Another late night ramble, just because there's a mic and an endless supply of nights.
A personal reflection on the evolution of birthday wishes, life, the universe, and everything.
Saw The Social Network and became more convinced of the importance of storytelling style over engaging real life content.
pic courtesy hollywoodphony.wordpress.com
After hearing that Facebook.com is suing Teachbook.com for use of the word "book" in their domain name, I thought I'd combine this with some personal events of the day to discuss the concept of Awareness.
Spent some time thinking about the evolution of the social media meetup tonight and did a piss poor job being clear about my thoughts in this rambling podcast, but it's very late, it's very muggy, and I'm very tired.
A broken letter to Mark Zuckerberg:
Maestro Marky Zee,
You've been getting a lot of flack recently from tech pundits about the liberties that Facebook has taken with regards to user privacy. And you've responded without apology, but with indications of placating the mouthpieces.
Good for you, but if you ask me, I'd say don't apologize whatsoever.
In fact, if I were you, I'd completely rape any and all personal user privacy on the Facebook site and serve it up for all to see. Out of the 400 million users you have now, only a couple of million would even notice or give shit. What do you care?
People have a choice: use Facebook or don't.
There's a very clear way to simplify the privacy process instead of asking users to micromanage each subset of their information - eliminate the choice. Like any website, if it's on the FB, anyone can see it, you can hold it, advertisers can scrape it and your users will go their merry way, playing Farmville or starting up slacktivist groups that people can join to assuage their social guilt.
You're offering a free service. While the moral pundit minority may express their outrage, you should choose to ignore them.
I publish several podcasts and blogs which include social networking content, and as much as I don't like the fact you've been arbitrarily switching privacy settings, I don't blame you for it. Hell, you can make a boatload of money by serving up all this data to advertisers, so why wouldn't you?
I honestly believe that by forcing all the tech pundits to run from the site, you won't have to worry about them anymore. Most people are stuck using FB because their neo-Luddite family members have finally crawled up out of the Web 1.0 ooze to sign up and become their "friends". Those in the know can't afford to ditch FB now because Uncle Mort and Aunt Gertrude will feel slighted and not come over for holiday dinner next year.
Just lay it all out on the initial sign up page. Be blunt. Something like:
If you click YES, realize that EVERYTHING you share, even the crap you think might be private, is going to be stored on a hard drive somewhere and advertisers will use the information to try and sell you shit.
Do you accept?
YES or NO
You'll still get 95% of anyone who hits this point, because people love to share pictures of themselves in Las Vegas, or spend hours tilling virtual cabbage, or ROTFL while sharing clips of Glee with each other. When the pundits abandon you for some other service, you will be able to reap in the rewards of the people who either don't know or don't care, and either generates the same amount of data for the advertisers.
Whichever way you choose to go, good luck. I hope you gain respectability with your upcoming starring role in Zombieland 2: Harvard Headshots.
Sincerely,
Anthony Marco
Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for Serendipity.
While I've posted on a similar topic before, I found last week's announcements regarding Google's social search and Bing's full pipe search of Twitter and Facebook APIs cool, yet, at the same time, also a bit disconcerting.
In as much as one the greatest downfalls of early search algorithms was the assault of flotsam that was returned with every query, it is precisely an aspect of that muddled result that I fear losing. A great characteristic of the early graphic web was serendipity.
We're talking Web 1.0 here. It was a time before the great permeation of referral engines and aggregators, when a reader had to scour through fathoms of muck and mire NOT to find something good, but often just to find something of interest. If it was good, that was an added bonus.
There were regular occurrences of finding fantastic useful and interesting stuff, that enabled you to expand your horizons and knowledge, which had nothing to do with your original search term. Such is one of the great benefits of raw research; you don't only hope to find what you're looking for, you hope to find a whole bunch of other bizarre, eclectic, and brilliant knowledge as well. Click this webpage randomizer link five times and tell me that, by the end, you haven't learned something.
When Social Network algorithms become integrated into your average Google or Bing query, your results will be throttled tighter than they ever have before. And I'll be the first to acknowledge that's probably what most people want. We love the idea of not having to wade through the morass of Web 1.0 where it sometimes took hours to find what we wanted. We lust after authority-based aggregation and recommendations that will point us in the right direction so that the content-drenched world of Web 2.0 won't swallow us whole.
There is a little part of me, however, that enjoyed the search and the discovery that went along with it. There is a piece of my brain that expanded by being forced to make connections in wondering why, when I queried one term, would I get a result that included this specific link. Don't we all have a small part of our brain that yearns for the open road, not caring where we're going or how we get there; productivity be damned! Don't we wish that upon being asked "where you goin'", we could just say "not here"?
One of the things I love doing is going to a site like StumbleUpon and doing random "stumbles". But, even then, they aren't completely random. They are a subset of the users of service, who, by themselves, are a generally pretty savvy group of web users. It is still fun nonetheless.
The search tools are necessary. There are plenty of times that I need to really find something, and swimming around in the trillions of bits and bytes of information trying to find one piece would be useless and foolhardy. It's the evolving pattern that is beginning to scare me a bit. The pattern dictates that as information multiplies, search results become more focused.
When static web pages ruled, results were more widely varied, partially due to the fact that web communities were less automatic and SEO was above the head of the average Geocities or Lycos user.
When social networks emerged and blogging ballooned, subjective content resulted an exponential explosion that threatened to muddy up you average search, but, conveniently enough, technology allowed the results to get even better. SEO, easy tagging, and a more educated internet-savvy content creator was being bred, and we found what we needed easier.
As "social search" and like-minded approaches start to filter into user habits, every search will now pass through yet another filter, distilling the purest result to the end user. This is great for answers. This is a boon to productivity. This is what everyone wants when they search for something. This is what I want when I search for something. But has serendipity died online? Does filtering a search through ever-increasingly effective algorithms which factor in popularity, and adding a filter of authority based on a list of people I have on Facebook or Twitter allow me to expand my horizons or does it effectively quash them.
If you walked into a bookstore and in the first room there was only one shelf with "Books You Will Like", would you be tempted to forage beyond the curtain at the back of store to see what's being hidden?
Maybe it's just the adventurer in me, but sometimes I like the open road, even with the occasional undercooked Stuckey's chicken and glaring billboards for adult stores and firework warehouses.
via dyscultured.com
With news today that Facebook has fed on Friendfeed, I suppose the only question left to ask is will everyone FINALLY hear about Friendfeed now? At least I’m sure the cable news will report it… if they can tie it to Twitter.
Our hope: that the new amalgamation will be called Facefeed, because Facebook has essentially become the junkfood of social networking anyway (I would say MySpace, but they’ve dropped to the dollar store canned food of the genre). And since we love nothing better than to FEED OUR FACE, I propose we all bow down to our new Lord of Timesuck: FACEFEED!
On the Facebook Vanity Land Grab of aught nine. 16 reasons why you shouldn't smoke. And how the paradigms of the arts are echoed in our consumption of Social Media.