Clunky Flow

From here:

The problem that I’m seeing with most of the current social networks is that 90% of the time spent on those social networks is work that is done in order to maintain currency, keep content fresh, and continue building a sprawling network of friends and raise popularity.

So, what does that mean? What it boils down to is this: If you are working for your social network instead of your social network working for you, you my friend, are standing on top of a classic MMO-style treadmill grind.

I have bobbed in and out of various social networks and there is something that every single one of them had in common: for me to gain any value from that network, I had to go out of my way to perform repetitive, out-of-band tasks just to gain any value from the network. Having been the victim of many a MMO treadmill grind, I recognize an infinite loop of horse poo when I see it, so I bailed.
I have yet to find a measurable value in Facebook or any of a dozen other social networks I’ve played with.

At some point, someone is going to get it “right”, and there will be a social network that gives us tremendous value without us having to sacrifice for the cause, and all of the apologists using MySpace, Facebook, and the others who don’t know they’re apologists will flee to the new network in droves.

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From today’s New York Times

Kids played Dungeons and Dragons in basements instead of socializing. Geeks like algorithms. We like sets of rules that guide future behavior. But people, normal people, consistently act outside rule sets. People are messy and unpredictable, until you have something like the Dungeons & Dragons character sheet. Once you’ve broken down the elements of an invented personality into numbers generated from dice, paper and pencil, you can do the same for your real self.

For us, the character sheet and the rules for adventuring in an imaginary world became a manual for how people are put together. Life could be lived as a kind of vast, always-on role-playing campaign.

We geeks might not be able to intuit the subtext of a facial expression or a casual phrase, but give us a behavioral algorithm and human interactions become a data stream. We can process what’s going on in the heads of the people around us. Through careful observation of body language and awkward silences, we can even learn to detect when we are bringing the party down with our analysis of how loop quantum gravity helps explain the time travel in that new “Terminator” TV show. I mean, so I hear.

Facebook and other social networks ask people to create a character — one based on the user, sure, but still a distinct entity. Your character then builds relationships by connecting to other characters. Like Dungeons & Dragons, this is not a competitive game. There’s no way to win. You just play.

This diverse evolution from [Dungeons and Dragons] goes much further. Every Gmail login, every instant-messaging screen name, every public photo collection on Flickr, every blog-commenting alias is a newly manifested identity, a character playing the real world.

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via Valleywag:

After he left Facebook, Nipon Das wanted the social network to erase his personal information from its servers. Eventually that happened. But only after two months, a lengthy email exchange and — ultimately — threats from a lawyer. “It’s like the Hotel California,” Das told the New York Times. “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.” Facebook PR flack Amy Sezak claims the company is doing users a favor by making it easy to come back to the site after they quit. 6,000 members of the Facebook group “How to permanently delete your facebook account” don’t seem grateful.

Jean Burgess is deleting her account partly because of all these facets of her identity are collided together in an unnatural and unmanageable way on facebook. Which illustrates the point that faceted identity does not scale well and on facebook many people have discovered that it has been stretched uncomfortably out of shape.

Too many worlds colliding, too many invites to vampire garden pirate fishtank zombie kissing applications, and yes, I ended up with kind of too many friends from too many different spheres of my existence (not that I don’t love them all, really) for it to be non-complicated and fun.

And check out what your facing if you want to really remove yourself from Facebook…

Oh, and by the way, in order to delete your Facebook account, apparently, you have to not only deactivate it, but also delete every single item you have contributed to the site (messages, wall posts, posts other people have written on your wall, photos, links to contacts, profile information) and then email customer service and request they delete your account completely. Oh, and also, in order to delete absolutely everything, I’d also have to re-add every single one of the applications I’ve ever had installed, and then go through and remove the content, and then delete the applications again. Because when you delete an application, guess what? Your data is still stored there somewhere.

That’s not just meanness, but I’m pretty sure it’s also not just to be helpful in case you’re quitting in a fit of pique like this one and might decide later that you want to come back. It’s also because of the way the business model works: Facebook and all the marketeers who sail in her pretty much just want you to visit as many ad-bearing pages per visit as possible (that’s what all those applications and invites are for), and having lost your eyeballs, they’d quite like to keep the data that can be mined from those activities. So they’re going to make it as difficult as possible to scrub that data out of the system. Can you guess how much that softens my heart toward the company?

Mark Evan’s compares his relationship with facebook as a kind of ‘amour fou’ that has run its course.

At first, the romance was hot and heavy…It was a lusty, unhealthy affair that made me crazy but you know how lust consumes you…You know that awkward feeling when you’re dating someone, and the romance starts to fade? …I feel that way about Facebook these days…Truth be told, I’ve found someone else - younger, sexier, more streamlined: Twitter. Yet, I’m not as enraptured with Twitter as I once was with Facebook, which is a good sign.

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The move:
Google have made an API which they call the Social Graph API.

The hook:
The move looks utterly benign as Google announce it as a significant advance toward the goal of helping you ‘liberate’ your personal data. Google is ‘liberating’ your personal data from the ‘protectorship’ of the likes of Facebook and MySpace. Information is meant to be free and these walled gardens have controlled access to your information long enough. Google is ‘liberating’ your data. And this will allow you to move your social graph from one service to another. It will also allow you to pull out the social graphs of others and move them from one service to another.

The sucker punch
This advance is good for users and good for developers, but my God is it good for Google too. I presume that this toolset will be very popular. I presume that this also means that Google is making copies of all this data on their servers. I presume this will places Google at the very centre of all the information about your web-mediated social life. Which is a space that until a minute ago that everyone thought was occupied by Facebook and MySpace etc.

The final word
I presume the Google guys are sitting in their office writing an email something like this:

Dear Facebook, MySpace, OpenSocial partners..whoever.

Ahem. In case you haven’t noticed.
All you bases belong to us.

Larry and Sergey.

The next move:
The final task left for Google now is to build/acquire a platform that will enable anyone and everyone build bespoke social networks for anything and everything. Something like Marc Andreesen’s Ning.

So how did these guys get so badly wrongfooted by the Google’s ninja moves?

Well they weren’t paying attention to what is important. The long game, the strategy. While everyone was shouting about Facebook opening its platform and OpenSocial and all that, Google was planning its killer moves. To explain let me refer you to what may be the best quote that was never heard in 2007. I’ve lifted it from Tom Morris who posted it earlier today.

I haven’t bought into the OpenSocial hype…Not interesting… Facebook vs. OpenSocial, as if that actually mattered in the long run (the social network fight is doomed to one winner - the Web-… )

Google have always understood this. Ning has always understood this. And both have focused on positioning themselves. So that they will be in the best strategic position to reap the reward as this inevitability unfolds.

Hats off.

***As an important piece of plumbing in the social web, I’d be very interested in what the SIOC guys make of all this.

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The move is on…

Robin Blandford has mostly lost interest in Facebook. Pat Phelan has left. And James Corbett closed down his account a long time ago (scroll to comments).

So what you might say? Well, i’ll hand you over to the man himself Clay Shirky from here on in. Here’s an excerpt from his (and I’ll never tire of saying this) absolutely-must-read classic-of-classics “A group is it own worst enemy”

You are at a party, and you get bored. You say “This isn’t doing it for me anymore. I’d rather be someplace else. I’d rather be home asleep. The people I wanted to talk to aren’t here.” Whatever. The party fails to meet some threshold of interest. And then a really remarkable thing happens: You don’t leave. You make a decision “I don’t like this.” If you were in a bookstore and you said “I’m done,” you’d walk out. If you were in a coffee shop and said “This is boring,” you’d walk out.

You’re sitting at a party, you decide “I don’t like this; I don’t want to be here.” And then you don’t leave. That kind of social stickiness is what Bion is talking about.

And then, another really remarkable thing happens. Twenty minutes later, one person stands up and gets their coat, and what happens? Suddenly everyone is getting their coats on, all at the same time. Which means that everyone had decided that the party was not for them, and no one had done anything about it, until finally this triggering event let the air out of the group, and everyone kind of felt okay about leaving.

This effect is so steady it’s sometimes called the paradox of groups. It’s obvious that there are no groups without members. But what’s less obvious is that there are no members without a group. Because what would you be a member of?

The question now is how long until there is no life left at the Facebook party but that virtually represented by a bunch killer zombies and blood-sucking vampires.

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A modern re-working of the children’s classic:

Some years ago, there was a merchant prince who was riding the crest of the kingdom’s latest social networking craze.

The one problem was that his network had grown up to have the same user-privacy issues that plagued his forerunners.

One day he heard from two swindlers who told him that they could make the finest privacy controls the world had ever seen. These controls, they said, would not only be highly granular but also extremely easy to use. And, as if that wasn’t enough, these controls had a special magical quality in that their value was invisible to anyone who was either stupid, careless, lazy or ill-informed.

Being a bit nervous about whether he himself would be able to see the value of these new controls, our young prince first sent two of his trusted men to make evaluations. Of course, neither would admit that they could not see any meaningful value for the users and so praised them.

The prince and his trusted advisers then announced that these new controls solved the issues of privacy for all except those too stupid to recognize this or too lazy and careless to be beyond help.

The prince and his advisers went on to promote the new controls all over town, never giving into their personal reservations that the new controls were tiresome to use and kinda icky too in the way they expected you to define and distinguish between your friends. In fact they didn’t actually really use them themselves but didn’t say so because they were afraid that the other people would think them stupid.

Of course, many of the prominent townspeople went out of their way to lavish wild praise on the magnificent controls introduced by the prince, while denying the fact that they knew them to be unwieldy and impracticable too, until some people started saying what was on everyone’s mind:

“Facebook doesn’t give a hoot about your privacy!”

This got whispered from person to person until everyone in the crowd was shrugging their shoulders and starting to slip away. The prince noticed this and couldn’t help feeling the game was up, but held his head high and continued with his procession, thinking ‘what else am I to do’.

And that, dear readers, is the story of one of the ways the overwhelming majority of Facebook users, despite individually recognizing the absurdity of the entire scenario continue to engage with a service they themselves feel has had its day.

[Breaking news...And with neat timing, this just in from Pat Phelan on twitter explaining why he has retired from facebook and Robin Blandford too... ]

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I read this entire piece out aloud to Dawn just now. Saying

‘This is what I’ve been saying. Isn’t this what I’ve been saying?’

She says ‘Yep! Just a pity you couldn’t articulate it as well as danah boyd”

Oh well, at least I can repost some of danah’s key points describing the Facebook approach:

For all of the repentance by Facebook, what really bugs me is that this is the third time that Facebook has violated people’s sense of privacy in a problematic way.In each incident, Facebook pushed the boundaries of privacy a bit further and, when public outcry took place, retreated just a wee bit to make people feel more comfortable

I kinda suspect that Facebook loses very little when there is public outrage. They gain a lot of free press and by taking a step back after taking 10 steps forward, they end up looking like the good guy, even when nine steps forward is still a dreadful end result.

Most people… will still believe that Facebook is far more private than other social network sites (even though this is patently untrue). And, unless there is a large lawsuit or new legislation introduced, I suspect that Facebook will continue to push the edges when it comes to user privacy.

danah also explains how Facebook expertly negotiates the confusion about how ‘defaults’ ought to be set. (after the jump) Continue Reading »

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This roundup of reactions to Facebook Beacon ( via rojo ) doesn’t cite a single positive reaction.  That said if there was ever anyone who knows how to handle a user revolt its Mark Zuckerberg & Co.  

Top Stories for the Week of November 5–9, 2007  

It’s official: Facebook has decided to bastardize its community, writes Negative Approach. It wants to put your face on advertisements for products that you like via the new Facebook Pages ad platform (via Facebook Blog). Mark Zuckerberg declared this the latest once-each-century shift in how ads are served. Rent from Blockbuster.com, and Facebook will ask whether your rental preference can be shared with others on Facebook (via NY Times). You’re no longer just a user—you’re an endorser. Will we continue to trust our friends as they spam us wonders broadstuff.