Perry

Hewitt

Tag: facebook

  • Friday 5 – 05.24.2013

    Every Friday, find five quick links about compelling technologies, emerging trends, and interesting ideas. Source: the internet.

    1. There’s a new Pew Internet/Berkman Center report on teens and privacy. The report confirms that sharing on social is up overall; more teens are on Twitter; and enthusiasm for Facebook and its drama may be waning. 
    2. Those mobile-savvy teens eschewing Facebook in favor of Tumblr now find themselves on Yahoo, as the 1.1B purchase was finalized this week. With a mixed track record for acquisitions, can Yahoo keep its promise not to screw it up?
    3. Storify and Typekit team up to help brands customize their stories. As the world becomes more real-time and social, Storify is a canny curatorial end run against enterprise CMS; offering better customization options for paying customers is a smart move.
    4. Over 2 million Oklahoma tornado tweets have been automatically processed. As citizens have solidified their presence as social media news sources in recent events including Oklahoma, Boston, and London, automating analysis using algorithms will be essential to separate news from noise.
    5. Finally, NPR reports from the future on the use of bots in therapeutic settings. As we begin to narrow what falls into the uncanny valley of creepy, human-like interaction, I predict these kinds of bots will turn up in a wide range of interactions from caregiving to news reading.

  • 5 tips for your post-college social media self

    female graduate 1931If you’re reading this somewhere between finishing your last college final and returning the polyester academic robe crumpled on the floor of your dorm room, you’re in the commencement process. Your brain is on emotional and practical overload: you’re simultaneously figuring out how to say goodbye to friends; planning for (or praying for!) a new internship, job, or grad school; and wondering how on earth to pack up all the stuff you’ve accumulated during your college years. Here’s a manageable to-do list: five ways for new graduates to get your digital and social media presence in order.

    1. Set up and clean up your LinkedIn profile. Of the five profiles sent to me this week from recent grads, three of them had typos — and two candidates had misspelled their major. Have a friend read your profile for common sense, grammar, and spelling. Do the same for a Google+ profile. Pro tip: try your name on Google image search and see what comes up. If you don’t like what you see, update your online profiles and let indexing do its work.
    2. Review your social media privacy settings. If you’re 21 today, you were 12 when Facebook launched, 14 when Twitter emerged, and are now far too old to be messing around on Snapchat. Younger users tend to be savvier about privacy settings, but just in case: read these Facebook basics and settings controlling who can find you, then hop over to Google and check out Me on the Web. While not all companies will hire through Twitter like this the web is, increasingly, your resume.
    3. Put together a listening system. Are you still looking for a job or entering a new field? Set up a system of alerts and feeds to keep you informed. Google Alerts have been around forever but are surprisingly useful — enter one or more terms relevant to your area of interest. For blogs and sites you follow, try feedly and its fantastic mobile interface. Use the content you follow to your advantage — at very least you’re staying informed, and at best you’ll have current and relevant ideas to share with co-workers.
    4. Manage your inbox and contacts effectively. Email is an overwhelming and unwieldy system where, some say, information goes to die. Gmail does have a number of features to improve email management from starred senders to priority inbox; check out Lifehacker for a useful selection of hacks. Mobile email ninjas may do well mastering all the swipe actions of Mailbox to prevent overload. And while a new grad won’t need a fully-fledged contact management system, be sure to keep your contacts in a way that ensures they’re accessible and in context.
    5. Own your own domain and a sensible email address. It’s true that each new release of gTLDs makes your URL less relevant and search and social more important. That said, for less than 10 bucks a year you can have your own domain name, and refer it to a profile page on LinkedIn or about.me. And now’s the time to set up email forwarding via your academic institution, if they offer it, or settle on an email address that omits your year of birth or favorite Twilight character.

    Congratulations! The good news is that it’s neither difficult nor costly to set up a reasonable online presence. The even better news is that digital and social technologies provide you with the keys to find and connect with people and ideas to continue learning beyond the campus you’re leaving behind.

     

    Photo credit: Ladies Home Journal 1931, courtesy George Eastman House

  • Try it: Graph your Facebook friends

    Last week, Stephen Wolfram released a long and interesting analysis of aggregated and anonymized Facebook user data from his Data Donor program. He offers some observations about how Facebook behaviors illustrate the trajectories of people’s lives — how many people they friend, where they settle, and how clusters of friends reflect communities (school, friend, neighborhood).

    In September I tried Wolfram Alpha to examine my Facebook use, and not much about the broad strokes observations changed when I re-ran it recently. I still use words more than pictures, and have roughly the same number of male and female friends. Geography is still fairly widely dispersed. This time, I took a closer look at the network graph.

    social_network_2013

    The colors indicate a typology defined in the web app. In brief:

    • Social insiders (purple) share the most connections with you. These include many colleagues in interactive, and my son.
    • Social outsiders (grey) share at most one friend with you. These include people I’ve worked with briefly during consulting gigs, or met traveling somewhere far away on vacation. I see far more of these than I would have predicted.
    • Social connectors (green) connect groups otherwise disconnected. In my network, this includes a friend who I went to elementary school with who also worked with me at the same software company in our twenties.
    • Social neighbors (orange) have few friends you don’t already know. In my graph, this includes late adopters of social networks, and skews older.
    • Social gateways (red) have a great many friends who you don’t know. If I were being more strategic about growing my social network, this is where I would focus, thinking that the strength of weak ties would provide more opportunities for connection that could be helpful for everything from a great restaurant in Montreal to job candidate referral.

    You can graph your own life and social network courtesy of Stephen Wolfram right here.

  • Facebook intent by age cohort

    Many commented on a recent Pew report finding that 61% of all Facebook users admitted to taking a break from the popular and addictive social networking site at some time in the past. Reasons included everything from avoiding too much drama and gossip to fasting or observing Lent. The chart below from the same report caught my attention:

    Pew on plans for spending time on Facebook

    According to Pew, 1% or fewer of 18-29 year olds see themselves spending more time on Facebook in the coming year. Is this accurately depicting a trend borne of the frustration with issues like privacy concerns and monetization plans (like dreaded autoplay video in the news feed) for the site? Or is it, like the 2010 media hype over the anti-Facebook Diaspora project, more wishful thinking about the behavior we would like to show versus what is likely? Either way, the prediction of declining usage by age above tells a story.

  • Stop the Madness: Password Proliferation

    The growth of the internet has been blamed for a good deal: the decline of conversation, an explosion of pornography, and even the re-wiring of the human brain. But perhaps the most egregious crime is the proliferation of passwords required to navigate one’s everyday life. From newspaper subscriptions to checking accounts to all flavors of online retail, we’re relentlessly prompted to create and remember passwords. Each site has its own rules around the length, capitalization, and the number of special characters permitted (or required). Effectively, we’re reinforcing a system that trains people to create passwords that are hard for humans to remember, but easy for computers to guess. And if you work in an enterprise IT environment, Sharepoint and Peoplesoft will cheerfully remind you to recall and re-enter those passwords again and again as Draconian settings time out within minutes.

    And guess what — it’s not working. This week SplashData released the top 25 passwords of 2012 — and once again, “password” topped the list. It’s easy to mock passwords like “123456” and “abc123” (although I like the vaguely paranoid “trustno1”) but the fault is with the system, and not the users. The proliferation is unmanageable, and leads to people either using the same password for everything or keeping long lists in Google docs and sticky notes — exactly the kind of data insecurity passwords were designed to prevent. Password management services like LastPass and 1Password address this need, but have yet to see widespread adoption.

    So, what’s the answer? Within the enterprise, it means tackling single sign-on, which is challenging in any organization with large legacy systems. Web applications are relying heavily on social network integration before smartcards or retinal scans obviate the need.

    And as passwords get harder to manage, Facebook has cleverly capitalized on this pain point ever since it launched Facebook Connect back in 2008. I’d never want Facebook feed to allow Spotify to display my dubious taste in music, but I was damned if I’d create yet another password and defaulted to Facebook login. Innovations like the news feed in 2006 and acquisitions like Instagram in 2012 are often cited as drivers for Facebook’s success. Perhaps we’ve got it all wrong: the creation of Facebook as a seamless password management system with a social network on the side may have been the cleverest innovation of them all.

  • Facebook, individuality & loneliness

    Just re-read this thoughtful Stephen Marche essay in The Atlantic Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? about social networking in the current American social context.

    • Facebook arrived at a time when Americans were more alone that ever before. The article points out that in 1950 fewer than 10% of U.S. households contained only one person, and that number had reached 27% by 2010. We’re a culture that extols the individual, something I am reminded of constantly when I compare my own family’s daily or vacation habits and choices with those of friends who immigrated to this country.
    • Our hyperconnectedness leads to myriad but shallow connections with others. In-person connections still matter, and having a number of people we consider confidants reduces loneliness — and that number is dropping.
    • There’s a troubling paradox of how many people we are connected with online and our increase in social isolation. The effects of the latter are tangible — more mental health workers from psychologists to life coaches, and more professional carers needed as we age and become ill.

    What about time spent on Facebook, in particular, drives the loneliness in a constantly connected world?  Social media mavens cite the importance of authenticity. “Don’t mimic, that other guy with all those followers,” they tell us, “but be yourself.” Generally sound advice, but what they forget to add is that most people online are highlighting their best and most interesting selves “Here I am in Paris!” “Here’s the kind of witty banter that typifies an evening with my family.” The toddler beams into the camera, but the explosive tantrums are rarely captured and shared. It’s both widespread FOMO — at any given moment, someone in your network is guaranteed to be doing something more fabulous than you — and an underlying fear that perhaps almost everyone’s true selves are more adventurous and clever than your own.

    Perhaps we’re all just using Facebook wrong. The author refers to the work of Moira Burke, HCI graduate student and soon-to-be Facebook employee, who points to the behaviors of broadcasting and passive consumption rather than engagement with friends as a cause of loneliness. To a degree, that makes sense: We’ve all had the cocktail party experience of the person who speaks in paragraphs, and with it the dullness and loneliness of listening to a monologue in a venue built for dialogue. True engagement, in Burke’s opinion, is enhanced by writing to friends rather than resorting the “lazy like,” and being motivated by others’ sociability to enhance one’s own.

    Last year a Pew Internet and American life report asked ~1,000 technology stakeholders and critics about the ways millennials will benefit and suffer due to their hyperconnected lives. The opinions were diverse — even among a wide range of people who think a great deal about the effects of the internet, it’s hard to find consensus on how our brains, behaviors, and happiness will change as a result. U.S. internet users spend about eight hours a month on Facebook, so the degree to which hyperconnectedness to Facebook itself creates or abets loneliness remains an important and unresolved part of the discussion.