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Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

HEIs Get Facebook Fever (again)

Sunday, June 14th, 2009

Facebook rolled out its ‘usernames‘ function today. This is a new feature at Facebook which allows a user to claim their little bit of the Facebook namespace, along the lines of:

http://www.facebook.com/[preferred_name]/

The process started at 05:00 am UK local time – on a Saturday morning – yet several people in my social and professional networks got up early to claim their personalised Facebook URL. Not all were successful despite this determination, and some ended up having to settle for some variation on their preferred username.

As for me, I enjoyed a rare lie-in

So, why do people think this is important – and worth getting up at 05:00 for? And why am I not ‘bovvered’? From the various commentaries I’ve seen so far – blog posts and Twitter discussion primarily, here are some aspects & motives I’ve identified so far, and some of the issues I have with them.

Fear of someone else registering your preferred username

This seems to be the main reason for the 05:00 land-grab. The motivation for registering a username appears to be, primarily, a defensive one. I guess there’s a sense that this might become important. The majority of people, from my very limited straw-poll, seem to fall into this category. While I don’t personally feel the need, I understand this reasoning.

Wanting to be able to offer a neat & personalised Facebook URL for you or your organisation

This is covered by Brian Kelly – he describes the decision to register a Facebook URL for an organisational Facebook page as a ‘no-brainer’, and lists a few higher-education institutions (HEIs) which have rushed to register a URL.

In his post, Brian asks:

So tell me, what is the logic in having a personal or institutional Facebook account and keeping the long form for its address? Or are the tweets I’ve been seeing simply a minority view from the ideological purists….?

For some people, the personalised URL is immediately important as they intend to use it as a personal ‘identifier’. The motivations here are convenience – such a URL can be much more memorable, and ‘vanity’ – a personalised URL is undoubtedly more satisfying and attractive. (Note, I use the term ‘vanity’ here as it has been used by others in this context and I don’t intend any pejorative sense that this term might convey).

So, why was I lounging in bed rather than rushing to claim my Facebook ID, and why would I hesitate (’ideological purity’ aside!) before registering and publicising a URL for my HEI?

I have a personal namespace, having registered the domain ‘paulwalk.net’. This is also my OpenID, through the use of delegation (I have already changed OpenID identity provider twice without changing my OpenID). I realise that maintaining a personal domain is not yet a mainstream activity – yet I’m frequently surprised by the fact that many of those generally very tech-savvy people in my professional/social networks do not bother to do this, instead investing a major part of their online identities with companies such as wordpress.com or Facebook.
Do you trust Facebook? How much? Because, by registering a Facebook URL and publicising it, you just tied a potentially major part of your online identity with the fortunes and behaviour of this company. As an individual, this risk might be worth the convenience perhaps. But as an HEI – why would you want to introduce this risk when you already own and manage your own namespace?
As an HEI, you will have, no doubt, invested considerably in establishing a strong URL-based online brand, being careful with search engine optimisation and the like. Why then would you introduce a competing URL which will tend to dilute your primary Web address’s prominence? It may be that some HEIs have, after careful deliberation, decided to base their online identity and the marketing of their organisation on the Facebook platform – but I’d be amazed if this were true. So what exactly is the point in establishing a public Facebook URL for your organisation?

An expectation that Facebook will become an OpenID identity provider in the future

More tech-savvy users recognise that the Facebook URL they claim could soon become an OpenID. If they are a regular user of Facebook, this could offer a measure of convenience in the sense that their identity provider will be also a service provider which they use frequently. But as the usability issues with OpenID (and there are several) are gradually ironed out, we can expect to see OpenID’s importance as an ‘identifying system’ rather than an authenticating mechanism come to the fore. Using Facebook (or any equivalent service provider) as an identity provider will make less and less sense.

Time will tell

It may be that I am wrong about these issues. However, I have challenged the HEI sector’s desire to jump on the Facebook bandwagon in the past, and I have not seen much evidence to convince me that Facebook is a significant platform for engagment with students. As part of a marketing strategy, it probably makes sense to maintain some sort of presence in Facebook – just as it might make sense to establish a presence in various other systems. But on the public Web, an HEI’s identity must surely be kept independent of any private commercial concern. The mechanisms for ensuring this are well established. And, increasingly, we can begin to apply these mechanisms to our individual identities.

Tags: Facebook, openid
Posted in Social Software, Web Infrastructure | 9 Comments »

Smoke and mirrors, or good intentions?

Friday, February 20th, 2009

Update: Karen’s presentation has now been made available.

Yesterday, despite the best intentions of Worst Great Western, I travelled to the British Library in London to hear Karen Calhoun, Vice President WorldCat and Metadata Services at OCLC presenting on Working collectively – the way forward in an academic environment (not available online as far as I can tell).

While Karen’s presentation was interesting it was, inevitably, mainly a sales-pitch for WorldCat, OCLC’s global-scale union catalogue of bibliographic records. Based on a fee-paying, membership business model, WorldCat provides value to member libraries mainly through the economy of scale to be derived from processing such data centrally, and through the expectation that concentration, as Lorcan Dempsey has characterised it, will provide greater traction on the Web and, consequently, more discovery and use. Karen used an array of metaphors to convey this idea: WorldCat was variously described as a ’switch’ (as opposed to a ‘destination’), a bicycle wheel, and (bafflingly) a funnel.

I get the ’switch’ idea, although I’m not sure that I entirely buy into it. WorldCat is positioned as a service which switches the user from a generic search engine (where they begin their typical enquiry) to the member library system. OCLC are clear that they do not intend WorldCat to be the destination site. From a systems architecture perspective, I recognise the value in this. What I don’t yet see is the business model.

A little over a year ago, Richard Wallis commented:

OCLC are trapped in an increasingly inappropriate business model. A model based upon the value in the creation and control of data. Increasingly, in this interconnected world, the value is in making data openly available and building services upon it. When people get charged for one thing, but gain value from another, they will become increasingly uncomfortable with the old status quo.

Now Richard is employed by Talis, who might be considered to be competing with OCLC to some extent in the library domain. And, it has to be said, there are some of us who aren’t entirely convinced that Talis will be able to build a viable business out of their undeniably interesting Talis Platform initiative.

Karen, in her presentation offered a rebuttal to Richard’s comment, which led to more about the ’switch’ idea. During the Q&A at yesterday’s event I suggested that I didn’t feel that Richard’s comment had been answered. Again, invoking the benefits of concentration, Karen suggested that if all the world’s libraries made a record about every single copy of every book available as a URI on the Web then this would present scaling problems which even Google would balk at. I’m afraid I just can’t believe that this is problem of scale. It has also been suggested to me that concentration is necessary to allow the user to cope with the massive amounts of potential duplication – i.e. if I search for a book on a search engine like Google then I want one or two results, not one result for every copy in every library. Well, I think there are other strategies for dealing with this issue. Personalisation is one. Google seem to agree anyhow.

Recently, OCLC became embroiled in a controversy surrounding changes it made to its Policy for Use and Transfer of WorldCat® Records. (See also an FAQ). I won’t revisit the arguments here – there was significant commentary criticising the changes (e.g 1 2 3 4 5) and a response from Karen Calhoun: essentially the concerns revolved around the perception that OCLC was seeking to reduce the control which member libraries can exert over the use of the data which they have contributed. OCLC withdrew the changed policy shortly afterwards and have launched a process for engaging the community in reviewing its policy.

In the course of the presentation yesterday, I was very struck by the similarities between this situation and that of Facebook’s recent attempt to change its terms of use. Both OCLC and Facebook:

tried to introduce these changes quietly
were hauled up immediately by an outcry from users and others in the general domain, especially in the blogosphere
quickly withdrew the changes
have engaged with the community directly in an attempt to create a mutually acceptable arrangement

They have other things in common. Both require what is, in its broadest sense, a monopoly, to be useful. Facebook is a walled garden, while WorldCat is certainly more open, but both need to be the dominant player or their value-proposition of concentration just doesn’t work. And I was fascinated to hear Karen talk about the community using norms, or socially-enforced rules. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook has started to talk about ‘philosophy’ in a similar vein.

It seems to me that both OCLC/WorldCat and Facebook are trying to figure out how to make the best use of their position. One is driven by the search for profit, the other by delivering the best value to fee-paying members. Both have a monopoly of sorts, and both are seeking to exploit the Web, albeit in very different ways. They have custody of a huge amount of content, which has potential value but which is also an expensive burden. Because of their dominant position they are generally the first to expose some of the absurdities in user-expectations (witness the widespread belief by users of Facebook that they could really ‘delete’ their content from a distributed system), but they are also under constant, close scrutiny, which is A Good Thing.

I’m grateful to Karen for her clear presentation yesterday, and for her part in this process. When I put the comparison to Facebook to her yesterday, she didn’t recoil from this as she might have done. I think there has been a significant advance in recent months, in that communities are beginning to glimpse the complexities behind what were imagined to be more simple issues of rights, ownership and control. Both OCLC and Facebook have responded gracefully to having been called out by their respective communities and, crucially, have invited those communities to participate in solving the knotty problem of reconciling the desire for useful services with the expectations of ownership and control.

Tags: Facebook, Karen Calhoun, OCLC, Richard Wallis, worldcat
Posted in Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Facebook wants your attention, not your photos

Wednesday, February 18th, 2009

There has been something of a furore over a recent change to Facebook’s terms of service (ToS). The Consumerist reported this as Facebook’s New Terms Of Service: “We Can Do Anything We Want With Your Content. Forever.”.

The change in question was the removal of a clause stating:

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

[my emphasis]

So, even if I delete my account, any content I have uploaded to Facebook may remain. On the face of it, this sounds unreasonable. And the fact that this alteration to the ToS was made rather quietly is enough to raise a little suspicion. Objections to this change were swift and many. Fittingly, the largest concerted protest was organised within Facebook itself by the group called People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS) (ironically, if you want to read about the risks associated with the new ToS in this Facebook group then you will have to join Facebook as it remains a walled garden). The members of this group (claimed to be 60,000 in number) identified ‘3 Big Questions for Facebook’, which boil down to seeking reassurance that Facebook will not, at some future point, exploit user-generated content for its own profit.

Now, I think it is good that this change in ToS was picked up, challenged, and has now been reversed. Facebook were clearly mistaken if they thought that they could just make this change quietly without an ensuing protest. However I, for one, believe their rationale for making this change in the first place. On the Facebook blog, Mark Zuckerberg justified the change to the ToS:

When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

His comparison to email is, I think, bogus – for this to hold water the world’s email would have to reside in one system owned by one company, which it clearly does not. However Facebook is, by dint of its huge user-base if not technical innovation, raising all kinds of issues to do with user-generated content, rights, management etc. It has chosen to try to deal with these issues through a trial-and-error approach which may realistically, be the only way to do so. There is a lot of grey area to be explored here and a change, for example, which allowed users to delete all content which they had ever uploaded to Facebook would have a serious impact on Facebook’s architecture and functionality.

Now, I’m certainly not a fan of Facebook. I have yet to find a use for it in my professional life and have criticised before the assumption that, for example, Higher Education should be embracing it as a service because it is widely popular. But I will say that I think the furore about Facebook’s ‘ownership’ of user-generated-content has, by and large, slightly missed the point. There has been wide-spread concern about how Facebook might sell the rights to users’ photos for advertising purposes for example. The idea that Facebook would risk the public wrath of users for this kind of business model seems, to me, to be highly unlikely. Frankly, I don’t think that Facebook has any business model which revolves around individual user’s content. There is only one thing of potential, unproven, value to Facebook and that is the aggregate of users’ attention data. Typically, this would cover the data which a system logs about everything the user has visited and/or clicked on. Attention data can be exploited within a system to seed recommendation algorithms, tailoring a user’s experience and delivering personalised content to them. In the case of Facebook, attention data could also be derived from user-generated-content (i.e. status updates, news, mail, even other media such as photos) which can be mined for clues about trends in interest and behaviour. We know already that Facebook has sought to monetise this – witness the Beacon debacle of November 2007.

There are certainly some interesting issues to be wrestled with regarding user content in the special context of social networking sites like Facebook. We should be vigilant, as Facebook and the like are by no means clear themselves about how best to manage these issues, and some of their aborted experiments will be harmful to users and their rights. However, in being vigilant, we must ensure that we focus on the real issue. We flatter ourselves if we think Facebook is interested in our uploaded photos from the office party. What they really want is to know what we think, what we like and don’t like, what we buy, how we plan to vote….. People will pay large amounts of money for this kind of data.

And I won’t even mention the CIA….

Tags: attention, attention-data, beacon, Facebook, ToS
Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

Personal profile portability

Sunday, May 18th, 2008

I haven’t minted a TLA for ages – I think I might be the the first to come up with PPP for Personal Profile Portability as a convenient handle to wrap around the current flavour of ‘data portability’ being touted by the major ‘walled-garden’ social network sites.

Both MySpace and Facebook have recently launched initiatives to open up a little….but not too much.

MySpace has announced its Data Availability project with some major partner applications. Essentially, this will encourage the user to manage ‘profile’ information on MySpace, with a view to surfacing this information in other, partner applications (initially Yahoo, eBay, Photobucket and Twitter. It will also allow users to share some data such as photos which they have added to the MySpace site. Facebook has a similar initiative called Facebook Connect , initially in partnership with Digg. In both cases, a set of usage policies will be imposed such that the user retains control over what is shared, with the power to revoke the sharing agreement. I’m really encouraged to note that in the case of MySpace’s Data Availability, the mechanism adopted to solve the inter-authentication/authorisation issues between these systems is an implementation of OAuth.

Amit Kapur (MySpace’s Chief Operating Officer) says that Data Availability is:

“…founded first and foremost on allowing users to have comprehensive control over their content and data.”

Dave Morin of Facebook believes that:

“…the next evolution of data portability is [...] about giving users the ability to take their identity and friends with them around the Web, while being able to trust that their information is always up to date and always protected by their privacy settings.”

The extent to which users ‘have control’ over their content and data even while it has been completely locked up within the MySpace and Facebook applications has been argued about extensively. The relationships between these sites, their users, and their users’ data have evolved over the last year or two, as users have become a little more savvy. Pressure from groups such as DataPortability appears to have had an effect, with MySpace also signing up to this recently.

So, it seems as though the walled gardens are opening up, getting ready to participate in the wider web. Or are they?

In a web of distributed social networks, the most likely way in which users might manage their participation would seem (right now) to be through a single entry point. Essentially, if the web of social networks is going to allow ’single-sign-on for the user, and allow a re-use of profile information, and even content across multiple applications, then one model is to give the user a ‘gateway’ service, where they sign-on and manage their ‘account’. Both Facebook and MySpace are going to battle hard to be that gateway service for the masses. Both have accepted that they can no longer remain as a completely walled garden – they must open up, just a little, to avoid being eventually marginalised. But now that they are not totally closed, they may find it difficult to retain control. They may find others are waiting to seize the initiative. Enter Google, and its Friend Connect service.

Friend Connect is different to the previous initiatives from Facebook and MySpace. Google’s new offering is designed to provide a ‘middleware’ services, sitting between the big social networks, and sundry web applications which might want to exploit the new openings in these services. It also utilises components which have been developed with the OpenSocial API. Friend Connect is, I think, a very significant development, because it shows how more distributed social networks might work. It is significant also in a particular detail – notice how Friend Connect can become a social network of sorts simply by integrating existing social networks. Suddenly, the huge headstart enjoyed by Facebook and MySpace doesn’t look so unassailable. This is, presumably, the real reason why Facebook have taken steps to block Friend Connect.

I suggest that because they have been walled gardens for so long, neither Facebook nor MySpace really know how to succeed as middleware. They have always been the destination – never really a component in someone’s workflow. By contrast, Google has always offered services which the user employs en route to a different destination. Google understands this kind of arrangement fundamentally. Expect to see increasingly desperate measures from MySpace and Facebook to retain control while Google quietly grows its Friend Connect service.

Tags: data-availability, Facebook, friend-connect, Google, myspace, oauth, personal-profile-portability, ppp
Posted in Programmable Web, Social Software, Web Infrastructure | 1 Comment »

Destination, or workflow component?

Saturday, April 19th, 2008

In a recent post, Facebook Or Twitter – Or Facebook And Twitter , Brian Kelly says:

…in some circle such use of Facebook is being derided with comments such as “It’s a closed garden“, “Its popularity is on the wane” or “Twitter is a better development environment” being made. I have to say that I foind that such comments tend to miss the point.“.

Brian tackles the “popularity on the wane” comment with some web statistics, but leaves the “closed garden” and “better development environment” arguments. I’m not at all sure what the argument is about development environments, but I am very interested in the walled garden aspect – I wrote about this in July last year, and I have seen nothing since to change my mind. I’m not sure I’m deriding Facebook, but I do maintain that it is a walled garden. I still keep an account in Facebook out of interest but I rarely access it.

I attended a session on digital libraries earlier this week at the JISC conference, at which Lorcan Dempsey spoke about how where once the user built their workflow around the library, now the library must build services which fit into the user’s workflow. Facebook, it seems to me, is a destination. I go there sometimes, almost always because someone has uploaded some photos of an event I have attended. I go there for occasional amusement. According to the figures, Facebook is very successful at being a destination. But is it embedded in anyone’s workflow I wonder? Twitter is very much part of my workflow – it is the single most used application on my iPhone.

Twitter is an eminently ‘composable‘ service by design, while Facebook is an attractive (for many) destination. Twitter participates in any number of mashups, and has, given rise to an extraordinary range of user-interfaces. It fits into people’s workflows because they can choose how to access it. I use a combination of the mobile web interface and SMS: others use these and a variety of rich desktop interfaces.

So I think my response is still: use Twitter and Facebook, or both, or neither. But I believe that Twitter is more interesting, really because it’s composable nature will allow it to fit all kinds of workflows.

Your mileage may vary

Tags: composable, Facebook, Twitter
Posted in Programmable Web, Social Software, Web Infrastructure | 5 Comments »

Twittering about Facebook Fatigue

Sunday, February 24th, 2008

The headline to Guy Dixon’s post on vnunet.com is “Facebook user numbers fall in the UK”. The sub-title is: “Social networking fatigue sets in at last”.

I don’t think the one follows the other. I think that what we are really seeing is simply Facebook Fatigue.

I felt the first effects of Facebook Fatigue months ago and stopped actively using it although I still respond to the alerts that it sends me about people communicating with me in some way. I wouldn’t want to be rude!

When Facebook announced their platform which would allow third parties to deploy applications within the Facebook environment, I was momentarily interested, until I had a closer look, and concluded:

I just can’t get all that excited about facebook as a platform. From my point of view, in an exciting era of mashups, facebook is only seriously mashable in one direction, and it’s the wrong direction. If facebook’s social networks were exposed to the web, ‘mine-able’ and mashable – now that would be exciting.

I have yet to see a compelling use of Facebook’s platform. Very quickly, during the period I actually used Facebook, I decided that the only value it offered me was the status and news updates provided by my ‘Facebook friends’. The RSS output facility for these allowed me follow them without having to log in to the application proper. Of course, this relegated me to the status of ‘lurker‘ but I was already getting bored with the thing anyway.

I was actually alerted to the possibility of more widespread Facebook Fatigue by someone ‘tweeting’ about it on Twitter. Twitter is, from my point of view, interesting in all the ways that Facebook just isn’t. From one point of view, Twitter provides the social network and ’status updates’ functionality of Facebook, and nothing else. Importantly, it does so in an open way – it has a very good (and simple) API which has allowed a number of applications which use Twitter to spring up already. Where everything developed for the Facebook platform is only usable within Facebook itself, Twitter-based applications can be deployed anywhere.

I’m a fan of Twitter. It took me a while to ‘get it’, but now it is becoming increasingly useful to me. It’s my virtual ‘water-cooler’, where I catch up on the gossip in my network. It’s my alerting system for breaking news. It’s agile – I can easily start/stop following people. Now I can do the same to ‘tags’ – if I get interested in something, I’ll follow it for a while, then stop. By embracing the constraint of the 140 character limit per post, we get a very different communication channel – one which seems to fit a need for an increasing number of people. Where my network on Facebook peaked to a plateau quite early on, on Twitter I’m gaining new contacts frequently.

Facebook has failed (so far) to get embedded, in systems, workflow or practice on a large scale. Given it’s massive user-base, this is interesting. Facebook seems to want to be the destination, and the only destination. Twitter is already both destination and component – I now habitually turn to Facebook to see what my network thinks about the latest news for example, and have already started roughing up application which could use Twitter to add to my ‘finely-tuned antennae‘.

If you haven’t already, give Twitter a try.

Social networking fatigue? We’re only just warming up!

Tags: Facebook, facebook-fatigue, Guy Dixon, Twitter
Posted in Programmable Web, Social Software | 2 Comments »

DataPortability – Facebook to play along

Wednesday, January 9th, 2008

Facebook, Google And Plaxo Join The DataPortability Workgroup. So, parts of the blogosphere are quite excited by the news that Facebook, previously criticised for being a closed system, has agreed to join the DataPortability Workgroup. According to Duncan Riley, the author of this TechCrunch post:

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.

Of course we can only speculate on the real significance of this. While Facebook would not be impossible to copy and compete with a technical level, especially for someone with the resources of Google or Yahoo or the like, it is the established user-base, and consequently the brand, which would be very difficult to match.

It seems clear to me that Facebook has been looking for ways to open up access to its data – it has to in order to be able to exploit it beyond the simple ‘page view’ advertising model. But Facebook has already found this difficult – witness the strange mistakes they made with RSS and the Beacon debacle.

What the participation in the DataPortability initiative gains Facebook is three-fold:

Facebook becomes immune to the ‘walled-garden’ accusation for the short/medium term
Facebook is not alone in navigating the uncharted territory of social network portability
If DataPortability actually delivers, it puts competitors on the same playing field as Facebook – rather than Facebook being scrutinised and expected to lead the way

However this pans out, it is certainly a boost for the credibility of the DataPortability initiative – I’ll be keeping an eye on this now.

Tags: DataPortability, Facebook
Posted in Programmable Web, Social Software, Software Development | Comments Off

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