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Let’s Start Fixing Twitter – For Real

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It’s fair to say that for many mainstream users, the Twitter experience is pretty broken for anything other than celebrity stalking. It’s way too easy to make mistakes with serious consequences (DM for the fail), @replies are wonky, and #hashtags #really #OMG #canwekilltheseobnoxiousthings #JimmyFallon #JustinTimberlake #FTW.  Real-time translation is nice, but it’s the sprinkles, not the cake. Here are my simple fixes to the Twitter experience that I’d love to see happen:

Fix media tweets.

Here’s a recent tweet with an image link:
2014-06-13_1026

Why on earth is there a link, highly visible, to the exact page the user is on? This makes, literally, no sense and contributes to a cluttered interface. Fix this: removing all awkward links.

Eliminate character use for @mentions

Personally I’d question the 140-character limit at this point – it’s arbitrary and while limits are a good thing, maybe 200 is better? Maybe 250? Who knows? Frcing txtspk on nrml ppl is rlly annoying if u want their attn in the long run. Kthxbye.  Either way, using characters in communications means the system discourages people with longer twitter names from conversations, and further discourages users from having engagements with multiple people simultaneously. So @ESPN is rewarded, @BleacherReport is punished. And those poor @Kardashians. Fix this: each @reply only counts as a single character each.

So now I could write a tweet that could include @all @three @kardashians but those 22 characters would be reduced to 3, and I’d still have tons of space for telling them how amazing they are and make the world a better place. I mean, I don’t actually know what they do, but they wouldn’t be so popular if they weren’t somehow contributing to the greater good, I assume.

Ditto for hashtags and URLs

Before I go into whether or not I think #hashtags #make #sense, again if we want to see more engagements with more people on more topics, Twitter should encourage their use (and links), as opposed to discourage it. Even with a URL shortener (next topic), linking out takes up far too much of my precious character space. Fix this: each #hashtag and link only count as a single character each.

Auto-fix ALL link URLs with sensical content

I don’t want to see a bit.ly or an ow.ly or a t.co – ever again.

2014-06-13_1042

Why do we have to see these things? Beyond the possibility for malicious links, it’s just not necessary.  Fix this: The twitter “client” (web or mobile app) should replace all these links with either the full destination URL, or better yet, the Title tag of the destination page.

Eliminate “mistakes” in DM or @replies

In every medium but Twitter, mistakes are correctible before sending. Sure you might have meant to BCC your colleague instead of CC’ing them, or you accidentally hit reply-all, but these mistakes are in plain sight prior to hitting send. In Twitter-land, since one can create a DM via the Create Tweet button, it’s far too easy to make a mistake.

Screen Shot 2014-06-13 at 10.48.28 AM

Similarly, I’d make a big wager that even highly proficient Twitter users are unaware that tweets starting with an @reply are NOT seen by their followers in their own feed. So when someone wants to go on a “@brandname you destroyed my life” rant with the intent of public visibility, then wonders why there’s no retweets happening, they should be able to figure it out. Fix this: eliminate the ability to craft DMs other than by the “DM” button, and add a pop-up informing the user about their attempts at either manual DMs or @replies so they understand the consequence of the Tweet.

Fix Search & Hashtags

I am not an expert at search, but I accept that trying to search a colossal data feed that’s constantly moving and updating sounds like a big problem. And hashtags are just plain ugly. But either way, it is increasingly true that neither manual search or following hashtags is an effective way to get information out of the Twitter stream beyond a lot of noise. Fix this: you’re kind of on your own here, but you employ a lot of smart people – make this a priority.

Improve the Game Mechanics

Last I read the average Twitter user (who even Tweets, at all) has about a dozen followers, most of whom are likely just bots informing them about deals they could get on new iPads. There’s literally no way to “catch up” to people who started a few years ahead of them, and because follower count is so prominently displayed across all aspects of Twitter, the game mechanics inherently discourage becoming an active user. Fix this: there are tons of ways to improve the find & follow experience, which must become part of onboarding and daily use. 

Conclusion

I could go on a lot longer on little tweaks here and there. Twitter still has, in my eyes, a lot of interesting potential in so many different fields – but it just has to focus focus focus on product and user engagement. Trending topics is increasingly annoying, the new user experience is still mostly a disaster, etc. Maybe I’ll write another post, or leave it to you to comment here and add your thoughts. Then we can all tweet about it with hashtags and such!

 

My New Year's Tech Resolution: Quitting Real-Time

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Let’s take a long trip back in time.  Let’s remember a world where you were running a little late for a dinner date with friends, and you just showed up a bit late, no texts.  You got to the restaurant and didn’t check-in on Facebook, Yelp, or FourSquare (oh, and you didn’t even use Yelp to find the restaurant, or double-check that it has 4 stars, you just heard about it from a friend).  When the menu arrived, you read it, picked the item(s) that looked good, and placed your order, and if you wanted to know what was the most popular, you asked the waiter.  While waiting for the food, you drank wine and chatted with your friends.  When the meal arrived, you didn’t take a picture of it (or apply a filter) and shared with others.  If the service was lousy, you told the manager, not your Followers or Friends.  When you finished up the meal, you drove home, without using crowd-sourced GPS to get there.  And as a final note, at no point in the meal did you get interrupted by others sharing equally unimportant minutia with you, but if they really *really* needed to track you down, maybe you got a call.

If you are under 25 and reading this, the above probably sounds like a nightmare, but trust me, it wasn’t.

I think it’s time to admit that living in “real-time” is a bit of a disaster, and there’s tons of studies arising that lend evidence to social media (among other things) as problematic to society (here’s a funny take, but full of facts on the topic).  But you really don’t need the studies, just some common sense.  We’ve evolved over millions of years (or, as they teach in several US States – a few thousand plus some fairy dust) and until the last half a decade, the only thing that was really crucial to do in real-time was running from sabre-tooth tigers, which we were actually pretty good at.

Since I started writing this a few minutes ago I’ve received two texts and one IM – every one of which disrupted my writing and thinking.  Thankfully I had already closed my email client (something I plan to do much more frequently), and I have push notifications OFF for Facebook and Email on my phone.  But that’s a core to it: we’ve somehow made ourselves constantly interruptible, and I can’t see how anything good comes of it.  How do you think deeply on anything if your pocket is buzzing, the corner of your screen is flashing, and other little whooshing and tweeting sound effects keep rolling by.

If you are reading this and thinking “that guy’s just an old-fuddy-duddy” (which, to be fair, no young person today would ever actually say), and you are also patting yourself on the back because YOU are a great multitasker, go take a break from this piece, google “multitasking myths” (or just read this) and then come on back.  Bummer, eh?

And it’s not just about getting stuff done, as that too is just massively overrated.  It’s about a lack of peace and calmness. When do we take time anymore just to do nothing.  Even standing in line for a coffee (which is, of course a take out coffee, since there’s no time to just sit in a cafe and enjoy a hot cup of coffee in a real cup) everyone’s on their phones, doing stuff.  The human brain actually needs time, every day, just to do nothing and process all of the events that are transpiring (great article here on “doing nothing”).

So what am I doing?  Focusing on purposeful activity, single-tasking, and shutting down virtually anything that expects me to deal with it imminently, as there are truly very few events which can transpire that I must reply to in real-time.  Somehow I doubt this will negatively impact either my professional or personal life in any way.   This doesn’t mean I won’t use services like Yelp, Twitter, Facebook, IM, and the like – it just means I’m getting a lot more comfortable turning them off for long stretches.

My focus in 2013: Enjoying the moments, and having them for myself – not others.  Enjoying the view, not the retweets of the photos. Enjoying the funny/cute/silly kids, not worrying about grabbing the camera, nor counting the likes or comments.  Enjoying walking into an unknown restaurant, ordering anything I like, getting delighted by it, and telling a friend about it some other time.  Sorry real-time, I’m pushing pause.

Can Social TV Survive Without Appointment TV?

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This is the image you get if you do a google image search for "world record".

So the Grammy’s unsurprisingly (I will explain why I say it that way in a moment) set all sorts of records for social TV.  Just like the Superbowl did a few weeks ago.  Just like the ___ did a few weeks before that. I call this a big yawner, but first, some definitions:

  • Appointment TV: a TV show where the majority of the audience is watching live.  The 5 primary examples are Reality Shows (American Idol, Amazing Race, etc), News (CNN, uh… CNN Headline News?  I don’t know, televised news is just propaganda in my opinion anyway – but I digress), Sports (mostly hockey, particularly the Canadiens), Events (Oscars, Royal Weddings, etc), and “big episodes” of scripted television (Lost Series Finale, Game Of Thrones Season 2 Premiere, etc).
  • Catch-up TV: everything that doesn’t fit into Appointment TV above.  Literally.  Every “typical” episode of every “typical” show is in the catch-up category, which means there is no particular driver for someone to watch it anywhere near to real-time.  This is why I’m still on Weeds season 5, Entourage season 6, etc, and will catch up on things like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and others whenever I find the desire.
  • Social TV: let’s do this SAT-style.  Social TV : TV :: Social Media : Web.  In other words, it’s a nebulous mess of “stuff you use things like Facebook and Twitter to do while watching TV”.  It includes hashtags, check-ins, second screen, likes, and is a big jumbly undefined thing.  And I have no problem with that.

So why do I say things like “unsurprisingly” and “yawner”?  Because this is a burgeoning activity.  We are at the very earliest stage of people using second screens whilst (yup, whilst) watching TV.  I myself tweeted a couple of times during the Superbowl (really during the ads):

This is an infinite increase over last year’s SuperBowl.  I didn’t watch the Grammy’s, but had I, I likely would’ve tweeted.  And this isn’t just about me, it’s a pretty universal trend.  Why?  Because Twitter, the platform we are using to measure Social TV as a concept, is still growing.  So anything measuring a growing service with growing use and calling the outcome “record-setting” is really just fulfilling an exercise in redundancy.  Every new instance of appointment TV tweeting will outpace all previous instances, until Twitter stops growing.

But really, that’s all just a sidepoint.  My issue, concern, and question, is whether or not there’s any value whatsoever in any of this for catch-up TV.  Do I care about tweets someone sent during an episode of House from last year?  Or last week?  Or even 10 minutes ago?  I don’t, and I don’t understand why someone else would either.  Nor do I care about what someone is watching right now unless I too can (and should) watch the same thing, at the same time.  Heck, I hate seeing the promos to text in my vote (to Top Chef, my guilty pleasure show) when I’m seeing an episode 4 months after it aired.

I don’t see a solution to this conundrum.  To be clear, I’m not questioning will social media impact TV behaviors – that will certainly happen. Further, as evidence is mounting that catch-up TV is growing steadily and will inevitably outpace real-time/appointment TV, I see the window somewhat shrinking for what’s currently called “Social TV.”  But that shouldn’t really surprise anyone, as it’s such an early stage in the evolution of TV.  And if you think about it in evolutionary terms, TV is just learning about making fire now, and the wheel is probably a few years away…

Path: To Trust or Not to Trust?

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privacy fail

In a nutshell: Path, a facebook-like social networking app, recently found themselves in hot water after a programmer discovered they’re uploading your entire address book to their Web servers when you use it.  Mike Arrington’s proposed solution is they should “nuke” all their data (and as disclosure, he’s an investor in the company).  My initial reaction is this is absolutely correct, but doesn’t necessarily address my real concern – moving forward, can I actually decide to trust Path or not?

I am in the “no photos of my kids on Facebook” camp.  Why?  Because Facebook has demonstrated a fairly deliberate motive to not keep my data private.  The company actually believes privacy is “Dead” so why would they even care about this kind of a thing?  They don’t, and that’s their decision, and since I think privacy is alive and well, I make the (easy) choice not to share anything about my children there (for so many reasons, but here’s one if you need it).  Enter Path.

When I first tried Path (and by the way, it’s one of the most beautiful apps I’ve seen for my iPhone), it seemed fairly clear they were pretty dedicated to privacy and your “real” social network.  Initially you were limited to 50 friends, and all sharing happened within the confines of the app itself.

Now, the 50 friends limit is up to 150, the app enables sharing to Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms, and, lo and behold, there’s a privacy fail.

One can quickly look back to Facebook and say “privacy fail = no big deal”, unless, of course, your value proposition is around privacy!

As they say, it takes a lifetime to build trust, and mere moments to utterly destroy it.

Path is at a crossroads.  They must decide what they are, and what their stance on privacy is, and they must do it imminently.  If they want to be “the social network you can trust”, they have that opportunity.  But they are on the verge of squandering it.  Which leaves them as “the social network that’s not Facebook or Google+” and in that mode, I can’t imagine them doing more than just eking it out if they continue down this… wait for it… path.

I’d love to see Dave Morin (Path’s CEO) use this moment to step up, make a public statement on what the company’s vision is and what they stand for.  I for one hope they don’t choose… poorly.

We Need a Digital Do Not Disturb System

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I don’t need to write much “backstory” on this one.  Thanks to the technologies that pervade our lives, we are in a hyper-connected world.  But methinks it’s too much, and the blame lies solely on us, but all of us and in two different ways.

  1. We let ourselves get interrupted.  Multitasking is basically a lie, nobody’s good at it, and it’s proven unproductive.  If you have multiple windows doing different things, bottom line is you are getting less done.  Further, we leave our ringers on, have pop-up alerts for lots of things (from meeting notifications to Twitter DMs), leave our chat/IM programs open, have email checking once a minute, etc.
  2. We interrupt others.  Sending a chat request, a text message, a DM, etc is, in effect, an interruption on someone else’s time.  I loved Jeff Jarvis’ post on how we need to redefine “rude”.  The problem right now is, we’ve all accepted so many interruptions as “the norm” that we are imposing it upon others, and expecting them to react to our whims.

We need to fix this, and soon.  And I don’t mean for the “decreased productivity” factor – Americans especially have gotten far too focused on how productive we all are.  Here was Bobby Kennedy’s famous quote on measuring productivity:

“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armored cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

I think we’ve all tolerated these interruptions because we are chasing these false ambitions, and perverting the concept of productive to “work all the time, letting anything interrupt me, because it makes me seem/feel busier and therefore more important and more productive.”  I suggest we stop it.  And, since I’m human too, I’m going to state that I am fairly guilty myself, but I’m working on it.

I want a “do not disturb” app.  I want it to run on my desktop, iPad, iPhone, and laptop.  I want it to let me control when I’m interruptible and when I’m not.  I want it to work in a “polite” way, so nobody thinks I’m avoiding “them” but can be properly informed that I’m using this block of time to work on something specific.  I want it to let someone override in case of emergency, and I want it to mesh with my schedule.  I don’t need it to be very “smart”, it doesn’t have to “learn”, it just has to work.  And yes, I know it’s impossible, and this is unicorn territory.

But what I can do in the meantime…

  • Shut down Tweetdeck and start using Twitter when I want to, not worrying that I’ll “miss something” because in all truth, real-time is irrelevant for 99% of our personal and professional lives (unless you are actually in the media).
  • Turn off all notifications on my iPhone.
  • Close Skype and Adium except for when I want to chat with someone (which I’ve hopefully scheduled already).
  • Close mail, only checking it a few times a day – and move all “rapid back & forth” email conversations to the phone.

I have no idea how to do the above 4 things and actually make it work, but I’m going to try.

ps – my official interruption count while writing this was: 3 incoming texts, 1 twitter DM, 1 Skype instant message, 1 appointment reminder, and a Words With Friends update (I won – yeah, baby!).

My Top 10 iPhone Apps in 2011

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Sharing your favorites seems to be the hip thing to do, so I thought I’d share my absolute favorite apps on both my iPhone and iPad (not including any default iOS apps).  These are basically the apps I use all the time, and really enjoy using. There’s also quite a few apps I use daily, but might not like as much, as well as apps I think are amazing, but only use on a very infrequent basis.  And there are also apps I don’t much like and rarely use, but I didn’t really see the point in including those…

One other note – I picked apps from all categories, including games, social, etc. Also, I didn’t deliberately pick 10, it just worked out that way.  First up – iPhone fave’s (in no particular order, btw).

Chef’s Feed

Chef’s Feed is a fun app for foodies (wannabe foodies as well).  The app has a list of the “top” chefs of a city, and said chefs have picked their favorite dishes (not restaurants) to eat.  The app lets you make a bucket list of dishes that appeal to you, and also is a handy way to find a good bite when you aren’t sure what to eat. Free app.

Words With Friends

It’s like Scrabble, only more “balanced” so players at many levels can really enjoy the game.  Vocabulary and knowledge of “Scrabble words” is very helpful, and tile placement strategy is essential to win, but regardless, it’s possibly the best non real-time game time waster app out there. Free and paid versions.

Camera+

It’s a good photo taker, but more importantly it’s a fun photo editor/filter.  Simple effects, easy cropping, and simple sharing (though I wish they’d just let me send images instead of creating a whole new link/web system). Paid app.

Test Flight

Simply put: Test Flight lets app developers send you their apps prior to putting them in the iTunes App store. It’s great for previewing or testing out apps in development. If you are an app developer and are not using Test Flight, you should start now.  Free to consumers, paid by developers.

GrubHub

GrubHub is an app that replaces all the crappy little delivery menus restaurants leave on your door (though hey, free rubber band).  They have tons of local restaurants, plus in-app ordering, and, as pictured above, an order history which makes it super convenient to remember where you liked (or hated) to eat.  Free app.

Starbucks

Yeah, I know, cliche, whatever. You prefer Blue Bottle, great, so do I, but $12 for a latte that takes 45 minutes to make doesn’t always work out for me. The Starbucks app does one main thing: let me not have to carry my Starbucks card around.  Nice.  Free app.

Flashlight

Guess what this app does?  Free.

Temple Run

After Words, Temple Run is the next best time-killer game I know.  Basically, you run, and run, and run, and then run a bit more.  You jump, duck, pivot, and you turn yourself around, and that’s what it’s all about.  Free.

Pandora

Free personalized radio on your iPhone.  Any questions?  Nah, I didn’t think so. Great for road trips.  Free.

Zite

Gosh I love Zite.  Zite brings me articles I want, on topics I like, and does so with sickeningly good accuracy.  While Twitter (and vis-a-vis Flipboard, Pulse, etc) are great for bringing me feeds on a variety of topics, the one thing these apps fail to deliver for me is topical content based on my interests, not my followers or those I am following. I open Zite, I find content I like.  Life is good. Oh, and – free.

That’s my list of favorite iPhone apps, hope you enjoy.  Here’s the quick list of “runners up”:

  • Plants vs Zombies – it’s fairly new to me, I’m having fun playing but I’m not sure how long it’ll hold my interest.  Could be a winner, not sure yet.  Paid.
  • WhiteNoise – self explanatory. Free and paid versions.
  • Flixter – movie lookups (solid app, just don’t get to see many movies).  Free.
  • IMDB – satisfies inner movie nerd needs. Free.
  • Path – just started experimenting.  Beautiful app design. Does all that Facebook stuff, only without the massive invasion of privacy.  Also, just for your real-world friends (you remember those, right?). Free.
  • Twitter – read description of Path above.  Now think the opposite of it.  Free.
  • Yelp – great to look up restaurants I already am thinking of going to. Not useful as a restaurant recommendation/finder app.  Free.
  • CardMunch – take picture of business card, scans it, sends to the Internet, comes back as LinkedIn contact.  Previous version of app was notably better than current, but still works great. Free.
  • Expensify – if you do a lot of business expensing, you must have this app.  Free.
  • Sonos – controls my Sonos.  Would be on the must-have list, but I know not everyone has a Sonos.  Free.
  • AppShopper – great app, lets you create a “wishlist” of apps you want, then notifies you when they go on sale.  Free.
  • iHandy Level – it’s a level.  comes in handy.  Free.

Anything you think I should check out – leave a comment!  iPad version of this list coming soon!

ps – I’d include Dijit, but that’s cheating. 🙂

7 Simple Ways To Improve Twitter

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Last January I wrote a post “Will Normal Folks Ever Use Twitter?” in which I decried the service from a “regular” person perspective, including the new user experience, search, etc.  It’s been almost two years, we’ve seen change of CEO, product team, engineers, lots and lots of cash, and #NewTwitter, but in my opinion, it’s far from enough.  I’m of the mindset that if Twitter cannot get it’s collective product experience together, their growth will flatten, and usage will recede amongst several populations (great post on that over at AllThingsD).  Here are some of my thoughts on how to improve the Twitter experience:

Eliminate URLs and @Users from 140 character limit
Twitter announced their official URL-shortener is here to stay, which is fine, but I think it’s a poor experience for all users.  Instead, I’d prefer to see a URL and an @User take up a single character each of the official limit.  It makes no sense, even in “tight” communication/messaging, to count against a link or a person simply due to character length. Twitter’s system should ingest all URLs and @Users and only count against the usage, not the length.  Further, all twitter clients should auto-expand the URLs, and preferably replace them with the title of the target website.  Here’s some examples:

whats your opinion on Google+ versus facebook and twitter?  do you think they’ll be able to “win”? @harrymccracken @Scobleizer @jlouderb @jlanzone

Is currently 147 characters, and I as a user would probably remove the 2nd half of the question to tie in the names.  Instead, removing the 39 characters “wasted” on the usernames would make the tweet legit.

i think this is the most important news of the day, everybody should take a moment, stop what they are doing, and read it.  http://bit.ly/p7Ez3c

The above is 144 characters, but of them only 6 were needed to uniquely identify the link, and 14 were a waste.  Further, if the above were auto-fixed by a twitter client, they’d know better than to click on the link.  Suckers.

Make Search Work
I’m not sure which is more useless, searching on twitter.com for something, or trying to stop getting printed catalogs from Restoration Hardware. It’s been more than a decade since Google figured out search, why can’t twitter?

Autocorrect Error @-Replies and DMs
Twitter only really has two “commands” and both can be done so wrong so easily.  That’s like having an iPod that doesn’t always play music when you pushed the play button.  Twitter should intercept tweets “gone wrong”.  Not only would this improve the product experience for all its users, it would probably save some famous people from incredibly embarrassing moments.  That said, perhaps this is just nature’s way of weeding them out?

So if twitter “sees” a tweet like “D @username” or “DM username” or ” D username” or anything *even close* to an almost-DM, the client should prevent it from being sent without a Yes/No pop-up dialog.  Same thing when a user starts a tweet with an @, since I still believe even experienced users don’t realize those tweets are fairly hidden.

What could possibly go wrong?

Offer Multiple Views
Lists are definitely a great way to view tweets, and the media views are good, but realistically they are barely a band-aid on the massive problem: separating signal from noise.  Twitter needs to offer a lot of new ways for me to view my twitter streams.  For example, how about letting me select a few users whose most recent tweets are simply always in my timeline.  Or how about showing me my stream based on which tweets have been retweeted at least X times.  I use Tweetdeck to separate numerous topics, but there’s so much more that could happen here.

#Explain #Hashtags #Somehow
OK, so a hashtag lets people tweet about one topic, and really only seems to exist because of the brokenness of Twitter search (see above).  But most of the hashtags I see make no sense, and even clicking on them doesn’t exactly “answer” the question of why they exist. How about having users “register” a hashtag for a period of time?  Even if multiple users do that, it’d be fine.  Then when a new user clicks on a hashtag, they can see all the “terms in use at present” to close the loop on it.

Eliminate Trending Topics
When was the last time a single trending topic was actually useful to you?  That’s right, it was never.

I'm sure I'd learn a lot by clicking on these...

Help Manage Contacts
Ever get a DM from someone, try to reply, but can’t because they aren’t following back?  That’s not user error, that’s product design error.  Users shouldn’t be allowed to DM without following the target themselves. Alternately, at least inform the user they aren’t being followed back…  Also, why can’t I easily ingest LinkedIn and other contacts into the people I follow?

In Conclusion

The reality is I could keep going.  I could explain why 140 characters is arbitrary at this point and should be bumped up to ~200/250 without “damaging” the service.  I could talk about how they should fix username squatting issues.  I could talk about improving integration with other Web services.  I could talk about fixing the RT/Retweet issues.  But then I’d have to write more, and that would far exceed my character limits.

When Will Facebook Fail?

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Just like governments, mixing “creativity” with “banking”, taking naked pictures of yourself and hoping they won’t end up on the Internet, and well, this stuff, tech companies have a certain inevitable amount of failure built-into them.  Sure, IBM, Xerox and Motorola have existed for many decades, and both Microsoft and Intel still have dominant positions, but if we really think about the “powerhouses” in technology today (Amazon, Facebook, Google, and Apple), they are all fairly young (I’m using the argument that Apple effectively reinvented itself in the late 1990s).  And if we look ahead even 10 years, it’s hard to argue those four will hold they same positions they do today.

Little known secret? Sony guts.

Of the four, I’d personally assess Google and Facebook as “most vulnerable” to obsolescence (just a hunch, I’m sure I’ll be ridiculed in the commentary for such a statement), and with the points made on “why Facebook’s the new Yahoo!” by Mike Elgan and Mathew Ingram, I thought I’d write up a little somethin’.

First and foremost, I see Facebook as in no way similar to Yahoo!  Not even a little bit, I’d barely even figure out how to compare the two companies (other than the “.com” at the end of their URLs).  The key thing, beyond whatever “Facebook.com” is all about, is that Facebook is unarguably the most well-distributed and deeply integrated service on the Internet.  According to Nielsen, Facebook users spent 53 billion minutes in May 2011 using the site – and this does not count Facebook-integrated features on other websites.  The Facebook “social graph” is at/near/above 700 million users at this point.  That’s a lot of the Internet.  A lot.

My God. It's Full of Likes!

I don’t see Facebook dying due to “stale technology” – they aren’t about technology (other than scaling, etc).  They aren’t about UI/UX (tip to FB: the “clickable thing” in an update should be the action/verb, not the user nor target/noun).  Most of the typical norms of a website’s laws of gravity simply don’t apply to them, due to the massive inertia they’ve built with their userbase. Further, the inertia of existing social graphs make growth of Google+ and Twitter effectively irrelevant – I think speculation that “Facebooking” will shift to a different social network is extremely hard to substantiate.

I used to take the “cool club in town” position on Facebook, and the moment it wasn’t “new” and instead full of B+T crowds, it’s popularity would sink and people would move on.   But I don’t think this argument holds up anymore, Facebook is too popular in too many demographics and the “cool kids” are “over” the fact that their lame parents are there as well.  It’s like the mall – just because Dad’s shopping at Eddie Bauer isn’t stopping the utes from hanging out in the food court.  I know it too is easily picked apart, but I think the mall argument works really well as a parable for Facebook.

Why does the one in the middle look so. much. older?

When you want to open a Gap, and you want customers, you find a mall.  Orange Julius? Mall.  Crappy replica furniture Bombay Company? Malls.

What’s the online equivalent of that?  Facebook, Likes, Facebook Connect, etc.  Facebook is the way brands are engaging with customers online.  And this is just making them even stickier.

I just hope there's a kiosk with a crazy lady selling mystical gems.

So how might Facebook fall?  A few thoughts…

  1. Massive shift to mobile interactions – Facebook’s weakest point at present is its mobile presence.  If the world continues its mobile/social/web path, I believe Facebook has less to offer that ingrains it so deeply in the traditional browser/web world.  Without the stickiness across mobile apps (especially with the iOS shift to Twitter and Android’s inevitable equivalent with Google+), they could be highly vulnerable.
  2. Massive revolt on social networking – At present, our society is unfortunately radically focused on narcissism and fulfilling ego problems.  This may (please, please, please!) change, in which case folks’ll have much less desire to share every (useless) nuance of their (mundane) lives with their friends/acquaintances/people they kinda met once.  If these patterns ever emerge, you can put Facebook at the top of the chopping block as it’ll become the target of said pushback.
  3. Massive elongated platform failure – Whether its by hackers or internal problems, a significant outage of Facebook and its related services could cause things to unravel in a significant way.  I’d wager that if a Facebook Connect downtime prevents users from logging into websites/apps for more than a few days could cause the digital equivalent of a bank panic by both the web services and the end-users themselves.
  4. Massive rapid shift to post-PC platforms – Similar to (1) above, if the shift from a computer-based world to a tablet iPad, phone, connected TV, and other device world happens, and Facebook can’t provide the same “glue”, they’ll be vulnerable.
  5. Massive privacy breach – When I say massive in this case, I don’t just mean Facebook makes some (typically) poor decision regarding consumer rights/privacy, I mean something really awful happens, and its very public, and its entirely due to Facebook.  Like, huge act of terrorism on highly visible people entirely tied to something that was Facebook’s fault.
  6. Unknown – This would be the deux ex machina of today’s post – something otherwise unpredictable comes along and clobbers them over the head.

It’s hard to predict the end of giants or eras.  But that they will fall and whither away is predictable.  Curious to hear any other people’s thoughts on the topic in the comments below!

Introducing the Future of TV newsletter and Twitter list

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Now that I’m “back in the game” so to speak, I’ve spent the past few months creating a few tools to help me find industry relevant content.  A few of my peers have asked to take a glance “at my tools”, which I found shocking at first, but soon realized what they were talking about.  As such, here they are:

1 – the Future of TV newsletter

Inspired by my colleague Jason Hirschhorn‘s excellent “MediaReDEFined” newsletter, I’ve set up a newsletter that’s just me curating news in the “Future of TV” space.  Topics include Social TV, Connected TV, SmartTV, Second Screen, Four Screens, OTT (Over-the-Top), Cord Cutting and just about anything else that comes along that way.  It’s a fully manually curated production, so you should expect anywhere from 2-20 or so article per day (substantially less on the weekend).

Sample excerpt:

The Difference Between Connected TV, Social TV and Expanded TV (TribecaFilm) | Talk NYC

Posted: 19 Aug 2011 01:39 PM PDT

With television moving onto different platforms, it seems like nowadays we can watch TV everywhere. What is the ultimate future for television in a world that expects more from their
The Cable Customer’s Bill of Rights

Posted: 19 Aug 2011 01:39 PM PDT

Over the past few days, we’ve received more than 1,000 horror stories about bad cable experiences: tales of bad techs, terrible service, and troubling billing practices. We used those to build a cable customer’s bill of rights.

Hope you find this useful, click here to subscribe.  And don’t forget to tell all your friends!

2 – the Future of TV Twitter list

The best way to really *use* Twitter (other than pure self-promotion, narcissism, and stalking purposes that is), is to organize people into “lists” that tend to tweet about a given topic.  Even then, it’s an easy bet that said list will still contain it’s fair share of lunch-related discussion and reality TV show spoilers, but it’s still better than the pure noise of your regular Twitter stream.  I’ve culled a list of people who tend to be more likely than not to tweet about something having to do with the future of TV.  It’s not perfect, and it’s probably still missing some folks.  Here’s a sample:

Note that this is *not* a list of all companies or people in the Future of TV industry, and Twitter accounts from companies such as Miso and GetGlue are conspicuously absent – but this is because they aren’t really tweeting about TV, and are tweeting about TV shows themselves (not to pick on either company – and if there are Twitter accounts from them, or others, that are more germaine to this topic, I’d be happy to include them here).

I’ve also embedded this list into the sidebar of the blog, so you can follow along from here if that’s easier.   Or click here to see the whole list in action.

Hope either of these are useful tools to anyone in this very fun, very fast-moving industry.  Happy to take any feedback or suggestions as well!

Spoiler Alert! How To Avoid Secrets, Surprises and Twist Endings Online

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Warning: Spoilers Ahead (for real).

For a time, twist endings, surprise cameos or cliff hangers were shocking secrets that were not discussed in the media. Psycho ads even asked movie goers to “not give away the ending.” Ah, that was nice.

Then, around the time of “The Crying Game” and later “The Sixth Sense,” people and media began to publicize clever plot twists (in my opinion the “big secret” of The Crying Game was that it was a pretty lousy movie). This lead to an environment where viewers went in to movies aware that there was going to be a “shocking twist ending.”  On the small screen, virtually every show seems to end with “scenes from the next episode” as if we viewers need some teaser just to watch the following week’s episode (heightened to its worst moment ever by having Heroes show a preview of a scene later in the same episode during a commercial break – like I was about to change the channel, but ooh, cool, now I won’t just to see that little gem.  come on.).

Now, with the rise of real time media, it seems that no secret is safe anymore. CNN Showbiz recently tweeted that Ricky Gervais will make a surprise cameo in “The Office” later this season. The blog post mentions a “top-secret cameo, which was shot in September.”

Awesome. Now I know it’s coming. No spoiler warning. Nothing in the headline that hints at a secret that is getting ruined. Just a leaked secret that can not be unseen.

If I am already an Office fan, viewing that tweet, blog post or headline made my experience with that show worse. I know that the “secret” cameo is coming so the surprise and delight that would accompany an uncredited, unspoiled cameo by Gervais is gone. If I am not a fan of the show then I have no reaction to the headline. It is just news (sort of), as opposed to a leaked secret.

The bottom line is that there is no upside to broadcasting spoilers as news with no warnings attached that tell people what is coming. Sure, some small segment of fans or potential viewers will be gratified by the news, but the large majority of other fans and casual observers will either be spoiled, upset or indifferent.  In my opinion, treating audiences this way is, in a word, disrespectful, as if we are just so flippant that the only way we can possibly like your content is by knowing what’s coming.  Some of us just like you for what you are, not what you will be.

Another example of real time media and spoilers comes up frequently in sports. Readers of this blog know that I am a big hockey fan and support the Montreal Canadiens (Go Habs!). Living on the West coast means I watch all games timeshifted, and have done so for over a decade.  At first I just had to ignore my family calling me after/during big games – that was easy.  Over the past couple of years they’ve learned (somewhat) not to text me either until the next day.  But between the terrible UX surrounding the otherwise awesome NHL Gamecenter Live (Web and iPad app both default to showing scores, not hiding them) and the official Twitter accounts for the teams and sports services, I have to close multiple windows just to avoid getting score updates!

It is easy to point fingers at Twitter and say that real time media and 24-7 micro-broadcasting has erased our right to be surprised by films, television and sports. But I don’t see this as a technology issue. This is a personal issue. Why do so many people have the desire to spoil things? We all should reexamine our Netiquette in this regard. How can we live spoiler free in a media saturated world? The answer is not more tech (a top of mind easy solution is the creation of spoiler accounts (ex: @CanadiensMTL and @CanadiensMTLScores) and spoiler free accounts for social TV clients, or splitting up fans by time zones). The answer, for me, at least, is more conscientious communication when it comes to disclosing spoilers, secrets and plot twists (the first rule of Fight Club is…).

I think this issue is sure to grow and gain more media attention with the rise of social TV. For instance, how do you avoid a twist ending or a season-finale cliff hanger on the west coast if all of Twitter is sending out the  the ending as soon as it airs back east? Expect even more on this topic as Connected TVs take off and “Social TV” heads toward the mainstream.

11 Things You Should Never Do Online

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Did you know you could lose insurance benefits from putting photos online?  Or that a Tweet can put you in jail?  Or that the FBI might be friending you on Facebook?  Or that even brand-new service Chatroulette isn’t truly anonymous? I’ve blogged recently on my concerns about privacy trends, and it’s quite the hotly debated topic these days.

I see two primary reasons why you shouldn’t do something online:

  • Personal Harm/Loss
  • Future Regret

So without further adieu, here’s 11 Things You Should Never Do Online!

  1. Show your goods. One would think this would be obvious. One would imagine that an individual would not normally choose to show their private parts to the entire world, presuming they are not in the adult entertainment industry. It took me less than a minute on Chatroulettemap to find a picture of a naked guy, and his hometown (pictured here, safely edited by me). Here are some NSFW pictures found on Facebook. Why shouldn’t you do this? How about “decency” or “self-respect”? I wouldn’t even call it prudish to say there is a reason for the phrase “private parts” and some things are simply best left out of the public eye. Leave it to the pro’s, people.  Nobody’s going to be walking around when they are 80 years old saying to themselves “I sure regret not showing my penis to the entire world.”  Unless they have some kind of exceptional penis, that is.
  2. Meet a random stranger in a non-public location. As a child I was taught not to get into cars with strangers.  Of course I was also using public transportation as of age 8, but I don’t think that’s too contradictory.  We’ve heard numerous stories of people meeting strangers via sites like Craigslist, then bad things happen.  I have no problem with online dating services, but use some common sense people.  How about having 2-3 dates in public before you decide to even reveal your home address (assuming you haven’t done so already online – see more below)?  Why shouldn’t you do this? Pretty much goes without saying – and while there will always be creeps and they will always find methods of doing terrible things, but how about not enabling them to occur so easily?
  3. Publicize travel plans. Be it foursquare, brightkite, gowalla, plancast, tripit, dopplr or anything else, the concept that an individual would specifically tell anybody in public that they aren’t at home is something I personally find mind-boggling.  Whether it’s a simple burglary (or much much worse), there’s no greater bait I can think of for a wrong-doer. And to think that all criminals are simply too stupid to figure this out is somewhere between ignorant and elitist. Heck, teenagers in the UK find empty swimming pools with Google Earth, and thieves last year used it to find and steal koi fish from backyards.  Why shouldn’t you do this? It doesn’t take extreme paranoia or a DVD collection of Law and Order to come to the simple conclusion that these activities are asking for trouble.  Combine public records with services like plancast and twitter, and you have the equivalent of a “how-to rob me” service that you are proactively choosing to use – it’s gonna happen.
  4. Share identity-revealing data. Over 9 million Americans have identity theft issues every year. Why on Earth would you make it easier for them?  Further, one of the easiest methods of gaining access to an identity is through simple human error and naivete.  If you put personal information, like say your credit card activities, proactively into the public eye, you are asking for problems.  And unlike physical thieves (per the above point), phishers currently use technology to steal information.  You want to put your phone number in public? Fine! Get a Google Voice account, set up a redirect, and use that.  But don’t put the same number you have to authenticate important personal records! Why shouldn’t you do this? Actually this should be the opposite question – why oh why would you put private data out in public? If I can’t get you to stop buffoonery, fine, but at least be on the watch for things that can impact your finances and credit score!
  5. Ignore privacy requests/needs of others. It’s perfectly legal to take pictures of people in public. It’s also perfectly legal to put those pictures in the public spectrum (so long as you aren’t profiteering from their likeness).  But that doesn’t mean you have to.  Some people prefer to keep their lives completely out of the public eye, and they have the right to do so (despite what many social media bloggers would like to say).  Just because you choose to publicize your life doesn’t mean everyone else has to as well.  Furthermore, and more specifically, parents should rethink what pictures they put online in public or semi-public locations.  Maybe your kids won’t want those pictures to be accessible one day when they are older – and I can guarantee they’ll have a tough time taking them down.  The oh-so-cute moments in the bath might be funny to reveal at a wedding or bar mitzvah (both private events, mind you), but how about during their sophomore year in high school, to the whole class? Not so much. Why shouldn’t you do this? It’s inconsiderate – and that’s enough of a reason.
  6. Reveal vices. My healthcare company is raising our rates 35% this year – despite no claims or major changes of status.  Their business, in a nutshell, is to profit as greatly as possible, which they accomplish by (1) raising rates, and (2) giving out minimal claims/benefits.  I will say the following unbiased and bluntly: it is in their interest to find evidence of you smoking, drinking, and otherwise acting recklessly because it lets them profit more. If I were you, I’d make sure there were no tweets, status updates, or anything else containing “So drunk I almost fell down the stairs” or “Onto my 2nd pack today. Boy these Marlboros are smooth” etc.  Why shouldn’t you do this? If you don’t think insurance companies, healthcare providers, or other “big brother-like” organizations will use social technologies to raise rates or otherwise increase profits, you are just fooling yourself.  Drink, smoke, be merry – and just enjoy it with the people you are actually spending the time with (they’ll probably appreciate it too).
  7. Mock those you may do business with. A famous PR exec once tweeted disparagingly about a magazine his firm had to pitch.  The editor in chief saw the tweet.  An ad agency salesman on his way to pitch a client openly mocked the city in which that client lived. The client saw the tweet.   Disparaging a potential (or existing) client is generally speaking, not the way one gets more business from said client.  The whole concept of doing things in public means anyone might just see them – including the people you are trying to get to spend money on you. Why shouldn’t you do this? How about… “livelihood”?
  8. Sound like a schmuck. Per the above point, you never know who is going to see the words you write. Your “witty banter” with an old high school friend on Facebook might not sound so clever to a potential employer.  I’ll be the first to admit that I am a cynic and an outspoken one, and I am certain this colors peoples’ opinions of me. But I also do my best to sound objective and educated about whatever topics I’m talking about.  While I’m sure I’ve tweeted things I shouldn’t have, or left comments on blogs that could be misconstrued, I generally make a concerted effort to consider my commentary and how it would be interpreted by a complete stranger (though I could still use improvement myself).Why shouldn’t you do this? Your words will come back to haunt you – how about just not saying them in the first place?
  9. Publicize your partying or let your friends put up embarrassing photos/videos of you. The most famous example I’ve found so far involves a swimmer and an arbitrarily-banned substance. Whoever took that picture is, in a word, a jerk. Not as big of a jerk as whomever made this happen, but a pretty big jerk nonetheless. But when you compare it to the amazing amount of inappropriate stuff you can easily find with simple Google searches, you really start to wonder if the entire concept of self-respect has gone out the window.Why shouldn’t you do this? A future employer? A future spouse? Your kids one day? Your grandkids? How about anyone you want to not massively unimpress one day.
  10. Be inconsistent with your real life claims. If you call in sick, stay offline! Let’s face it, lying consistently can be challenging – it’s something you really have to work hard at. So if you are going to call in sick, you probably shouldn’t update your Facebook status or tweet or do anything else that conflicts with your claim. I recall the classic “which tire?” tale from university lore, only dramatically more impactful with public timelines and social presences.  You should also know that when you take pictures and upload them to sites like Picasa or Flickr, the actual day/time is logged in that photo somewhere as well. Why shouldn’t you do this? Hopefully you don’t need me to tell you not to lie or otherwise make false claims in the office space or personal life.  But if you are going to, try to tow the line with your online presence as well.
  11. Assume you are not being recorded. We decided at the office to try playing Chatroulette last month. Every time we used it, we recorded our session (using freely available screen capture tools), just in case something funny/outrageous happened (and it did, and no, I won’t be sharing with the group).  Your web history is recorded by Google (if you are logged in).  Facebook knows everything you’ve done.  Most Web sites store your IP address along with the comment you leave.  The Internet Archive stores copies of just about everything. Your cookies have privacy flaws. When you do something on the Internet, it is there to stay. Don’t forget it!

The funny thing (if there is one) on the above list is if you were to ask your grandparents if you should do any of those things, they’d give you one of those “what’s wrong with you boy?” looks.  But instead here you are reading my blog because it’s actually a topic.  Them kids today…

Your Privacy Online: The Internet's Greatest Bait and Switch

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There was a time when things like decency, self-respect, and privacy mattered, and that time was not too long ago. I’m not going to spend this post lamenting modern society abandoning the concept of self-respect, poise, decency, and other things which seem practically alien in our show-all, tell-all, midriff-sporting, trampstamp-pride (yeah, I hate the word too, but it’s appropriate) oriented culture. I may seem like one heck of an old fogie, but I’m talking about a time I remember that was less than 15, maybe even 10 years ago! With regards to the “living near the bottom” mindset America seems stuck in, I think (hope) it’s just a natural cycle and it will just get better in time. But when it comes to the privacy topic, I’m more than disappointed, I’m near outraged. And I’m going to point some fingers.

It’s hard to say when and where we decided to give up our rights to privacy online. Note that I’m focusing to the online world, and have no commentary regarding people’s ability to do things like steal credit card receipts, dumpster dive, or other methods of specifically targeting an individual, as these take concerted and directed effort. One could argue the entire concept of the “social web” might be in exact defiance of personal privacy. Some of the early players (this is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all things social on the web!), in semi-chronological order:

  • Geocities – instead of, well, not really existing online, you can have a home page! Unquestionably the first time people chose to give up personal privacy for some flirtation with Internet fame – but – it was at a time when there was little “networking” from one site to another, so a given person’s home page actually was it’s own disconnected “island” on the Internet (as opposed to the inherent connected nature of services like Facebook). Geocities deserves special mention for being the first (but far from last) time an individual could not only create their own customized page, but make it extremely ugly and hard to read. Privacy impact: moderate.
  • Delicious – instead of keeping your favorite bookmarks to yourself, share them with the world! The reality of the potential harm here is fairly low, as one still has a local bookmark capability through the Web browser AND one can easily choose not to share a bookmark they don’t want shared. Privacy impact: negligible.
  • MyBlogLog – instead of being able to read a blog post in relative anonymity, a “footprint” is left of the trail you have as you surf various blogs. Again, this is extremely opt-in, however, the mere enablement of this plug-in on a blog meant a third-party could specifically “follow” you as a unique Web surfer. Privacy impact: low.
  • Flickr – instead of having to manually share your photos with your friends/family, automatically upload your photos into the public eye unless you specify otherwise. Flickr represented a massive shift in thinking, and I’d personally argue it ushered in the concept of “live in public” to the masses. Example search for pictures that are probably going online without consent of those who are actually in the pictures. Privacy impact: major.
  • Friendster – technically not the first attempt at social networking, but the first one to bring it to a wide spectrum of users. I honestly don’t even remember what I did on Friendster, other than befriend the fake users others had so much fun creating (except for the management team, who clearly thought using the Internet for anything fun was a bad idea). Friendster marked the first time people really paid attention to “numbers of friends” as a metric of importance (ah, the implacable human ego). Privacy impact: moderate-to-low.
  • YouTube – Take Flickr up a notch, by enabling anyone, no matter how dreary and boring, to have their own special place to upload pirated commercial personal videos. Prior to YouTube one was judged purely on their attractiveness (based on the best-looking picture of themselves ever taken, regardless of how long ago), but now we could take every embarrassing, awkward, and goofy moment we have, and immortalize ourselves online with it. It didn’t take long for YouTube to be the haven for people falling off skateboards, failed catapult launches, or (one of my personal favorites) take the video of your friend accidentally hurting herself and further embarrass her by putting it on the Internet – but don’t worry, she didn’t bleed or anything (now that is a great example of friendship!). Privacy impact: major.
  • MySpace – It’s like GeoCities, but now with 10 times the ugly, and more ways to connect than ever before. Originally started as a way for bands to connect with their fans (and for fans to connect with each other), MySpace evolved (or devolved) into a haven for bizarre methods of self-representation, a lustfulness for comment-writing and a bizarre desire to have as many friends as is humanly possible. Today it’s a bit of a “black sheep” in the social networking world, but still has millions of people sporting the most outrageous color schemes (oh look, it’s red-on-red, hey thanks!) and online “bling” imaginable. Privacy impact: massive.
  • Blogging – While there’s no specific technology at play here, the notion that one and all could have a “web log” aka a public diary became very in vogue in the latter half of the aughts (you know, the decade that just ended?). Blogs were key to creating the illusion that one’s deeper thoughts should be shared, in written form, with the world. Since there’s actually a decent amount of work required in order to blog, and most blogs are rapidly abandoned, on an individualized basis it’s not a big deal – except for those who go overboard. And yes, I do get the irony of this blog post. Privacy impact: minor-to-major (highly self-inflicted!).
  • Zoominfo – You might not have heard of this one, but ZoomInfo.com uses all the content it can find about you to build a profile of who you are (or might be) – screenshot is below. On the plus side, they will allow you to effectively delete your profile, and it’s really focused on your business “identity”, but if you ever needed an example of how scary the concept of being stalked online is, this is the one. To be clear, the company itself is not doing anything wrong, they are simply finding information about you through completely publicly available sources, that’s the scary part. Privacy impact: N/A – they themselves merely aggregate stuff.
  • Twitter – Without analyzing use of the service, Twitter is just a “public update” one can make, in 140 characters or less. Not a big deal. However, the cultural shift one is inclined towards after deep adoption of the use is where the problems show up. For those who actually use the service (which is not the majority of Twitter’s users), there is a sensation wherein it becomes more and more challenging not to share things. And for those with poor critical-moment-decision-making skills AND a lack of extreme discipline, Twitter is the ultimate tool in accidental self-representation online. Self-censorship is a difficult thing, and a tool like Twitter makes it way too easy to accidentally tell a lot of people something you’d rather have kept to yourself (and yes, we can make the argument that people should just be better about how they Tweet, but that’s like blaming bullets for shooting deaths). Privacy impact: massive.
  • Foursquare, Gowalla, and other location-based services – Take Twitter (above), now apply it specifically to enable you to proactively tell the general public where you are at a given moment. This plus the free white pages is about the easiest way in history to explicitly tell thieves when your house will be unoccupied. Granted it’ll take a bit before the average criminal gets quite so sophisticated, but the mere concept of it should be giving you the willies. And if it doesn’t, check out Blippy. Privacy impact: so high it’s amazing anybody uses it.
  • Facebook – The grand-daddy of them all. Over 300 million people use Facebook today, one could call it an individual’s “hub” of personality on the Internet, not to mention the best place to buy fake farm animals and even throw sheep at each other – awesome. Now when Facebook first launched, it was for (and from) college kids only – us old folks couldn’t even see what crazy fun was ensuing inside the closed doors. They then opened it up for anyone to use, however all activities were “private” within Facebook – only your “friends” (a term the service has effectively destroyed) could see your activities. This notion of privacy is what got people really using Facebook to share personal moments en masse. Facebook then, and this is the worst part, threw that precedent out the window. Facebook not only shares your content, updates, photos, friend lists, and everything else in public, it does so with the entire world! Privacy impact: words don’t describe.

I want to make sure I explain my premise again properly, as by now I’m sure some people just think I’m a loony laggard who doesn’t “get it”. I get it. I get how we’ve been tricked. I see it very clearly. Let’s face it, Friendster was clearly the “gateway drug” which led us down the path to sharing crazy intimate details in the public eye, and thinking how it’s expected. Heck, it was an easy path to follow, and it played into so many people’s desires to feed egos – finally it could be done unilaterally! The Internet basically enabled the individual to be famous. And if it’s not clear, fame sells – and sells well. But it’s at a cost – simple google searches showed me information like prominent bloggers’ home addresses, birthdays, and other data that makes identity theft (an actual real crime) something so easy that a clever hacker could probably write a web program to do it automatically.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg even went so far as to say something to the equivalent of “that if he were to create Facebook again today, user information would by default be public, not private as it was for years” (source). Guess what Mark – you might not be at the helms of a huge company had you made that choice. I hear a lot of industries afraid to make certain decisions because of the “slippery slope” they lead to. Well, it’s happened, and there’s really no one company to blame. Sure, each played their part, and some more aggressively/offensively than others, but let’s face it – we all got suckered in.

Please note and be aware – your privacy has been in violation for a long time. Public records show home ownership details, birth certificates, licenses, and much more. These have been available to the lowest bidder for quite a while. I view this as a different (albeit serious) issue, as none of these are opt-in privacy flaws. But just because someone can do things like dumpster dive to find your most recent credit cards statements does not by default imply that one should sign up to Blippy and voluntarily throw this information info the public eye. Further, I’ll completely acknowledge that I am just as guilty as many others for living in oversharing mode – but I guess the first step is being aware that there is a problem.

I read today (I’ve been working on this post for a while, so the timing is a little ironic coincidental) that people are starting to give up social networking for a variety of reasons – privacy being one of them. I don’t know if that’s necessary, but I think it’s certainly understandable. What I think is more important is for people to make certain choices about the public scrutiny they choose to live their lives under.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO?

  • Make sure you are personally aware of the various nuances and ramifications of each of the services you use (for example, did you know that your status updates on Facebook will, by default, be seen not only by your network, but by their networks as well? – here are some tips for improving your Facebook privacy settings – go do them immediately upon finishing this reading).
  • Think about how your choices to proactively share can impact not only yourself, but your family, coworkers, and friends. Take into consideration that you might think it’s adorable to put up a photo of your kid in some embarrassing moment now, but they might not appreciate it when they are an adult and it’s still on the Internet (and it will be)!
  • Don’t forget about the future you – who may not want to have the world know about some incident better left in private.
  • Finally, consider your real objectives. Do you actually care about Twitter followers? Does it matter to be the Mayor of your local Starbucks? Of course not, and there’s nothing wrong with having some fun and frivolity – but remember that it all comes with a cost. When you proactively give up free information, companies are profiting from it.

Your privacy is an asset. Take care of it.