You’re coming on a little strong, don’t you think?

Personalizing the web will make us stupider

Facebook has taken the web-swallowing step of adding a personalization platform, Open Graph, to as much of the web as will allow it. This means ads and content will be targeted according to your Facebook profile.

Yikes. The web shouldn’t be personalized for me. Here’s why:

1. My interests don’t encompass everything important that happens. The news is what is new and valuable for me to know to understand the world, but I’m not the best judge of that, nor are my Facebook interests a predictor of it. I prefer to rely on the professional judgment of news directors, editors, and journalists to make sure I know what’s up across the globe, not just in my narrow band of interest.

2. I keep very limited info on Facebook out of privacy concerns, and what is there may not reflect my real interests. I might fan a page because it belongs to a friend and I want to support them, or because I’m trying to win a contest.

3. Part of what I’m doing on the web is looking for new things I don’t know I want to find. Serendipity, syntopic analysis, and random discovery make you smarter. Finding more of the same, however novel, doesn’t.

4. I don’t want my biases confirmed or my stereotypes perpetuated. Feeding me what I like surrounds me with people who think like I do, talk like I do, and know what I know. The more insular our thinking and the fewer challenges presented to it, the more homogenous, boring, and satisfied we become. That’s not who I want to be.

5. My friends aren’t that bright either. (Just kidding, guys). Privileging news on CNN, for instance, that amused or captivated one of my friends would work if I was 14, but I’m an adult with a broad range of acquaintanceships. Their interests aren’t any better a source for my daily news than my own; neither would their shopping habits or music tastes necessarily suit me.

6. It impacts the fun I have on Facebook. I’m increasingly nervous about the things I post there. I lock down as much as I can, and think twice before private messaging anything I don’t want to accidentally show up on my wall due to some “glitch”. Now I have to consider the ramifications of listing a favourite book, as the tentacles of my professed liking spread throughout the web and potentially affect everthing I see and read thereafter. Holy pressure = a lot less fun.

Platform Wars

Who will dominate location-based status? The Big Blue Boot stomps Gowalla & Foursquare into ‘roo & d0u¢hebag soup. Illustration available creative commons-style on Flickr for all your bloggy uses.

Facebook goes #local, Erica freaks out/geeks out

I am freaking out so much right now that I thought the best way to show my reaction to the news slash rumour that Facebook is incorporating location-aware updates and releasing the API to developers is in pictures. Pictures of me going mental on Twitter.

How Facebook can kill LinkedIn: Tiered scaling of social networks to combat overfriending

The best way to look like a superfuturist guru is to predict the demise of the current big thing. Social overload is leading some to wonder if, rather than being the year of ubiquitous social web, 2010 might just be the year social eats itself.

People are muttering about social networks not scaling. Overfriending, social lines blurring, and etiquette confusion are sucking the fun out of Facebook. We know you can only maintain about 150 meaningful connections, and that as networks get bigger they turn from conversations back into broadcasting. Group inertia also keeps us mired where our group already is—no one seems to be asking for one more network to log in to, update, and remake connections on. Google Buzz did not entice my mother-in-law.

I’m not sure it’s the number of friendships we’re trying to maintain, it’s the intrusion of different kinds of relationships into inappropriate spaces. It’s like when your spouse shows up at work and it’s so incongruous to see them there that you act weird in front of your work friends. You know?

“It’s not information overload, it’s filter failure”

Web 3.0 (don’t roll your eyes) is gonna be about signal to noise. Connecting everyone was great, but it turns out we don’t like everyone. Filters like lists are weak at this point, whether to limit their adoption (more sharing = more revenue) or because demand hasn’t been great enough. But if Big Social doesn’t want to see a precipitous decline in participation, they need to hire a few usability experts and make it happen.

So Facebook is where my robust profile resides, and where I’m most likely to contribute to conversations. You can have the most holistic relationship with me there. As such, I’m ending up friending people I haven’t met IRL, and Facebook is becoming less of a front-porch-with-a-beer and more of a cordial-nod-at-the-grocery-store experience. I kinda like beer. But I’m scared to say so, because Senior People Are Watching. Socializing just became brand building, ugh. What can we do to get that down-home feeling back? How can I associate with people who like my blog without them seeing me in my jammies?

The smartest thing Facebook could do would be to introduce a secondary request system, “Professional Request”, and scoop LinkedIn. I belong to LinkedIn but don’t use it, in part so as not to replicate effort. Facebook could make LinkedIn utterly irrelevant by allowing users to add professional contacts that would receive limited (or different) profile access – perhaps restricting photos, video, and application activities (Farmville, I’m talking to you), highlighting instead fan pages and status updates. This pared down sharing would become the accepted new norm for professional relationships within Facebook, allowing users to keep their Dunbar 150 in the lifestream loop while still offering aquaintances limited access, including messaging. With etiquette in place to govern this dual stream of relationships, users can feel more confident expanding their personal networks to include people they haven’t met IRL and with whom they still want to engage without sharing baby pictures.

This could extend to what virtually amounts to dual profiles, with separate status updates for personal & professional contacts, and a rich niche for developers to build apps geared towards enhancing professional connections. Facebook could smoothly handle this double stream for sophisticated power users that have both networks to maintain.

Btw I googled “LinkedIn is useless” to find this video. Facebook, if you want to pay me for this awesome idea, I’ll be glad to send you my Pay Pal info.

And THIS is why I love Twitter

You get to rub (possibly the wrong way) elbows with the smart and famous! Steve Rubel, Senior Vice President/Director of Insights for Edelman Digital, lifestreamer, AdAge and Forbes columnist and avid sports fan, has personally told me to ‘buzz off’. I earned it for protesting that he nearly roped me into signing up for Google Buzz, when I (kind of  ironically) went to comment on his ‘buzz’ about social media overload.

Steve has tweeted 10,095 times (as of this tweet), so that means .009906% of the time, he’s talking about me!

I should also take this opportunity to note with gratitude that I get a large amount of traffic (for me) from comments I’ve made on Steve’s lifestream, and that Steve’s readers spend by far the most time of any visitors to my site reading content—an average of  12 minutes each over 5 pages! Some smart fans, Steve Rubel’s lifestream has.

/sense of accomplishment for today.

Oversocialized! The social media meta-cliques pick their new BFFs

Image: The New York Post

Here’s what I think. There are some big time alliances going down in the social media stratosphere right now. People are picking sides.

ReadWriteWeb had that trouble the other day with people thinking they were logging in to Facebook when they got ReadWriteWeb as a Google result for “Facebook login”. ReadWriteWeb, in a post immortalizing their own internet-famous moment, blames Google for this.

But how had this happened? It certainly wasn’t that thousands and thousands of people had just started searching for “facebook login” yesterday. This stream of people has been there all along and something is broken.

Google had completely failed its users. It put us, with a post about how an AOL partnership foreshadowed Facebook becoming the de facto user database, above the most logical search result possible – Facebook’s login page.

While for us this was completely random, other search results show that this is actually a space that is otherwise intentionally occupied by sites trying to siphon off this traffic and profit from it.

But does that sound like an accident? This might seem obvious, but Google controls search results. Google’s taking on Facebook head on with Google Buzz. Steve Reubel thinks Facebook might have a crush on Bing, confirming, in my mind, Google and the One Social Network To Rule Them just aren’t that into each other. I betcha Google pretended to think ReadWriteWeb was cute to capitalize on the usual disgruntled user fumbling during a Facebook UI change rollout.

Huh, that’s an interesting idea. What happens when the business that controls the news has to manage news about their business? I know Google’s not evil and all, but if I was the PR guy over there I’d be hanging out around the search guys, um, quite a bit.

So Google hates Facebook, plays ReadWriteWeb to annoy its users. RWW, while flattered at the attention, knows Google is just using them and makes it clear they will never, ever be their date for the prom.

So who is trying to bff the all-seeing GOOG? Read the rest of this entry »