Accidentally in Code

Tag: Facebook

  • Social is Normal

    Jump on the social media bandwagon
    Credit: flickr / Matt Hamm

    Last week, I read Coders at Work (Amazon, Google books). I really enjoyed it, it was fascinating and I learned a lot about the history of programming and the programmers themselves.

    There’s a great quote from Douglas Crockford:

    Progress isn’t always forward. Sometimes we’re leaping forward and sometimes we’re leaping backwards. When we leaped to the PC, we lost a whole lot of stuff. In the timesharing era, we had social systems online. A timesharing system was a marketplace. It was a community, and everyone who was part of that system could exchange email, they could exchange files, they could chat, they could play games. They were doing all that stuff and it got lost when we went to PCs. It took another 20 years or so to get that back.

    Humans are social creatures. Social is normal. So the person pitching a website so: “<generic idea>, blah blah blah… but it will have this social network and that’ll be so awesome” – how different are they really from those people who used to pitch: “we’re going to have a business, we don’t know what it will do yet but it’ll be on the internet” back in the day.

    Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about user’s mental models. For instance, for the “average user”, what does their mental model of the internet look like? How about their mental model of their social network?

    For sophisticated users, the mental model explains to me why Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Foursquare can be completely complementary. LinkedIn is for professional contacts. Twitter is for people they want to share ideas with. FourSquare is for people they actually hang out with. Facebook is for everyone else (perhaps that is why power users have lately been finding Facebook so expendable?).

    What about average users though? Do Facebook lists sufficiently enable the distinctions they have in their mental model? What do you think? It seems like they wouldn’t.

    In the real world, people have different social networks. Some people work hard to keep their different networks separate, and may act differently depending on who they are with. Some people are consistent, and deliberately try to build links across networks. Most of us probably fall somewhere in between.

    It used to be that you managed these networks from one phone – two at a push. That is less and less the case. Now we manage our networks through diverse means – multiple phones, multiple email addresses, multiple social networks, chat programs. I might make a plan with a friend on Facebook, confirm the day before by SMS, and know that they’ve arrived via Foursquare. Mentioning that we’re hanging out on Twitter or Facebook might mean that other people join us. It’s confusing.

    Ages ago, I read a novel about a woman with commitment phobia who managed her cheating by having a different phone for each lover. Horrifying, right? Most of us would not want to live like that. And yet – right now it seems like I kind of do. I catch up with my work colleagues via Sametime, some friends via Facebook and some via Twitter. I email a couple of people. I chat with some friends via a AOL/MSN using Adium, and others on Skype. The other day I invited some people over, and I had no clue how many people were coming because I’d arranged it via so many different medium.

    I think the future of “social” depends on our mental models of ourselves and our network. I was started to explore this in this post, and I’m increasingly fascinated by it. So I’m going to keep thinking – and let me know what you think, too.

    Social art
    Credit: flickr / kevindooley

    Embedded below – really great slide deck with commentary which has given me a lot to think about in respect to this. I hope you enjoy it too!

    The Real Life Social Network v2

    View more documents from Paul Adams.

  • Google Me, Google You

    Google Logo in Lego
    Credit: flickr / keso

    Have you heard? Google is apparently making a new social network that will rival Facebook.

    This is being derided because, well, how can anyone hope to challenge Facebook? (Language stats from InsideFacebook) And Orkut has, tellingly, been a “huge success in Brazil“.

    I often find myself voicing the opinion that there is no need to create another social networking site – let people bring their existing networks to you (Disqus allows you to do this, I use it on this blog). And yet here, I’m excited and think there’s real potential.

    Why? Because much as Facebook is presented as the only social networking site, that’s bunk. Google has a ton of social networks – aside from Orkut, it’s just that many of them are functional, useful sites with a layer of social, and they’re disparate. I’ve listed a bunch below (in no particular order) – can you think of any more?

    Don Norman wrote ages ago about the organizational structure of finding things on Google and how that might reflect on the organization itself:

    Is Google simple? No. Google is deceptive. It hides all the complexity by simply showing one search box on the main page. The main difference, is that if you want to do anything else, the other search engines let you do it from their home pages, whereas Google makes you search through other, much more complex pages. Why aren’t many of these just linked together? Why isn’t Google a unified application? Why are there so many odd, apparently free-standing services?

    A long time ago, 1968 to be precise, a wise person named Conway wrote: “Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” So true: I can see this in products from many a company. Except with Google, there appears to be no organizational structure of the product. Hmm.

    But what I see here, is that Google has all the components of a social networking site that would be technically far better than anything Facebook is doing; they have an existing, and huge, user base; they are also more trusted. But will they give users the option to assemble them in a coherent manner? Perhaps with the addition of widgets from outside, like Twitter, and allow people to manage their Twitter AND their Buzz from one place?

    Or will they start from scratch?

    I really hope it’s the former.

  • I’m Back on Facebook, but I Still Hate It

    Facebook for Dummies
    Credit: flickr / daveynin

    After some time without Facebook, I’ve become quite happy without it. However, it’s my birthday next week and I’m headed to Seattle for the weekend and later on next week, we’re planning a party for the Awesome Foundation (which is GO – we have 10 trustees and a project, I’m so excited – expect more news this week).

    What does any of that have to do with Facebook? Well I know some people in Seattle, but don’t have their email address. Ditto for people I know and will want to invite to the AF party – I don’t have their email, or their phone no. because for the first year I was in Ottawa, I didn’t have a cell phone. Aside – does anyone else find that people don’t really give out contact information anymore? They just say, “Oh I’m on Facebook, you’re on Facebook – right?”.

    So I reactivated my Facebook profile and then went through and hid most of my information, and checked (and double checked) my privacy settings. Now Facebook is trying to take over the entire internet, I was trying to stop them from sending my personal data everywhere, and I managed the opt out bit (I think). What I couldn’t find, though, was the bit that stops my friends from sending my personal data out and about even with these instructions. Is it a coincidence that after stuff like this is published there are some subtle changes in the UI?

    So I have a BSc (hons) in Computer Science and most of a masters… and I cannot fathom the Facebook privacy settings. Worse, even the one that I think I found I can’t be sure of.

    So I’m back on Facebook, but this time it’s more in search of an exit strategy.

  • Life Without Facebook: Week 1

    hey babe, want to come over to myspace and twitter my yahoo 'til I google all over your facebook?
    Credit: flickr / constantine✖belias™

    Last week, I deactivated my Facebook account. Why? There were a number of reasons, and I’d just found myself using it less and less. Since they rolled out the redesign the news feed seemed out of date (it might take days for something to show up), but the live feed was full of repetitive drivel so it wasn’t helpful for keeping up with what my friends were doing.

    Perhaps the beginning of the end for me was the constant Farmville updates – which I (stupidly) didn’t disable until I’d got to the point when it felt like I actively disliked half the people I was “friends” with. And I know, you can block Farmville (I eventually did) but there are so many other applications that it didn’t seem to make a difference.

    I like ambient awareness, I do, but I was concerned that I’d got to the point that whilst I could get a bunch of people to come to a party, I didn’t have many people with whom I’ll exchange phone calls just because. Is that where we’re going? Where we’ll have a close-but-not-that-close relationship with so many more people, but fewer close relationships? Perhaps it’s just my experience as someone who moved to another continent about 18 months ago knowing no-one. I don’t know.

    However an @ message on Twitter has started to feel more intimate than the vast majority of the communication I was receiving on Facebook. The sheer volume of “I’m having a terrible day” / “why does no-one love me?” / “I’m so incredibly busy and important” updates was drowning out the great stuff that does get shared. I prefer Twitter, the lack of requirement to reciprocate, the character limits. Yes some people are still full of angst and over-sharing, but you can just quietly unfollow them. As well as quitting Facebook, I also did some cleaning of my stream on Twitter – some people I find are better in lists, because I want my main stream to be manageable.  And that’s OK, everyone does it differently. They can unfollow me too, and that’s up to them.

    So far, I have moments where I would normally check Facebook and I pause, but it’s been pretty easy to give it up. Perhaps in a while I’ll reactivate it and just be one of those people who is on Facebook, but never uses it. Or I’ll just leave it, because you can’t commit Facebook suicide anymore.

  • Developers? Humans? You Guys Should Meet

    robot invasion
    Credit: flickr / Don Solo

    I love Google, I do. I wouldn’t use another search engine and I use a lot of their other stuff as well. But I’ve been following the debate about privacy  in Buzz (read this – if you doubt that the privacy issues are a potential problem, and this info for lawyers and journalists with useful instructions for managing privacy – note that Google is in the process of making changes to resolve these issues) and wondering where all my random new followers in Google Reader came from… and now I know.

    Developers, we like to make things that are new and shiny, and they we assume that other people will get it because it’s oh-so-simple to us. They don’t. Seriously.

    Check out the comments on a post from Read Write Web which ranks so highly for “Facebook Login” that there are a bunch of confused people there wondering why they can’t log in to Facebook from that page. For real. The worst part of my mother getting a Facebook account, incidentally, isn’t what she can see that I’m doing (I’ve not done anything incriminating lately), it’s that now not only do I get phone calls for computer support, I get phone calls for Facebook support. And the privacy settings? If they made sense to people this guy wouldn’t have been able to do this level of analysis.

    From danah boyd – “Streams of Content, Limited Attention: The Flow of Information through Social Media” :

    Throughout my studies of social media, I have been astonished by the people who think that XYZ site is for people like them. I interviewed gay men who thought Friendster was a gay dating site because all they saw were other gay men. I interviewed teens who believed that everyone on MySpace was Christian because all of the profiles they saw contained biblical quotes. We all live in our own worlds with people who share our values and, with networked media, it’s often hard to see beyond that.

    I think this is extending to developers and the technically savvy. We’re tweeting, and blogging, and interacting with people who are like us but I don’t think we have a generation of people who are technologically literate, as much as technologically competent, and even that is questionable. What does that mean? It means they use the things we produce but they don’t understand the inner workings of it and they don’t want to.

    Wave was supposed to revolutionize conversation, but I still meet people – regularly – who haven’t heard of it. A girl I know was telling me today that her supervisor (a comp sci) hadn’t heard of Google Talk. I wasn’t even surprised by this.

    It’s easy to think that whatever you’ve created is the be-all and end all. But we should really know by now that if it’s at all complicated, people will be confused. People will almost never change their behavior because your product is so amazing. If we think otherwise, we’re deluded.

    And privacy is too important to screw up in this respect. People complain about Twitter’s controls not being fine grained enough, but it is at least simple – no misunderstanding. Private, public. On, off. It’s a binary choice, of the type that we probably need more of.

  • Facebook’s Got Your Mail

    Airmail envelope memo pocket book
    Credit: flickr / Kasaa

    It’s long been the case that in times of stress, I stop responding to email. Right now is a time of extreme stress (this week  I have to write a paper, mark an assignment, and have an interview) and I’ve stopped even reading it. I’m monitoring my iPhone for genuine emergencies, but if it doesn’t convey in the first line that it needs my attention now that’s it. No response. Sorry, I’ll read it next week – unless there’s something more important on. I haven’t checked Facebook in days, and this morning I though – I could just suspend my account. And then realized I couldn’t, because yesterday someone said to me:

    You’re on Facebook, right? Everyone’s on Facebook.

    And I’ve got something on Wednesday, which is still TBC… but I have someone on my Facebook – and don’t have their email address.

    I am, in effect, locked in to Facebook. Not because I myself depend on it, but because other people do.

    This is why we should be interested in Facebook’s Project Titan – a full featured web-mail. What I’d like it to have is IMAP, so I could just get my email from my email client, remove the Facebook app from my iPhone and probably disable my wall.

    However for the people who already use Facebook for most of their communication, what will the ability to, I don’t know, send attachments and email people not on Facebook bring?

    They won’t need a regular email address anymore.

    I know, this seems horrifying. But you know what? Some people still use Hotmail. I don’t just mean have a Hotmail account, I mean use it as their primary email. Like, they’d send a CV from it! Even though Microsoft took a bunch of features standard in every other (free!) email client out in a bid to make people pay for it. Now they’ll just use Facebook instead.

    For those of us who’d like to quit Facebook, but can’t, what will this mean? I think we may be even more locked in than we were before. It is notoriously difficult to delete your Facebook account and it’s not going to get any easier if our friends abandon email for FBmail.

    What do you think?

  • Unfriending on Facebook

    Friendship
    Credit: flickr / Paul Swee

    These are the terms that send significant traffic to my website. Yes, I realize what that says about the content of my blog. Anyway, I may as well try and be useful!

    Can you accidentally unfriend someone on Facebook?

    I guess so, the only time I ever heard of anyone doing this they were trying to remove me from a list and ended up removing me period (the explanation arrived with a friend request). Now Facebook has changed the interface, you can’t do that anymore. So if someone has unfriended you, assume it wasn’t an accident.

    I accidentally zoomed out on my Facebook

    Erm, zoom in? Cmd and “+” on the Mac.

    How do you unfriend someone on Facebook?

    Scroll down on their profile page, and it’s at the end of the left hand column.

    Will they know?

    If they try and go to your profile, it’ll be pretty obvious. If you decide to block them instead, it will look like you’ve just quit Facebook – I recommend you go with this option if you have friends in common/your privacy settings are low. To block someone, go to Privacy Settings -> Block list and type in their name.

    Should I?

    This really depends on how you use Facebook. If it has a lot of personal information about you and this person has a reason to be mad at you, yes. It’s fertile ground for plotting revenge. If they are your ex and you’re starting to behave like a crazy person, yes. If they are your ex and they are behaving like a crazy person, yes. If you have a lot of personal information and you don’t know them, yes. Otherwise, it’s really a judgment call.

    What is the code for reading someone else’s facebook messages?

    If you seriously think you can find that on Google, I hope you’re at least smart enough not to be using Facebook yourself.

  • My Journal is Online

    WTJ 94 - Write a list of more ways to wreck this journal
    Credit: flickr / isazappy

    Now that my iPhone is unlocked (yay!) and has a data plan, I can play Foursquare. Which is exciting for me, but I know some people hate it and my boyfriend has been getting all angsty about giving up my privacy for nothing.

    The thing is though, I love tracking things. I track the applications I use, and the music I listen to. I track random things on Mycrocosm. I track my todo list through Remember the Milk and my goals page and I use various applications for tracking how I’m doing on Twitter (am I tweeting too much? Tweeting stuff that’s interesting?). I track my blog stats through Google Analytics which means I can say that when I added related posts to my blog, my bounce rate went down. I’m a bit of a data junkie, I guess. But that is probably fitting considering that to describe what I like to work on I’ve taken to saying, “I take data and try and present and organize it in a way such that I can answer questions that you didn’t think to ask.”

    Not everyone is interested in doing this, of course. But I’ve been thinking about why I like to document my life and track it online like this and I have an answer. And no, it’s not that I’m self-obsessed and want everyone to know exactly what I’m doing, all the goddamn time. It’s my way of keeping a journal – the journal I tried to keep at numerous points growing up, but never had the dedication to stick with. It’s easier! I track my music and application use just by running stuff in the background. My task lists are a little more arduous to maintain, but they can be updated anywhere and the payoff in terms of organization is well worth the time. Twitter allows me to keep track of funny or useful articles I find online and document the highlights of my days in snippets, now I archive my tweets into weekly blogposts for easier searching. My blog is a history of things I’ve thought about and worked on, it documents my ideas and is search-able, and sometimes I find things in the related posts section that I’ve forgotten I wrote.

    Now with Foursquare, I can keep track of where I’ve been. And I get that it’s annoying when your every check-in gets posted to your Twitter or Facebook stream, so I don’t do that. Currently it’s set to post only badges and mayorships, but I’ll turn that off if they’re frequent occurrences. Here’s what I’m getting out of it:

    Ambient Awareness

    I’m a big fan of this idea, I like the ease of keeping track of people and staying in touch this way, rather than the long “this is everything I’ve done in the last month” emails. And I suck at writing emails anyway (working on replying, I’m getting better at it), so nobody gets those from me. This makes it all the more useful to have places where people who are interested in what I’m up to but can’t be bothered to write the email and wait for the response can keep up with me, and hopefully I can keep up with them in return. If you’re not that person and my content is boring, I’m sorry – but it’s not meant for you. I tend to use Facebook for this, because it’s closed and I tend to limit it to people I know, but I think Foursquare can potentially be nice for that too.

    Serendipitous Meetings

    OK, this hasn’t happened yet but I hope it will. If I’m in Starbucks and you’re nearby and fancy a coffee then maybe you’ll come by and hang out. That’s kinda cool! And the other day when I was meeting friends at a restaurant, I knew one of them was there because his Foursquare check-in popped up on my phone. That’s potentially useful, too.

    Competition

    I really want to be Mayor of where I kickbox. Perhaps some people might find that a little sad, but if it gets me training more isn’t that a good thing? Competition encourages me to get out there, and visit new places. It’s pretty cold in Ottawa right now – the more motivation to get out and about, the better.

    How about you? Do you think Foursquare and services like that are stupid, or do you use them? And if so, why – what do you get out of it?

  • Does Facebook Render Twitter Redundant?

    I’m going to start this by saying that if you’re thinking about using Twitter to communicate with your friends, that’s a job that can be done fine by Facebook. Especially if you have a smart phone.

    Of course your friends who are using Twitter are probably using it differently from Facebook (danah boyd has some commentary on that here). I definitely use these services differently, I tend to post more frequently on Twitter, share way more stuff, and Facebook I use to communicate with people who aren’t on Twitter, or for statuses that are too personal for public consumption.

    Anyway, the other day one of my friends said that he was quitting Twitter because it was pointless and Facebook did everything Twitter could do (and more). And so I directed him to my Why Twitter isn’t a Pointless Waste of Time post and said – how do you replicate information gathering on Facebook. And he said – groups.

    I disagree, because I think Twitter gives you so much control over your stream, and you can’t have that in a Facebook group. And my friend said, no you can be the administrator and then you can have that much control.

    And I guess he is right. I could be the despotic dictator who says who can be in my group and subject them to rules depending on who they are. So friends can post anything, but people who I’m following for inspiration can’t say anything depressing (or religious) or they’re gone. Techies can’t wax lyrical about Windows 7 otherwise I’ll get bored and kick them out. And there’ll be an eclectic mix of people – techies, atheists, newspapers, academics, friends and the people who relay what’s hot right now. But they’ll have to coexist peacefully and I don’t expect to see much cross-subject discussion – this isn’t an exercise to encourage them interacting (unless they already are), nor can they complain if I get bored and get rid of someone else. And they have to be posting regularly, I want to see perhaps 200 posts a day.

    But somehow I don’t think people would participate under these conditions, and even if they did that it would work as well as Twitter does. Do you?