Mike English's blog

If  Facebook is the social web’s equivalent of a shopping mall, what would be the social web’s equivalent of a public park?

We may already have a repository for a kind of knowledge commons, but what about public spaces? As the Internet becomes increasingly the environment in which identities are formed, we need to find ways to build safe, public, non-commercial spaces online.

Maybe we’re not quite addicted to computer mediated communication, but we’re certainly becoming increasingly dependent on it. Nicholas Carr, author of Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage, The Big Switch, and the forthcoming book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, argues that:

The problem with the addiction metaphor … is that it presents the normal as abnormal and hence makes it easy for us to distance ourselves from our own behavior and its consequences. By dismissing talk of “Internet addiction” as rhetorical overkill, which it is, we also avoid undertaking an honest examination of how deeply our media devices have been woven into our lives and how they are shaping those lives in far-reaching ways, for better and for worse. In the course of just a decade, we have become profoundly dependent on a new and increasingly pervasive technology.

Too often today, concerns about the implications of technology are dismissed because of the over-anxious language used by under-informed news media crying wolf to cash in on the zeitgeist. What are we doing to ensure that the voices of well-informed scholars and experts are not lost in the cacophony caused by the democratization of media? For example, how do we engage the public in civil discourse about issues like privacy, identity, and the changing face of media consumption before their attention becomes over-saturated by base sensationalism?

In response to Michael Arrington‘s post, The Meaning Of Friendship.

Bucketing and “fake following” are good enough for now.

Why?

Most of this social data will be public soon because managing changing relationship is a huge time-sink, and the benefits of carefully managed privacy just aren’t worth the efforts. I already have to think of it this way – as if all my social data were potentially public – just because I can’t mentally juggle which bits of my data I’m give to whom. (The users most affected by increasingly public social data are the popular users who receive a lot of attention. But they’re also in the best position to deal with potential problems because they can call on their ‘tribe’ to self-manage aberrant behavior.)

There are a number of problems with trying to manage relationships online as if they were analog equivalents to real life relationships. One problem has to do with two things, presence, and the persistence of data.

In real life, as Arrington points out,
“when you don’t want to be friends with someone, you just find ways not to spend time with them.”

This isn’t only true in a binary sense, but actually applies to how we manage all of our relationships. All relationships are constantly in a state of flux. You’re never just ‘friends’ or ‘not friends’ with anyone. The degree and nature of our relationships has a lot to do with how and when we spend time with people.

In the real world relationships are built up by when the two people spend quality time with each other and relationships can wane when people are apart. In the real world, these events are always symmetric. Online, this isn’t always the case.

Online, someone can read your profile data, or your blog, or your activity streams when you’re not there. Depending on what information you’re sharing, this could be like leaving a copy of your journal or diary at every single one of your friends houses.

Getting away from privacy paranoia, say we’ve already accepted that all of our social data may as well be public, one remaining problem is that this exchange is not equivalent to symmetric relationship building in the real world. It’s difficult to gauge online, without the subtleties of body language &c, the exact nature of our developing relationships. When the data exchange is inherently asymmetric, we may find a lot of people far more interested in us then we are in them. ( = problematic.)

In real life, for the most part, data about us is present when and where we are present. Outside of that it’s only present in our friends’ memories, and perhaps though gossip. Online, our social data is like everything else on the web, persistent. Every exchange is potentially immortalized in a log somewhere, and it’s quite acceptable to leave “wall posts” up forever. The social data is persistent, and this changes things.

Additionally, our relationships aren’t only determined by the amount of time we spend with other people, but how we spend it. Besides the quantitative aspect, there is a very important qualitative aspect to social interaction.

To put it in terms of data, we don’t exchange the same subset of our personal data with everyone. Every relationship is unique, because every person is unique and has slightly different interests. Within certain groups some general subset of data may be more relevant, but our relationship with one member of the group is still not identical with our relationship with every other member of the group; each relationship is unique, qualitatively and quantitatively. Even if the quantitative aspect is nearly identical (maybe you go bowling with the same group every Tuesday and you don’t see any of them outside of bowling,) still we couldn’t say that our relationship with every member of the group is identical. (You wouldn’t potentially ask Bob out on a date, but you might ask Mary out sometime.)

To mimic all of these nuances of relationships in both their quantitative and qualitative aspects would require extremely complex granular controls. It would be a huge time sink to manage manually, but I also wouldn’t begin to think I cold trust a computer to do it for me – at least any time soon.

Instead, I find it better to simply recognize that being “friended” on Facebook is not equivalent to being friends in real life. You can say that I’m “Facebook friends” with Robert Scoble, but that doesn’t tell you what our relationship is beyond the most basic level of trust. For example, I’d be out of place offering an intervention for his FriendFeed addiction – I don’t know him that well.

Merry Christmas, everyone!

As Joseph, David, and Chris were all traveling this week, TheSocialWeb.tv posted video from Le Web as this week’s episode.

Dave Morin does an excellent job highlighting the value of Facebook‘s social graph data. – Real names, real friends, etc. as I pointed out the other day.

But I also think Michael Arrington raises an interesting point when he says that Facebook is not actually interested in being open. He goes on to say that “open” doesn’t always win, but is actually what the weaker competitors do when they band together to compete. I agree that it may not be in Facebook’s best interest to adopt the standards of the open stack at this point, but is openness really a sign of weakness? Or could it be rather a sign of strength when a social network adopts an open attitude – a sign of confidence in their network, and the commitment of their users to the community that their network provides? Is Facebook worried that being more “open” will degrade the value of the social graph data they’ve hoarded? Are things like Friend Connect, MySpaceID, and OpenSocial enough to force Facebook to adopt standards like OpenID and OAuth?

Much as I generally dislike the MySpace community, I’m really excited by Max Engel‘s enthusiasm about the open stack. If MySpace continues with its commitment to “open” ideas, a lot of users stand to benefit.

The biggest problem for “open” as I see it, is not having a place to control your identity that is both independent and centralized. A lot of sites are implementing bits and pieces of the open stack, but as far as I’ve seen, only a few of the large existing networks are trying to implement the whole thing. If I’m going to connect the dots between my accounts across the web and tie them all to one source for my profile information, I don’t want that source to be under someone else’s control. I don’t want my Facebook profile to be the definitive ‘me’ on the web, and I definitely don’t want it to be my MySpace page. I’m glad that we’re starting to have more freedom to choose, with a growing list of OpenID providers and all, but I still don’t see a comprehensive solution that works for me. I want complete independent and centralized control of my identity.

I’ve made some slight modifications, and now I have Sixjumps‘ Facebook Connect plugin up and running on Mike English dot Net. Come check it out.

This means that you can now comment using OpenID, or by logging in through Facebook Connect. I’m all about giving you options. (If someone wants to try linking an OpenID to their profile after logging in with FB Connect, let me know. I’m curious to see how that works.)

(please be patient as I continue to tweak things – remember that this blog is a work in progress.)

What makes Facebook so important? It seems that conversations about social networks always circle back to Facebook somehow. Why?

Well, I see a few reasons for this. First, Facebook has what is probably the most valuable social graph data. Accurate names and profiles are maintained by most of the users. I speculate that by slowly rolling out the service among colleges, and focusing on being a social utility, Facebook encouraged this social behavior. They didn’t add too many features or too many users too fast. As new users joined the network they copied the behavior of the earlier adopters, which was to provide accurate data.

But accuracy isn’t everything. You can find accurate profiles on LinkedIn for example, but LinkedIn doesn’t have the reach Facebook does. Facebook has penetrated the social networking market especially among college students (the original target audience) to such an extent that it is treated as a given, a ubiquitous utility, the way Google is treated for search. Facebook has entered the college student’s vernacular lexicon as a verb.

This is why Facebook is important. Not just because it’s done such a great job perfecting the social UX, – a vast improvement over MySpace‘s earlier efforts – but because ‘everyone you know’ is on Facebook, maintaining fairly accurate profiles.

It’s the data. Real data about real-world contacts.

(Here come the questions…)

What are the essential elements of a profile page?

• your name
• your contact information
• a picture or avatar
• some kind of bio, or a few self-descriptive words
• what else?

What contact information should be included on a profile page?

• e-mail
• twitter
• instant messaging
• phone?

Eventually these questions become more about privacy than accessibility.

But what does privacy mean on the open web?

With the advent of social networking websites, and especially since the increased popularity of Facebook and Twitter we’ve grown accustomed to living publicly. We no longer think twice about updating Twitter or our Facebook status to let the entire world know where we are, or what we’re doing. Why?

Part of this has to do, I think, with knowing that this information is of interest to our own existing social groups. It’s nice to know what your friends are up to. On the other hand, are we at greater risk by exposing this information? By using services like brightkite or Dopplr are we simply asking to be kidnapped, or to have our houses looted in our absence?

In my personal experience, doubts about these new web-ventures have usually been dismissed as old-fashioned and out of place. There’s a new paradigm, we’re working toward a new reality, and these old fears need to be set aside on the frontier of innovation.

The new reality, as I see it, is one where technology works for people.  The new social web is one where our virtual interactions begin to mimic the subtleties of ‘real life‘ social interaction. But there are a lot of difficulties in manifesting this vision. At the forefront is the problem of privacy. In real life you don’t go to great lengths to hide information about yourself, but you don’t rattle off everything you’ve ever done the first second you meet someone either. In real life we get to know people gradually; we become acquainted with them over time and more intimate channels of communication may or may not be opened.

If you strike up a conversation with someone in a coffeehouse for example, you don’t give them your home phone, mobile phone, mailing address, weekly schedule, favorite books, favorite movies, and who knows what else in the first five minutes of conversation, and before you get to know them as a person. But this is how it works on the web right now, it’s usually all or nothing, because we treat profiles like business cards. Not that this isn’t useful, but for the average user, it becomes difficult to decide what information to share.

The other thing about real life information sharing is that it is almost always managed subconsiously on an individual basis. We think about our relationship with each person we interact with, and they often don’t fall into clear-cut categories. The categorical model of relationships assumption that most social websites with privacy controls make is inadequate.

Mimicking the safety of this individual and gradual sharing of information is difficult on the web. On the web, we like everything to be automatic and ready to go. We don’t want to spend our time managing our information, we want to spend it actually being social. It’s easier to build in levels of privacy to a closed, centralized network like Facebook. But on the open web, lack of universal standards makes managing privacy a dauntingly time-consuming task. Is it worth the effort? How badly do we need our privacy? How do we think about privacy on the open web? Are our models analogous to real world social interaction? Can they be?

EDIT:

Chris Saad points out that “traditional ideas of privacy are changing.” Are these changes a natural evolution, or are they sparked by the inability of the Internet’s global interconnectedness, the “global village” model, to mimic traditional social relations?  If the later, and if we treat this effect of technology on our lives as acceptable, the Internet potentially stands to have a larger cultural impact than I think anyone yet expects.

Part of my goal with this blog is to create a real home for my online identity. If you’ve known me for very long you’ve probably watched me move from one URL to the next like a hermit crab outgrowing shells. I’ve grown tired of moving from one network to the next without anyplace to really hang my hat. My solution is to attempt building myself this space.

What I’d like is something akin to what Facebook is becoming, but open. (more on that later, as I continue to figure out what exactly it is I want this to be)

An interesting thing happened this evening; I re-discovered the DiSo project, but I learned much more about it this time than I had in the past. What I found is that to really learn what the project was doing, I had to learn who exactly was working on it.

I’ve grown so accustomed to the old media of broadcasting, that I first assumed if I found the project website, I’d learn everything I needed to know. Instead, I was surprised to find that there was much more information distributed across various blogs and social networks than there was in any one centralized location. I was forced to look at the project as the work of people.

Perhaps it’s fitting that DiSo would operate in this fashion.  It gives me a lot of hope that the new forms of social media are going to put people back in control of technology and bring online social interaction back in touch with authentic personhood.

This is the hope that goes in to building this home.