Filed under: Privacy, Social media, Technology | Tags: facebook, picture memories, see friendship
There has been a whole string of developments over the last week which indicate Facebook is taking even more of an interest in relationships than usual.
Facebook’s impact on relationships has been somewhat lost in the noise about privacy infringements. Interest is picking up however, as people begin to notice they are less in control of their online relationships than they might think. See Tom Weber’s excellent analysis of how Facebook decides what to put in your news feed. Did you know there was a pecking order of status updates – in that links are more ‘top news’ than status updates, and photos are the most ‘top news’-worthy of all? Which is why that get who keeps posting links to Being a Dickhead’s Cool two weeks after everyone already e-mailed it round gets prioritised over closer friends’ status updates (and Facebook is easily clever enough to work out who your closer friends are, as you’ll see if you read on).
Jealous lovers
Not everyone has actually noticed the ‘Photo Memories’ feature which pops up on the right-hand corner of their screens. lt is an unobtrusive feature which pulls in an apparently random choice of photo from a friend’s album from a year or more ago. Facebook’s recent reasoning is that it might give you a nasty jolt if photos of a former lover popped up out of nowhere – even if you’ve been careful enough to ‘hide’ their updates in your news feed (being too cowardly polite to go the whole hog and delete them). So it has carefully rejigged some code so that anyone who once shared your relationship status remains hidden from view. To help (I’m not making this up) ‘heal the heartache’.
What a far cry from the days of “Ben and Jessica are no longer in a relationship” next to an 8-bit image of a broken heart.
Jealouser lovers, bordering on stalkerish
Let’s be entirely honest here though. The problem with Facebook and exes isn’t really that you get a nasty jolt from seeing an ex-partner unexpectedly because you haven’t seen a photo of them for ages.
Non, non. Most dumpees of my generation embark at some point on a massive Facebook stalking session of their former beloved. It might be just after the break-up. It might be sparked by jealousy or genuine curiosity. It might just be a one-off, after which they say ‘No more’. But it happens – and hiding old photos probably isn’t going to cure that.
Especially with another new feature which has been introduced – ‘See Friendship’. The ‘Wall-to-wall’ functionality which allowed you to see every wall post between two friends with has now been replaced. See Friendship is a scary/clever first look at how accurately Facebook can picture not only you, but your relationships with others. Essentially, I see See Friendship as a mini Facebook page, dedicated to your relationship with a given Facebook friend. Isn’t that a little strange? A page enshrining the history of your relationship online?
Go and look at it, if you can. The way to do it is either to look on any post from a friend, where on the bottom right-hand corner you’ll see ‘See Friendship’. Alternatively, go on any friend’s profile, look under their picture and click ‘View you and [friend]. The scary/clever bit is that Facebook does absolutely no work, and relies purely on the data you volunteer. See Friendship can tell you:
- What events you’ve both been to.
- All the photos you’ve both been in
- Your shared relationships with other people, and the nature of these relationships
- Where you’ve both commented on something anywhere in the history of Facebook EVER.
All this, as I say, relies on tiny everyday actions like photo-tagging or clicking ‘attending’ on an event. I doubt many users are aware of the consequences of all these tiny online actions, particularly on a platform as complex and controlled as Facebook. So much for making life easier for exes – it’s now become considerably easier to reflect nostalgically on the history of your relationship, because it’s all now gathered and documented conveniently in one place. (Or if you’re really masochistic – a convenient place to track how well your ex-partner is getting on with someone new. But that’s a very dark thought. Don’t go there.)
You’re about to become a jealous lover.
Finally, I leave you with this unhappy little chart – when Facebook statuses predict you’re about to get dumped. Everyone wants to be single before the summer, it seems.
Mathias Mikkelsen, using data from David McCandless.
This is a post taken from my work blog, the social marketing agency RMM. There’s a great follow-up blog by my colleague Dr. Dan O’Connor that’s also worth a read.
Clay Shirky, talking head on social technology, the internet and technology’s effect on human behaviour, has a new book out. You’ve probably heard the book’s title “Cognitive Surplus” bandied about already. I was a little hazy over what this actually meant, so I headed along to the RSA to hear his explanation. I think I’ve just about wrapped my head around it:
- The cumulative free time and talents of people within the developed world have to spend on stuff they like doing. (Mostly watching terrible TV, he says)
- The shift from the media producing stuff for us to consume passively, to us producing stuff on our own. For free. i.e. How the Internet Now Lets You Make aLOLcat Bible and Inflict It On the Rest of the World Without a Publishing House Getting in the Way.
So free time + consumers creating stuff out of love, for free = cognitive surplus. What Shirky primarily focused on was the result of this surplus, and how it may lead to profound cultural change. He broke down the value of these online creations into three categories:
- Communal value – creating stuff like LOLCats
- Public value – providing information or some other service, like Wikipedia
- Civic value – a (social) project which aims to fundamentally change social attitudes. e.g. How PatientsLikeMe connects individual users with certain medical conditions on the basis of the data they upload. BUT, above and beyond this, the project founders believe, contrary to social norms, you should be encouraged to just…give away your medical data. Your diseases, your dosages, everything, for the purposes of research. Read below for their Openness policy.
It’s these projects with civic value which seem to excite Shirky the most – the idea that without any contractual obligations, people willingly devote their free time to uploading their dosages to PatientsLikeMe, with the wider cultural aim to change how medical data is used for research. I found this example problematic – take a UK example of a civic-value project, the Democracy Club. The Democracy Club encourages anyone to scan election leaflets given out by their local candidates – one point being to hold them to account when they might renege on their original election promises. The wider cultural aim here being not transparency in medical data, but transparency in democracy. Shirky would equate these Democracy Club volunteers with those uploading medical data to PatientsLikeMe. But I would argue these civic-value projects are different.
Surely those uploading data to projects like PatientsLikeMe are doing so for ultimately selfish purposes; to track their own medical data and to find out more about their own conditions. Read the language of the website; it’s all about how PatientsLikeMe can benefityou. I don’t think the majority of those users are uploading data with the purpose of improving medical transparency. By contrast, I do think Democracy Club volunteers are very aware of the wider cultural ramifications of holding local candidates up to account – with flyers (usually binnable once the election’s over) actually scanned and publicly available, it’s much easier to pin down MP’s who quietly change their policies once they’re in power. And that’s a win for transparent democracy. But one project positions itself as beneficial to the user, whereas the other makes it clear this is to achieve that wider cultural benefit.
That’s a quibble around specific examples, but…I guess the implicit question is this: do you have to dupe people to harness their cognitive surplus? In order to truly effect a cultural sea-change via online projects of civic value, do you have to fool the wider, average consumer who watches too much Eastenders into taking part in these projects? To encourage users to spend time on a task, for free (the proverbial stick), do you have to lure them in with some promise of immediate gratification (the carrot)? And if so – is that a good, ethical thing to do to effect wider cultural change?
Filed under: Internet, Social media, Technology | Tags: geeks, MUDs, online, twitter, warcraft, web 3.0
The internet jungle is full of predators these days, and it’s best making sure you’re at the top of the evolutionary scale before venturing into it. Are you predator or prey – or are you off the geek radar altogether?
Geek 1.0
The grandaddy of geeks, who used MS DOS and played Lemmings off a floppy disk – and that’s the whizzy ones who weren’t playing table-top role-play games like Dungeons and Dragons. Geek philosopher Douglas Adams knew what he was about when he said these people ‘still thought digital watches were a pretty neat idea.’
There are very few female samples of geek 1.0, it being more of a hobby than a way of life. Geek 1.0 has moved with the times, in that he is now a 40 year old manchild more obsessed with Warcraft than painting his high-level elf warmage precisely the correct shade of red.
Primitive and pot-bellied he may be, geek 1.0 is still worth paying attention to. It’s old school graphics designers and coders like him who have created some of the most viral fantasy games on the market. And some slightly less viral ones which are nonetheless an excellent way of wasting 5 minutes. Sadly, he should have spent more time bringing up his kids properly, who have grown up to become…
Geek 2.0 
Just to wrench Chuck Palahniuk hideously out of context, this emo kid in the family tree is probably best described by Tyler Durden:
We don’t have a great war in our generation, or a great depression, but we do, we have a great war of the spirit. We have a great revolution against the culture. The great depression is our lives. We have a spiritual depression.
At least, this is what 2.0 likes to think when he’s hideously overanalysing in his smelly hovel darkened bedroom. I should know – I am one. It’s only just become acceptable to confess to being socially challenged a 2.0 nerd, if your BO hasn’t given you away already. And even then, there are levels. You shouldn’t, for example, reveal that perhaps you didn’t spend your 90s childhood raving to Prodigy but in multi-user dungeons, which would mark you out as roughly the social equivalent of plankton.
You should also never, EVER admit to having been in a chat room. Even I would shun you.
When it comes to communication, 2.0 comes into his own as the inventor of the weblog, MySpace and Facebook. But there are drawbacks which haven’t yet been resolved. I, for example, have spent so many years communicating online that I now can’t think clearly when writing with a pen. No really, it’s a real disease. The mainstream press says so.
And now, 2.0 is in a state of crisis. Because suddenly there’s a cooler younger brother on the scene who goes by the name of…
Geek 3.0
Social life: I haz it, says 3.0, sashaying about with an iPhone and an ego to rival that really talentless guy from Razorlight. Because 3.0 uses the net to splat you with his opinions where possible. In any format possible. And he’s absolutely certain you’ll want to know the depths of profundity he can achieve in a mere 140 characters.
Not that a 2.0 like me is bitter or hypocritical in any way. But it’s a little disconcerting to see 3.0 journalists treading all over what should be your territory, worshipping the non-event that is Second Coming Life. And even more disconcerting to have your users talk back at you.
But I are serious cat, and this is a serious blog. Beautiful as interaction between writer and reader is, there are implications of 3.0 reporting which sees the spread of information to the general populace at breathtaking speed. And live blogging about terrorism even from the highest quality dailies risks making news into entertainment. At what point does constantly refreshing for an updated death toll become less about accuracy and more about the thrill of immediacy?
But there is no more terrifying evidence of 3.0 dialogue between content-provider and content-consumer than on YouTube. I mean, you really want to know exactly what kind of animal the online public is? Just go to any YouTube video and read the comments underneath. That’s the voice of the future, my fellow geeks. Phear.
Filed under: Social media | Tags: digital media, generation y, Social media, twitter
You know those couples who suck face on London Underground? That’s the frankly revolting way in which the media behaves with social technology. Morbid fascination with MMORPG World of Warcraft was swiftly followed by a brief flirtation with LolCatz until finally we married Facebook. This is a solid partnership occasionally supplemented with liasons with Second Life and, bizarrely, Rick Astley. Threatening, however, to topple Facebook in novel meeja communications came Twitter.
Twitter is the kind of heady midlife-crisis romance which excuses any idiocy, including using ‘tweet’ as a verb.
Twitter started off as quite a nice idea. So did communism. Usability News puzzled over its pointlessness, while New Scientist blogger Will Knight sums it up thus:
Twitter lets you post very short messages (140 characters or less) to describe what you’re currently up to. You can let friends know – or just announce it to no-one in particular. And you can post and receive messages via email, IM and even a mobile.
Mobile is the key word here. Short of clicking through 20 friends in your phone’s address book, what other way is there to hint at your unbearable loneliness get people to the pub en masse? Awesome device.
Naturally I caved. No more unbearable loneliness multiple texts! I used Twitter as a way of creating in-jokes with a select group of people I pretty much saw every day anyway. But its main appeal was vanity, said InformationWeek:
Twitter provides a public billboard for users’ interior monologues.
Kind of like an online version of writing on the wall, in fact. So much so that Obama has 111,371 online followers and McCain has…4,512. Make of that what you will.
But Twitter sounded its own death knell when it announced that status updates made online would no longer be delivered to followers’ inboxes – no longer mobile, in short:
Beginning today, Twitter is no longer delivering outbound SMS over our UK number.
Oh. So…back to unbearable loneliness mass texting to get people to the pub. That’s not to say you can’t twat tweet online still – but there’s no immediate thrill of someone texting back. So now, as far as I can see, Twitter is almost entirely useless. Its mobility was one of the few things which appealed to its fast-paced users – there’s nothing here which can’t be offered by a simple Facebook status update.
Twitter fails to cope with user demand. Again.
