Posts Tagged: information

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 — No Comments
27
Jan 09

Reviews on new media practices

Mimi Ito’s team is posting reviews of new media practices to the Future of Learning blog.

For the past few months, I have been working with a team of researchers in conducting a literature review of new media uptake in different parts of the world. This work has been part of our work with the MacArthur Foundation Digital Media and Learning Initiative to understand the ways in which new media is intersecting with young people’s everyday learning. Our work thus far has been focused on the U.S. context, but now we are trying to understand how what we have learned relates to developments overseas.

We selected a set of countries where there are interesting developments in new media uptake, but there is relatively little research literature available in English. The literature reviews are broken down by country, with Cara Wallis taking the lead on Chiina, HyeRyoung Ok for Korea, Anke Schwittay for India, Heather Horst for Brazil, Daisuke Okabe and I for Japan, and Araba Sey for Ghana. We will be rolling these out in installments starting today and continuing through March. You can find the posts at our Futures of Learning blog.

via Mimi Ito – Weblog: International literature review on new media practices.

Thoughts — No Comments
30
Jul 08

Twitter, free-riders, and lived community

Yesterday, Twitter introduced some changes to their privacy model. Previously, if you employed privacy (kept your Twitters private), allowing someone to follow you forced reciprocation. That is, in turn, you were forced to follow your followers. Personally, this situation has always been troublesome: I’ve wanted to keep my Twitters private, mostly to prevent Google from indexing them – not because I’m sharing anything particularly salacious. However, as allowing followers had costs, I was forced to be selective about who was allowed in.

The particular costs of “fame” in Twitter are interesting, not only for their anachronistic nature (direct costs of fame on the web?), but the way they shape the system and uses. I’ve been forced to think of my Twitter stream as a budget. I may like you, and allow you to follow me, but if you post 30 Twitters a day you blow my information budget, and I’m forced to close the connection. I’ve wondered how the distributed cognitive processes of community have shaped norms around posting in response to budgeting. Since fame implies costs, and there is mutual understanding of these costs, have we evolved practice that shapes discourse to our information budgets?

Now that Twitter allows asymmetrical private following, it is interesting to think about how the site changes. At one level, Twitter becomes more like the rest of the web: when you subscribe to my RSS feed, there is no expectation that I’m reading yours. I can now “allow” high-producing followers without worry of my information budget. At face value, all of these things seem “good” and “normal.” It is also useful to think about the consequences of this change, as privacy practice has very literally shaped community in Twitter.

Dourish and Anderson, in the 2006 paper Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as a Social and Cultural Phenomena, describe privacy as a process, one “embedded in social and cultural contexts.” The authors present models of privacy – and I find the particular model of privacy as discursive practice applicable in the case of Twitter. The (admittedly brute-force) nature of privacy in Twitter has shaped our relations to one another, forcing the development of particular practice and strategies of community management. As fame has costs, our information budgets directly enforce our notions of community.

Interestingly, the costs of fame may have beneficial effects on community. To allow in private followers meant reciprocal information disclosure, a social information processing transaction. Within SIP, we develop our own strategies of reading-in, filtering, and information management – that is, we get to know our community. Like it or not, this forms tight bonds, feelings of closeness, and a unique form of community unlike others on the web. I don’t think that the privacy changes will disrupt community in a catastrophic way, but it is useful to think about how this reshaping of privacy to fit more “normal” patterns will shape the lived experience of those on Twitter. Our followers transform themselves from costs to free-riders, and privacy is reimagined from control of utterances and information budgets to simply control of utterances.

The point of this analysis is not to make value judgements about Twitter’s privacy practice, but rather to highlight how decisions about privacy shape the experience of technology. Dourish and Anderson argue that we should explore “privacy and security as social products rather than natural facts.” In this context, perhaps both the previous “forced reciprocal” and current “free-rider” approach to privacy in Twitter are equally arbitrary. Notably, the effects of either approaches on community will not be arbitrary, and this is the important takeaway for the interaction designer.

Cited:
Dourish, P. and Anderson, K. (2006). Collective Information Practice: Exploring Privacy and Security as Social and Cultural Phenomena. Human-Computer Interaction, 21(3), 319–342.

Thoughts — 4 Comments
10
Jul 08

Information Budgets and Shared Cognition

Compared to some people, I probably appear to be an extreme consumer of information. I follow a few hundred RSS feeds, 60-odd people on Twitter, belong to more listservs than I should, and so on. Compared to others – say uber-bloggers Robert Scoble or Mike Arrington – my information diet hardly registers. I’m always impressed by information omnivores, but I realize that my skills and time availability place me at a different space on the information consumption continuum.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about information consumption as a budgeting process. This is certainly not new – the earliest theories of information explored uncertainty reduction and budgeting. In the early days of the telegraph, Morse’s code, and the machines designed to use the code, were adopted because they transferred information more efficiently than Cooke’s machines. How we can fit the most information in the littlest amount of space/time is the essential challenge for many in the field.

Feeds – be they an RSS stream, Twitter or Facebook Newsfeeds, have driven the concept of budgeting home. Unlike an inbox, to which anyone has access, our feeds are managed, pruned, scoped and, most importantly, gatekept. When we subscribe to an RSS feed, or follow someone on Twitter, the information they send is equated into our budgets. If the person posts 100 blog posts or twitters a day, it is likely that we’re overloaded with information, that our budget is blown.

In the early days of Twitter, I noticed that my information budgets were consistently being blown. As new users joined the service, unaware of the norms and necessary economy of information, my personal information budget was a mess – I couldn’t keep up with the small number of people I tried to follow. However, over time, I’ve noticed a shift. Call it an acculturation, a calming, or perhaps an evolution – but information budgeting seems to have evolved among Twitterers. Of course, this does not apply to publicity-seekers, but I think that more or Twitter’s users are considering their followers information budgets when they cast off a new message.

Of course, short of data collection, I don’t have any way to prove my hypothesis, but it has stuck with me long enough that I thought I might investigate the cognitive underpinnings. In a chapter from Perspectives on Socially Shared Cognition, Krauss and Fussel write about Constructing Shared Communicative Environments. In a nascent communication environment, the communication process is influenced by the development of common grounds; our knowledge of our self, audience and context influence the communication processes. According to the authors, we “do indeed take the informational status of a listener into account” in creating messages.

In a face-to-face conversation, we’re always taking our audience into account. We watch for body language – rolling of the eyes, scrunching of the brow. These cues inform what we communicate and how we go about the communication process. How, then, do we read Twitter? Twitter is full of cues – we know who follows us, how many followers we have, we get direct messages. At the same time, Twitter is new. It is more a living discussion forum than it is a person-to-person IM conversation. With this new form, new behaviors must emerge.

Have we evolved our communication processes in Twitter? I think this is inarguable. We Twitter differently than we did six months ago, and new behaviors and fads are constantly emerging. But are we budgeting our communication, reflecting our desires for a more sensible information space? Has Twitter become more sensible to me because I’ve developed literacies, or have we simply decided that the space works better if we post less and stay on topic more? Again, I’m not sure this is happening, but I do think that our shared cognition – of our identities, the information budgets of self and others – affects our perceptions and behaviors.

The process of communicative evolution in social spaces is fascinating, and instructive for those who study information and communities. One wonders if processes of Gemeinschaft inform information budgeting, or vice versa. Krauss and Fussell note that our communication processes are continually informed by knowledge of audience and the rules of interaction. Notably, both of these are inherently evolutionary, a theory that fits nicely into our always-changing and ill-defined online spaces.

Hacks / Software / Thoughts — 13 Comments
28
Mar 08

Fixing Information Overload in Twitter

As someone who has started or run a few web projects, I’m used to the complaining blogger. And because of that, I try to stay away from being the complaining blogger. But I think that Twitter is about to drive me crazy with information overload, and I think I know how to solve the problem. So here’s a go.

Increasingly, Twitter has begin to feel like a collection of RSS feeds. My Twitter home screen is my personal newsreader. Unfortunately, it is completely dysfunctional. Some people I follow for personal reasons, some people I follow for work. Some people post often, some people once a week. I want to read every single message written by some people, and others can float by. Sort of like any other inbox, I guess.

If you’ve used Twitter, however, you know that all your messages go into the same place. Everyone is treated equal. There’s no method to deal with the information overload inherent in the system, there’s no way to mute over-Tweeters, there’s no way to have any control over the information space.

This may have worked in the early days of Twitter, where the interaction was supposed to be ephemeral – some messages you caught, some float by, who cares. Unfortunately, Twitter has grown up as it became more mainstream. People are saying “Did you see my Tweet” just as they would say “Did you get my email.”

We know how to deal with this: Folders, labels, mute buttons, regular expressions, etc. We need Tweetboxes, we need Tweetfolders to separate contexts, we need better strategies to deal with the information overload. And this is just in regards to incoming information – the multiple-audiences problem is another, more difficult problem.

Looking around at Twitter clients, I don’t see any that support such functionality. But I’m not really interested in using a Twitter client – I just want Twitter’s web interface to work. Let me create some folders, or tag my contact into a few different bins, so I could sort my incoming messages. A mute button would be nice as well, but right now folders (or labels, if you want to be Gmail-y) would really help. Look at the existing patterns that work with RSS and inboxes, and give us that. Because this current all-or-nothing isn’t the right answer.

Research / Thoughts — 11 Comments
11
Jan 08

Social Network Clutter

Over the past few months, I’ve found myself increasingly frustrated when I load Facebook. My Newsfeed is a cluttered mess of ads, application spam, and despairingly little real information about my friends. I’ve dutifully clicked the thumbs up/thumbs down icons hundreds of times, giving Facebook a decent preference set, but the problem persists. Newsfeed, which used to inspire me as one of the most innovative information spaces, has quickly lost its utility through this signal/noise imbalance.

When I talk to others, they echo my problems. Newsfeed is “spammy”, you have to squint to find real information. Personally, I’ve found that my visits to Facebook are down as a result – each time I log in it sort of feels like I’ve been given an inbox that’s full of spam and I have to sort it. That is not a good feeling. In an effort to improve Newsfeed (and argue the value of such information spaces), I thought I might work through some of the problems of the proposition.

The fundamental proposition of Newsfeed, like a head’s up display, is to project relevant information to the information consumer in a singular place. Implicit in the projection is editorial control, where certain types of information are promoted and others left to their traditional spaces. Relevance should always be the goals of these spaces; if they are not relevant they pose outlying ability to damage the product. If I am wincing every time I log in to Facebook and see a huge list of spam, it is clear that Newsfeed is damaging my impressions of the product as whole. Designers of Newsfeed-type spaces should understand and adapt to this reality.

Of course, the challenge of a Newsfeed is the multidimensional nature of relevance. You may want information about when friends have added new friends, and I may want information about upcoming events. Arguably, we’re all going to want some individual combination, and to that extent Facebook allows one to tune their Newsfeed preferences. The problem with tuning, however, is that Facebook fails to respect my preferences, sending me miscellaneous stories when the system lacks stories that match my preferences. These non-opted-in stories are spam. Imagine this scenario: you set up your RSS reader, and you read all of your feeds and mark them read. Then you update your reader, but there are no new stories. Instead of just telling you this, your RSS reader finds you a bunch of random stories from blogs you aren’t subscribed to. It’s a broken proposition.

Newsfeed was designed to keep you interested, to keep you logging in again and again. Each time you’d be greeted with fresh information. This is a failure of assumption. I recheck my newsreader after I’ve read all my feeds – people will naturally go back to good information sources, even if there isn’t much information there. We’d rather know that there’s none of the information we’re looking for than tons of the information we aren’t.

Facebook Social Ads Not That GoodTo add insult to injury, my Newsfeed finds itself increasingly inundated with advertisements, such as my favorite one that urges me to go to dental school (hey, maybe Facebook knows something my brain will only figure out ten years from now). Advertisements in the Newsfeed, be they social or not, are also a failed proposition. First of all, they completely lack context, which my brain involuntarily processes as being the least-important item in the Newsfeed. Second, they compete with “good” information. I’m much more likely to click on pictures of my friends than some random Verizon ad, and that’s just the way it’s always going to be. Finally, they pollute the feed, devaluing the information space. It’s as if Google included sponsored links in their organic search results. Any self-respecting Googler would be horrified at that proposition; yes, it would have been lucrative, but it would completely destroy the trust in that information space.

Unfortunately, Facebook’s already polluted Newsfeed, so I’m not sure the trust/value can be regained. And I’m also pretty sure that they’re not going to change their approach any time soon – this short-term revenue is eclipsing the long-term value of creating a useful information space. That doesn’t stop me from wishing for a revamped Newsfeed, one that followed my rules, acted like my RSS reader, and understood the value of a trusted, relevant information space. If Facebook really is in it for the long haul, the Newsfeed should be a space I enjoy, not one I wince at and try to avoid.

Noticed / Thoughts — 2 Comments
4
Sep 07

Rheingold on Facebook

Howard Rheingold, a guy who knows a bit about virtual communities, has turned bearish on Facebook. And you know what, I can’t blame him. Rheingold says:

I am getting half a dozen Facebook friend requests a day from people who claim not to remember friending me. When I complained in my status message, another Facebooker told me that the “Friend Finder” overrides user privacy settings and spams friend requests via users’ gmail contact lists. Between that and the really awful message board feature that renders groups near meaningless, I’m beginning to conclude that Facebook growth will start slowing, then stagnate, and eventually it will die a slow death. It’s too much work to respond to friend requests, too little ability to set my own boundaries, too many silly apps, and not enough return on the investment of my time. They seriously should have taken the big money when it was offered. If Facebook founders think they are going to be the “social operating system of the web,” they are delusional. They won’t even be AOL. It’s definitely an interesting fad at that moment, and if I ignore all demands on my attention, it can be a useful broadcast channel. But as an online social network, it’s sinking itself.

Howard’s point about “return on investment” is essential. Facebook distanced itself from competition because it delivered relevant social information in a sleek, efficient manner. As networks expand and my messages and newsfeeds get spammed, I get a lot less signal per noise. Facebook should refocus on delivering relevant social information without spam. There is a very clear inverse relationship between spamminess and information utility – FB should be mindful of that.

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