Posted: September 24th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Culture & Cultural Anthropology, Social Media Platforms | Tags: culture, Facebook, futurism, redesign | Comments Off
As our culture rapidly changes under the yoke of technology, as these changes are forced upon it, it’s heartening to see the subtleties of Facebook’s effect being discussed from the perspectives of sociology, psychology, marketing, & privacy.
Here’s some thinking on Facebook big F8 announcements. I know it’s a lot (though far from all) to take in, but hey, it’s a lot to take in.
Not Sharing Is Caring: Facebook’s terrible plan to get us to share everything we do on the Web (Facebook is Killing Taste)
Premise: Zuck wants you to share your every move, regardless of whether that move turned out to be a really good experience actually worth sharing. Frictionless sharing takes the curation element (or “taste”) out of your presentation.
UI implications: The news feed is now totally stories about your friends (status updates), whereas the minutiae of their liking & commenting has moved to the ticker.
Assessment: I don’t want you to know about every movie I watch, only the ones I liked so much I want to endorse them and thereby incorporate them into my personal brand. Media will become status, like wearing a logo, as a display of taste. People may be less inclined to experiment, because merely absorbing media now implies some sort of support for it.
What Facebook Open Graph Means for You
Premise: “You, the point of friction in their data mining, have just been excluded from the process.”
Assessment: I agree. Facebook wasn’t wringing every piece of information out of users, and information about users is the product it sells its customers, advertisers. The more it can collect about what you watch, listen to, like and use, the more money it makes.
Why Facebook Timeline Is Made For Its Youngest Users
Premise: Facebook’s Timelines is intended to facilitate the communication & sharing needs of younger users, and doesn’t really care if older folks want to ‘scrapbook’ (ie, blog) or not.
UI implications: Not everyone wants to blog or lifecast. Picking a header (‘cover’ picture) etc might be a little more tech/design-intensive than they desire, which may lead to a feeling of pressure instead of fun for some users (age agnostic). With customization comes a pressure to perform that some people might not appreciate.
Assessment: As far as I know, GenX is still the biggest participants on blogs, microblogs (Twitter) and Facebook. We’ll be ok, and the Millenials will too. Boomers who don’t work in the tech industry will not like any of this (UI changes or personal record). And GenZ? They could probably use a little MySpace. Expressing yourself is paramount in the Maslowian hierarchy of the young.
@ All interesting. Maybe younger gen is more willing to share in general, but less willing to share something out of mainstream? @ Our gen will be more consciously self conscious, but they'll have that judgement of their tastes built in to their DNA. Holy. What newsrooms should know about new Facebook stream
Premise: Getting content seen depends on quantity of interactions (like & comments). More frequent posting is going to be required to get in front of people.
UI implications: Stories need to gather the momentum of user approval before they join Recent Stories
Assessment: A commenter thinks the author of this post has it all backwards, and branded pages have a better chance of being seen in the timeline. I dunno. I can tell you that as a brand manager I was masterminding an inside liking job like no other on Thursday, trying to push my update into people’s streams. It didn’t feel good, but it did feel necessary.
As a page I feel like Facebook's new feed needs me to either create awesome content or drum up a whole lotta support to get posts seen. All Facebook thinks the ticker stands to be a huge force for branded page interaction, spreading social proof. This also benefits from grassroots liking, commenting, & sharing as every such action not only lends weight to GraphRank, but floods the ticker with evidence of how awesome your content is.
What Facebook Changes Mean for Marketers
Premise: Apps that provide real value, like Nike+ are going to be key; content is going to have to step up its game. Gathering likes means less than ever.
Assessment: The onus truly is on brands to earn a place in people’s lives.
@ I think the danger in what they're doing is it will force everyone to pump up the volume until its all too noisy... The Ultimate in Privacy
Premise: The ticker is freaking people out. The “please hide my comments & likes for me” status that’s going around tries to put the onus for your privacy on your friends.
UI implications: We need to either get comfortable with all our actions being visible, or leave the system.
Assessment: The way the ticker is set up, it’s a bit of a reality check into “Hey, everyone can see what I do on the internet”. They always could, but aggregating those actions and explicitly revealing them makes people feel kinda naked.
The ticker doesn’t follow normal conversational conventions (though it does lead to new person/topic discovery, which is what Facebook is trying to facilitate to combat social graph boredom and purchasable media sharing). So I sort of see the freaked out users’ impetus for wanting to hid eall that minutiae; it isn’t actually intended for everyone; it functions beneath status updates as a subtle communication upon which it’s a bit awkward to shine a light.
There’s a distinction to be drawn between inappropriate sharing and action aggregation. When you see the sum of your actions gathered and reported by an insensitive algorithm, it seems like an unfairly black and white overview of your character.
This is precisely why the likes Sponsored Stories, Klout and retargeting bother privacy advocates so much: they lack context. They paint a partial picture by which we are judged, but that we can’t fail to own because it is, after all, constructed of our data.
We’re All Doomed: Facebook’s Giant Reality Show
Premise: “The lines between entertainment and real life disappear, as people use social media to broadcast whatever they want. Criminals like thieves and murders are followed online, given TV shows, endorsement deals as we as a culture begin to lose grip of reality. A world where everyone’s a celebrity and anything can be entertaining leads to murders and suicides for fun as advertisers monitor in-depth metrics on what we view and how. Our social lives are put in digital pens that lie to us and tell us that we are all stars”.
Assessment: No surprise: “Heavy reality television (RTV) viewers not only spend more time on sites like Facebook, they also have larger social networks, share more photos and are more likely to engage in “friendships” with people with whom they have no off-line relationship, a practice known as promiscuous friending”.
A generation is going to grow up living very public lives, because that provides more accurate information for advertisers.
Facebook is actively gathering your life story: it just suggested I add a photo of the day I was born. http://t.co/p6SiEeBs @ and how do you feel about that? @ At the moment (I might change) like it's super cute, a fun thing to share & valuable to digitize (likely 2 b a real Polaroid) @ But is it there this memory should reside? If it does, does it become a more valuable, emotional platform for me? Update
More thought-provoking stuff people are sending me.
Logging out of Facebook is not enough (from David Pensato)
Facebook: “We don’t track logged-out users”
Facebook Changes Upend Advertiser and Agency Models
Facebook Disconnect Chrome Extension
Facebook’s Eerie Goal: Why Timeline Changes Everything (from David Pensato)
Facebook is Scaring Me
What Facebook’s latest updates mean for journalists
How Not To Make Music Social: The Way Spotify And Facebook Did It
Facebook confirms ‘Like’ data collection, will fix three cookie-related issues within 24 hours (from Nico Wlock)
No, you aren’t going to quit Facebook
Is Facebook trying to kill privacy?
The Pros & Cons of Frictionless Sharing
It’s the end of the web as we know it
The Problem With Facebook’s New ‘Frictionless’ Sharing
Facebook is getting too damn complicated
Posted: September 23rd, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms | Tags: Facebook redesign | Comments Off
Facebook seems to have acted quickly to restore the essence of the ‘Most Recent’ news tab. I’m glad; I don’t want to miss less popular / frequent / interacted-with friends because they statistically uninteresting 
I’m pretty sure this is new overnight, and if so, agile response to user feedback!
Posted: September 20th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms | Tags: animated arrow, desperation, Google | Comments Off
An animated arrow now desperately dances for your attention when you visit Google. When did The Social Platform Wars get so clingy?
Posted: August 23rd, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Graphics, Social Media Platforms | Tags: download, free, Google, hand drawn, icon | Comments Off
Use this image to illustrate articles on, presentations about & screeds against Google+. It’d be swell if you linked to my portfolio.
Posted: August 20th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms | Tags: Google, social search | Comments Off
A guy I don’t know (who seems arty & lives where there’s palm trees), who had me in an unreciprocated Google+ circle, shines some light on how social search on Google is going to be weighted towards your G+ peeps.
I’ve been fretting over social search since been pimpin’, and the reason is mainly that I don’t want Google to compromise great search for social. My friends don’t necessarily know the most about the subjects they talk about, and the links they share might not deserve a place on The Vaunted First SERP (Me totally included. I was horrified this guy was getting my recommendations in a Google search).
In this case, though, I seem to have shared a link that was actually exactly what the person was looking for. The morale may be: choose the right friends and social will be a nice layer on top of search.
I’ve since circled the guy, btw. He totally earned it.
Posted: August 10th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms, Winnipeg | Tags: CoverItLive, Google, journalism, Lindsey Wiebe | 5 Comments »
Yesterday I livechatted my butt off with fellow panelists Matthew Ingram (GigaOm), Modern’s Earth‘s Ian Rountree, and 416 other interested parties.
The topic: Google+. The pace: frantic!
Hosted at the Winnipeg News Cafe by Free Press social media reporter Lindsey Wiebe, the chat used CoverItLive, a nifty live participation tool journalists use to update realtime from events, take questions, curate tweets by hashtag and liveblog.
The stream moves turbo, questions fly, and it’s a lot of fun. After, I asked Lindsey how she thought her first totally-on-her-own live hosting for the Free Press went.
Me: Were you nervous!? I totally was, until we got rolling & got swept away by the speed & the fun!
Lindsey Wiebe: I totally was! (But) I was really happy with the overall level of engagement and participation. According to the CIL data we had 416 readers total & 156 reader comments.
There are a few things I might do differently in future, based on suggestions and feedback. Numbering the questions, for one, would have helped (thanks for that, Matthew Shepherd!), and I think soliciting for questions prior to the event would have allowed us to target the conversation a bit better, and narrow down the number of similar questions.
The chat tended to veer off in different directions, which was fine with me, but I’m not sure how easy it was to follow for readers who weren’t used to live chat formats.
Me: We went about an hour – did we talk about everything you hoped to (in the depth you hoped for)? If not, what would have made it work better?
LW: I had a few questions I didn’t get to, or that didn’t really get taken up by the panelists, and there were some areas where I think we could have gone into more depth. But the unasked questions didn’t really bother me – the chat was for the benefit of participants, and if their questions are addressed, I’m happy.
Me: I’m curious about how the comment moderation works. Did the moderator hold back a lot of reader comments to keep it making sense, or let everything through except unacceptable stuff?
LW: The goal of moderation was mainly to guide the conversation and make it easier for readers to follow along.
Since a lot of the comments were in the form of questions, we tried to stagger them a bit so there wasn’t a question deluge. But I realize this might have been confusing for people who posted questions and wondered about the lag time, and for our panelists (like yourself), who might not have been clear where they were meant to direct their energy when new questions popped up.
I’m still thinking on how we could fine tune this in future, and whether it was the best approach: would it have been better to allow a commenting free-for-all? To close comments entirely until a designated period? To set clearer comment rules?
I find that live chat conventions tend to favor the speediest typists and thinkers, and the pace and rhythms (plus keeping track of various question threads) can be a little daunting if you’re not accustomed to it. But it’s always going to be a challenge to keep the conversation moving quickly enough for more active participants, while making sure it stays coherent and well-paced for newcomers.
What do you guys (participants & lurkers) think? Was it fun and satisfying from an audience perspective? Any suggestions for improvements?
Update: some tweeted replies, in the interest of keeping all the feedback in 1 place for Lindsey
@ @ I think giving panelists the first couple of questions in advance would help. 1 or 2 answers could be ready @ Sometimes I didn't know who was a guest and who was a panelist, would be nice to have a way to tell the difference. @ Is there a hashtag for the chat? @ Totally fun! I sent it around the office, but I think I was the only one who was intrigued! @ It's ok! I realized quickly that it wasn't a live video chat! @ No doubt. But I like to be able to passively listen to these types of things better than reading, personally.
Posted: August 9th, 2011 | Author: Erica | Filed under: Social Media Platforms | Tags: competition, Facebook, Google, images, Twitter | Comments Off
[edit 1] Yesterday Facebook’s news feed got all circley. Today, Twitter launches an in-stream image. G+ competition is making everyone step up their game!
[edit 2] Boo, the image appears as a link, not instream. Too little…
[edit 3] Well, it kinda appears instream. If you click on the tweet it shows like any media in the right-hand column, and if you link directly to a tweet it shows there too (I’m talking Twitter web interface here). This is the anticipated photosharing feature announced/leaked in May.
