The Problem With Social Networks: When Worlds Collide

from the keep-'em-separated dept

There's a famous episode of Seinfeld where the character of George Costanza freaks out that his worlds are "colliding" when the woman he's dating starts becoming friends with his friends. It made for an amusing episode, but it is true that most people have separate "worlds" of people that they know -- and that can cause problems on social networks. Most social networks effectively treat every one of your friends the same. There may be some slight levels of differences, but there's still a lot of overlap. And that's troublesome when your college buddies know you as one sort of person and your work colleagues know you as someone else. As the article above notes, as more and more people get on Facebook, and more of these worlds collide, it actually may cause some people to stop using the social networks as much and to pull back from sharing certain bits of information that made the various systems fun in the first place. Next up: which social network will allow you to have totally different profiles depending on who's looking at the page?

Filed Under: seinfeld, social networks, worlds collide

Surprise, Surprise, Social Networking Ads Suck

from the as-expected dept

One of the questions that came up last week in Edinburgh was whether or not social networking sites were really the big moneymakers they claimed to be. In the discussion, what we agreed on, was that the social networking sites had done a good job in doing an "upfront" monetization, with MySpace getting a guaranteed ad deal from Google and Facebook getting a guaranteed deal from Microsoft. However, all the details suggested that on the backend things were pretty ugly. It's not hard to figure out why. Ads work on Google because people are looking for information. They do a search, and if the advertisement shows information that helps with the query, that makes everyone happy. However, when it comes to a social network, usage is quite different. People aren't looking for information about products -- they're looking to communicate with friends. In that environment, ads are seen as an intrusion -- which is the exact opposite of ads in a search world. That explains why Facebook was so focused on its Beacon offering, which was designed to try (rather unsuccessfully so far) to make an advertisement about communicating with your friends.

With all that said, I estimated that within a year, advertisers would begin to back away from social network advertising, unless some new, more effective, mechanism was found. I figured it would take about a year, because the mindset of advertisers would still be focused on just getting ads on these "hot properties" and it would take some time before they realized that no one looked at the ads. Apparently, my estimate was wrong. Brands are already staying away. At least, that was a major point behind Google missing its earnings estimates. It seems unlikely that this situation will get much better, unless social networks really do come up with a different form of advertising. They need to recognize that simply throwing up ads doesn't work any more. An advertisement can't be intrusive. It can't be annoying. It needs to be relevant and wanted.

Filed Under: advertising, earnings, social networks
Companies: google

Cop Gets Investigated Because MySpace Friend Links To Porn

from the you-have-to-be-kidding dept

Rich Kulawiec writes in to let us know about a ridiculous situation in Florida, that has some similarities to the ridiculous Julie Amero situation. Basically, a bunch of school officials and local newspaper folks are freaking out about the potential for students to access porn and are blaming the wrong people while displaying stunning levels of ignorance.

The basics of the situation are pretty straightforward. A cop who works at a middle school in Florida has a MySpace account, that he set up with the approval of the police department and the school, hoping it would allow him to connect with the kids he's supposed to be protecting. One of his many, many friends on MySpace happened to link to a porn site on their own profile. So, because one friend out of a huge list of friends happens to link to a porn page, the cop is now under investigation with the local paper dramatizing the situation by noting that students could (gasp!) get to porn "in just three clicks." Apparently, they're investigating whether the officer is criminally liable for exposing children to inappropriate content -- yes, because someone on his friend's list linked to porn. Under that definition, an awful lot of people are probably guilty.

Ah, but the story gets better (or worse, actually). You see, after some investigation, people noticed that the school's own website actually linked directly to a porn site itself -- which would seem a lot worse than what the police officer did. In this case, the school had a list of "resources" and one of the links was on a domain that had expired and was taken over by a porn site. Now, using the logic that the school used in having the police officer investigated, shouldn't the school officials also be investigated? Apparently not. Instead, they're angry about the changing domain and are looking at "legal recourse."

So, to summarize: If you happen to work at a school and have a MySpace profile where one friend of many links to a porn site via his own MySpace page: potentially illegal exposure of porn to children. If you work at a school and set up a website that directly links to porn: you're a victim who should be suing the website in question. Very logical.

Filed Under: porn, school police, social networks, witch hunt

Adults Encroach Upon Youth Turf Online

from the your-mom-poked-me dept

As technology starts to develop at a quicker and quicker pace, a generational digital divide has started to form between the children, who are growing up amidst all of this new technology, and their parents, who are left to play catch up. So, though most adults are now familiar with technologies like email (which has been around for decades now), more are starting to use instant messaging and social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. We're not referring to the so-called "online predators" that have been the subject of numerous tv specials. As mom and dad embrace these technologies, today's youths complain that grown-ups are encroaching upon their "turf" and would prefer that they stay on their side of the generational digital divide. Online youths have been quick to embrace the sites like Facebook as somewhat of a social theater where they where they publicly canoodle with crushes, post pictures of the previous night's escapades, and comment openly on each others' profiles. Now, as adults get hip to the internet, these once private worlds are now at risk of being invaded. Back when these adults were kids, there was never really a fear of their parents invading their parties, or crashing their proms, so now some youths feel it necessary to keep a "grown-up friendly" online presence, thereby ruining the appeal of such sites. It might behoove Facebook to introduce more selective sharing levels, lest their most avid users start to lose interest in actually using the site. That said, this problem of over-sharing is not unique to youths -- for quite some time now, adults have been getting into trouble over their online profiles as well.

Filed Under: culture, kids, parents, social networks

Hey MySpace, Aren't You A Little Late To The 'Portal' Bandwagon?

from the retro dept

Brian Stelter opens his piece on MySpace on a generally positive note, suggesting he was intending his write-up for the New York Times to be a sympathetic look at the company's relationship to its corporate parent, owned by Rupert Murdoch. But the article ends up painting a picture of a site without a clear vision of its future. In probably the most damning paragraph in the article, an advertising executive says that the MySpace's parent company had envisioned the site as a portal, but that he "thought they would be much further along with that today." For about a decade, websites have tried to mask their lack of focus by labeling themselves portals. A decade ago, that strategy worked pretty well for Yahoo! in 1996, when it had enough content to really make it stand out from the crowd. But it's hard to imagine that a similar strategy will work in 2008. Users have many more choices and more sophisticated tools for finding the content they need, so the attraction of a one-size-fits-all portal is much lower.

I suspect that the fundamental problem is that it just doesn't make much sense for an "old media" company like News Corp. to own a tech startup like MySpace. They key to MySpace's success in the years before the acquisition was precisely that the company didn't need to produce content; users created "content" of their own by swapping messages, posting pictures and music, etc. Social networking sites are fundamentally technology platforms that enable users to share their own content with one another. Trying to produce "original content" for the site is a step in the wrong direction. There's no way they can satisfy the diverse tastes of their millions of users, but they can waste a lot of money trying. And while MySpace focuses on becoming more like the mainstream media, its competitors—especially Facebook—are working feverishly on enhancements to their underlying technology platforms. Meanwhile, the MySpace user experience continues to deteriorate. I regularly get spam from other MySpace users (although this has become less common in recent months), the site is littered with gaudy banner ads, and I encounter error messages a lot more frequently than I do on Facebook. These are the sorts of problems that an 80-year-old newspaper mogul like Murdoch just isn't going to know how to deal with. He is, by all accounts, a brilliant businessman, but he's not a technologist, and it was probably a mistake for him to buy what was fundamentally a technology company.

Filed Under: content, portals, social networks, technology
Companies: myspace, news corp.

Just Assume Any Info You Put Online Is Public

from the welcome-to-the-new-world dept

I have to admit that I was sorry to see that my fellow Techdirt blogger Julian had beaten me to the punch, writing a characteristically insightful post on the Robert Scoble/Facebook story. But Facebook and screen-scraping are two of my favorite things to talk about, so I can't resist pointing out that I disagree with some of Julian's analysis.

Having noted that a script acting on Scoble's behalf can only access information that Scoble himself can reach manually, Julian argues that this can't be considered the only criterion in evaluating the situation:

[P]rivacy is not just a function of the publicity of your personal information, but of the searchability and aggregability of that information. Public closed-circuit surveillance cameras, for instance, typically capture the same information that a casual observer on the street is already privy to. But we recognize that being spotted by diverse random pedestrians, or even being captured on diffuse and disconnected private security cameras, is not intrusive in the same way as being captured on a citywide surveillance system that is searchable from a centralized location.

All of this seems true: individuals' attitudes about privacy are rightly driven by a pragmatic appraisal of the likelihood of someone doing something bad with the available information — a judgment based on the information's value and the cost of obtaining it. Ripping up your credit card statement before throwing it in the trash doesn't make it impossible for a dumpster-diving thief to target you, but it increases the difficulty of ripping you off enough that you'll probably be safe.

But I think Julian makes a mistake when he assumes that this is a viable way to conduct your life online. The problem with applying this approach to an digital context is that a user's estimation of the accessibility of a given piece of online information is almost invariably going to be too low — and will be getting more so by the second. The costs to automatically collecting data are very small and getting smaller.

There are a few reasons for this. First, the tools are getting better. Libraries like WWW::Mechanize are simple for any programmer to use and available in a variety of languages. And GUI-based applications like Dapper and Piggy Bank aim to make things even simpler. Second, if done properly, it's very difficult to prevent, detect or punish automated data collection. Facebook's script detection technology is impressively existent relative to that of its competitors, but it's still almost certainly trivial to subvert it with proxies, faked user agents and plausibly human delays. Third, once the data is collected it can, of course, be easily distributed.

And the situation is only going to get worse! In fact, it's getting worse at such a rapid rate that counting on the privacy of any even slightly public online information is a mistake.

The negative reaction to Scoble's script is coming from users who think of it as a violation of the covenant they perceived to surround their data. But that covenant was based upon their own mistaken understanding of the internet. Scoble's actions shouldn't be viewed by these users as a transgression against them, but rather as a pleasantly benign lesson.

It's fine to lament the situation, or to applaud Facebook for taking steps to keep its valuable, freely-acquired user data away from competitors (and, while they're at it, script-employing users). But this assertion of community norms is unlikely to stop those who, unlike Scoble, are genuinely acting in bad faith. The technology for containing digital cats in digital bags is woefully inadequate, and it's unlikely to improve anytime soon.

Filed Under: privacy, robert scoble, scraping, social graphs, social networks

Is There A Conflict Between Open Social Graphs And Your Privacy?

from the what-about-your-friends? dept

Techblogger Robert Scoble has apparently been barred from Facebook for running a script from Plaxo to export his relationship information (or "social graph," as the kids say), in violation of the site's terms of service. On one read, this makes him a martyr to the cause of open social graphs. I'm a bit more ambivalent.

Intuitively, it makes sense for users to be able to make whatever use they please of information about their own social networks. But in a social network, "your" information is someone else's as well. And on a site like Facebook, much of that information will have been provided in the context of a set of individually calibrated privacy controls, by people who expected it to be used in that context by a limited audience. Exporting that information without permission, then, raises important privacy questions.

Within Facebook, users have a fair amount of control over who can access what information about them. I can choose to block particular users on Facebook, rendering myself wholly invisible to them, as though I weren't even on the network. I can decide how much of my profile information will be visible to friends, to people who live in my region, to the general Facebook membership, and to the Internet at large. I can even decide how aggressively public, so to speak, such information will be. Lots of Facebook users are happy to let friends view their relationship status, but disable those status notifications in their news feeds, to prevent everyone they know from being simultaneously blasted with the news that "Bob has gone from being in a relationship to being single." Automated data collection "liberates" information from those constraints, possibly against the wishes of the people who provided it.

It's true that a script can only sweep up information that would already have been visible to a particular user anyway. But privacy is not just a function of the publicity of your personal information, but of the searchability and aggregability of that information. Public closed-circuit surveillance cameras, for instance, typically capture the same information that a casual observer on the street is already privy to. But we recognize that being spotted by diverse random pedestrians, or even being captured on diffuse and disconnected private security cameras, is not intrusive in the same way as being captured on a citywide surveillance system that is searchable from a centralized location. By the same token, I may be unhappy with the possibility of someone forming an external public database full of data I've freely shared with more narrow communities—personal, regional, or whatever.

None of this is to deny the initial intuition that it's desirable for users' social graphs to be portable to some extent. But as with all forms of intimacy, openness and privacy complement each other: We feel free to share information about ourselves to the extent that we have some assurances about how that information will be used. So while it's one thing to argue that Facebook should enable greater openness or portability in some particular way, subject to user control, it seems like quite another to criticize them for enforcing a rule about indiscriminate automated data collection.

Filed Under: privacy, robert scoble, scraping, social graphs, social networks
Companies: facebook

Market Still Not Totally Crazy: Classmates.com IPO Shuttered

from the a-little-sanity dept

In all the talk about a "new" internet bubble, the one thing that many people have pointed out over and over again is that we're still not seeing the same sort of crazy IPOs that were everywhere in 1998 and 1999. However, that's not to say some weren't interested in trying to push the envelope. More internet firms -- including quite a few that were unprofitable -- have been looking to go public lately. However, perhaps the most outlandish was Classmates.com's IPO plans. Classmates, of course, was a survivor from the original bubble, and had something of a web 1.0 social network, helping classmates reconnect. It tried to make money on premium services that very few people signed up for -- and even fewer as things like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook came along. However, with social networking sites getting astounding valuations, United Online (the current owner of Classmates) decided to try to polish the company up and position it as a social networking IPO. Of course, it didn't take Sherlock Holmes to realize this was a dud from the very beginning -- and it seems that message finally got back to the folks at United Online who have pulled the offering costing the company $4.5 to $5.5 million for a lot of nothing. Still, this should be seen as a positive development. Even with the hype and crazy valuations around social networking, the folks on Wall Street have at least some sense of when a company just has a story rather than anything of substance.

Filed Under: ipos, social networks
Companies: classmates.com, united online

Irritating Your Customers Is Almost Never A Good Business Strategy

from the customers-first dept

Brad Templeton notes a problem with Facebook that I have also observed: third party applications on the site are often quite annoying. I pretty regularly get messages from friends asking me to sign up for some random Facebook application that says (as Templeton puts it) "Fred Smith wrote something on your pixie wall!" and I have to sign up for the application to find out what Smith said. Most of the time neither Fred Smith's message or the app is that great, and so I end up quickly deleting it and am annoyed at both Fred Smith and the pixie wall application for wasting my time. I'm now at the point where I mostly ignore application requests. It's a bit of a sticky situation for Facebook. On the one hand, the company doesn't want to stifle experimentation by micromanaging the way applications are deployed. On the other hand, if applications make themselves too much of a nuisance, they might degrade the entire Facebook experience.

At a minimum, Facebook should revise its guidelines to make it clear that applications should, as much as possible, allow users to interact with them without formally signing up with the application themselves. Of course, applications have a strong incentive to ignore this advice in the interest of viral growth. One way to help enforce the guidelines would be for Facebook to put a complaint button right next to all application installation requests. The applications that received the most complaints could be investigated by Facebook staff and asked to clean up their act. One problem is that, as Templeton points out, Facebook itself hardly has clean hands on this issue. When you get a message on Facebook, you receive an email without the body of the message in it. Facebook ought to set a good example by switching this default.

It's true that in the short run that would moderately reduce website traffic. But that's a short-sighted way of looking at it. As I pointed out on Wednesday, one of the reasons Google has been so successful is that they almost never degrade the user experience in pursuit of other objectives like revenue maximization. That enhances their brand and increases user loyalty. By the same token, we at Techdirt provide full-text feeds despite the fact that partial feeds would generate more traffic in the short term. In both cases, the focus is on building the long-term value of the product, and sometimes that means giving up some short-term benefits in order to enhance the user experience. If Facebook doesn't learn this lesson, they are vulnerable to a competitor that offers similar functionality and a better user experience.

Filed Under: applications, intrusive, social networks
Companies: facebook

72.8 Percent Of All Statistics Are Made Up -- Or Maybe Twice That When It Comes To Facebook Blocking

from the this-again? dept

Another "web security firm" (I'm not going to give them undeserved publicity by naming them but you can click the link if you care) is getting some easy publicity by announcing the results of a survey finding that half of their customers block MySpace or Facebook surfing at work. That's not too surprising, since this was a survey of the customers of a company that sells blocking software. We covered a similar publicity stunt back in August (and indeed we've been debunking these stories for years). That study found that 43 percent of workers are blocked from accessing Facebook at work. But the latest study finds that only 25.6 percent of the firm's customers block Facebook. There are a couple of ways we might interpret this data. One is that Facebook blocking is actually falling, and that we can extrapolate no Facebook blocking at all sometime next May! The more likely explanation, though, is that these numbers are totally meaningless and self-serving. Of course, these stories inevitably go on to quote a company executive about how personal surfing at work is a "growing concern." In the latest story, the company predicts that two-thirds of companies would be filtering by next year. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that the company is selling the software companies would need to do that filtering.

Filed Under: filtering, personal surfing, social networks
Companies: facebook