Starting Points: social networking

Showing posts with label social networking. Show all posts

May 10, 2010

Why I Left Facebook

by John MacDougall

I joined Facebook (FB) several years ago with simple aims. I wanted new, real-name private sources about Indonesia and Timor-Leste, subjects of two list projects I ran on Yahoo Groups. I was also frustrated about the limited options for private presentation of self (for myself and others) and direct communication on Friendster, then a key social networking player. For a while, FB managed to meet these needs to a partial degree which made it seem worth investment of my time.

This only occurred after a dismaying start, in which my account was quickly suspended, twice, for 'spam-like' activity (simply adding a few friends and posting a few links). FB's then spam detection robot was very amateurish. Finding relevant friends was hampered severely by a then requirement to join a single geographical network -- searching for friends outside was not permitted. (This lame attempt to create 'community' was later eliminated.) I did create several FB 'groups' akin to my Yahoo lists on Indonesia and Timor-Leste. Groups were open to all and adding members was all too easy -- friends on FB longer could simply invite all their friends to join a group. Through friending group members, I was slowly able to build my preferred network on FB, even though, as on Yahoo, few persons besides myself contributed to these 'groups.' On the other hand, I was besieged with requests to join 'fun' game applications.

In retrospect, I should have learned more from these early strange patterns which ultimately turned FB into the deeply flawed, dangerous and specious social networking site it has now unfortunately become.

1) The site owners and admins change the user interface capriciously and too frequently, often without announcement and without first ascertaining, through trials, user feedback. New users cannot possibly master the site even in a month and as a result wind up with settings they would not otherwise approve, even if they have the patience to locate and examine them. The link to the well-written help pages is so poorly placed that few know it exists. In any case, the help pages have grown to almost book-length size, a deterrent to their use.

2) The quality of the main programs which define and maintain the site is too often very poor, too slow, or too inclined to fail. Applications especially lose their original attractive simplicity as they monetize, and they sometimes simply are suddently drastically modified, abandoned or made to disappear. This includes even a major native FB app like the one controlling 'groups.' I had to re-write and adapt text for all the six groups I created and maintained on FB, an onerous task. Redundant and fad apps now are overwhelmingly numerous. It has become very hard to get enough friends to coordinate their apps.

3) On-site search of FB itself now ranges far and wide, revealing much private information of almost everyone on the site. Worse, recent major site revamps reproduce much of this information on the public internet through simple Google searches. All current users should try such external searches to gauge whether what they intended to remain private within a closed community is now public even to persons who are not FB members.

4) In its recent mandatory use of Microsoft's Bing to change words on the personal Info tab of user profiles into clickable links, everything on that tab is now publicly visible on the net. The only way to keep such material private is to write nothing there, or delete what one has already written there. This is a truly egregious violation of the presumption of privacy most people bring to social networking sites. Otherwise put, much of the 'social' part of one's profile must be self-destroyed if privacy is to be preserved. If this is not done and those public links are allowed to stand, one is no longer networking but broadcasting to all the major search engines. Worse, the links automatically generated are almost always repetitive, more often than not inappropriate, and grossly distort the presentation of self on which most social networkers initially focus. The main purpose of this change, expanding by at least a factor of three what is visible to the public from just the Info tab, is mainly to allow FB more room for the paid ads on which it depends. An irony advertisers have likely not yet realized is that personal profiles are generally just briefly scanned by new friends, then forgotten, with such social interactions as do occur originating mainly from the overwhelming News Feed. That in turn turns the site into the breeding ground for social trivia it is today.

5) I left FB with over 2,600 'friends.' This network could in theory be very valuable. But only a small fraction of these 2,600 friends ever read what I post on my Wall. That, for the longest time, was mainly information in the form of links. These postings do not appear in the news feeds of most of my friends. Few FBers post or read mainly substantive content, esp on the order of 5-15 per day from a friend like me. Instead, since they are there mostly to socialize, not to get subtantive information, they make use of a Hide Friend option in their news feeds on the default Home page, so that everything I do never appears in their feeds. A large majority of FBers have too many friends, often in the hundreds and upward, making Hiding Friends almost a necessity to keep one's sanity at the overload of stuff thrown at people while using the site. FB does not help matters by suggesting new friends to add during every new visit to Home. The more friends FBers have, the more opportunities FB has to sell ads and make more money.

FB resembles a good social networking site less and less with each passing day. It has become a money machine. Its socializing has become trivialized, and it is hostile to enough exposure for substantive content. In numerous ways, just a few remarked on here, it has deliberately gradually breached the privacy of all its members' data to the point that by now most of that data is public. The best way to protect yourself, and your friends, from further inevitable FB admin mischief is to delete your account.

Apr 4, 2010

Rob Pegoraro - The latest Facebook fracas: Your privacy vs. its profit - washingtonpost.com

Image via CrunchBase

By Rob Pegoraro
Sunday, April 4, 2010; G04

The signs of a new season surround us: Flowers are blooming, trees are budding, and another Facebook privacy fracas is brewing.

The last event kicked off a week ago, when the popular social network posted a note on its blog about "working with some partner Web sites that we pre-approve to offer a more personalized experience" at those sites.

This possible change didn't exactly get a charitable read in reactions like "Facebook's Plan To Automatically Share Your Data With Sites You Never Signed Up For," and "Facebook Planning To Give Away Your Data To 'Partners.' "

How bad could things get for the 400 million-plus Facebook users when this test begins a few months from now?

Image by Trucknroll via Flickr

The potential downside seems obvious. You'll see that some random site knows who your Facebook friends are and fret about other once-private information Facebook might be leaking. But what will you be able to do when so much of your life is tied up there?

As Sherry Turkle, a sociologist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said in an e-mail Thursday: "There is a sense of the 'investment' in Facebook being so great that one is beholden to it. . . . This is not empowering."

(Before I go further, a few disclaimers: Washington Post Co. chairman and chief executive Donald E. Graham sits on Facebook's board of directors; Facebook's chief privacy officer, Chris Kelly, who is on leave to run for political office, is a friend of mine from college; and many Post staffers, myself included, use public Facebook pages to connect with readers.)

The upside isn't quite as clear.

In a phone interview Wednesday, Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt and product director Bret Taylor said the Palo Alto, Calif., company wanted to expand its utility. In this experiment, Facebook would build on its Facebook Connect system (in which people can sign into sites such as The Post's with their Facebook accounts) to help other companies greet Facebook users with a taste of its social network.

For example, Taylor suggested that if a Facebook friend posted a link to a song on his wall and you clicked over to the record label's site, the label could tell you which Facebook pals liked the song.

This test would come with limits. You'd have to be logged into Facebook in the same browser to get any such personalized welcome elsewhere, less than 10 sites would be invited into the program at first, and each of them would have to let you easily opt out (after which each would have to delete any data Facebook had shared about you). Facebook would also provide a universal opt-out for the entire program.

To its credit, Facebook hasn't tried to spring this change on people. Beyond that blog post, it has invited users to comment on proposed changes to its privacy policy and "statement of rights and responsibilities" -- then provided a marked-up version of each showing text that has been removed and added, a step few other sites bother to take.

The reaction to that prior disclosure could indicate how worked up people really are about the changes. The relevant part of the new privacy policy, "Information You Share With Third Parties," had drawn only 211 comments early Thursday.

More important, consider what's happened since Facebook made far more user data public by default in December. According to Schnitt, 33.9 percent of Facebook users had changed their privacy settings one way or another, even though the site required all of them to confirm, decline or edit its suggested options. Since then, 50 million more people have joined Facebook.

You can't chalk all of that up to audience obliviousness.

Perhaps Facebook users have decided that with so many people on the site, their own data get lost in the collective noise -- sort of the way living in a big city affords some enforced anonymity.

Some might have learned to think like publicists on Facebook. They dial back how much information they post, they only write status updates that beg for publicity (think of all the political manifestoes you've seen), or they create second accounts for their work identities (an action Facebook's user agreement prohibits).

Or maybe Facebook's executives are correct in assuming that people don't want as much privacy online, as founder Mark Zuckerberg said in January. (He did not say that privacy was dead, nor does he seem to think that; his own Facebook profile informs strangers that "Mark only shares some of his profile information with everyone.")

But even if all of those theories are true, changing the rules to share people's information without advance permission crosses a line. If the benefits of this openness are as obvious as Facebook suggests, this new option should sell itself to the same people who let Google's computers read their Gmail, then publicize their pastimes on Foursquare. And if this experiment is as limited as Facebook suggests, the company won't forgo much revenue if it eases off on its launch.

In the meantime, I'll stay on the site -- as a journalist, it's implausible not to. But it would help to see some sign that this company will go to the mat to defend its users' rights, even if that means jeopardizing its profits. It's not too late for Facebook to pick a fight with China, is it?

Living with technology, or trying to? Read more at http://voices.washingtonpost.com/fasterforward.

Mar 31, 2010

The Twitter List Directory - Mashable

Image by See-ming Lee 李思明 SML via Flickr

The Twitter List Directory - Mashable

Mar 8, 2010

Jackson Diehl - Where are Obama's foreign confidants?

Image via Wikipedia

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, March 8, 2010; A13

I recently asked several senior administration officials, separately, to name a foreign leader with whom Barack Obama has forged a strong personal relationship during his first year in office. A lot of hemming and hawing ensued.

One official mentioned French president Nicolas Sarkozy, who is scheduled to bring his glamorous wife to the White House residence this month for a couples dinner with Barack and Michelle Obama. But in France, Sarkozy's bitterness toward Obama, the product of several perceived snubs, is an open secret, reported widely in the French press. In a speech at the U.N. General Assembly in September Sarkozy appeared to mock Obama's signature disarmament initiative, saying "we are living in a real world, not a virtual world."

Angela Merkel's name also came up: Obama and the German chancellor, I was told, share a down-to-business pragmatism. But Merkel, too, has been conspicuously cool toward Obama ever since he made Berlin a stop on his 2008 election campaign. She stopped him then from appearing at the Brandenburg Gate and was said to be miffed last November when Obama didn't show for ceremonies celebrating the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin wall. Anyway, diplomats say that Merkel has a much warmer relationship with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

No one named Gordon Brown. That's fairly remarkable: The relationship between the sitting British prime minister and U.S. president has been consistently close over the past 30 years. Think Reagan and Thatcher, Clinton and Blair, Bush and Blair. But Obama has been portrayed as dissing Brown ever since he presented him with a set of DVDs as a gift during their first meeting in Washington a year ago. Last fall the British press reported that the White House had turned down five requests for Obama to meet Brown one-on-one at the United Nations or the G-20 summit.

Image via Wikipedia

Finally, I was offered a name I didn't expect: Dmitry Medvedev. Obama, I was assured, has built a solid relationship with the Russian president during their several bilateral meetings, which have focused in part on a new nuclear arms control agreement that both could count as a distinctive achievement. But the deal hasn't been clinched -- maybe because Vladimir Putin, whom Obama has held at arm's length, doesn't like it. And could it really be that an American president has found his closest foreign partner in the Kremlin?

The paradox here is that Obama remains hugely popular abroad -- from Germany and France to countries where anti-Americanism has recently been a problem, such as Turkey and Indonesia. His following means that, in democratic countries at least, leaders have a strong incentive to befriend him. And yet this president appears, so far, to have no genuine foreign friends. In this he is the opposite of George W. Bush, who was reviled among the foreign masses but who forged close ties with a host of leaders -- Aznar of Spain, Uribe of Colombia, Sharon and Olmert of Israel, Koizumi of Japan.

Jealousy or political rivalry may play a part -- Sarkozy is one of several Europeans who have wanted to assume the role of Obama's closest ally and reacted poorly when he didn't respond. But another big cause seems to be lack of interest on Obama's part. Focused intently on his domestic agenda, the president is said to be reluctant to take time to build relationships with foreign leaders. If something has needed to be done or decided, he has readily picked up the phone. If not, he generally hasn't been available.

Obama also hasn't hesitated to publicly express displeasure with U.S. allies. He sparred all last year with Israel's Binyamin Netanyahu; he expressed impatience when Japan's Yukio Hatoyama balked at implementing a military base agreement. He has repeatedly criticized Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai, and he gave up the videoconferences Bush used to have with Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki.

An argument can be made that none of this matters. Bush, after all, was often criticized for depending too heavily on personal relationships -- remember how he looked into Putin's soul? -- and his pals didn't save his administration from being universally condemned as "unilateralist." The Obama administration, in contrast, can argue that it has done pretty well in lining up European support on key matters such as Afghanistan and Iran. And Obama's personal popularity continues to provide leverage with leaders around the world, whether they hit it off with him or not.

Still, it's worth wondering: Would Sarkozy have fought French public opinion and sent more troops to Afghanistan (he has refused) if he had been cultivated more by Obama? Would Israel's Netanyahu be willing to take more risks in the (moribund) Middle East peace process if he believed he could count on this U.S. president? Would Karzai cooperate more closely with U.S. commanders in the field if Obama had embraced him?

The answers seem obvious. In foreign as well as domestic affairs, coolness has its cost.

Second Life's virtual money can become real-life cash

Image via CrunchBase

By Michael S. Rosenwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, March 8, 2010; A01

Dana Moore sells rain. He sells a lot of it, for about a buck per reusable storm.

"I don't know why people love buying rainstorms," he said, watching his product drizzle last week, "but they do seem to like them a lot."

The attraction isn't rain, per se, but Moore's rain, which can deluge swaths of land on command. The rain falls not in Bowie, where he lives with his wife of 37 years, but in the virtual world of Second Life, the Web portal where he also markets snow, clocks, University of Maryland basketball T-shirts, Duke basketball T-shirts (grudgingly), two-story Tudor-style homes, pinup posters from the 1930s and the sounds of barking dogs.

In the physical world, Moore, 62, writes software for a subsidiary of defense contractor Raytheon. In the virtual world, he is one of thousands of entrepreneurs selling products -- for genuine American dollars -- that add a remarkably profitable dose of reality to Second Life's fantasy world.

Newbies show up in Second Life without so much as 40 acres and a mule, so their avatars need hair, and fancy shoes for a concert or suits for business meetings, and a house, and art for the house, and maybe a waterfall for the living room -- virtual goods that cost real money.

Last year, as the physical economy withered, Second Life's economy blossomed, with user-to-user transactions topping $567 million in actual U.S. currency, a 65 percent jump over 2008. About 770,000 unique users made repeat visits to Second Life in December, and the users, known as residents, cashed out $55 million of their Second Life earnings last year, transferring that money to PayPal accounts.

The big purchases in Second Life are land and the material goods residents put on that land. It isn't real land, obviously, but digital space that looks like land. Users control the intellectual property rights to whatever they build, giving them economic incentive to create things. And create they do.

"The barriers to entry are really, really low for an enterprise to get started in Second Life," said Tom Boellstorff, an anthropologist with the University of California at Irvine who studies virtual worlds, in an interview at one of his Second Life residences -- a lovely modern space with a water view. "You don't need a factory. You don't have a lot of expenses."

Boellstorff, through his avatar, was sitting on a couch. To make his point, the professor arranged for a box to appear suddenly in his living room, not far from a reporter's virtual face. "You can make it hollow," he said, making the box hollow. "Or you can make it a circle," he said, making the box a circle. "You can't do that in the physical world. It's just not that easy. Here you can make anything." His voice came through a computer's speaker with the clarity of a land-line telephone call.

Second Life's economy looks remarkably like that of the physical world. At one end, where most users are, small-business owners such as Moore keep their physical-world day jobs but make a few hundred dollars a year selling niche products such as rain and T-shirts. But as Second World has grown, some users have built much bigger, full-time businesses: Stiletto Moody sells thousands of high-end shoes for about $8 a pair, and Curious Kitties is a Japanese maker of somewhat risqué clothing.

More than 50 businesses in the virtual world made more than $100,000 each last year.

Second Life's owner, Linden Lab, makes money by selling land plots and islands. An island runs about $1,000, a high barrier of entry for most Second Life users. But to open a strip mall, dance club or office tower, or to build a home, avatars need land. Some Second Life users have taken on Donald Trump-like personas, buying land from Second Life and then leasing plots to small-business owners or would-be homeowners, or flipping their properties as speculators.

As in physical reality, these land barons are few in number but generate a big chunk of the world's gross domestic product. The top 25 Second Life earners are mostly land barons, making a combined $12 million.

"The Second Life economy really starts with the idea that people want to socialize," said Robert Bloomfield, a Cornell University management professor who hosts a popular financial talk show in Second Life called Metanomics. "People need a place to do that. So the foundation of the economy is land." Sound familiar?

Ray Williams, who lives near Richmond, is a Second Life land baron. In 2006, on his lunch break as a computer technician at Circuit City, Williams stumbled on a CNN.com news item about an avatar named Anshe Chung, Second Life's first physical-world millionaire. Chung, whose real name is Ailin Graef, is a former schoolteacher who became known as the Rockefeller of Second Life by buying and selling land. That night, Williams logged on to Second Life for the first time. Two and a half years ago, after he was laid off by Circuit City, Williams made Second Life his full-time career.

The other day, standing on the beach of a private island he shares with his real-world girlfriend, Williams -- through his avatar, named Ray Burdeyna -- told a story that sounded very much like Trump's: He started off small, buying land plots here and there. He saved enough money to buy his first island. Then he started leasing out spaces. That led to more island purchases, and now he owns 100 islands. Each of his holdings generates about $85 a week in rent. He pays for his health insurance and runs his business from a room in his Chesterfield, Va., apartment -- two computers tuned in to Second Life, a third to his music.

"I make a lot more money doing this than working at Circuit City, that's for sure," said Burdeyna, strolling on his island near a yacht his girlfriend bought him for Christmas. He looked out of place on his beach; after all, he was wearing a shirt and tie. Burdeyna said he put it on for his interview with The Washington Post, and then he invited one of his tenants, who runs a virtual club from his physical home in the Netherlands, to drop by.

Foxx Bode proclaimed Burdeyna a great landlord. "He's a lot cheaper than other landlords," said Bode, who declined to give his real name. "I've got no problems with him."

Every week, Williams's tenants drop by his office, where signs on the wall show how much each resident owes and the date the money is due. Tenants click on boxes to pay their bills.

Nobody in Second Life pays for anything with actual currency. They pay in Linden dollars, which, like real-world currency, is traded on an exchange. Linden Lab, like the Federal Reserve, controls the exchange and money supply to maintain a steady value for Linden dollars. That value has historically hovered around 250 Linden dollars for every U.S. dollar.

People entering virtual worlds for the first time are often surprised to learn that virtual dollars have actual value. They should not be surprised, economists say, because whether the world is physical or electronic, all value is virtual.

"I think it's fair to say that the car I am in or the clothes people wear, a good chunk of their value is virtual," said Ed Castronova, an Indiana University economist who studies and creates virtual worlds. "A coat is not entirely about keeping the cold off -- there's a look, a signal, a message, and that's virtual. There's always been this virtual part of the economy, but by stripping out the physical part, you go, 'Oh my gosh, a lot of our motivations are intangible.' "

To that end, one of the more popular posts last week on the virtual worlds blog Terra Nova was by Castronova, linking to a story in the satirical newspaper the Onion that opened: "The U.S. economy ceased to function this week after unexpected existential remarks by Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke shocked Americans into realizing that money is, in fact, just a meaningless and intangible social construct."

In Second Life, that money buys weather.

Feb 17, 2010

Google Buzz Plays Catch-Up

by Katherine Boehret

WSJ's Katherine Boehret reviews Google Buzz, the latest effort by Google to join the social networking wave. Buzz is an opt-in social network built into its email program that allows users to share status updates, video, photos and more.

...

These days, it's near impossible to use a computer without running into a social network. Web sites encourage people to "tweet" links to their articles via Twitter; photo-sharing sites nudge users to post albums on Facebook; and aggregators like TweetDeck display content from several social networks in a digestible way. Last week, Google Buzz joined this trend by integrating social networking into something people use every day: email.

Image by Oversocialized via Flickr

Google Buzz (google.com/buzz) is built into Gmail, Google's email program, as an opt-in social network that provides people with a place for sharing status updates, Twitter tweets, photos, videos, Web links and blog posts with a network of friends. I've been testing Google Buzz, and I like the way it displays shared photos in full-screen view and nestles into Gmail, which I use every day. But right now, Buzz still falls flat.

One of the biggest problems with Buzz is that it's late to the social-networking party. People have had years to get comfortable with networks like Facebook and Twitter, and old habits are hard to kick. Microsoft and Yahoo already incorporate social networking into their Web email in Windows Live Hotmail and the Yahoo Mail, respectively. Windows Live Hotmail lets users create networks of friends and connects with up to 69 other networks, including Facebook and Twitter. Yahoo also builds networks with your connections, and integrates content into email from sites like Twitter, Flickr and Picasa.

Google tried to catch up with existing social networks by using a proprietary algorithm to create networks of people with whom users communicate most in Gmail and in Google Chat, the company's instant messaging program. In other words, the people you emailed the most via Gmail or chatted with the most on Google Chat automatically became the people you followed in your social network.

But Google took a lot of heat for these pre-made networks because people didn't know where the names came from or who some of the people were. Even worse, these networks were made public by default so every Buzz user could see everyone else's closest contacts.

This is a problem because many of us treat email differently than we treat our social networks. We communicate via email in private conversations—often with people who we don't necessarily want looking at our personal photos or other information. If I exchange several emails over an extended period of time with my plumber about fixing a sink, it doesn't mean I want him in my social network. Likewise if a parent regularly emails with a teacher about a child's progress.

In the past several days, Google has apologized for its presumption that you would absolutely want to add the people you email into your social network online. The company has changed settings in Buzz to ameliorate this and several other issues. A network is now suggested rather than predetermined so users can clearly select whom they follow by checking boxes beside names and photos, nixing the plumber and keeping a best friend. Likewise, a very clear box now lets people opt to share these names publicly or not.

So how does the rest of Buzz work? All Gmail users will find a Buzz icon in the top left area of the Gmail site and must opt in to use Buzz. A tiny link at the bottom of every page can always turn it off altogether. Buzz is a separate screen and isn't fully weaved into Gmail's inbox, though notifications are sent to the Inbox in three instances: if someone comments on your post; if you comment on a post and then someone else makes an additional comment; and if someone directs a Buzz at you, such as starting a post with @Katie Boehret.

Buzz doesn't yet have a way to completely stop notifications from coming to an inbox, but you can opt to stop receiving inbox notifications every time someone else comments about a post. (Go to "More Actions" within the email and select "Mute.")

Google Buzz uses ideas from Facebook, like the ability to "like" a post. It also integrates with other Google properties including Blogger, Google Reader, Picasa and YouTube. Rather than using a system of friends like Facebook, Buzz takes a page from Twitter's playbook by organizing friends into followers: people a user follows and people who follow the user. If you don't want someone following you, just block them.

I spoke to Facebook about Buzz, asking specifically if the company would consider integrating with Google's new program. A spokeswoman noted Facebook's position as an open platform and said the company is always delighted to be working with new partners that want to integrate Facebook Connect in ways that help people connect with their "real" friends.

Buzz pulls in Twitter updates, or tweets, from people who have connected their Twitter and Buzz accounts. But the Twitter feed is only one way—coming into Buzz—so people can't respond to or direct message back to Twitter. They can just leave a comment about the tweet on Buzz—a comment that is never displayed on Twitter. A Google representative said the company is working on more two-way integration in the future.

As for photo sharing, Buzz lets users integrate with Google-owned Picasa or Yahoo-owned Flickr so they can share on Buzz whatever photos are publicly shared within those services. Images show up in Buzz and, when selected, they take up the full browser screen—an eye-catching feature. But though users can browse Picasa albums from Buzz to select photos, they can't share whole albums to Buzz right now.

Buzz is usable on the go with Apple's iPhone and Google's Android phones. By default, it uses someone's current location whenever posts are made on Buzz. But this can be turned off, albeit in a clumsy way: Currently, people must tap an "x" beside their location to remove this location information from a post. Later this week, this language will be made clearer with a bolded explanation on each screen before a post is sent of how to remove locations. If someone opts not to use location in one post, this setting sticks for subsequent posts—except when Buzz is accessed through a voice program.

Google Buzz got off to a rough start and still has a lot of catching up to do. Though it could be a convenience for people whose social contacts all already exist in Gmail, it could also saddle them—and their friends—with yet another social network to check every day. For now, my social-networking friends are sticking to Facebook and Twitter, making the buzz on Buzz almost inaudible.

—Edited by Walter S. Mossberg.

Jan 22, 2010

‘Controlled Serendipity’ Liberates the Web

Image by JB via CrunchBase

By NICK BILTON

twitter.com/nickbilton Atul Arora’s Twitter stream shows a constant flow of breaking technology news links.

When I finish writing this blog post, I will Tweet it.

I will copy this link, go to my Twitter account and spend a minute writing an abbreviated (yet hopefully catchy) description of this piece. And I’ll follow the same actions on Facebook and other social networks.

Then off I go to scour the Web looking for more news to sift through and ration out to my friends and followers — a natural course of action in my day. I spend a considerable amount of time each day looking for interesting angles about technology, news, journalism, design or just the latest comic video to pass along the daisy chain.

Most of us do this to some degree. We are no longer just consumers of content, we have become curators of it too.

If someone approached me even five years ago and explained that one day in the near future I would be filtering, collecting and sharing content for thousands of perfect strangers to read — and doing it for free — I would have responded with a pretty perplexed look. Yet today I can’t imagine living in a world where I don’t filter, collect and share.

More important, I couldn’t conceive of a world of news and information without the aid of others helping me find the relevant links.

For example, Atul Arora, an engineering manager at a Silicon Valley start-up, spends two to three hours a day scouring the Web for the latest technology related blog posts and news stories. On an average day, Mr. Arora will share 15 breaking news technology links with his Twitter followers. When I asked him over e-mail why he does this, he said, “In the past, I may have used this time in the day to read newspapers, magazines or books. Now I have just substituted the same time with reading and sharing news online.”

Another purveyor of fine content is Maria Popova, who calls this curating “controlled serendipity,” explaining that she filters interesting links to thousands of strangers out of her thirst for curiosity.

Mrs. Popova uses a meticulously curated feed of Web sites and Twitter followers to find each day’s pot of gold. She said, “I scour it all, hence the serendipity. It’s essentially ‘metacuration’ — curating the backbone, but letting its tentacles move freely. That’s the best formula for content discovery, I find.”

Sharing has become a reflex action when people find an interesting video, link or story. Great content going viral isn’t new. But the sharing mentality is no longer confined to the occasional gems. It’s for everything we consume online, large or small.

John Borthwick, chief executive of Betaworks and Bit.ly, the URL-shortening service, said each month more people were clicking on shortened links from social networks and e-mail. Last week, Mr. Borthwick said bit.ly processed 599,100,000 clicks, its highest number since starting in July 2008.

Surfing the Web has become even more of a challenge as more content appears online. We are asked to navigate any number of new obstacles when finding new content: which site should I click through to read the latest earthquake news? How many blogs should I check on a daily basis? What if I miss something? Do I read the comments everywhere, too? Which social network should I update in the morning, noon or night? The list goes on.

But we are solving the problem, through our aggregation. We’ve reduced the fear of missing something important because we share “controlled serendipity” with others and they with us. And without this collective discovery online, I couldn’t imagine trying to cull the tens of thousands of new links and stories that appear in the looking glass on a daily basis.

We are all human aggregators now.

Dec 6, 2009

Beware Social Media Snake Oil

Image via CrunchBase

Hordes of marketing "experts" are promoting the value of wikis, social networks, and blogs. All the hype may obscure the real potential of these online tools

By Stephen Baker

For business, the rising popularity of Facebook, Twitter, and other social media Web sites presents a tantalizing opportunity. As millions of people flock to these online services to chat, flirt, swap photos, and network, companies have the chance to tune in to billions of digital conversations. They can pitch a product, listen to customer feedback, or ask for ideas. If they work it right, customers might even produce companies' advertising for them and trade the ads with friends for free. Starbucks (SBUX), Dell (DELL), and Ford Motor (F) have all testified to the magic social media can create.

But the same tools carry risks. Employees encouraged to tap social networking sites can fritter away hours, or worse. They can spill company secrets or harm corporate relationships by denigrating partners. What's more, with one misstep, one clumsy entrée, companies can quickly find themselves victims of the forces they were trying to master. Thousands of bloggers attacked Motrin last year because of an advertisement from the Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) brand they found demeaning to mothers.

Over the past five years, an entire industry of consultants has arisen to help companies navigate the world of social networks, blogs, and wikis. The self-proclaimed experts range from legions of wannabes, many of them refugees from the real estate bust, to industry superstars such as Chris Brogan and Gary Vaynerchuk. They produce best-selling books and dole out advice or lead workshops at companies for thousands of dollars a day. The consultants evangelize the transformative power of social media and often cast themselves as triumphant case studies of successful networking and self-branding.

The problem, according to a growing chorus of critics, is that many would-be guides are leading clients astray. Consultants often use buzz as their dominant currency, and success is defined more often by numbers of Twitter followers, blog mentions, or YouTube (GOOG) hits than by traditional measures, such as return on investment. This approach could sour companies on social media and the rich opportunities it represents. "It's a bit of a Wild West scenario," blogs David Armano, a consultant with the Dachis Group of Austin, Tex. Without naming names, he compares some consultants to "snake oil salesmen."

Critics complain that many of the new experts have adopted an orthodoxy that provides little flexibility for differing situations—or outcomes. Their pronouncements follow a rigid gospel: Be transparent, engage with your customers, break down silos. Yet these strictures don't always make business sense. Adam Kmiec, director of interactive marketing at Marc USA in Pittsburgh, tells of a company he met with that got much of its revenue from the Defense Dept. and had allocated $4 million for social media. "What do you hope to get?" he asked them. Ultimately, the client decided the privacy-obsessed Pentagon may not be thrilled with a supplier publicizing itself through Twitter.

FURY VS. BUZZ

Scrutiny of the hype merchants is picking up. Rob Spencer, senior research fellow for idea management at drug giant Pfizer (PFE), mingles frequently with social media vendors and consultants as he looks for ways to amplify the company's brainpower. He urges caution. "You have to tread your way carefully and have your B.S. sensors up," he says. "I call them innovation hippies. 'Here's my book for free. Won't you hire me for $500 to run some workshops?'"

Social media consultants' own promotions can collide, on occasion, with those of their customers. Take the case of James Andrews, who was working early this year at the PR firm Ketchum (OMC). As a consultant, he helped companies such as Newell Rubbermaid (NWL), Monster Worldwide (MWW), and FedEx (FDX) work out their strategies for blogs and the microblogging service Twitter. On landing in Memphis for FedEx meetings, he says he had an ugly run-in with a racist at the airport and twittered that he would "die if he had to live" in the city. The tweet produced an outpouring of blogged fury from FedEx employees and a fast apology from an embarrassed Ketchum. But for Andrews, the tweet generated buzz and may even have boosted his brand. "It helps me today," he says. "I use it as a case study. It creates authenticity." In June, Andrews left Ketchum to launch a boutique consultancy, Everywhere. He helps Macy's (M), CNN (TWX), and Jane Fonda promote their brands and monitor their audiences on Facebook, blogs, and Twitter.

Skeptics can draw from plenty of examples of social media experiments run amok. Consider Saatchi & Saatchi's ill-fated promotion for the Toyota (TM) Matrix. Targeting young men, a demographic known to resist traditional advertising, Saatchi's social media team last year created a campaign based on the pranks of the popular MTV (VIA.B) show Punk'd. According to the plan, a prospective buyer of a Matrix would single out a friend to be the target of a prank. The promise: a bit of fear, a lot of laughs, and perhaps a groundswell of free marketing across Facebook, MySpace (NWS), and Twitter.

Amber Duick, one of the targets in the short-lived campaign, says she received a series of e-mails from a fictitious British soccer hooligan named Sebastian Bowler. He said he was coming to visit her and bringing along his pit bull. He had a MySpace page where he bragged about "drinking alcohol to excess" and participating in riots. One e-mail Duick received was a fake bill for damage to a hotel room wrecked by Bowler. He had left her e-mail address, the message explained, as his contact info. Duick filed a $10 million lawsuit in October and says that to protect herself from the oncoming Bowler, she slept with a machete by her bed. "She was terrified," says her lawyer, Nicholas Tepper.

In a statement, Saatchi and Toyota wrote that they would "vigorously defend against the claim," which is "entirely without merit." They said the plaintiff had granted "her permission to receive campaign e-mails and other communications from Toyota."

CAN CHAGRIN BE GOOD?

James Cooper, Saatchi's digital creative director, says social media, by their nature, are unpredictable, which makes them an easy target for critics. "Anyone who says 'This is going to work' is either lying or deranged," he says. He compares the risk model with venture capital, where one bet out of 10 might pay off richly, while the others struggle or even bomb. And he stresses the difficulty of measuring results. "If something's got 20 million hits on YouTube, that's a good thing," he says. "But what if half the comments are negative? I don't think anyone's got a long-term case study yet."

While the marketing consultants focus on buzz and engagement, their in-house colleagues are trying to use social media to change how companies operate. The goal of Enterprise 2.0, a descendant of the "knowledge management" movement in the '90s, is to reroute the information traveling through corporations, undermining rigid hierarchies. Tools from Microsoft's (MSFT) SharePoint, IBM's (IBM) Lotus Notes, along with packages from newer companies such as Jive Software and Socialtext enable vast networks to share documents and work together on projects.

Yet the buzz around social media has led many companies to buy these systems before they're ready to put them to work. Jennifer Okimoto, associate partner at IBM Global Business Services, says many corporations took the plunge into social media and now are sitting on loads of uninstalled software. "I'm working with a company that has made huge investments" in social software, she says on a phone call from Switzerland. Yet only a small number of employees at the company use it. A Forrester Research (FORR) study shows that despite buzz around Enterprise 2.0, less than 15% of the knowledge workforce makes use of internal blogs, wikis, and other collaborative tools. "E-mail is still dominant," says Ted Schadler, author of the report.

The economic situation is heightening the focus on accountability. "Companies no longer have fluff money" to experiment with, says Mark Turrell, chief executive of Imaginatik (IMGKF), a vendor of corporate knowledge management tools. "A lot of programs you launch and get good buzz. But now it's all about outcomes."

The debates over buzz are leading to confrontations among consultants. In late October, Marc USA's Kmiec, a little-known figure in the industry, launched a blog attack against Chris Brogan, one of the towering chieftains of social media. President of consultancy New Marketing Labs, Brogan is an object of considerable envy: He boasts 110,379 followers on Twitter, has co-authored a new social media best-seller, Trust Agents, and commands top dollar on the speaking circuit.

Kmiec wrote of Brogan: "He speaks well. He presents well. Does that make him talented? Yes. Does it make him smart? Yes. Does it make him an expert? No." Kmiec asked Brogan for client case studies and metrics to prove his social media success. Responding on Kmiec's blog, Brogan dismissed the questions about his clients and social media metrics: "Is it an exacting marketing science? Not at all. Partly because it's so damned new that we're inventing the case studies while we're experimenting with what comes out of it. Are companies asking for more and more experiences with me to see if it'll work for them? Hell, yes."

DANGER OF A BACKLASH

Many argue that a fixation on hard numbers could lead companies to ignore the harder-to-quantify dividends of social media, such as trust and commitment. A Twittering employee, for example, might develop trust or goodwill among customers but have trouble putting a number on it. "There is this default assumption that return on investment is the correct measure for everything," says Susan Etlinger, senior vice-president at Horn Group, a San Francisco consultancy. "Everything needs to monetize within 12 weeks, so we can understand that we're successful. But frequently the thing they're measuring is misleading."

This can lead to confusion. The risk is that a backlash against the consultants' easy promises could reduce social media investments just as the industry takes off. Think back to the dot-com boom a decade ago. Soaring valuations were based initially on promise and hype. In early 2000, when investors started focusing on scarce profits, the market collapsed. But many companies drew the wrong conclusions. Believing the fall of a hyped market was a sign of the failed promise of the Internet, they drew back on Internet investments. This happened just as the technology was on the verge of living up to much of its promise, dominating global communications, transforming entire industries—and spawning social media.

The best way to avoid a similar backlash today is for social media's practitioners, including thousands of consultants, to shift the focus from promises to results. It may be the only way to convert the skeptics—and flush out the snake oil.

Oct 15, 2009

No Friends of Facebook's, in a Generation That Is - washingtonpost.com

Image via Wikipedia

By Ian Shapira
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 15, 2009

Tomek Kott is so stubborn about not joining his friends -- in truth, nearly his entire generation -- on any social networking site that his wife launched a mini-crusade against him. Exploiting a tactic surely befitting our times, she whipped up a Facebook group last year called "Tomek Kott Must Join Facebook."

So far, it hasn't worked. Her husband, a 25-year-old physics graduate student who considers social networking a time-wasting cesspool of pseudo-communication, remains blithely unconnected.

"I am old-school in the personal touch way," said Tomek Kott, who lives in Silver Spring and has outsourced many of his digital communication duties to his wife, Anne. "All my friends from high school have also met my wife, and they're friends with her; my wife 'friended' them or whatever it's called."

Kott and others like him are social networking refuseniks: people in their 20s or early 30s who have gone off the grid, eschewing the ecology of Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and the like. In Washington, refuseniks are not exactly operating in isolated, Luddite worlds: One is in a dance company, another is a rapper/hip-hop singer, another is a Georgetown undergraduate. Kott grew up in Redmond, Wash., where his father is a software engineer for Microsoft.

All of them, given their ages, qualify as exotic life forms.

The vast majority of their peers in the millennial generation are social networking pros: About 85 percent of all Internet users 18 to 34 visited Facebook, MySpace or Twitter in August, according to ComScore, a Reston-based Internet data research company. And about 84 percent of 18- to 29-year-olds check social networking sites at least once a week, according to a May study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press.

In the DCypher Dance company, friends of Natasha Hawkins, 28, consider her digital abstinence a nuisance.

They labor to send e-mails to share photographs, reexplain personal news that has been publicized on a Facebook news feed and wonder whether she knows about upcoming auditions or performances of other companies.

"Maybe I should pressure her to get on it," said Vikki Weinberger, 27, a fellow DCypher dancer who's been hesitant to do so because she doubts Hawkins will budge. "She's a very strong person in her morals and beliefs."

Hawkins, who eons ago joined and later left the social networking site BlackPlanet, views such realms as potential for drama and rumor. She believes in forging bonds the old way and preserving a tight circle of quality relationships.

"I have close friends -- and I know how to reach them," she said. "People create arguments, actual arguments or disagreements as a result of Facebook. I am like, 'Really? It's a computer network?' We need to stop."

She knows not everyone approves of her boycott. "I probably have 20 e-mail requests to join Facebook, and I have not accepted," Hawkins, a risk analyst for the federal government, said with a half-chuckle. "My friends hate me."

Social networking holdouts can be ironclad about their beliefs.

Kiran Gandhi, a junior at Georgetown University, has one lone laggard friend who refuses to join to protect her privacy.

"When someone tells you that they don't have Facebook, it's untouchable. It's a sign of disrespect to try to convince them" to join, Ghandi said.

Gandhi's friend, a senior in Georgetown's foreign service school, agreed to be interviewed but only on the condition that her name be withheld. (She's serious about her privacy.)

"I don't feel the need to go to the most trendy party because everyone found it on Facebook," she said. "Not having Facebook allows me to focus on things I really care about."

On a broad level, there might be differences between those who tweet or issue status updates and those who don't. Pew researchers point to a new but very small study they conducted to show that resisters and adopters 18 to 29 have demographic differences: Social networkers are more likely to have an annual income of $75,000 or more, and nonusers are more likely to have only a high school education.

Yet even as the refuseniks assert a lofty stance on privacy and cling to precious -- perhaps enviable -- face-to-face communication, they inevitably rely on friends or relatives who are members of the very sites they protest.

Anne Kott said she is happily married to the man she met at Bucknell University, where she first joined Facebook. However, she cannot help but feel as though she is in his employ.

"I am his Facebook secretary," she complained. "His friends will send me a Facebook message, 'Do you have Tomek's number?' And, 'What's Tomek doing?' He occasionally looks over my shoulder to see what photos are up, but he has never shown interest in starting his own account."

Ricardo Thomas, 23, who works at a photo restoration shop in Prince George's County, didn't go to college and is the only person he knows not on Facebook. His hip-hop band has pages on YouTube and MySpace, but he rarely checks them and doesn't have a personal site anywhere because he hates typing and computers. He leans on his friends to keep him up to speed, even about the doings of his ex-girlfriend.

"Last week, I was over at a friend's house, and he showed me a picture on Facebook of a girl I used to" date, Thomas said.

And? "I didn't know she had a kid!" he said. His friend "showed me her pictures, and I started looking at her status -- she was single."

"I told my friend to write her a message for me, saying, 'Ricardo is right here and he said hi,' " Thomas recounted. "But Facebook is funny because they've got this thing called a 'wall,' and she deals with a lot of guys on the site. She says she's single, but I know she's dating."

His lack of membership on Facebook has other disadvantages. Sometimes Thomas doesn't find out about parties being touted on the site until the last minute. Last week he almost missed a gathering at Johana's nightclub in Petworth.

"We knew about this on Monday!" said bandmate Nicholas Hewitt, 20, who goes by Booka Wildboy Hewitt on Facebook, standing outside the club Thursday night.

"Yeah, you really bring me all the Facebook stuff to my attention," Thomas said sheepishly. "I know eventually I'm going to have to do it. It will make stuff much smoother."

It might be just a matter of time for Thomas and his ilk. Technological innovations -- from hybrid corn in the first half of the 20th century to cellphones in the latter part -- can take years for most to adopt.

But social networking sites are seducing laggards at supersonic speeds. Although MySpace's monthly traffic dropped to about 64 million unique monthly U.S. visitors in August, Facebook's has soared to 92 million, and Twitter's has exploded to more than 20 million -- up from 1 million last year. In the past year, the fastest-growing age group on Twitter is the demographic that initially rejected it: those 12 to 24, according to ComScore.

Facebook, which just announced that it has 300 million members, might never win over Tomek Kott. His wife realizes that.

The "Tomek Kott Must Join Facebook" page, which has 19 members (including this reporter), does allay some of Anne's frustration. On the group's message board, a Baltimore friend wrote supportive words to the beleaguered wife: "This is awesome. Well done Anne. Take it to that weird tall guy."

And although Anne was kind enough to make the group's page accessible by invitation only, she couldn't resist having a bit more fun at her husband's expense. "I loaded," she said, laughing, "a somewhat ridiculous photo of him."

Sep 8, 2009

Parents and children meet and clash on social-networking sites - WSJ.com

Cover via Amazon

By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN

David Rivera recently had someone "unfriend" him on Facebook: His own child.

For months, Dr. Rivera, an obstetrician in Lombard, Ill., had been exasperated that his 25-year-old son, Nate, often complained he was broke and asked for money, yet posted photos of himself on Facebook taken at bars, restaurants, movies and concerts.

Dr. Rivera says he tried to talk to his son, a senior in college, about his spending habits, but his son refused to listen. Frustrated, he finally wrote on his son's Facebook wall: "I can see what you are blowing your money on, so don't come whining to me about money."

"I think they figure that their friends are watching but we're not, because they think we are old and decrepit and we barely know how to turn the computer on," says Dr. Rivera, 54-years-old, of being a parent.

In the new era of helicopter parenting, more and more parents and kids are meeting up, and clashing, on Facebook, MySpace and other social-networking sites.

Nate Rivera, who lives in Chicago, says he unfriended his father for several reasons, including his comment about money and other "snide" remarks. "It was mildly pestering," he says. "I thought, 'Do I need this?' "

In my last column, I wrote about how our behavior on Facebook can harm our real-world relationships. That article prompted a great deal of response, including a number of letters from parents who wrote about how social-networking sites and texting have become a powerful means to stay connected to—and to spy on—their teenagers and young-adult children. As one father put it: "It's so much easier to keep track of what they eat and when they pick their nose this way."

Many kids dread getting a friend request from Mom or Dad. There's even a Web site, www.myparentsjoinedfacebook.com, where people post screen views of their parents' most embarrassing posts. Recently, these included one mother telling her daughter to stop drinking sodas because she had cavities, another mother requesting "intervention should she ever wear twill, tapered-leg, buttless mom jeans," and the results of one stepfather's "Which sex position fits you best?" quiz.

"Mom, it's like my friends and I are standing around having a conversation and you interrupt and say, 'Hi, guys! What are you doing?' " says Andrew Doerfler, a 17-year-old high school senior in West Grove, Penn.

Andrew has a solution for embarrassing mom posts, like the amusement she expressed after he linked to a video of the rock star Bret Michaels getting hit in the head by a prop at the Tony Awards: He deletes them immediately. (His mom, Megan Reese, a 40-year-old insurance-industry recruiting manager, says she's not trying to annoy her son, but just trying to stay aware of what's going on in his life.)

Parents of teens are used to being snubbed, of course, but it's getting harder for kids to ignore mom and dad when they have access to their children's entire virtual social life.

When Dave Hill's twin 14-year-old daughters Maddie and Megan wanted to create Facebook profiles in May, he laid down rules: They would have to be friends with him, and he would have to be friends with all their friends.

"Part of this is being a careful parent and part of it is being in law enforcement for so long, and knowing what kind of freaks are out there," says Mr. Hill, a 46-year-old police lieutenant in Orange, Calif.

When he's working late shifts, he sometimes checks in briefly with his daughters on Facebook so he can hear about their day or say good night. He also likes to comment on their pictures. Once, when Maddie forgot to log out, he posted a status update under her name: "My dad is the coolest guy in the world."

The girls mostly take it in stride. "I think he's funny, but not all the time," says Megan, who admits she likes when her dad comments that she looks pretty in pictures. Adds Maddie: "Our parents are looking out for us, and making sure no one is posting bad stuff."

"Facebook is kind of like a parenting tool," says Joel O'Driscoll, a 41-year-old father of eight in Woodside, Calif.

Mr. O'Driscoll likes to keep tabs on whom his 18-year-old daughter, Holly, is friends with on Facebook—especially the boys.

Several times recently, he says, he's used information he discovered on his daughter's Facebook page to spark a discussion with her in person, most recently about the need for a boy to ask her out by calling, rather than texting or emailing.

"It's a good way to have some contact in your child's life," says Mr. O'Driscoll, an executive at a consulting firm.

Holly O'Driscoll says she's fine with her dad monitoring her friends on Facebook. "I think it's sensible," she says. Still, she admits she sometimes blocks him from seeing her status updates, explaining she doesn't want him to see how often she's on Facebook.

For many parents, Facebook and MySpace are helpful conversation starters, particularly with older teens or young adults. Just ask Cherie Miller, who has seven sons, ages 15 to 28. She says she not only stays in touch via social-networking sites with the ones who no longer live at home; she also learns things about them she wouldn't otherwise know. "You know how boys are," says the 53-year-old mom, who administers a graduate-degree program at Kennesaw State University near Atlanta. "It's very hard to pull conversations out of them."

Thanks to pictures posted on her 21-year-old son's page, Mrs. Miller learned he started smoking and whom he is dating. She then talked to her son about the choices he was making, using private messages sent on Facebook. On this platform, she says, "you can get more words out of him. It's less threatening." Her son couldn't be reached for comment.

This virtual parenting is fine, experts say, but just to a point. "How would you feel if you were a teen and your mom listened in to every single conversation," says Neil Bernstein, an adolescent psychologist in Washington, D.C., and author of "There When He Needs You: How to Be an Available, Involved and Emotionally Connected Father to Your Son."

Dr. Bernstein says the danger of monitoring kids too closely through technology is that it may make them sneakier. "As we become better detectives, they become better fugitives," he says.

The bottom line: Relationships need boundaries. And so he suggests some guidelines: It's OK for parents to require younger kids and teens to accept their friend requests, but kids should gain more freedom as they get older, just as they do in real life. Also, parents should be open with their kids about whether they are monitoring their page.

Perhaps as Generation Facebook grows up, the virtual parent-child relationship will sort itself out. We're already seeing proof.

When 25-year-old Brandon Hendelman helped his mom set up her Facebook profile last year, he kept the password. He has used it to log on to her account and remove pictures of himself from his "awkward" teen-age stage, and sometimes to delete friends of his that she has befriended.

But he leaves up all the cute pictures of him as a kid, and admits he sometimes slyly steers girls he likes to his mom's page, telling them, "It's so embarrassing, my mom posts all these pictures of me. Please don't look." Once the girls see how cute he was and how fun his mom is, he says, they like him better.

"She's my virtual wingman," says Mr. Hendelman, a junior equity-derivatives broker in New York.

Does Diana Hendelman mind? "We're complicit," she says. The 51-year-old from Palm City, Fla., uses Facebook to check up on her son when she hasn't heard from him for a day or so. And she has no problem when he sometimes controls her page. "I would ignore a friend request from my own mom," she says.

—Email: Bonds@wsj.com

Sep 6, 2009

How to Manage Your Online Life When You're Dead - Time

Image via CrunchBase

By Gaëlle Faure

Before her 21-year-old daughter died in a sledding accident in early 2007, Pam Weiss had never logged on to Facebook. Back then, social-networking sites were used almost exclusively by the young. But she knew her daughter Amy Woolington, a UCLA student, had an account, so in her grief Weiss turned to Facebook to look for photos. She found what she was looking for and more. She was soon communicating with her daughter's many friends, sharing memories and even piecing together, through posts her daughter had written, a blueprint of things she had hoped to do. "It makes me feel good that Amy had a positive effect on so many people, and I wouldn't have had a clue if it hadn't been for Facebook," says Weiss.

And she wouldn't have had a clue if she had waited too long. She managed to copy most of her daughter's profile in the three months before Facebook took it down. (See the best social-networking applications.)

Like a growing number of grieving relatives, Weiss tapped into one of the most powerful troves of memories available: a loved one's online presence. As people spend more time at keyboards, there's less being stored away in dusty attics for family and friends to hang on to. Letters have become e‑mails. Diaries have morphed into blogs. Photo albums have turned virtual. The pieces of our lives that we put online can feel as eternal as the Internet itself, but what happens to our virtual identity after we die? (Read "Your Facebook Relationship Status: It's Complicated.")

It's a thorny question, and for now, the answer depends on which sites you use. Privacy is a major issue. So are company policies to delete inactive accounts.

Facebook amended its policy a few months after Woolington died. "We first realized we needed a protocol for deceased users after the Virginia Tech shooting, when students were looking for ways to remember and honor their classmates," says Facebook spokeswoman Elizabeth Linder. The company responded by creating a "memorial state" for profiles of deceased users, in which features such as status updates and group affiliations are removed. Only the user's confirmed friends can continue to view the profile and post comments on it.

If next of kin ask to have a profile taken down, Facebook will comply. It will not, however, hand over a user's password to let a family member access the account, which means private messages are kept just that.

Rival MySpace has a similar policy blocking account access but has fewer restrictions on profile-viewing. (This inspired an entrepreneur to create MyDeathSpace.com, which started out aggregating profiles of the deceased and has since morphed into a ghoulish tabloid.)

Read tweets from the world's most popular Twitterers.

See the 50 best websites of 2008.

E-mail is more complicated. Would you want, say, your parents to be able to access your account so they could contact all your far-flung friends — whom you don't have in your address book because you don't have an address book — and tell them that you've passed on? Maybe. Would you want them to be able to read every message you've ever sent? Maybe not.

Yahoo! Mail's rule is to keep accounts private. "The commitment Yahoo! makes to every person who signs up for an account is to treat their online activities as confidential, even after their death," says spokesman Jason Khoury. Court orders sometimes overrule that. In 2005, relatives of a Marine killed in Iraq requested access to his e‑mail account so they could make a scrapbook. When a judge sided with the family, Yahoo! copied the messages to a CD instead of turning over the account's password. Hotmail now allows family members to order a CD as long as they provide proof that they have power of attorney and a death certificate. Gmail requires the same paperwork, plus a copy of an e‑mail the deceased sent to the petitioner. (See the top iPhone applications.)

If that sounds like a lot of trouble to put your loved ones through, several companies are eager to help you plan ahead — for a fee, of course. Legacy Locker, Asset Lock and Deathswitch are among the firms offering encrypted space for people to store their passwords and other information. "Digital legacy is at best misunderstood and at worst not thought about," says Legacy Locker founder Jeremy Toeman, who came up with the idea for his company midflight, when he was imagining what would happen to his many Web domains if the plane crashed. "I would be surprised if five years from now, it's not common for people to consider their digital assets alongside their wills."

His San Francisco-based site is looking to handle all the details of your online afterlife for $30 a year or a onetime fee of $300. To determine whether you have passed on, the firm will check with two "verifiers" (people you have designated to confirm your death) and examine a death certificate.

Deathswitch, which is based in Houston, has a different system for releasing the funeral instructions, love notes and "unspeakable secrets" it suggests you store with your passwords and account info. The company will regularly send you e‑mail prompts to verify that you're still alive, at a frequency of your choosing. (Once a day? Once a year?) After a series of unanswered prompts, it will assume you're dead and release your messages to intended recipients. One message is free; for more, the company charges members $19.95 a year.

See the 50 best websites of 2009.

See the 25 best blogs of 2009.

May 10, 2010

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Dec 6, 2009

Hordes of marketing "experts" are promoting the value of wikis, social networks, and blogs. All the hype may obscure the real potential of these online tools

FURY VS. BUZZ

CAN CHAGRIN BE GOOD?

DANGER OF A BACKLASH

Oct 15, 2009

Sep 8, 2009

By ELIZABETH BERNSTEIN

Sep 6, 2009