service isn’t free, and it is spammy and evil.  That said, Classmates.com managed to sign up 40MM accounts (their report), largely based on this incredibly powerful social motive for reconnection.  Classmates.com is AOL when it was charging per the minute.  Facebook is AOL with a flat fee.  And because of that, Facebook will now completely eat Classmates.com’s lunch.

Noticed — 3 Comments
1
Feb 09

Post-Gazette on 35+ Facebook Adoption

This morning’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a trends article on adoption of Facebook by older users, featuring a quote from yours truly.

To friend or not to friend: That’s just one of the many vexing challenges confronting baby boomer Facebook users — the fastest growing demographic on a site that has exploded in popularity in 2008, growing 127 percent to 222 million visitors and ranked as the top social networking site worldwide.

Facebook has not released statistics detailing the ages of those new visitors, but nearly a third of Facebook users are between the ages of 35 and 54, according to Comscore, an online audience measuring company.

via OMG Mom’s on Facebook And so are a lot of boomers.

Thoughts — 2 Comments
5
Nov 08

Regarding the Facebook Effect

Over the coming weeks and months, the role of the internet and social media in the 2008 will be debated.  Wired News leads with the headline “Propelled by Internet, Barack Obama Wins Presidency.” Similar sentiment resounds in a New York Times piece entitled “The ’08 Campaign: Sea Change for Politics as We Know It.”  Joe Trippi, comparing Obama’s ’08 effort to Howard Dean’s, states “they were Apollo 11, and we were the Wright Brothers.”  In my writing I’ve tried to tamper expectations regarding the political effect of social media.  That said, I do think social media helped win this election, though not in the way one might expect.

Before we proceed I want to unpack (and delineate) the effects of the internet and social media.  To keep this post topical, I’m not going to debate the effect of the internet.  The internet proved to be a financial and informational juggernaut, powering both the Obama and McCain campaigns.  Obama was prescient to opt out of campaign financing, as the internet provided him a supply of funding that was simply unprecedented.  That was a huge factor in his victory, a point beyond debate.

The effect of social media is more nuanced.  Howard Fineman of Newsweek wrote of the Facebook effect, something that I’ve heard a lot about over the course of this election.  The Facebook (or YouTube, or MySpace, or … ) effects attempt to connect social media use with political participation.  Early in the campaigns, we talked about how candidates could use these tools to engage their supporters, how these tools had a potential transformative effect.  Comparing statistics on the number of candidate Facebook friends was a fun pastime, but one always wondered what the effect of this virtual support might be.

I’d like to present an alternative statistic for analyzing the role of social media in the campaign.  It comes from a 2008 Pew Internet and American Life Study entitled “Home Broadband Adoption 2008.”  The report finds that 55% of American homes have broadband internet, and that approximately three-quarters of Americans are internet users.

Home Broadband

Pew is careful to point out systematic underrepresentation of some populations (low income, elderly) in broadband adoption.  I read this as a broad swath of Americans having access to the full potential of the internet.  One reading of “full potential” is that more Americans have access to streaming video and all of the other nifty things the broadband internet can do.  Certainly, that is important.  What I think is much more important is the “everyday life” impacts of broadband access on the deliberative political process.

Social Networks like Facebook reveal our lives to one another in novel and interesting ways.  I’m able to friend you and watch your life pass by in a News Feed.  Because of the pragmatics of daily life I probably wouldn’t be able to keep up with that information otherwise.  A side effect of this is that I’m also influenced by you – your decisions about the information you share or the identity you create.  And in this very personal, important election, many of us chose to wear our beliefs on our sleeves.

This phenomenon didn’t just occur in online social networks.  Every time a relative forwarded an email, every time an IM friend passed around a YouTube link, every blog post you “stumbled” upon because of someone else’s social action – these constitute important influence processes.  And because the internet is now this vast place where most of us can reliably find those we care about, where we can connect with them in a variety of formats, the influence of our everyday acts now carry more weight.  The media we consume online, the information we push around is social – because social is the ends to the widely-adopted internet’s means.

This is not to detract from Facebook or Myspace or any of the countless participation efforts that were launched this year.  I’m sure these efforts paid dividends in many ways.  But Obama was not elected because of a “Facebook Effect.”  No, what happened is that the internet helped us pull the veil back on one another.  It provided us a panoply of channels to discuss and share our beliefs, sometimes with intent, and sometimes by complete accident.  It provided the third space for political discourse that the futurists talked about.  It is not surprising there was a moderating effect.  As we connect and learn more about one another, we’re finding ways to share our beliefs and find common ground.  It is in everyday activity, where the sharing of media becomes social and influential, we see the true political power of the internet.  While I’m convinced that plenty of people changed their votes because of knocks on the front door, I’m also convinced plenty of us observed our friends, were engaged by their support, and decided that pulling the lever for Obama couldn’t be all that bad.

Noticed — 12 Comments
15
Sep 08

When is a Social Network not a Social Network

Nicole Ellison highlights a new Facebook controversy – whether the site is a social networking site (a place to connect with and make new friends) or a social utility (a site designed to reinforce real world contacts).  This is a particularly strange and circular distinction; the idea that one can draw a boundary between types of friendships is particularly useless in our increasingly-mediated social milieu.

The reading of this particular controversy may be misguided – it appears that Facebook users were creating accounts to play a new game that encourages rampant friending.  While articulated poorly, it seems the problem is actually fake account creation, not rampant friending (though rampant friending certainly sets off spam alerts).  Anyone who has ever run a consumer internet company is going to side with Facebook on this issue.

The wording of Facebook’s response is interesting:

Please note that Facebook accounts are meant for authentic usage only. This means that we expect accounts to reflect mainly “real-world” contacts (i.e. your family, schoolmates, co-workers, etc.), rather than mainly “internet-only” contacts. As stated on our home page, Facebook is a social utility that connects you with the people around you, not a “social networking site”.

I find Facebook’s contestation of definition and purpose to be somewhat superfluous, largely due to the extremely limited agency on both Facebook’s and the individual user’s perspective.  Facebook was not shaped by a corporate mantra of utility; it was a simple stroke of luck that Facebook geographically bounded its networks to create “close” networks.  Abstracting up a level, the idea that 100 million users can be shepherded into a way of acting through policy is particularly ridiculous.  Jonathan Grudin’s (1998) classic CSCW piece would be the first place to stop for those who wish to understand the social shaping of technology.  At this scale, programmatic barriers enforce a simple framework, but norms of use are purely shaped in-network – not by edict, not by techno-utopian marketing language.

Grudin, J.  (1988).  Why CSCW applications fail: problems in the design and evaluation of organization of organizational interfaces.  In 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, New York, NY, USA, 1988 (pp. 85-93).  ACM Press.

Noticed — No Comments
25
Jun 08

Google’s Ad Planner, TechReview on Web 2.0 and Facebook’s Business Network

A few links for Wednesday morning:

The New York Times reports on Google’s new Ad Planner, a streamlined analytics client for ad buyers. TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld and SearchEngineWatch ask if Google Toolbar data is being used in these new aggregate data. I’m not sure why this is surprising or noteworthy – one would have to assume that Google is utilizing all of its identifiable data sources – Toolbar, Analytics, Adwords, Properties (yes, including this blog). Perhaps it is Google Toolbar’s unique scope of data collection that is interesting – unlike session- or cookie-based services that can only track you across properties, Google Toolbar allows for total monitoring. If you need a mental image, session-based tracking is akin to being caught on surveillance tape, whereas use of the Google Toolbar is like wearing the surveillance camera.

Technology Review has posted a new edition exploring Web 2.0. There’s a lot of content here to digest, including articles on The Business of Social Networks, Facebook’s technical architecture (a true skill of the company), Twitter, medical data and so on. Dive in and enjoy.

Finally, news that Facebook has partnered with Visa to create a network for small business. Obviously targeting Facebook’s emergent 35-plus population, you’re supposed to use the Visa network to schmooze business contacts and so forth. I’m not sure if this was leaked before embargo, because as I clicked around the Visa network on Facebook I got a bunch of 404′s. Even though this is the opposite of exciting, I’m going to keep my eye on this – a big success here could be a huge validation for Facebook. I’m skeptical, though; huge, impersonal idea and networking markets are often races to the bottom, as opposed to the spaces of proper discourse executives imagine.

Post-script: Check out Lilly Nguyen et. al.’s new invention, Twitflicks. Using Flickr images, Twitflicks visually represents public Twitters. Fascinating.

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