links for 2006-10-01
The World is Flat And Now So Is Facebook…the kids are not happy.
At least the sample size of two that I live with who responded to the question{aire}. Last week after it was announced that Facebook, long the exclusive territory of those with an edu email address was going to throw open their doors to everyone. There had been an intermediate stop that allowed employees of certain corporations in and the addition of geographic networks to the existing school networks. When I mentioned that to my two teenage sons they exchanged the "Mom has no idea what she is talking about" look followed by the proverbial "how do YOU know?" question. I smiled and told them they could just wait and see.
On September 26 at 1:47 PM, Carolyn Abrams of Facebook announced on their blog, "Welcome to Facebook, everyone." I immediately signed up. Research of course. I broke the news to the kids at carpool. First the open admissions policy; then my sign-up. They did not take it well. In fact, they are still trying to make the case that having adults on Facebook is bad enough; having their mother on Facebook is mortifying. MySpace fine; Facebook, not fine.
According to my kids, MySpace is for weidos, businesses and other adults. Facebook is for normal kids to hang out with their friends in a place where their parents or any other adults are not permitted. According to my in-home panel of experts, permitting parents on Facebook diminishes the attraction exponentially for kids; a complete lowering of standards. Perspective is a wonderful thing.
To quote Schopenhauer, "Every man takes the limits of his field of vision as the limits of the world." And as James Friedman tells us, the World is Flat and now so is Facebook. And so we will see how this plays out on the homefront.
There has been quite a bit of discussion amongst the three of us. My kids feel a sense of betrayal and ask "why" Facebook would do such a thing in general; and of course the fact that I now have an account regardless of my business rationale is simply mortifying. My thirteen year old wants to be assured that I will not be able to be "his friend"…he wonders if there is some unknown way that I will be able to figure out to accomplish this.
My fifteen year old asks me if I am aware that if someone searches for "Richmond" that my name will come up and do I realize what an embarrassment that will be for him. He poses a solution. He will make his account "private" and then no one will search for him. I ask, "Isn’t that the point…that your friends are supposed to be able to find you?" Well he says he is not sure what he will do, then.
And again he warns, "Did I know that any weirdo will be able to get on Facebook now…just like MySpace; not that you are a weirdo, Mom….its just weird that you are on Facebook.
Danah Boyd writes, "I don’t believe that they can continue as a hang-out space. I know that Facebook will continue to grow but I believe that the core value of it will be lost for the sake of growth." Rex Hammock says he and his teenagers agree that it is a mistake for Facebook to allow him to join. He quotes Danah Boyd’s use of the term "conflicting social contexts" which is precisely the conundrum expressed by my kids with the word, "weird."
Hammock writes, " I think one social network can’t be all things to all people: "Conflicting social contexts." I believe that in addition to our desire to have public personas and to be members of the community at large, individuals also need to be members of walled-off, defined communities, families and extremely finite networks….– so why online should there be one massive social network that is all things to all people?"
Well, let me tell you a story, a sponsored story. We all remember the Facebook debacle earlier this month with the mini-feed and news-feed features that produced Students Against Facebook News Feeds? News feeds, meet ad feeds.
This week MediaWeek reports that ads, or Sponsored Stories will be placed within the user’s News Feed so that when the user clicks on an ad, their network of friends will receive that information and the opportunity to do likewise. So, not only will your friends know where you are going, they may be able to make an educated guess about what you will be wearing.
Mashable provides this "Update: the Facebook folks mailed to say that your friends won’t be notified when you click an ad. Nonetheless, ads are still coming to the Facebook news feed - something that’s unlikely to go down well with the community."
Call it a mash-up, call it a smash up, call it conflicting social contexts; Facebook is flat and the kids are not happy. Mashable says, "Worse idea ever." He may be right. The deposits made in the authenticity bank account earlier may not cover the euphemistic use of sponsored story to mean advertising and the Facebook Brand may be a case story without a happy ending.
Tags: Facebook, Mashable, Media Week, Sponsored Story, The World is Flat, Marianne Richmond, James Friedman, Branding, Marketing, Advertising, Social Networks, Social Media, MySpace
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links for 2006-09-29
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I Spy.
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Interview with Intel; how to integrate social media into marketing.
links for 2006-09-28
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A good design is the one that works.
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awesome
links for 2006-09-27
Online Social Networks: Counting Friends or Friends That Count?
I was reading about Friends For Families on TechCrunch the other day and my initial reaction was, how pathetic that it has come to this. Friends for Families is described by TechCrunch as a kind of Match.com for families.
TechCrunch references a study as a "rationale" for the site’s creation that says that 25% of people say that they have no close friends; although in what is unfortunately an all too common practice in research study reporting, we are not given any context in which to evaluate that statement. A visit to the Friends for Families newsletter says that "several national news headlines have recently called attention to the fact that people generally have about 50% fewer friends than they did a decade ago." Again, what is the context? What headlines? What people? Why are these kinds of statements made in a total vacuum? But that could be the topic of its own post….
Back to Friends for Families.So the idea seems to be that you can get instant friends for your whole family from the comfort of your own home.You can eliminate the annoying anxiety of actually trying to establish relationships over time and through interactions and all for the low everyday price of $20. As TechCrunch notes, a Match.com for the whole family.
So…what does this mean, if anything. According to the US web stats company Compete, 2 out of every 3 people online in June 2006 visited a social network site. This is over a 100% increase since January 2004. USA Today headlines, Meet My 5000 Closest Pals which references the "friending" process as practiced on MySpace. Of course, the 5000 friends on MySpace aren’t all real friends…are they?
According to Amanda Lenhart, a senior researcher at the Pew Internet & American Life Project, the friend collection is just that, a collection of "how man people you can put onto your network. Some of it is seen as a proxy for popularity."
Ands before you start to think, well these are teenagers and college kids, there is a 40 year old man quoted in the USA Today article that articulates his rules for his "top 8" friends list. My own recent forays into MySpace as part of the GourmetStation Get Out of the Dog House Video Contest can substantiate, there is lots of highschool behavior going on well beyond highschool years.
So, although there are headlines that say Americans Have Fewer Friends Researchers Say, I think it depends on your definition of friends. Robert Putnam thinks we are bowling alone and that there is declining social capital as we become less engaged in our communities. It would seem though that the increase in social network "friends" might indicate otherwise…that the definition of communities and friends might be different but that the benefits of social capital and connection such as better physical and mental health, would exist on line as well as off line.
Henry Jenkins of MIT and author of Convergence Culture uses the term civic media for what we may call social media, "media which contributes to our sense of civic engagement, which strengthens our social ties to our communities — physical and virtual — and which reinforces the social contracts which insures core values of a democratic society." He writes that young people may be increasingly alienated from traditional journalism because the coverage of the communities that they inhabit and the issues that they care about are not recognized as important. He points out that traditional media coverage of MySpace, Video Games, and DOPA doesn’t reflect their perspectives but only the perspective of adults .
So, we have a new social network, Friends for Families that for $20 will match your family with other families and deliver new friends to your door, presumably wrapped in brown paper so that your neighbors that you probably haven’t met because you were online ordering friends, won’t know where they came from. And the t-shirt says, "Plays well with strangers." If this
And we have MySpace friends which mean different things to different networkers. Oh, forgot to mention that there are helpers on MySpace, MySpace Friend Bot and Buddy Generator and even Google Ads to jump the friend learning curve. So, are we bowling alone? Or if we are participating in online communities are we engaged. connected and building social capital?
Well, it depends….are we counting friends or making friends that count? Depends on what you mean by count…..
Tags: MySpace, Henry Jenkins, Friends for Families, DOPA, civic media, Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone, Marianne Richmond, GourmetStation, Get Out of the Dog House Video Contest, Amanda Lenhart, Pew Internet
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links for 2006-09-25
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In a word, yes; see comments.
links for 2006-09-24
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dating 2.0
links for 2006-09-21
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lots of good stuff
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people, people, people….one question not asked. The cost of not knowing.
links for 2006-09-19
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