danah and her Microsoft Research colleague Alice Marwick gave two stunningly insightful talks about how (American) teenagers use social networking. Their talks alone would have justified the trip to Oxford.
Links to the article behind this available from here.
This morning’s Observer column.
To read some of the excited commentary on these innovations you’d think that teleportation had actually arrived. Watching people salivate over Circles and, er, Hangouts helps to explain how the ancient Egyptians came to worship an insect. It also reminds one of the astonishing power that large corporations possess to create a reality-distortion field around them which, among other things, disables the capacity to believe that these organisations might sometimes do very silly things indeed. There was a time, for example, when Microsoft’s every move was greeted with the hushed reverence with which devout Catholics greet papal utterances. Grown men swoon whenever Steve Jobs appears in public. And it’s not that long ago since Google launched its incomprehensible “Wave” service (now defunct) and an idiotic venture called “Buzz” – things that excited geeks but left the rest of the world unmoved.
So the question du jour is whether Google+ is an electric wok or not…
This morning’s Observer column.
A spokeswoman for the CSA explained the thinking behind the ban. “Why give preference to Facebook, which is worth billions of dollars,” she asked, “when there are many other social networks that are struggling for recognition? This would be a distortion of competition. If we allow Facebook and Twitter to be cited on air, it’s opening a Pandora’s Box – other social networks will complain to us saying, ‘Why not us?’ ”
Quite. You can imagine the derisive reaction to this in the Anglo-American media, old and new. The broadcasting ruling was linked with President Sarkozy’s clueless remarks at the G8 summit about “civilising” the internet, and interpreted as a sign of cultural resentment at American dominance in cyberspace. “Poor old Frenchies,” was the general tenor of the commentary, “they just don’t get it.”
Actually, the joke's on us. As it happens, the French do ‘get’ it. To appreciate that, just do a simple thought-experiment. Suppose, for a moment, that BBC News started to use “Dyson” instead of “vacuum cleaner” in its reports of dust-mite infestations, or “Bollinger” instead of “champagne” in its coverage of the drinks industry. We'd be outraged. Yet that is effectively what we are thoughtlessly doing when it comes to dealing with phenomena like social networking: taking the dominant commercial brand and pretending that it’s generic…
I’ve been wondering about the implications of LinkedIn (which one of my mates calls “Facebook for job-seeking suits”), and then came on this in an excellent piece by Patrick Kingsley in today’s Guardian.
“One of the first places a hacker will visit is LinkedIn,” says [Rik] Ferguson. [Director of security research at computer protection firm, TrendMicro.] “What do we do on there? We make our entire CV available for the world to see. You can see everywhere I’ve worked in the past. You can see all my connections, see everyone I’ve worked with, everyone I know. So a hacker can assume one of those people’s identities and reference things that have happened in my professional life. And I’m far more likely to open an attachment from your email, because it’s far more credible.”
Spot on. Wonder if all the people who stampeded to get in on the LinkedIn IPO thought about that.
I know it’s long (over an hour), but this video from a Berkman Center discussion of social networking in which a quartet of Harvard academics talk about their interactions with, and reflections on, social networking is worth it.
Good post by Jillian York.
When Syria’s government unblocked Facebook, YouTube and Blogspot in February, many activists saw the move as an overture to protesters, possibly one offering a semblance of the freedoms won by insurgents in Egypt and Tunisia.
Others saw it as a potential means of surveillance. They were right: Within weeks, reports began to emerge from detained Syrian activists who said that authorities had demanded their Facebook passwords. Others inside the country noted that their friends’ Facebook walls had been compromised and now contained pro-regime sentiment.
On Twitter, Syrian protesters have noted the emergence of pro-regime “spambots”: accounts set up with automated feeds that post benign content, including links to attractive photographs of Syrian landscapes, to the hashtag used by protesters and supporters, presumably to flood it with contradictory information. Activists believe the bots have been created by regime supporters, paid or otherwise.
The potential for authorities to use tools like Twitter and Facebook to track down insurgents is very real. Many demonstrators chose early on not to hide their identities, emboldened by the success of Egypt’s mostly peaceful uprising. When coupled with Facebook’s requirement that users create profiles using their real names, pro-democracy activists are at risk of being unmasked on social networks.
Intriguing post by Dave Winer.
Now here’s a chilling thought.
If Twitter wanted to, tomorrow, they could block all links that went into a paywall. That would either be the end of paywalls, or the end of using Twitter as a way to distribute links to articles behind a paywall, which is basically the same thing, imho.
Twitter already has rules about what you can point to from a tweet, and they’re good ones, they keep phishing attacks out of the Twitter community, and they keep out spammers. But that does not have to be the end of it. And if you think Twitter depends on you, I bet Adobe felt that Apple depended on them too, at one point.
There’s a useful piece on the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s site about federated networking, seen as a way of counteracting the centralising power of outfits like Facebook.
To understand how federated social networking would be an improvement, we should understand how online social networking essentially works today. Right now, when you sign up for Facebook, you get a Facebook profile, which is a collection of data about you that lives on Facebook's servers. You can add words and pictures to your Facebook profile, and your Facebook profile can have a variety of relationships — it can be friends with other Facebook profiles, it can be a ‘fan’ of another Facebook page, or ‘like’ a web page containing a Facebook widget. Crucially, if you want to interact meaningfully with anyone else’s Facebook profile or any application offered on the Facebook platform, you have to sign up with Facebook and conduct your online social networking on Facebook’s servers, and according to Facebook’s rules and preferences. (You can replace “Facebook” with “Orkut,” “LinkedIn,” “Twitter,” and essentially tell the same story.)
We’ve all watched the dark side of this arrangement unfold, building a sad catalog of the consequences of turning over data to a social networking company. The social networking company might cause you to overshare information that you don’t want shared, or might disclose your information to advertisers or the government, harming your privacy. And conversely, the company may force you to undershare by deleting your profile, or censoring information that you want to see make it out into the world, ultimately curbing your freedom of expression online. And because the company may do this, governments might attempt to require them to do it, sometimes even without asking or informing the end-user.
How does it work?
To join a federated social network, you’ll be able to choose from an array of “profile providers,” just like you can choose an email provider. You will even be able to set up your own server and provide your social networking profile yourself. And in a federated social network, any profile can talk to another profile — even if it’s on a different server.
Imagine the Web as an open sea. To use Facebook, you have to immigrate to Facebook Island and get a Facebook House, in a land with a single ruler. But the distributed social networks being developed now will allow you to choose from many islands, connected to one another by bridges, and you can even have the option of building your own island and your own bridges.
Why is this important?
Why does this matter?
The beauty of the Internet so far is that its greatest ideas tend to put as much control as possible in the hands of individual users. And online social networking is a powerful tool for the many who want a service that compiles all the digital stuff shared by family, friends, and colleagues. But so far, social networking has grown in a way that concentrates control over that information — status posts, photos, and even your relationships themselves — with individual companies.
Distributed social networks represent a model that can plausibly return control and choice to the hands of the Internet user. If this seems mundane, consider that informed citizens worldwide are using online social networking tools to share vital information about how to improve their communities and their governments — and that in some places, the consequences if you’re discovered to be doing so are arrest, torture, or imprisonment. With more user control, diversity, and innovation, individuals speaking out under oppressive governments could conduct activism on social networking sites while also having a choice of services and providers that may be better equipped to protect their security and anonymity.
Twitter is five years old today. As @NickKristof of the NYT tweeted just now: “The Middle east crisis proved its huge value: it’s the haiku of news.”
This from the Twitter Blog.
It’s easy to remember working with @jack, @ev, and our tiny team on a project we called Twitter like it was last week. Amazingly, it’s five years ago today that the first tweet was sent. Over these years, Twitter has matured and made an impact in the areas of social responsibility, politics, sports, media, and more. The people who use Twitter have made it what it is today, and on our fifth birthday, it’s the people that make Twitter special who we are celebrating.
There are now more than 400 full time employees working at Twitter. In the last year alone we have made huge progress towards stability and performance. This work sets us up to continue innovating but it also allows us to build a profitable business on a strong foundation. We are in a position now which allows us to continue serving and delighting everyone who relies on Twitter to connect them to that which is meaningful for another five years and beyond.
Twitter users now send more than 140 million Tweets a day which adds up to a billion Tweets every 8 days—by comparison, it took 3 years, 2 months, and 1 day to reach the first billion Tweets. While it took about 18 months to sign up the first 500,000 accounts, we now see close to 500,000 accounts created every day. All of this momentum and growth often pales in comparison to a single compassionate Tweet by a caring person who wants to help someone in need.
En passant, just looked at my Twitter account to find that I have 1,999 followers.
Also: just remembered that I wrote a column about it last year.
