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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If you’ve been talking to me at all you probably heard me say stuff like this.

Connecting ‘people 2 info’ is trumped by connecting ‘people 2 people’.
Google is great at connecting people to information. But a better way to create new knowledge is to connect people to people. When you connect to people they discover and create new knowledge. And people find this activity deeply rewarding and highly addictive. As the guys discoverio say ‘..discovery is the new cocaine’.

The company that manages this will be bigger than Google
To give people what they want. To really connect people online. We have to create the same sense of privacy, reputation, identity and trust online that we take for granted in the real world.

I came across this today. An article riffing on a comment made by a leading VC…

Search is dead…[In the near future, people will] find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm. After all, the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation, right?

Social discovery pivots on identity

…this focus on online identity is what could turn search upside down… it’s conceivable that the information could attempt to find us—the old concept of push media, but in a far more refined way. As new content enters the Web, it could tumble through the various filters that you set up around your identity…

The unholy mess of privacy and security issues show us where the pivotal opportunity lies

…[currently] nobody owns this space the way Google “ownsâ€? search. And as it evolves, there will be an unholy mess of privacy and security issues to work out.

This kind of talk was the ever-constant ever-recurring theme at the Web2.0 expo this last week in San Francisco. And this has made me even more excited about RelevantM than ever. If that were even possible.

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O’REILLY CAPTURES IT IN A NUTSHELL

Conference blurbs usually drop me into a coma with their schmarketing speek. But not from O’Reilly Media for the Web2.0 conference.

Web 2.0 technologies are empowering us in ways we could only have imagined even just a few years ago.
We’re able to… connect more, have more fun,…and do it all faster.
But as the pace…accelerates, separating signal from noise, useful from annoying…becomes increasingly challenging.

How can we provide a more meaningful experience … have a positive impact on the world we live in?…deliver relevant information…increase conversation and collaboration?

Right on the money. And a word perfect context for explaining…

What MAKES RELEVANT MEDIA UNIQUE in the Web2.0 ecosystem.
In a nutshell:
Relevant Media works ‘with reality’.
Rather than working with ‘models of reality’.

All existing social tools begin by capturing something of real life into a model of some sort. Social networks, for example, try to create an online model of your real world social network. Recommendations engines create a model of what to recommend based on the expression of your tastes by you and your friends.

The problem with models:
The problems with models is that by definition they only capture aspects of the real thing

And this in turn leads to instances where the model and the reality clash. For an example you can take any problem peculiar to online social networks. And I include all those problems related to breakdowns of privacy, reputation, identity and trust. All result from incidents where there have been unanticipated breakdowns or clashes between the model and the reality.

Reality bites:
What is needed are tools and platforms that support, merge and coevolve with the dynamics of social reality

Relevant Media’s tools and platforms couple and coevolve with the emergent and dynamic characteristics of real life social interaction as opposed to trying to capture reality and shoehorn it into a model of the real thing.

This is what gives us a unique ability to better answer all those questions raised by O’Reilly for the upcoming Web2.0 expo.

If you are there, make sure to look me up here on Crowdvine and come over for a chat.

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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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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.