My friends think I’m crazy … overreacting. I’ve gone and done it, though.

I’ve deactivated my Facebook account.

My privacy settings were set to be as restrictive as Facebook allows, and I still didn’t feel comfortable with it. Not because I have anything to hide, but because I don’t trust Facebook to not use my information (and that of my friends) for evil, or even to adequately protect it.

What’s the big deal? Like me, you might be thinking, “I have nothing to hide. Who cares if Facebook collects personal information and sells it?” That’s a fair statement; pretty much every large company we do business with today does that. The problem here is that Facebook tells us that we can trust it, but then it repeatedly changes the rules on us to suit its own needs. Facebook is within its legal rights to do this, but that doesn’t make it right.

I have a friend whose identity was stolen a few weeks ago via a Facebook exploit, and he’s in a living hell now. Facebook’s new Instant Personalization pilot is so controversial that it’s being debated on the floor of the US Senate, and the latest change — switching your interests to keyword links that you have to individually opt out of — is a completely transparent user-hostile move. A few months ago, Facebook changed the privacy defaults to be completely public (in other words, not at all private) and pitched it as an improvement to their privacy controls. In fact, those privacy controls are so convoluted (and it’s hard to imagine that it isn’t intentional) that even when you think you’ve got it locked down, there’s a good chance that your friends don’t, and they could be sharing information about you.

Google’s mission statement is to “organize the world’s information,” and their motto is, “Don’t be evil.” What’s Facebook’s mission? Where do they stand on being evil?

Actually, we know Facebook’s mission statement: “Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” Of course, back in 2008, it was: “Facebook helps you connect and share with the people in your life.” It’s certainly not “to be the best place in the world to connect and share with friends and family,” even though that’s what Elliot Schrage, vice president for public policy at Facebook, claimed it is in a recent New York Times article.

Though Mr. Schrage points people to view his Facebook profile and compare it with Mark Zuckerberg’s, at the time writing his profile comes up as a missing page. What happened, Elliot, share a little too much information, maybe? If you need to get a better understanding of your privacy policies, check out this info graphic in the New York Times that shows the more than 170 possible options you can set.

Given the changes Facebook has made over the past couple of years, what new surprises do the folks there have in store for us? Clearly Facebook feels the power of having such a dominant online community. As they say, power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

So, yeah, I’m taking a break from Facebook for a while. First, I want to see if it’s possible to live without the big FB. Then I’ll decide whether it’s a good idea to live with it. I already know which way I’m leaning.

Of course, even if I do decide to completely delete my Facebook account, Facebook will keep my personal data and continue to mine it.

I don’t expect anyone to follow my lead. I do, however, urge you to think about whether you think Facebook is deserving of our trust. Is Facebook a good steward of our online (and increasingly offline) identities and information?

If Facebook was a person, it would be one who can’t keep a secret and talks about you behind your back.

Would you stay friends with a person like that?

Jason Clarke did it first, and now I feel the time has come for me to say goodbye to Facebook.

For me, it started getting creepy when I kept getting status updates from people who are not even my friends, and who have no idea they’re broadcasting their status to “friends of friends”.

Sure, you can control that through the privacy settings. But how many people actually know all 170 privacy settings?

There’s a huge difference between reading bad things about a company, and witnessing it yourself in the UI you use every day. And that’s where it crosses the line for me. I mean, whenever a company does well (and Facebook is doing very well), there are detractors crying out about how evil it all is. Usually, this is just a knee-jerk response to a company growing large. I think that on some basic level, some people just don’t like large, successful anything.

But today’s Facebook actually has a split personality; on the one hand, it puts on a super-friendly, smiley-happy face for newcomers and non-geeks. On the other hand, to prevent your personal information from getting all over the place, you need to be a super-educated and “paranoid” geek.

Since when did privacy become “for geeks only”?

And it’s also a matter of trust; Facebook has an interesting habit of opting users in to all sorts of new schemes. I suddenly found out I was included in their information sharing scheme with other sites. I just randomly discovered this. I’m just plain sick and tired of having to watch over Facebook’s shoulder every day, trying to figure out what they added or changed to make my information more broadly available.

The bottom line is that it’s just not worth it, at least for me. Goodbye, Facebook.

To that end, however, I do wonder how I will deal with this little ditty about Outlook taking in social networks. With iStreamPlanet Boss Mio being such a fan of all things Redmond, of course we use Exchange and Outlook so there’s pretty much no doubt that as soon as Outlook 2010 drops, we’ll have it all at our fingertips.

On the one hand that could be great – not having to log into all the networks each time. But I can also see a real danger in it, both from a productivity as well as a privacy standpoint. In the article, Terrence O’Brien writes “The question is whether or not developers will be able to make the marriage seamless and unobtrusive. Let’s just hope we won’t have to train our spam filters to start blocking Facebook updates.” Touché. Guess I’ll have to download the Outlook Social Connect beta and find out for myself. Speaking of LinkedIn – if anyone knows of a GIS job opening in Honolulu, Denver or Des Moines, shoot me an email (no joke).

[insert Dr. Evil laugh here]

OK, seriously, nothing against it but to this day I still don’t really see the point and despite incredible efforts and even more incredible simplification, it’s still confusing. So nah nah nah!

And to my students (and former students) who’ve put in invites…this should obviously signal why I am not on it. It’s also a violation of school policy to engage in fraternization. And yes, virtual still counts. See you in class instead!

Grads, catch me on LinkedIn instead.

It’s no secret that social networking as a whole fascinates me, but in a different way than most.  To this day, frankly, I still haven’t figured it out.  I’ve been in this game long enough to remember SixDegrees and watch the MySpace explosion, see the mess that Second Life and Facebook are becoming and now, there’s Twitter.  At least with SixDegrees and MySpace there was an actual theme, and even with Second Life and Facebook I can almost understand why, but Twitter is a conundrum in itself.

Being the professional that he is, I couldn’t say it all any better than he did, so here is Mr. Ridley’s post/comment:

At the risk of sounding like that old guy in Gran Torino telling those “young punks” to “get off my lawn,” it’s gotten to the point that whenever I hear somebody talking about Twitter or twittering or tweeting it just makes my little tummy want to hurl.

I haven’t tweeted once in my life, but I’m sick of hearing about it already. What once may have been the cool way of letting a hundred people know that you’re about to go mow your lawn now has the feel of a used-to-be-fresh means of communicating. So yesterday, like two-way pagers. And AOL.

To be honest, I think tweeting jumped the shark long before ultrahip CNN got into a Twitter match against superdown Ashton Kutcher. Back when politicians started live-tweeting responses to the president’s demi-State of the Union address, Twitter had already taken on all the cool of your mom getting a tattoo.

I imagine, I hope, twitterers are ultimately headed for the social networking retirement home that’s the current residence of Second Life and MySpace.

But my real issue with social networking sites isn’t their faddishness.

It’s the hypocrisy that goes with them.

We claim to be a nation of people who take our privacy very seriously. Just mention the idea of warrantless wiretaps and expect to get hit up with a congressional investigation.

But give somebody an avatar and a URL, and he can’t tweet, post or hyperlink enough personal information about himself to as many people as possible.

Seriously, does valuable broadband space need to be taken up with announcements in that creepy Facebook third-person-ese that “John is enjoying two-for-one margaritas with the rest of the IT Team at T.G.I. Fridays”?

Where is the expectation of privacy anymore? Or, more correctly, where is the expectation that people will keep their private nonsense to themselves so that those of us who still like to communicate personal information with one person at a time don’t have to get caught up in somebody else’s e-mail circles or listen to their one-sided cell phone conversations?

No, I don’t know what’s hipper; to Facebook or to Twitter. I just know for me, personally, discretion never went out of style.

To be sure, Mr. Ridley, like myself, operates a blog which most people view no differently than Twitter might be, but there is a distinct difference.  For him, the blog isn’t an outlet for sharing personal details and interacting in a social sense so much as it is a platform for discussing social concerns where technology comes into play, just like this blog is a sounding board for issues that affect areas that I teach.

Of course Mr. Ridley’s post was lambasted almost immediately in the comments.  The one that got my gourd was “I say keep your old-fashioned opinions to yourself and off the air.”  There is a certain virtue to old fashioned opinions, and just as the person who wrote the comment feels it appropriate to air his discontent over the post, Mr. Ridley certainly has the right to voice it.

[read "Keep Your Tweets To Yourself" here]

To wit I ask – do we really spend waste that much time reading blogs?

As more and more major newspapers fold, in the face of dwindling advertisers and subscribers, bloggers are usurping their roles in record numbers. According to The Wall Street Journal, over 20 million people now blog in the United States. Of those, 1.7 million earn money doing so, while 450,000 primarily earn their livings through the blogged word.

Those statistics indicate that there are now more professional bloggers than there are computer programmers or firefighters. Career bloggers now also rival attorneys in number, which leads us to a question. When bloggers outnumber lawyers, who is going to file all of those libel and slander suits?

The authors, Mark Penn and E. Kinney Zalesne, investigate some intriguing aspects of this journalistic shift. For instance, they ask whether or not bloggers deserve an official union, along with health and unemployment benefits. They also manage to throw in a few condescending and elitist shots at the blogosphere, accusing bloggers of having “limited standards and, for most, no formal training.” It must be humbling to lose readers to the unwashed, untrained, and ethically-challenged masses.

Maybe, the unemployed, professional journalists, with their high standards and firm grasps on ethics and morals, can go back to law school to even out the attorney-blogger numbers. Regardless, our primary concern is with this blogger’s union becoming a reality. We’re ready for our union-mandated break. [From: The Wall Street Journal]

Nonethless, it’s pretty indicative of the way things have gone, the power of the social media and the possibilities of the future.  With several regular jobs, I find it tough to make time to even post once a week (obviously) but then again, I don’t get paid for it either.  I think it would be pretty damned interesting to know what that would be like.  Do pro bloggers whose primary income comes from posting have the same worries about hitting deadlines as traditional journalists?  Or does the laissez-faire attitude change that perspective as well?

In the meantime, inasmuch as I would love to be able to post on a daily basis here as Jen does on her blog, I guess I don’t really have much of a point in doing it except to keep exalting the virtues of good web design, better user experiences, and DRM.  I must be kookoo.

Recently WebTrends blogged that Twitter search will now be listed in the standard search engine and keywords report in WebTrends. Omniture has also blogged about integrating Twitter search data into Site Catalyst.

As Twitter increasingly becomes a tool that people use to find information it is really critical for companies to know how people are finding their sites on Twitter. Doing so will allow them to incorporate that learning into future marketing efforts on Twitter as well as other sources (e.g. Google etc).

Since Google Analytics does not yet recognize Twitter search as a search engine like WebTrends or Ominiture does, I will show you how you can do it easily with one line of code.

However, keep in mind this solution only works when the search originates on Twitter (i.e. http://search.twitter.com). 3rd party tools like TweetDeck, those will not be captured in this solution (nor will it, I believe, be captured in WebTrends’ solution). Use this information to understand general search keywords being searched on Twitter but do not get caught up in actual number of visits that your Twitter efforts are driving.

So how do you capture searches conducted in Twitter?

GA provides a few functions to allow you to add your own search engines to the list of search engines that are already tracked by GA.

_addOrganic(newOrganicEngine, newOrganicKeyword)

You simply call this function right after var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXX-X”); This functions to track any custom search engine.

Twitter uses “q” as the querystring that contains the keyword. So in this case our search engine is search.twitter.com and newOrganicKeyword is the value in query string q

So you code will look like

var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker(“UA-XXXXXX-X”);
pageTracker._addOrganic(“search.twitter.com”, “q”)
pageTracker._trackPageview();

(Note: pageTracker._addOrganic(“twitter”, “q”) will also work)

What will the reports look like in Google Analytics?

Note: For some reason I cannot get Twitter search to show up as Twitter in Google Analytics Search Engines report, it shows up as “search”(Maybe it’s a bug in GA? If anybody can provide pointer that will be a great help). However, for now this works fine as long as you know what “search” means in your search engine report. I am playing with filters and if I get that resolved I will post the fix or if you know the fix please email me.

Search Engines Report will show the following:

Drilling down to keywords will show the keywords on Twitter Search.

Looks like Twitter Search brings me repeat visits and more engaged traffic.

[original article here]

Swurl is a lifecaster (life Friendfeed and Spokeo) – a social networking aggregator.  In short, it pulls all the data from all your various social network activities and aggregates it into one place.  More than that, it uses somewhat intelligent decisions about the content and context to attach related materials.  For example, if you rent a movie from Netflix, Swurl appends it with a YouTube link to the trailer.  Interesting.

This may sound a bit intrusive, and to me it is, but only because it’s being shared.  Nonetheless, it does bring up some interesting issues about where we are headed.  Many industry experts, including Web inventor Berners-Lee, foresee the Web becoming a tool where semantics yields to intelligent agents that link enough intelligently associated information together to basically make your life easier.  Is this not one step closer to that?

For more on Swurl, check out this article on TechCrunch or Swurl’s web site.  Any of my student’s who’ve started using this, let me know what you think.  And maybe I’ll slice out a couple of hours and set it up for myself.  Like you’d really care what the hell I’m doing (and if you do, that’s a bit scary and I still don’t get why one would want to).

Is Twitter TOO good?

Twitter scares me. For all its popularity, I see at least three issues: 1) it’s a near-perfect example of the psychological principle of intermittent variable reward, the key addictive element of slot machines. 2) The strong “feeling of connectedness” Twitterers get can trick the brain into thinking its having a meaningful social interaction, while another (ancient) part of the brain “knows” something crucial to human survival is missing. 3) Twitter is yet another–potentially more dramatic–contribution to the problems of always-on multi-tasking… you can’t be Twittering (or emailing or chatting, of course) and simultaneously be in deep thought and/or a flow state.

[Disclaimer: I'm SO in the minority on this one... it looks like about a hundred-to-one in favor of Twitter, so I'm most likely way wrong on this one (but it doesn't stop me from trying). And this post is mostly a mashup of a variety of earlier posts I've made on related subjects.]

I’ll look at each of the three points in more detail:

1) The Twitter Slot Machine

One of Skinner’s most important discoveries is that behavior reinforced intermittently (as opposed to consistently) is the most difficult to extinguish. In other words, intermittent rewards beat predictable rewards. It’s the basis of most animal training, but applies to humans as well… which is why slot machines are so appealing, and one needn’t be addicted to feel it.

From a Time magazine feature story on multitasking:
Patricia Wallace, a techno-psychologist,…believes part of the allure of e-mail–for adults as well as teens–is similar to that of a slot machine.
”You have intermittent, variable reinforcement,” she explains. “You are not sure you are going to get a reward every time or how often you will, so you keep pulling that handle.”

 
2) The feeling of connectedness

The biggest benefit most people seem to be deriving from Twitter is the ability to feel more connected to others. Carson Systems’ Lisa put it this way in a comment to Tara Hunt’s defense of Twitter:
“Twittering fills in those gaps…recording our friends’ feelings, geographic location and actions as if we were spookily almost there. That makes us feel *really* connected…”

Is this really a good thing?

Probably, yes. For most people, perhaps. But I think it’s worth a critical look as opposed to an automatic connected-is-awlays-implicitly-good response. UCSF neurobiologist Thomas Lewis claims that if we’re not careful, we can trick a part of our brain into thinking that we’re having a real social interaction–something crucial and ancient for human survival–when we actually aren’t. This leads to a stressful (but subconscious) cognitive dissonance, where we’re getting some of what the brain thinks it needs, but not enough to fill that whatever-ineffable-thing-is-scientists-still-haven’t-completely-nailed-but-might-be-smell. He didn’t make this claim about Twitter… I attended his talk at The Conference on World Affairs, and he was addressing e-mail, chat, and even television (brain recognizes it’s looking at “people”, and feels it must be having a social connection (GOOD), but yet it knows something’s missing (BAD).

Dr. Lewis cited a ton of studies which I didn’t write down, so you can take this with a grain of salt. Plus, I’m extending his issues from e-mail and chat to Twitter. But part of the reasons he talks about are that our brain has evolved an innate ability to interpret body language, facial expression, tone of voice, etc. so the brain expects these channels of information and becomes distressed when the social interaction appears to be there, but these innate, legacy-brain pieces are missing.

Again, this doesn’t mean that it’s not worth it and highly valuable for people TO stay connected to far-flung family and friends, I’m just saying that it’s worth a look at whether that might be lulling some folks into a false sense of “I’m connected” at the expense of real-life connections.

Coffee with your next-door neighbor could do more for your brain than a thousand Twitter updates.

While this same argument has been going around forever, and is the same claim made about television, that doesn’t make it untrue. (There’s that study about the isolated Canadian village whose collective IQ went down once cable finally came to the village… Lewis cites it in his talks, although I can’t find it referenced online).

Ironically, services like Twitter are simultaneously leaving some people with a feeling of not being connected, by feeding the fear of not being in the loop. By elevating the importance of being “constantly updated,” it amplifies the feeling of missing something if you’re not checking Twitter (or Twittering) with enough frequency.

[credit: the original blog article]

3) Twitter is the best/worst cause of continuous partial attention

From an earlier post of mine:

Worst of all, this onslaught is keeping us from doing the one thing that makes most of us the happiest… being in flow. Flow requires a depth of thinking and a focus of attention that all that context-switching prevents. Flow requires a challenging use of our knowledge and skills, and that’s quite different from mindless tasks we can multitask (eating and watching tv, etc.) Flow means we need a certain amount of time to load our knowledge and skills into our brain RAM. And the more big or small interruptions we have, the less likely we are to ever get there.

And not only are we stopping ourselves from ever getting in flow, we’re stopping ourselves from ever getting really good at something. From becoming experts. The brain scientists now tell us that becoming an expert is not a matter of being a prodigy, it’s a matter of being able to focus.

We’re already seeing a backlash response to info overload, and it seems like a good chunk of Web 2.0 VC investments are going to companies that promise to help us get/stay organized. There’s a reason 43 Folders is a Top 100 blog, and it’s got to be more than just Merlin Mann’s good looks ; )

Lots of people are talking about this, and perhaps nobody more eloquently than Linda Stone:

“To pay continuous partial attention is to pay partial attention — CONTINUOUSLY. It is motivated by a desire to be a LIVE node on the network. Another way of saying this is that we want to connect and be connected. We want to effectively scan for opportunity and optimize for the best opportunities, activities, and contacts, in any given moment. To be busy, to be connected, is to be alive, to be recognized, and to matter.
We pay continuous partial attention in an effort NOT TO MISS ANYTHING. It is an always-on, anywhere, anytime, any place behavior that involves an artificial sense of constant crisis. We are always in high alert when we pay continuous partial attention. This artificial sense of constant crisis is more typical of continuous partial attention than it is of multi-tasking.”

Bottom line(s):

Do I think Twitter has benefits? Clearly, and Tara does a great job of defining them (although not everyone agrees that these things are all benefits, they are for her and that’s what matters).

Do I think people can use Twitter responsibly, without letting it get out of control or become too much of a distraction or encourage the same kind of voyeurism that makes tabloid news and TV so pervasively popular in the US?
Yes, definitely.

All I’m saying is that beyond the hype, we should consider just how far down the rabbit hole of always-on-attention we really want to go.

I am not in the target audience for Twitter–I am by nature a loner. I don’t want to be that connected. And I also have a huge appreciation for the art of keeping the mystery alive. I don’t want to know that much about so many people, and I sure don’t want people to know that much about me… mundane or otherwise. So, that puts me in the minority, and my Twitter fears are probably based solely on my own–quirky and less common–personality traits.

[via Passionate]

There was a good blog post about it in The Scientific American’s blog today:

“From what I understand, the thrust of the book is that the internet is currently at a defining–but dangerous–moment in its history. Specifically, the recent rise of more constrained applications (such as apps for Facebook or the iPhone) threaten to divert the creative resources that have hitherto driven the rapid growth of the internet. Instead, this talent will increasingly be devoted toward designing final products that the individual creator has little control over, applications that will not help drive future innovation, and applications that can be turned against their users in a variety of ways. Instead, we should be championing the continued development of more “generative” internet efforts (like Wikipedia and peer-to-peer technologies). On the flip side, the open and unconstrained nature of the internet has generated a wide range of genuine security threats, and these will need to be addressed proactively in order to protect users and to allow the more generative side of the internet to continue to flourish.” [Nick Anthis on Scientific American]

Check out the interview …

Weigh in please … I am dying to understand this.