How Facebook threatens “the social network” [UPDATED]

It won’t have gone un-noticed to any readers of this blog that I’ve been quite impressed at Google+ – what it can do, and more important what it could be possible of doing to our use of social networks. I’m particularly impressed at the implied movement away from the “social graph” to what has been described as the “interest graph” and the focus on task-related posting rather than people-focussed posting. In fact the demise of Google+ which has been trumpeted by the tech media press is almost certainly the result of posts disappearing from the “public stream” with more selective posting to Circles. A success story therefore you might argue for anyone who values their privacy.

Copying is said to be an indication of success too, and we’ve seen a “re-launch” of Posterous, trumpeting a feature that was always there which looks very similar to Circles, and of course there’s been the changes to Facebook. These have been thick and fast over the past few weeks, culminating in the announcements last week. First of all, I have to hold my hand-up … I’m not a great, nor active, Facebook user. It’s just too complicated to get the privacy controls correct, and as they keep on changing things, there’s just that nagging doubt always present in my mind that I might inadvertently be sharing something with people I don’t want to share with. So what goes on Facebook (from me) is generally of little interest to my “followers”, or it is factual and not likely to cause me any concern. But all that’s just changed because Facebook wants to change “the social network”, hold even more information about you – which you can’t get out without deleting your account, and wants to share that information with even more people that you don’t want to share it with.

Every time Facebook changes the timeline, or your profile, or whatever, a groundswell of complaint can be heard “from those in the know”. Of course Facebook probably doesn’t care about them (us) anyway – they’re more interested in the information they’ve trapped inside the Facebook firewall provided by the far greater number of users who don’t know, or who prefer not to know, what they’re doing. However, this time there’s been an up-welling of comment that beats most previous announcements and I thought I’d share some of that comment with you.

First of all take a look at the summary of features listed here. [If you want a sickening few minutes (you won’t want to stay to the end) watch the video of Mark Zuckerburg’s launch address.] “Is Facebook trying to kill privacy” – well yes it is, and this is seen by their view that “the social graph” should be open, so that everything you do can be made visible to just about anyone – read a review from Wired here. All those apps that you’ve allowed access to your Facebook profile, well now they will be following you, and what you do, even though you’ve not given them permission to do so – read Phil Bradley’s excellent post here, and as he and others have commented – it’s shameful that The Guardian has signed-up to this invasion of our private lives, and I’ll be even more worried if The Independent follows suit.

Two more links I ought to share with you as well are this one, detailing how the social reading apps will work, and this one which gives very wise advice – never leave your browser logged into Facebook, the cookies may be tracking everything you do.

[UPDATE: The storm doesn’t seem to be abating – @briankelly this morning (26/09/2011) tackles some of us who were tweeting that Fb is a walled garden with a riposte that suggests Russell Group (and presumably all Universities) can not afford to ignore it as there are so many fans using Fb Groups and suggests its not a walled garden anyway. However, my doubts are beginning to firm up even more and you ought to read “Facebook’s New Features Might Not Be as Private as You Think” and some of the comments that follow to help you come to your own conclusions.]

So … I’ll be reviewing my applications on Facebook again. I won’t be taking any of the new features and if I’m forced to change I’ll be deleting my account. My “followers” will always be able to find me on Google+ where I can then decide whether I want to follow them, or more importantly, post updates to them. I suspect The Force will remain undisturbed by any actions I take!

Google+ does it for me … big time!

I was ready for a move away from Twitter and my usage had dropped even before G+. I had already made the decision some months ago to do more in Facebook with “real” friends and family. Then G+ came along and I found that I could do what I wanted to do all along.

Which was …
a) to be able to write posts that were not cryptic or had such silly abbreviations, or had such bad English that the only thing it made you look was either incredibly clever, or silly, or both depending upon who was reading it;
b) to get involved in meaningful (sometimes) dialogue with people I didn’t know but who shared an interest with me, maybe it was just G+ itself at first but now it’s broadening to photography and I suspect in time to travel, walking and genealogy interests who will get circles of their own too [NB most of those I engaged with on twitter were people I DID know – they’re all in  my acquaintance circle now – who are a very diverse group of people who I’ve “collected” mainly from work encounters] ;
c) to engage with family and REAL friends in a more closed (dare I even say safe) environment using photos and videos as the trigger for engagement.

As a consequence, I was then able …
d) to reduce my time on Fb to that of just a quick glance to see what friends were up to, comment and perhaps send them an invite to G+;
e) to make my contributions on twitter to be either i) trivial and light-hearted banter – yes, I know … but social can mean that too, or ii) informative in the sense of sharing links, publicising blog posts, etc, or iii) just being friendly.

Either way my twitter follows will shrink over time I suspect (as will my tweets), and my Fb friends have already shrunk in terms of the ones that appear on my newsfeed. In passing, I guess it’ll be the API that determines the success of Google+. If it allows thoughtful integration of streams without adding to the noise then I’ll be a happy bunny.

Google+ does it for me big time!

Further thoughts re. Google+

What do I like?
It’s all becoming a little clearer :-). Tweets appear in Buzz, but don’t appear in streams – is this what I want? Quite possibly given the drivel that I tweet at 11:00pm on a Saturday evening. With the commitment to provide developers with an API this may be possible in the future, eg #G+Family would be a good way to send a tweet to your family Circle. So then I got to thinking about some other issues.

Q. Do circles force me to be more serious in what I share?
A. Probably yes, as I have to consciously decide which stream to share my thoughts in. This is most definitely a “good thing” and means I can begin to drop identities – I have four Twitter personas as it is!

Q. Is there a use for this in a work context?
A. Most definitely yes. I can set up discrete, or even overlapping circles, for different workgroups and can then conduct discussions within a semi-protected environment. Of course the usual email rules apply – don’t say anything that you wouldn’t say face-to-face with a person who you may be referring to – so this becomes a useful and easy collaborative tool. [NB This is particularly true until Google fix the backdoor that allows people in one of your Circles to broadcast Publicly something from within that Circle.] Rather like Posterous is an easy way into blogging, so G+ streams could be seen to be an easy way into collaborative discussion.

Q. What should I do with Buzz? How visible is Buzz to others in my various Circles?
A. Not sure. Something to look into I suppose. Buzz is a bit of an enigma. I just don’t get it, and I think Streams will in time replace it. I can’t remember (until now) when I last looked at Buzz. G+ has encouraged (by the tab on my Profile) me to look at it, and I can see it contains all my tweets. Perhaps I need to look again and see what else I wish to push into Buzz. Perhaps. Perhaps.

Q. Do I like the “no-limit” on characters in a status (like this one)?
A. Most definitely. Leads to better construction of arguments and de-trivialises status updates. [To be fair, Yammer does this too, but much as I like the idea behind Yammer, G+ kills it off … stone dead.]

Q. What do I think about the four little icons to add items to a stream?
A. Really neat. Makes a status post, almost a blog post. Which when you combine with Circles makes this potentially a blogging platform for everyone. However as @amcunningham has already asserted … it’s not currently a blogging platform, and although I use Blogger/Blogspot it’s not my blogging platform of choice. Perhaps G+ will now encourage Google to give Blogger a make-over. Now that would be welcome!

Conclusion. I really like G+ to date. Bit difficult to assess how it will work out in practice as I can not invite those I would like to join Circles. I look forward to seeing how the rest of the Google App family will be integrated, esp. Docs and Sheets. I’m also intrigued to see whether Blogspot/Blogger will get a much needed work-over. I must now try and send a message to my Family Circle and see what they receive. I understand they should get an email … we’ll see!!

Some further observations.
The mobile version of G+ appears to have less functionality than the Win/MacOS version – is that a good thing? Is that correct? Bit confusing that I can’t edit my profile on my iPad, but can on the #MBP. Also my profile on the iPad looks completely different to the one on the #MBP. Have I missed something, somewhere? [Apparently, the view you have on M.G+ of yourself is not the same as the Public view, but there’s no way of testing that, as there is on the Win/MacOS versions.]

Fascinating. I’ve only just bought some more Google storage (it didn’t break the bank) and then this comes along … it means that any pictures less than 2048 x 2048 pixels will not count against my storage limit of 1Gb (for all Google Apps) if I upload through G+, but if I continue to upload through Picasa then I can have larger pictures but they will count towards the 1Gb because they won’t be resized automatically. An incentive to use G+ possibly???? What am I going to do with all the storage I’ve just bought … don’t answer that!

I do like the showcasing potential for photos – this could be a real advantage over Flickr which is a bit cold and austere in it’s presentation of pictures. This allows a more personal presentation … it links so closely to your profile and it’s more social.

A little bit more … now i’ve had time to read the help documents connected to Picasweb (and quench my excitement). The way Picasaweb is integrated into Profile looks really good, but it does raise an issue of Album privacy; of whether you need to revise your settings for existing albums if people you’ve shared them with can then share them with others. In practice, I suspect this doesn’t make much of a difference because the previous privacy setting meant that the album was only visible to someone with the URL – this of course could be shared “unofficially”, so perhaps in practice … no change.

So … wonder what Vimeo (and other content hosting providers) are going to do to make it easy to link videos hosted on their sites appear nicely in G+. That will be where G+ wins because developers will be able to hook “stuff” in to G+

I’m more excited about G+ than anything I’ve been using for a long time. Google may not be open, but it’s a darn sight more approachable than Fb is!!

Can’t wait to see G+ in the wild and be able to put some of these thoughts into practice. For instance, I think this could kill-off Facebook Groups as a concept for voluntary organisations. If you don’t want to promote yourselves, but do want to share stuff, G+ seems a good way of doing it – especially if the future points to greater integration with the other Google Apps … which it will. Always seemed a bit wierd to see a Group on Facebook which is in itself a very person orientated site. Now a Circle can be created and shared with it’s members without the need for a public presentation … neat!

I like Sparks. I can add a search term (eg West Ham United) and follow the news feeds that come up; sort of RSS feed “on the fly”. Of course there are more serious uses of this facility :-).

So … you set up Circles to match the Groups in your Gmail Contact list and those that have not taken up G+, still get an email when you post to Circle. I really like this. For those organisations where the culture is slow to change and there is socialmedia phobia, they can at least benefit from the broadcast of a message, and the truth is that if you want to change the culture, then you put a little teaser on the bottom which is a G+ invite to them to get the “full experience” 🙂

Excellent Google – it’s neat, practical and useful. Well done!

[PS Not so sure about “hangouts” and “huddles” (if I could find them that is!)- perhaps that’s a generational thing.]

Oxygen as an enterprise alternative to Dropbox

My son has been VERY actively trying to persuade me to look into using Oxygen Cloud as an adjunct to Dropbox. Today he sent me this link which is worth taking a moment to read. There’s also a video to watch that explains/describes the model of file-sharing.

From this you can see that the main difference between Dropbox and Oxygen is the encryption which immediately addresses the recent “scares” about Dropbox releasing information to the US government upon request (of course you can still operate your own private encryption on Dropbox files if you want – but that’s a bit of a hastle).

So, Pete has allowed me to be one of his team members and so “family files” will be shared in the cloud using Oxygen. For any small team of five or less, why not use the free trial Oxygen service. If it meets your requirements, consider paying for secure storage in the cloud.

You wait for a bus, and then …

Yes it’s an all-action day in “Thought grazing Towers”. I’ve been meaning to poll for a day/time for our next socialmedia cafe event, but you know, the time never seemed just quite right, there was always something else that was “more pressing” {don’t laugh}.

Anyway, with Google+ in the wild (OK, under some kind of control in the wild) and with some other interesting developments:

  • What is visible.me, do you see a use case for it?
  • The emergence of Oxygen as a competitor for Dropbox in the enterprise.
  • Should we be pushing Posterous more as an easy-entry socialmedia tool?

… not to mention the feedback from, and follow-up to the Learning and Teaching Conference in May, we need to meet and chat over coffee don’t you think?

There’s a link to a meet-o-matic invite here. I’ll tweet it as well. When I see a good number of folk clustering around a given day/time I’ll re-tweet a revised meet-o-matic. Then I’ll update the side panel and tweet the event – so watch out for further updates. I’ve been thinking about using the cafe at Julian Hodge – what do others think? You might also note one option is late Friday afternoon, that would allow for an adjournment to a local hostelry for the dedicated.

I’ve not been asleep, just resting … it won’t be a roar, but it won’t be a whimper either!