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Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Jul 23, 2010
Status symbol: Facebook is ubiquitous, but is it really an antisocial network?
Image via WikipediaBy Monica Hesse
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, July 23, 2010; A01
Earlier this week Facebook acquired its 500 millionth user. This means that more people are on Facebook, which got its start a mere six years ago, than live in the United States, Canada and Mexico combined. Fewer people live on Facebook than in China, but Facebook is banned in China. If it weren't, then Facebook would have even more users.
How to mark this moment? The social network has taught us, above all else, the value of the brief and tangential -- the "ambient intimacy" that social scientists use to describe the site, where users become close simply by absorbing the casual status updates on each other's lives.
So, updates, then. A series of scattered ways to think about our relationship with this sprawling, looming thing. "What's become ordinary is that you are interacting with hundreds of people in the same space," that the compartments we once created for our interactions are dissolving, says Zeynep Tufekci, a sociology professor at University of Maryland Baltimore County who studies the social impacts of technology.
"You're having connections that were never before possible," Tufekci says. "It's profoundly altered our relationships."
Uh-uh.
But maybe, yes?
* * *
Facebook: It has rendered obsolete from the English language the phrase, "I wonder whatever happened to . . . "
Facebook: The bigger it gets, the more grumbly we get. In a recent survey on Web site satisfaction conducted by ForeSee Results, Facebook was ranked behind Google, Wikipedia, Bing, behind almost everything in its category, at 64 points out of 100. It's never doing quite what we want, even when we don't know what we want it to be doing. (We want it to stop changing its privacy settings.)
Facebook: The nostalgia, the elation, the lazy weekend afternoons spent with fingers poised over keys, trying to recall names. The kid from AP Chem. Whatshisname. Jason Whatshisname. The gratification when we found him, living in El Paso, maybe, working in pharmaceuticals.
Facebook: It's bigger than Jason Whatshisname. The vastness of the network's size means that our connection webs are increasingly complicated, too. "We usually think of connectedness as one-to-one, connecting to another person or connecting with information," says William Powers, the author of technology liberation manifesto "Hamlet's BlackBerry." "But in a larger sense, what we're really connecting to is the crowd," to that barbaric yawp of humanity. We're deciding how public we want to be, and what we want that public to think of us.
Facebook True Story No. 1: "I used to respond immediately to friend requests," says Madeeha Syed, a music writer in Pakistan who has been on the site for a few years. "But in the past six months I'm tired. I'm just tired." She no longer recognizes the people who are friending her. She used to deny these strangers, but two weeks later they would try again, forgetting they'd already been rebuffed once. Now she just lets the requests build up into a teetering pile that looms over her sanity. It's up to 447 now. "Four hundred and forty-seven requests is very intimidating," she says.
* * *
Maybe the exhaustion is generational, with digital natives -- under 30s -- bringing different expectations to the site than the older digital immigrants. "Technology doesn't create a separate world," Tufekci says. "But it does create some new norms." Digital immigrants, says Tufekci, might never comprehend the semantics of a site that labels both your priest and your ex-boyfriend's ex-roommate as "friends."
Another thing: Seriously, Mom. You do not need to sign your name to your wall posts.
Facebook: It is a fact that the people who lead the least interesting lives will post the most updates on them. These updates will be about how they can't wait for Friday, how they are glad Friday is here and how they are sad Friday is gone.
Defriend. Defriend. Defriend. Defriend.
Facebook True Story No. 2: "I thought I'd been very discriminating" with friend selections, says Renee McGivern, a consultant in Minnesota. But now she's wondering what she really has in common with these people at all. "It's really starting to be like the old telephone party line, where the vast majority is all idle gossip." Isn't it ironic, she says, that we're going back to that?
As a solution, "I'm hiding people like crazy." She lowers her voice. "And they don't know it! How do you tell people you're hiding them? They see me and they assume I've been reading all of their posts."
The guilt. The guilt you used to have over forgetting a friend's birthday is now magnified because it's always someone's birthday, somewhere in your network.
Gone are the days of unfolding conversations, news revealed in person and with dramatic pauses: We are . . . getting . . . married!
Now we enter everything mid-discussion, already debriefed.
Facebook: Oxygen Media released a recent survey in which 42 percent of single women 18 to 34 said it was okay to post drunken pictures of themselves. Who are these women?
Facebook: It's ruined our concept of privacy.
On the other hand, says David Kirkpatrick, author of "The Facebook Effect," maybe that privacy is a dated construct -- at least according to the site's philosophy. The company's ethos implies that people should "have one identity -- that perhaps it's unethical to present one identify at the office and another at home, or one face at the golf course" and another at a party, says Kirkpatrick. Maybe everyone should know us as the same person, whomever we decide that is online.
Maybe we are afraid of our own unified identities? Maybe the thing that is unsettling about the site is that it is the relentless online version of running into your cool soccer friends when you're hanging out at Five Guys with your church group? Multiple competing variations on yourself, and all of them true.
* * *
Facebook: Is still as bright and shiny as it ever was! How else to explain books like "Facebook Fairytales," which recount how people have found love, found long-lost relatives, found organ donation matches. There is so much redemption on the site, so many chances to see how the mean girls turned nice and the nice girls stayed that way.
Facebook: There are still people who are not on it. I don't gettttt it, they say. What does it dooooo?
Facebook: The lazy weekend afternoons bleed into evenings. The eyestrain headaches, the cramped fingers. We think about getting out of the house, calling up a friend. But then again, we already know what they're up to. They are "watching 'Coraline' with Isabelle and waiting for the laundry to dry."
Is this site enriching our relationships, or is it making us too lazy to check in with people in person anymore? Have we sustained ourselves on a friend diet of bread crumbs for so long that we no longer want sandwiches?
Facebook True Story No. 3: "I really value thoughtfulness and rigorous" dialogue, says Amy Alexander, a writer in Washington. But on Facebook, "I find myself chiming in with glib asides," for the amusement of her network. "I feel like I'm getting ADHD. I feel like it's inhibiting my ability for thoughtfulness." She joined the site in the middle of 2009 and is now considering a moratorium, to get her brain back.
Alexander, like so many others, is still negotiating boundaries. When you're still relatively new to Facebook, it seems like, if you just try hard enough, you can keep up with each and every Facebook friend.
But here's a secret early adopters know: You can't. It is impossible to water everyone's Farmville, coo over everyone's puppy pictures or get annoyed by every inane status update.
Eventually, Facebook will fade into the background of your life, no longer new and perhaps actually boring -- about as remarkable as a ringing telephone.
Jul 4, 2010
Ways to Use Social Networking to Land Your Next Job
By Stacy Rapacon
Sunday, July 4, 2010; G03
When looking for my first full-time job about six years ago, I didn't really consider tapping my personal networks online. Friendster and MySpace -- the big names in social media at the time -- were just vehicles for sharing pictures and finding out what old friends were up to (without having to actually talk to them). And that newfangled thing called Facebook, which still required a college e-mail account to join, just seemed redundant.
Today you're falling woefully behind in the race for open jobs if you're not plugged into social-networking sites. Facebook, for example, has exploded with more than 400 million active users, each of whom averages 130 friends. That's a whole lot of people who could help with your job hunt. LinkedIn, with more than 70 million members, offers a more professional networking platform for you to post your résumé and connect with former and current co-workers. And many other sites, including Twitter, can also help you find employment. Wherever you surf, here are tips on how you can work the social-networking scene to land your next (or first) job:
Build your professional brand. Just as you would with a traditional résumé and cover letter, you should create an online presence that represents you best. If you're active on Facebook or other sites for personal use, consider creating separate accounts specifically for your professional efforts.
Make sure all your profiles are complete, highlighting your skills and filled with keywords and phrases that recruiters might search for. Andrea Sittig-Rolf, author of "Revolutionize, Revitalize & Rev Your Résumé," recommends including a mission statement of five words: "I help companies . . . "
You should also start a blog or Twitter account that can establish you as an expert in the field you'd like to pursue. "A blog will enable you to become more visible in search engines, such as Google, which hiring managers use to screen a lot of candidates," says Ivan Misner, author of "Networking Like a Pro" and founder of networking company BNI.com.
Part of building and maintaining a brand is monitoring what others have to say about you. Watch out for anything about you (or someone with a similar name) floating around cyberspace that might put you in a bad light -- which could be anything from photos of you drunk to bad language or even excessively poor spelling. Google yourself regularly, and delve deeper into your online presence with sites such as Pipl.com and Spokeo.com.
Keep in touch. Social-networking sites have made it easier than ever to maintain relationships with distant relatives, old classmates, former co-workers -- just about anyone you've ever met (who's also plugged in). Facebook suggests people you may know through your existing contacts, and LinkedIn shows you first-, second- and third-degree connections.
Advertise your professional intentions. Misner suggests letting your networks know the top five companies you'd like to work for. Send out tweets and status updates asking, for example: "I'd really love to work for Kiplinger. Can anyone put me in touch with someone there?"
"That laser specificity is counterintuitive, but it's very powerful," he said. When you're explicit, people are more likely to remember connections they might have and offer them to you. Also, ask for an introduction, not just contact information.
Research prospective employers. Use your social-media savvy to dig up all you can about any companies and jobs that interest you. Check out a company's Web site and Google the heck out of it, but also search social-networking sites for company pages, as well as employees. Or follow them on Twitter; some companies even offer feeds specifically for job postings, including AT&T (@attjobs), MTV (@mtvnetworksjobs) and Thomson Reuters (@TRCareers). You can also check on career sites, such as Vault.com -- where you can find loads of information on companies for free, plus additional details for $10 a month.
Showcase your tech savvy. Ours is the first full generation raised on computers. Social-networking skills and knowledge that feel natural to us (no, Mom, you don't say the Facebook) can be a great advantage, especially in workplaces looking to enhance their online exposure. Be sure to include your social-networking expertise on your résumé.
Now that you've plumbed the Internet for opportunities to jump-start your career, remember that your online persona can only get you so far. You have to continue your job search with in-person meetings.
-- Kiplinger's Personal Finance
Jul 1, 2010
How Facebook Is Making Friending Obsolete
WSJ, 15 Dec 2009
by Julia Angwin
by Julia Angwin
Friending wasn't used as a verb until about five years ago, when social networks such as Friendster, MySpace and Facebook burst onto the scene.
Suddenly, our friends were something even better - an audience. If blogging felt like shouting into the void, posting updates on a social network felt more like an intimate conversation among friends at a pub.
Inevitably, as our list of friends grew to encompass acquaintances, friends of friends and the girl who sat behind us in seventh-grade homeroom, online friendships became devalued.
Suddenly, we knew as much about the lives of our distant acquaintances as we did about the lives of our intimates – what they'd had for dinner, how they felt about Tiger Woods and so on.
Enter Twitter with a solution: no friends, just followers. These one-way relationships were easier to manage – no more annoying decisions about whether to give your ex-boyfriend access to your photos, no more fussing over who could see your employment and contact information.
Twitter's updates were also easily searchable on the Web, forcing users to be somewhat thoughtful about their posts. The intimate conversation became a talent show, a challenge to prove your intellectual prowess in 140 characters or less.
This fall, Twitter turned its popularity into dollars, inking lucrative deals to allow its users' tweets to be broadcast via search algorithms on Google and Bing.
Soon, Facebook followed suit with deals to distribute certain real-time data to Google and Bing. (Recall that despite being the fifth most popular Web site in the world, Facebook is barely profitable.) Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt says no money changed hands in the deals but says there was "probably an exchange of value."
Just one catch: Facebook had just "exchanged" to Google and Microsoft something that didn't exist.
The vast majority of Facebook users restrict updates to their friends, and do not expect those updates to appear in public search results. (In fact, many people restrict their Facebook profile from appearing at all in search results).
So Facebook had little content to provide to Google's and Bing's real-time search results. When Google's real-time search launched earlier this month, its results were primarily filled with Twitter updates.
Coincidentally, Facebook presented its 350 million members with a new default privacy setting last week. For most people, the new suggested settings would open their Facebook updates and information to the entire world. Mr. Schnitt says the new privacy suggestions are an acknowledgement of "the way we think the world is going."
Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg led by example, opening up his previously closed profile, including goofy photos of himself curled up with a teddy bear.
Facebook also made public formerly private info such as profile pictures, gender, current city and the friends list. (Mr. Schnitt suggests that users are free to lie about their hometown or take down their profile picture to protect their privacy; in response to users' complaints, the friends list can now be restricted to be viewed only by friends).
Of course, many people will reject the default settings on Facebook and keep on chatting with only their Facebook friends. (Mr. Schnitt said more than 50% of its users had rejected the defaults at last tally).
But those who want a private experience on Facebook will have to work harder at it: if you inadvertently post a comment on a friend's profile page that has been opened to the public, your comment will be public too.
Just as Facebook turned friends into a commodity, it has likewise gathered our personal data – our updates, our baby photos, our endless chirping birthday notes— and readied it to be bundled and sold.
So I give up. Rather than fighting to keep my Facebook profile private, I plan to open it up to the public – removing the fiction of intimacy and friendship.
But I will also remove the vestiges of my private life from Facebook and make sure I never post anything that I wouldn't want my parents, employer, next-door neighbor or future employer to see. You'd be smart to do the same.
We'll need to treat this increasingly public version of Facebook with the same hard-headedness that we treat Twitter: as a place to broadcast, but not a place for vulnerability. A place to carefully calibrate, sanitize and bowdlerize our words for every possible audience, now and forever. Not a place for intimacy with friends.
Write to Julia Angwin at julia.angwin@wsj.com
Jun 19, 2010
Closing the Digital Frontier
The era of the Web browser’s dominance is coming to a close. And the Internet’s founding ideology—that information wants to be free, and that attempts to constrain it are not only hopeless but immoral— suddenly seems naive and stale in the new age of apps, smart phones, and pricing plans. What will this mean for the future of the media—and of the Web itself?
By Michael Hirschorn
Image credit: Jason Schneider
As Chris Anderson pointed out in a moment of non-hyperbole in his book Free, the phrase Information wants to be free was never meant to be the rallying cry it turned into. It was first uttered by Stewart Brand at a hacker conference in 1984, and it came with a significant disclaimer: that information also wants to be expensive, because it can be so important (see “Information Wants to Be Paid For,” in this issue). With the long tail of Brand’s dictum chopped off, the phrase Information wants to be free—dissected, debated, reconstituted as a global democratic rallying cry against monsters of the political, business, and media elites—became perhaps the most powerful meme of the past quarter century; so powerful, in fact, that multibillion-dollar corporations destroyed their own businesses at its altar.
It’s a bit of a Schrödinger’s-cat situation when you try to determine what would have happened if we had not bought into the IWTBF mantra, but by the time digital culture exploded into the mainstream with the introduction first of the Mosaic browser and then of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer, in the mid-’90s, free was already an idea only the very old or very obtuse dared to contradict. As far back as the mid-’80s, digital freedom was a cause célèbre on the Northern California–based Whole Earth ’Lectronic Link (known as the WELL), the wildly influential bulletin-board service that brought together mostly West Coast cyberspace pioneers to discuss matters of the day.
It gives you a feel for the WELL’s gestalt to know that Brand, who founded the WELL, was also behind the Long Now Foundation, which promotes the idea of a consciousness-expanding 10,000-year clock. Thrilling, intense, uncompromising, at times borderline self-parodically Talmudic, the WELL had roots in the same peculiar convergence of hippiedom and techno-savantism that created Silicon Valley, but it also called out, consciously and un-, to a neo-Jeffersonian idea of the digital pioneer as a kind of virtual sodbuster. The WELL-ite Howard Rheingold, in his 1993 digital manifesto, The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, described himself as being “colonized” (in a good way) by his virtual community. The libertarian activist John Perry Barlow, an early member of the WELL’s board of directors, was a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital version of the ACLU.
At the WELL, the core gospel of an open Web was upheld with such rigor that when one of its more prolific members, Time magazine’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt, published a scare-the-old-folks cover story on cyber porn in 1995, which carried the implication that some measure of online censorship might not be a bad thing, he and his apostasy were torn to pieces by his fellow WELL-ites with breathtaking relentlessness. At the time, the episode was notable for being one of the first examples of the Web’s ability to fact-check, and keep in check, the mainstream media—it turned out that the study on which Time’s exclusive report was based was inaccurate, and its results were wildly overstated. In retrospect, what seems notable is the fervor with which digital correctness—the idea that the unencumbered flow of everything, including porn, must be defended—was being enforced. In the WELL’s hierarchy of values, pure freedom was an immutable principle, even if the underlying truth (that porn of all kinds was and would be increasingly ubiquitous on the Web, with actual real-life consequences) was ugly and incontestable.
Digital freedom, of the monetary and First Amendment varieties, may in retrospect have become our era’s version of Manifest Destiny, our Turner thesis. Embracing digital freedom was an exaltation, a kind of noble calling. In a smart essay in the journal Fast Capitalism in 2005, Jack Shuler shows how similar the rhetoric of the 1990s digital frontier was to that of the 19th-century frontier era. It’s a short jump from John L. O’Sullivan in 1839—“The far-reaching, the boundless will be the era of American greatness. In its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles”—to Kevin Kelly, the pioneering conceptualizer of the “hive mind” and a founding editor of Wired, writing in Harper’s in 1994, “A recurring vision swirls in the shared mind of the Net, a vision that nearly every member glimpses, if only momentarily: of wiring human and artificial minds into one planetary soul.” Two years later Barlow, a self- described advocate for “online colonists,” got down on bended knee, doublet unbraced, to beseech us mere analog mortals: “Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone … You have no sovereignty where we gather.”
I take you on this quick tour not to make fun of futurism past (I have only slightly less-purple skeletons in my closet), but to point out how an idea that we have largely taken for granted is in fact the product of a very specific ideology. Despite its Department of Defense origins, the matrixed, hyperlinked Internet was both cause and effect of the libertarian ethos of Silicon Valley. The open-source mentality, in theory if not always in practice, proved useful for the tech and Internet worlds. Facebook and Twitter achieved massive scale quickly by creating an open system accessible to outside developers, though that openness is at times more about branding than anything else—as Twitter’s fellow travelers are now finding out. Mainframe behemoths like IBM wave the bloody shirt of Linux, the nonprofit open-source competitor of Microsoft Windows, any time they need to prove their bona fides to the tech community. Ironically, only the “old” entertainment and media industries, it seems, took open and free literally, striving to prove that they were fit for the digital era’s freewheeling information/entertainment bazaar by making their most expensively produced products available for free on the Internet. As a result, they undermined in little more than a decade a value proposition they had spent more than a century building up.
But now, it seems, things are changing all over again. The shift of the digital frontier from the Web, where the browser ruled supreme, to the smart phone, where the app and the pricing plan now hold sway, signals a radical shift from openness to a degree of closed-ness that would have been remarkable even before 1995. In the U.S., there are only three major cell-phone networks, a handful of smart-phone makers, and just one Apple, a company that has spent the entire Internet era fighting the idea of open (as anyone who has tried to move legally purchased digital downloads among devices can attest). As far back as the ’80s, when Apple launched the desktop-publishing revolution, the company has always made the case that the bourgeois comforts of an artfully constructed end-to-end solution, despite its limits, were superior to the freedom and danger of the digital badlands.
Apple, for once, is swimming with the tide. After 15 years of fruitless experimentation, media companies are realizing that an advertising-supported model is not the way to succeed on the Web and they are, at last, seeking to get consumers to pay for their content. They are operating on the largely correct assumption that people will be more likely to pay for consumer-friendly apps via the iPad, and a multitude of competing devices due out this year, than they are to subscribe to the same old kludgy Web site they have been using freely for years. As a result, media companies will soon be pushing their best and most timely content through their apps instead of their Web sites. Meanwhile, video-content services are finding that they don’t even need to bother with the Web and the browser. Netflix, for one, is well on its way to sending movies and TV shows directly to TV sets, making their customers’ experience virtually indistinguishable from ordering up on-demand shows by remote control. It’s far from a given that this shift will generate the kinds of revenue media companies are used to: for under-30s whelped on free content, the prospect of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars yearly for print, audio, and video (on expensive new devices that require paying AT&T $30 a month) is not going to be an easy sell.
Yet lack of uptake by young people will hardly stop the rush to apps. There’s too much potential upside. And with Apple in the driver’s seat, the rhetoric of “free” is becoming notably more muted. In rolling out the iPad, Steve Jobs has been aggressive and, to date, unapologetic about policing apps deemed unacceptable for the iPad store (or apps whose creators hold opinions that are anathema to Apple’s corporate interests or sense of universal order). And Apple has so far refused to enable Flash, the Adobe technology that runs 75 percent of all videos seen on the Web, and is launching its own ad-sales platform, presumably to control and monetize traffic on its devices.
On a more conceptual level, the move from the browser model to the app model (where content is more likely to be accessed via smartly curated “stores” like iTunes, Amazon, or Netflix) signals the first real taming of the Wild Digital West. Apple’s version of the West has nice white picket fences, clapboard houses, morals police, and lots of clean, well-organized places to spend money. (The Internet, it seems, is finally safe for Rupert Murdoch.) These shifts are seemingly subtle, but they may prove profound. Google, which built its once monopolistic position by harnessing the chaos of Web search, has been forced to move aggressively to preserve its business model against this new competition: it has teamed up with the Apple-scorned Flash; is making conciliatory gestures to the content owners it once patronized; has reached a deal to purchase a mobile ad-sales platform; and is promoting its own vision of the future based on cloud computing. Phones using its open-source smart-phone operating system, Android, are outselling the iPhone. Even so, Google still needs for the Web, however it’s accessed, to remain central—because without contextual search advertising, Google ceases to matter. Smart phones in general, and the iPad more pointedly, are not driven by search.
All of this suggests that the era of browser dominance is coming to a close. Twitter, like other recent-vintage social networks, is barely bothering with its Web site; its smart-phone app is more fully featured. The independent TweetDeck, which collates feeds across multiple social networks, is not browser-based. As app-based usage climbs at the expense of the browser and as more content creators put their text, audio, and video behind pay walls, it will be interesting to see what happens to the Twitterverse and blogosphere, which piggyback on, and draw creative juice from, their ability to link to free Web content. If they don’t end up licensing original content, networks such as Twitter and Facebook will become purely communication vehicles. At first glance, Web sites like The Daily Beast and The Huffington Post will have a hard time once they lose their ability to hypertext their digests; on second glance, they will have an opportunity to sop up some of the traffic that once went to their now-paid rivals. Google, meanwhile, is hoping to find ways to link through pay walls and across platforms, but this model will clearly not be the delightfully free-form open plain of the early Web. Years from now, we may look back at these past 15 years as a discrete (and thrillingly indiscreet) chapter in the history of digital media, not the beginning of a new and enlightened dispensation. The Web will be here forever; that is not in question. But as Don Henley sang in “The Last Resort,” the Eagles’ brilliant, haunting song about the resortification of the West, “You call someplace paradise, kiss it goodbye.”
Which brings us back to manifest destinies, physical and digital. As Patricia Limerick has argued in her reconsideration of frontier ideology, the moonstruck rhetoric of Manifest Destiny in the 1800s, though it may have been sincere, neatly papered over a host of less enlightened agendas. The surge west was a critical driver of economic growth, allowing the growing republic to harness vast amounts of natural resources and create new markets. The high-flown ideology of Manifest Destiny was, in short, a cover for a massive land grab (not to mention the slaughter of the Indians). The same is happening online. Now, instead of farmers versus ranchers, we have Apple versus Google. In retrospect, for all the talk of an unencumbered sphere, of a unified planetary soul, the colonization and exploitation of the Web was a foregone conclusion. The only question now is who will own it.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/closing-the-digital-frontier/8131/
Jun 1, 2010
Yahoo to turn subscribers' e-mail contact lists into social networking base
By Cecilia Kang
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 1, 2010; A08
Yahoo plans to announce Tuesday that it is jumping into social networking by using its massive population of e-mail subscribers as a base for sharing information on the Web.
Over the next few weeks, its 280 million e-mail users will be able to exchange comments, pictures and news articles with others in their address books. The program won't expose a user's contact list to the public, as was done by Google through its social networking application, Buzz. But unless a user proactively opts out of the program, those Yahoo e-mail subscribers will automatically be part of a sweeping rollout of features that will incorporate the kinds of sharing done on sites such as Facebook and MySpace.
The plan could spark criticism from Yahoo e-mail users, who signed up for the free service perhaps never imagining the people they e-mailed would become friends for sharing vacation videos, political causes and random thoughts throughout the day. And the move comes amid growing concern by federal lawmakers and regulators over how firms such as Facebook, Google and Microsoft have handled the privacy of Internet users.
After backlash, Facebook last week announced new privacy tools to make it easier for users to block Web sites from tapping into their information, as well as a simpler way to configure who on the site can see personal data. Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, asked Facebook on Friday to explain what kind of user data it had shared with third-party sites. Conyers also asked Google to retain, for federal and state regulators, the data the company scooped off WiFi networks as it collected Street View mapping photos around the country.
To allay privacy concerns, Yahoo said it would give users a week's notice before launching the new features and provide a single button on the site for opting out entirely.
Specifically, the company will launch a product called Yahoo Updates that allows e-mail users to see what other contacts on their lists are commenting about or sharing on sites like Yahoo Finance, Facebook and the photo sharing site Flickr. Updates will initially include 15 sites and partnerships and will eventually expand to include partners such as Twitter this summer.
Yahoo has tiptoed into social media, launching a similar tool last year called Connections, which allowed each user to customize a list of contacts with whom to share information. The company also tried two years ago to build a competitive product to Facebook, where users sought "friends," or contacts, to join micro-networks within Yahoo in the same way Facebook users amass friends through requests. Yahoo abandoned that project and instead decided to tap into its captive audience of e-mail users.
The move is part of a revamping of the once-rudderless Internet pioneer. Chief executive Carol Bartz, brought in last year to lead the firm, has stripped the company of unprofitable business units to focus on its greatest strengths -- its popular free e-mail and messaging programs, and its library of sports, news and finance sites -- to keep users in the Yahoo universe longer.
The longer a user stays on the site, the more advertising dollars and e-commerce it generates. But it remains to be seen if users will view their contact lists as the kinds of people they choose to socialize with on the Web. When Google launched Buzz, some users complained that they used Gmail for business and to correspond with strangers and that they didn't want to share birthday videos with their plumbers or bosses.
Yahoo will begin notifying users of the change on June 7, one week before the launch. Users who don't want to participate can click one button on the settings page to opt out. Or they can customize each piece of information -- a Facebook update or a comment on a Yahoo news story -- to either be shared with Yahoo e-mail contacts or Facebook. Eventually, Twitter and other partners with social-networking platforms will also be included.
"What Yahoo has done is recognized that your e-mail or messenger network is a useful resource and that you may be interested in knowing what your contacts are interested in knowing about, and they stop there," said Jules Polonetsky, the director of the Future of Privacy Forum, a privacy think tank. "That's opposed to the idea that then, therefore, your relationship with them risks being exposed."
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May 29, 2010
What sites such as Facebook and Google know and whom they tell
By Ariana Eunjung Cha
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, May 29, 2010; A01
When Disa Powell's husband and brother were badly burned in an electrical explosion while conducting maintenance at a Wal-Mart store and the family sued, the defense went after something she never expected: her online life.
Through a subpoena seeking information about the men's injuries, Wal-Mart was able to gain full access to her Facebook and MySpace social-networking accounts -- every public and private message, contact and photo for the previous 2 1/2 years.
There were the pictures of Powell's newborn baby lying in a hospital bed after heart surgery (Label: "The hardest day of Mommy and Daddy's life"). The messages detailing problems with her pregnancy ("I got a bladder infection, which has moved to my kidneys"). And the messages dissing on friends ("Brad is a big fat BABY, and can't do anything by himself. The whole issue is that he's lazy").
"I was livid," said Powell, 35, a former hospital administrator who a few years ago moved from Maryland's Eastern Shore back to her home town in Oklahoma. "I felt like I had been seriously violated."
The case, which was settled out of court in January, offers a window into an issue that in recent weeks has riled members of Congress, consumer advocacy groups and tens of thousands of account holders: what your social-networking sites know about you and whom they share it with.
Many online service providers over the past few years have been building huge dossiers with minute details of each user's online activities -- a practice that isn't usually mentioned in privacy policies. Some companies anonymize the data, while others do not. Some store detailed data for a month, while others keep it for years.
At the same time, the ease with which outsiders can access the data is increasing, as corporations, insurance companies and parties in divorces or employment disputes make widespread use of subpoenas.
David Hersh, the attorney who represented the Powells and Disa's brother Joel Ledbetter, said such subpoenas have become standard practice in litigation and are "meant to discover information that would be embarrassing or might be used adversely even if it has nothing to do with the claim."
Companies own the dataBecause your account information is stored on a company's servers, on the "cloud" that is the Internet rather than on your personal laptop, the company owns it, not you. While accessing your laptop may require a difficult-to-obtain search warrant, getting certain data on Facebook, MySpace, Meetup, LinkedIn and other social-networking sites' servers may require only a simple subpoena.
"The law in this area is really outdated. It's pre-'www,' " Christopher Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union, said of the 1986 act that was designed to introduce privacy controls to electronic communications. "Back then nobody could even figure out whether an e-mail was more like a letter or a phone call."
Efforts to give consumers more control over their private information have accelerated in Washington over the past month, in the wake of a furor over privacy policy changes at Facebook in particular. (Washington Post Co. Chairman Donald E. Graham is on the board of directors at Facebook.) Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg tried to quell the outcry this week by making it easier for users to control how they share data.
On Friday, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, wrote to Facebook and Google to demand that they cooperate with congressional investigators looking into privacy practices. Google has drawn scrutiny for accessing information including e-mails and surfing from open WiFi networks while photographing streets for its mapping service.
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has called on the Federal Trade Commission to provide guidelines for use of private information and prohibit access without user permission. The ACLU is part of a coalition of advocacy groups and tech companies that is pushing for a major overhaul of the 1986 act.
Meanwhile, software developers are working on a way to prohibit access using technology. Four New York University students recently made headlines for a project they call Diaspora that they say will allow users to keep control over their social-networking information. The group was seeking $10,000 for its startup but has raised $190,000 since the Facebook controversy broke out in late April.
In the 15 years since the World Wide Web brought the Internet to the masses, the most successful companies have been those that collect information about users and use it to sell things. Google, for instance, has confirmed that it keeps track of search queries sent from a particular IP address. (A spokesman said the company anonymizes IP addresses associated with search queries after nine months and cookies after 18 months.)
Extensive data collectionCompanies are loath to talk about what information they track, but internal compliance manuals for law enforcement for Facebook, Yahoo and Microsoft reviewed by The Washington Post show that their data collection is much more extensive than users might believe based on what they themselves can access.
For example: Microsoft tracks the Xbox LIVE start and end dates and times for game-playing and notes the game played, such as "SW: Jedi Academy." Yahoo keeps chat and instant messenger logs for 45 to 60 days and notes the time/date and IP address for when content is added or deleted to someone's profile or to its Flickr photo service.
Facebook's data collection is among the most detailed.
For every user id, Facebook keeps a log of the IP address that accessed the account, the date and time, and what exactly the user did -- clicking on an advertisement, looking at someone else's profile, posting a photo or sending a message to a friend, etc.
Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes declined to comment on specific data-gathering and retention policies but said the privacy policy makes clear that the company may disclose information pursuant to subpoenas, court orders or other requests.
However, Noyes said, "We scrutinize every single information request; require a detailed description of why the request is being made; and, if it is deemed appropriate, share only the minimum amount of information."
Facebook says in its compliance manual that it generally retains information about activity by IP address for 90 days, but in the Ledbetter-Powell case it's clear that other information, such as her private messages to and from friends, had been kept since her account was opened in 2007.
Eben Moglen, a Columbia University law professor and director of Software Freedom Law Center, calls Facebook "one big database of hundreds of millions of people containing the kind of information far beyond what the secret police in 20th-century totalitarian regimes had."
The company knows which social contacts are closest to you and can guess your moods, he said. And if you're obsessively checking another person's profile at the same time he or she is doing the same with yours, Moglen claims, "Facebook can even tell you're going to have an affair before you do."
Research editor Alice Crites contributed to this report.
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May 28, 2010
Google Names Facebook Most Visited Site
Daniel Ionescu, PC World
May 28, 2010 9:29 am
Google has publicly released a list of the top 1000 websites in the world, raking the Facebook social networking site as the leading Web property by unique users.
According to Google's AdPlanner stats, Facebook scores more than 540 million unique visitors per month, reaching a sizeable chunk of 35.2 percent of the Internet population.
Facebook not only has the most unique visitors in Google's stats, but also the most page views per month, a whopping 570 billion views, ahead of other properties like Craigslist (#49) with 14 billion views.
The AdPlanner list does not contain any figures for most of Google's own properties, like YouTube, Gmail, News, or Search, but gives an interesting insight into which top Websites do not serve advertising.
Wikipedia (#4) and Mozilla (#10) are the only two Websites in Google's top 10 not to display advertising. A noteworthy entry on the 18th spot in the AdPlanner rankings is Twitter (#18), with 98 million unique visitors per month, which doesn't serve ads.
Destinations portals such as Yahoo.com (#2), MSN.com (#5), Baidu (#8), Sina.com.cn (#11) and 163.com (#15) are also high on the list, probably due to the fact that many people use these sites as their home page.
Search engines also occupy several top places in the AdPlanner list (excluding Google's own Search). Live.com (#2) has over 370 million uniques per month, Bing.com (#13) with 110 million, and Ask.com (#20) with 88 million.
Blogging is also high on Google's list, with Blogspot (Blogger) situated in the 7th place with 230 million uniques, and WordPress.com in the 12th spot with 120 million uniques.
Several news sources made it into the top 100 as well: Cnet.com ranks as #35, BBC.co.uk on #43, CNN.com at #64, and NYTimes.com on #83.
Other entries worth noting among Google's top 1000 websites are Microsoft.com (#6), Adobe.com (#14), Amazon.com (#22), eBay.com (#24), Apple.com (#27) and Hotmail.com (#30).
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May 23, 2010
Differences in How Men and Women Use Facebook
04.26.10, 6:00 PM ET
"The world's gone social. And women are more social than men." --Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.
Facebook, the largest social networking tool in the world, is dominated by women.
According to BrianSolis.com and
Where Do Women Social Network? Top 10 Sites
Women are the majority of users on many of the biggest social networking sites, including Twitter, MySpace, Bebo and Flickr. Men, meanwhile, are most active on sites like Digg, YouTube and LinkedIn, which are more content-oriented and promotional than discussion-based.
However, women don't just visit different sites from men, they use social media differently than men. Experts believe the difference between how men and women operate online mirror their motivations offline. While women often use online social networking tools to make connections and share items from their personal lives, men use them as means to gather information and increase their status.
"We're women--we like to talk about things. Women use social media as a way to connect," says Jodi Kahn, the head of iVillage. A recent joint study from BlogHer and iVillage supports her theory, reporting that three-quarters of women use online communities to stay up to date with friends and family, and 68% use them to "connect with others like me."
On message boards and forums, Kahn says that both sexes seek information and advice, but women tend to get more personal. She says women want to learn about real people experiencing similar conflicts. "Women are online solving real-life issues. If I'm a mom who is about to start potty training, it's important to me to hear how other real moms are doing it," says Kahn.
Men, on the other hand, are researchers and social climbers. Professor of social media marketing at UC Berkeley, Lorrie Thomas, says men use social media as an "interactive Rolodex," storing contact information for future use.
Sherry Perlmutter Bowen, a gender and communication professor at Villanova University in Pennsylvania, says she's seeing men use social media to gather information and boost their influence. "I see males espousing their wisdom on social media sites and using social media to sell, to compete, to 'climb the ladder,'" she says.
According to Bowen, these gender differences are rooted in communication styles learned since birth. "Girls and boys are often raised in two distinct cultures where they learn different rules and norms for behavior and talk: Girls learn to build relationships by sharing social information. Boys learn to compare and compete with others, always striving for more success."
Psychologist Leslie Sokol, author of self-help book Think Confident, Be Confident, believes virtual communication differences between men and women can be tracked back through history as evolutionary methods of survival. Throughout time, males have been in competition with each other, even in the animal kingdom, she says. "The sexiest bird with the brightest plumage and best territory got all the women." Because it was in their best interest not to show weaknesses or give away their strategies, men became more reserved as an adaptive method, she says.
Sokol believes that women, the gatherers and community builders, had to work as a team to survive. They needed to use each other as resources and adapted to be more supportive by sharing their plans, shortcomings and advice. Today, women are still more likely to be forthcoming and verbose than men, she says, a difference that is reflected online.
Diana Windley, 39, is a good example. The assistant vice president of marketing at Goldenwest Credit Union in Utah uses several networking sites mainly to keep up with friends and read and discuss things she likes, rather than using it for business or promotional purposes. She also blogs about her life as career mom. Everyday she signs into Facebook to reconnect with old friends from high school and college and to build new relationships with neighbors and extended family. On Twitter she aims to make connections with people who aren't in her immediate circle but share similar interests in career, parenting and religion.
On the other hand, Allen Chen, 31, a communications assistant at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, uses networking sites as mediums to discuss ideas rather than share personal information. He logs onto Facebook several times a day to post interesting articles, which solicit responses from his 175 friends. He also uses Twitter to keep up on current events by following news outlets and "strangers" who share common interests in sports and technology.
Elisa Camahort Page, cofounder and chief operating officer of BlogHer, believes men leverage social media for broadcasting their ideas and skills vs. women who find connections with others by sharing the ups and downs of their daily lives.
Men are more active blog participants, she explains. They are more likely to read, write and post comments to blogs. Surprisingly, both men and women report that their most common blog topic is "my life," she says. However, the second most popular topic for men is business and career, and food and fashion are tied in second place for women.
Men are also more active users of YouTube, with about 20% more men visiting the video-sharing site per week, according to the BlogHer-iVillage study. Camahort Page believes men prefer the site because it is more passive. "[YouTube] is about finding, consuming and passing along content, but it's not about conversation."
Not surprisingly, the different ways men and women approach social media are beginning to be noticed and exploited by advertisers. Scott Staab, group creative director of marketing agency T3, whose clients include JCPenney and
Staab says that a woman who advocates for a brand online is more likely to influence her friends. "Some of our clients skew highly female, and we are going into social gaming because it's an area that we know women spend more time." Companies would be smart to create their own games to draw in users, Staab says, because "it doesn't have to be about pushing product all the time. It's about brand engagement."
According to Kelly O'Neill, director of product marketing at e-commerce software firm
Patty Kennedy, founder of communications firm Kennedy Spencer, uses her knowledge of gendered behavior on social networking sites to better target men and women for her clients, which include
Says Facebook's Sandberg, "If you reach women [online], they will tell their friends." What may be an evolutionary fact turns out to be a marketer's dream.
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How Facebook Tricks You Into Adding Too Many 'Friends'
Help Center |
Friends: SuggestionsExpand All
Suggestions is a feature that helps you connect with people and Pages...
Suggestions is a feature that helps you connect with people and Pages you are likely to know, as well as engage with your confirmed friends on Facebook. Facebook calculates Suggestions based on the networks you are a part of, mutual friends, work and education information, contacts imported using the Friend Finder, and many other factors.
Since this feature is automatic, it occasionally identifies people that you do not know or do not want to be friends with. Please keep in mind that Facebook will never send friend requests to the users that show up in this list.
Since this feature is automatic, it occasionally identifies people that you do not know or do not want to be friends with. Please keep in mind that Facebook will never send friend requests to the users that show up in this list.
Suggestions may appear on the home page, in the new user orientation,...
Suggestions may appear on the home page, in the new user orientation, on the Friends page, and in ad space around the site. To see more Suggestions, click the "See All" link.
You can block someone from appearing in Suggestions by clicking the "X...
You can block someone from appearing in Suggestions by clicking the "X" button at the top right of their entry. This will close the person's entry and prevent them from appearing in this section again.
Please note that the Suggestions section will not appear if you block all of the people Facebook suggests. You can, however, find this section by clicking the Friends drop-down menu and selecting "Find Friends." Once you have more matches, this section will reappear on your homepage.
Please note that the Suggestions section will not appear if you block all of the people Facebook suggests. You can, however, find this section by clicking the Friends drop-down menu and selecting "Find Friends." Once you have more matches, this section will reappear on your homepage.
The Suggestions feature was built to connect you with people or Pages...
The Suggestions feature was built to connect you with people or Pages on Facebook that you are likely to know. If you don't want to appear in this box for everyone on Facebook, you can restrict your privacy settings from the Privacy Settings page. Under the Contact Information section, you can restrict to the setting for "Add me as a friend" to "Friends of Friends". This will ensure that only these people will be able to view you in the Suggestions feature.
If you have ever used the Friend Finder feature, Suggestions may show...
If you have ever used the Friend Finder feature, Suggestions may show people who have your email address in their address book and/or contacts that you have in your address book. If you would like Facebook to remove these contacts, please follow the instructions found here.
The Suggestions feature has been expanded to help you engage with your...
The Suggestions feature has been expanded to help you engage with your confirmed friends on Facebook in addition to finding people or Pages that you are likely to know.
Please report this information here so that we can memorialize this pe...
Please report this information here so that we can memorialize this person’s account. Memorializing the account removes certain more sensitive information like status updates and restricts profile access to confirmed friends only. Please note that in order to protect the privacy of the deceased user, we cannot provide login information for the account to anyone. We do honor requests from close family members to close the account completely.
Find questions and answers from other users here.
Find questions and answers from other users here.
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