Tag Archives: Online Communities

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Taking over the world – Facebook’s agenda may not be your agenda

With more than 700,000 members, one should be wary of calling Facebook a closed community. With the objective of connecting the world – limited only by political agendas – Facebook’s agenda can be seen as an anti-privacy agenda.

Consider Open Graph. At first glance it appears to be a boon to those who use Facebook to communicate with those who friend or like. However Facebook is a business. Never forget that Facebook is a business. So the value to Facebook of Open Graph is its value to aid message mongers – not-for-profit and for-profit alike.

If privacy is important to you, do not post on the Internet – ever. If you want an Internet presence, but want to protect your privacy, don’t join Facebook, or any “closed” group with a population greater than that of the United States of America.

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Essential 21st Century Skill: #Writing intelligently in fewer than 140 characters

Emergency "Twitter was down so I wrote my...

Emergency “Twitter was down so I wrote my tweet on paper and photographed it and posted on flickr” : Satire on internet culture (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This is a post about blogging for the time-crunched aka Tweeting. (65 characters including spaces) Concise, clear communication is the goal only some of the time. (63 characters including spaces) If I tweeted those two sentences I would have used 128 out of the 140 characters available. Should I leave it there, or use the remaining 12? That depends. (Without the period that phrase is 12 characters long). Let’s take a look at the thought as if it were a Tweet:

This is a post about blogging for the time-crunched aka Tweeting. Concise, clear communication is the goal only some of the time. That depends.

The absence of the question from paragraph one, completely changes the meaning of the Tweet.  Am I able to rewrite the Tweet to express my original message? Something has to give…

Tweeting, blogging for the time-crunched, demands concise, clear communication, but does it require we use all 140 characters? That depends.

I used all 140 characters. I didn’t have to overlook the final period. But…I couldn’t use some Twitter conventions like hash tags (#). Hash tags have a number of uses, depending on your motivation. {I’m going to use depend a number of times in this post…you can depend on it.} Marketers and Late Night TV Talk Show Hosts love the hash tag. Oh, and revolutionaries. Hash tags allow people who share a subject in common to converse in an alphabet-soup manner.

If I had added # to communication – no space between the symbol and the word – my message would appear with all other messages that contained the word communication and/or the hash tag #communication. The Twitter feed could contain information about IT stock, telephony, writing, classroom assignments, etc., as well as my message. If the hash tag is unique – no one else has thought of using it – the entity that launches that tag can identify a Twitter audience. Creating unique hash tags is increasingly difficult.  Today’s number one hash tag in my region? #Halloween.

The elevator pitch is an old marketing trick. Reduce your sales pitch to 2 minutes or less, as if you were communicating your concept to someone you met during an elevator ride. If you can’t you haven’t thought it through. The 21st century equivalent? The Twitter pitch.

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Ego and Phishing: Bait and Switch

I consider myself an expert when it comes to the role of emotion in online communication. A recent compromise of my Twitter account was an embarrassing reminder that expertise is not a protection when ego is involved.

My phone alerted me to a Twitter post from an account I follow on a regular basis. I enjoy the tweets from that account and often respond. This message however, complete with the familiar avatar, was slightly odd.  I couldn’t put my finger on it, but warning bells went off. However, the message appealed to me ego. I was sent a tiny url to a “mention” about me. The phishing folk stroked my ego and I foolishly clicked, the result was a request to login to Twitter to see the URL content. Should have known it was phishing! Because I was logged into Twitter. Ego overcame common sense, et voila – my account was compromised.

Within a few hours, my Twitter feed sported posts that appeared to come from me. So legitimate yet so fraudulent.

Don’t do as I do, please. Do as I say. Listen to your gut, not your ego.

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Pinterest’s Facebook Connection

By definition, social networks are closed communities, analogous to systems. The communities may overlap to varying degrees. Shared interests or connections are the key to membership in a social network. Take a moment to consider the number of social networks to which you belong. My list begins with family. I have been working contracts recently, so my “work” social network, is actually a number of unique circles, one of which overlaps with a network of friends of long-standing. I suppose I could say I have one network called friends, but unlike Facebook, my friends don’t all move in the same circles. My friends network is really a collection of circles within circles, with only the slightest overlap.

That was a description of my 3D living relationship to social networks, which, you will note, I could not describe without mentioning one virtual network Facebook. Facebook is fast becoming the most open closed network in the world. That is driving me crazy. Just as I do in 3D I want to control who knows whom within my social networks – and not because I have something to hide. This desire to contain has nothing to do with kinks, but has everything to do with public presentation. That need to make a positive first impression is the reason that Linkedin works. Who you are on Linkedin is not who you are on Facebook or YouTube. Just as who you are at work is not who you are at home with friends. Unfortunately Facebook’ is fast becoming ubiquitous.

That is the reason that I hate Pinterest and I haven’t even joined yet. Although I received 6 invitations this morning from some auto-responder function with diarrhea. Every one of the crafted-to-be-warm-and-welcoming robotic messages explained that the only method for creating a Pinterest account was to use my Facebook login. Son of a tetra-bite, I don’t want to give one more external online entity permission to access my Facebook profile. Pinterest claims it won’t post messages to my Facebook wall – slippery slope folks: Because Facebook makes it so hard to undo anything – even deleting a Facebook page.

I am a social integration specialist. The irony of my absolute loathing of the Let’s-build-our-site-so-people-ca-log-on-with-Facebook trend and the fact that I advise folk how to integrate social networks is not lost on me.

So Pinterest here I come. I feel like I have sold my soul to the devil.