In case you missed it, Facebook changed the default options for the “Political Views” section of user profiles. From the official announcement:
“Find the Political Views menu on Facebook a little limited? Users have often asked for the ability to select from more options to describe their political viewpoint, so we’ve expanded the list. And since terms like “liberal” or “conservative” don’t necessarily mean the same thing in every country, we’ve switched to a global listing of national political parties.”
Users are still free to define their political persuasions ‘free form,’ eschewing party labels for something of their own creation. Facebook veterans will be familiar with other free form categories: one of my friends has defined her religious views as “pandora.com,” for instance, and we all know “that guy” whose status generally reads something like “Joe Schmo is COME TO MY SHOW TONIGHT!!!#@!” By contrast, political views as a category previously followed a simple spectrum from “Very Conservative” to “Very Liberal,” with an “Apathetic” alternative. No more.
Continue reading ‘Party Foul: Facebook and “Political Views”’
The Story
Mashable reports that Google introduced an “invisibility” feature into its Gmail version of Google Talk over the weekend. I am very much against this type of feature, and am disappointed that Google has chosen to implement it.
If you’ve used AOL Instant Messenger (or its Microsoft and Yahoo! competitors), you’ll be familiar with the invisibility option: while you are able to see which of your contacts are online and even initiate conversations with them, it appears to them as if you’re offline.
The Argument
Instant messaging is a form of social networking. By choosing to become invisible, you’ve chosen to selectively participate in your social network. You have elected to receive all the benefits while experiencing none of the risks or costs. I believe that this goes against the very social nature of the whole social networking phenomenon.
Continue reading ‘Invisibility: A Violation of the Social (Networking) Contract?’
A few days ago I wrote about the data portability debate sparked by the deactivation of Robert Scoble’s Facebook account following his attempt to siphon his social graph data out of that service. Well, now Duncan Riley at TechCrunch and Steve O’Hear at ZDNet are breaking the news that Facebook (along with Google and Plaxo) have joined the DataPortability Workgroup. Riley reports:
The DataPortability Workgroup is actively working to create the ‘DataPortability Reference Design’ to document the best practices for integrating existing open standards and protocols for maximum interoperability (and here’s the key area) to allow users to access their friends and media across all the applications, social networking sites and widgets that implement the design into their systems.
Riley congratulates Google and Facebook, but O’Hear is less optimistic:
Call me cynical, but while I welcome this move [...], I remain skeptical of how quickly users will actually see real-world benefits from Google and Facebook’s membership.
Whether there will be an immediate change in the services or not, this is a big step towards unlocking the social graph.
One of the big stories in the tech world this week was a showdown between controversial blogger Robert Scoble and Facebook. You can read this article to get a fairly balanced recap of the drama, or browse through Blogrunner’s aggregation of posts and articles. (On a side note, I just discovered Blogrunner and it may be the coolest thing I’ve found all week).
But the gist is this: Scoble was alpha testing a program being developed by Plaxo (a forerunner of social networks as we know them today) called Plaxo Pulse. The particular feature he was testing was a script which logged onto his Facebook account, and then rapidly browsed through his friends, profile-by-profile, collecting — or, “scraping” — their names, birthdays, and e-mail addresses. (For more on scraping, see this recent article in Wired). This data was to be imported into Plaxo to help populate a user’s address book there. Facebook picked up on the superhuman speed at which the profiles were being accessed, and promptly deactivated Scoble’s account while notifying him he had violated Facebook’s Terms of Use.
Most of the heavyweights have weighed in on the matter: Arrington, Battelle, Carr, Fake Steve, Hansell, O’Hear, and of course Scoble himself has a few things to say. And they’re not all singing the same tune.
Continue reading ‘Who Owns the Social Graph?’
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