Tag Archives: Social Networking

Computers/Technology, General, Web/Internet

Imitation Is…

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Back in February, a group of former Google employees launched FriendFeed, a site that allowed users of multiple social networking sites to aggregate feeds of their data from those sites into a single stream that could be shared with their friends, so for example my account on FriendFeed aggregates my blog and my Google Reader shared items along with feeds from BrightKite, Del.icio.us, Facebook, Disqus, Flickr, LinkedIn, Pownce, StumbleUpon, Tumblr, Twitter, Upcoming, Vimeo and YouTube. Thanks to a handy Facebook application, I could also pull the contents of my FriendFeed feed into my Facebook account, bringing in those friends and family whose social networking only reached as far as the walls of the Facebook walled garden.

Then back in May, Facebook added a new feature, importing data from third-party sites into the mini-feed – albeit with a much more limited selection of sources (hence why I’m still using FriendFeed).

One the big draws of FriendFeed – and ironically one of it’s biggest controversies, is that it provides the ability for other FriendFeed users to comment on items in the feed. This results in conversations taking place initiated by the posting/sharing of an item. The reason for the controversy is that if the initial item is a blog posting there is quite often a separate conversation going on back on the blog, and whilst there are ways to link the two, some bloggers do not like the separation of feedback on their content. Anyway, a month on from the first set of Facebook mini-feed changes, this week Facebook announced the addition of mini-feed commenting, leading to accusations that they are copying FriendFeed. Again from my point of view it’s not up there with the FriendFeed implementation due to the lack of services it is aggregating, and the fact that it is all within the walled garden of Facebook.

Having said that, FriendFeed isn’t all conquering either. Although I quite often use the site, the feature where it shares FriendFeed items liked by people I am following quite often throwing up some gems, I’m still regularly logging on to SocialThing! The two are subtly different in what they set out to achieve – fundamentally SocialThing! is aggregating feeds from my contacts on social networking services, rather than aggregating my feeds for someone else to subscribe to. The big downside of FriendFeed is that if a particular friend I have from a service such as Twitter is not on FriendFeed I have to manually create what is called an imaginary friend in order to be able to view their feed in FriendFeed. Whilst that may seem fairly straightforward if you consider the number of services and the number of potential friends you could have on each service the size of the job starts to grow rather a lot. Over on SocialThing! if I add a new Twitter feed or Flickr account their content just starts appearing in my account without any further intervention from me. There are some third-party solutions around, but fundamentally with FriendFeed if you expand your social circle, you end up having to duplicate the addition if that person is not already on FriendFeed.

So who is going to win out? Facebook has a big advantage in terms of numbers, but how many users really know about the aggregation and commenting features? Since Facebook is very reliant on having a captive, easily target-able user base, it is important for them to try and keep up to stop people going elsewhere – in their world they’d rather you didn’t post your pictures and videos somewhere else, but it seems they’ll now let you link to them to keep you using their service. However much like their photo and video applications, the mini-feed aggregation is not nearly as good as the specialist services like FriendFeed and SocialThing! FriendFeed has a burgeoning user base, and the current reliability problems at Twitter are starting to push conversations from there onto FriendFeed. SocialThing! is still in beta, and whilst it lacks some of the conversation features of FriendFeed, is a lot easier to handle, and certainly enhances using the other third-party services rather than bringing in another.

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

Social Graphing

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Friend Wheel

It has to be said, although there are loads of Facebook applications around, very few actually seem to do something with the underlying social data, which to some extent is the most interesting aspect of the social networking phenomenon – especially if you’re in marketing.

For a while I’ve had one, Friend Wheel, sitting on my profile, that simply puts all your Facebook friends as points around the edge of a circle, and then connects together any of your friends that know each other. It produces a pretty pleasing effect, as you can see from the picture, but from the point of view of looking at how your friends connect with each other, it’s not overly clear. What is actually needed is a more fluid way to position your contacts.

There are two other applications that do that. The first, TouchGraph actually runs almost separate from Facebook, but using data from Facebook to do some clever things. I’ll talk about that in a bit. However, the other is called Connection Cloud and is intended to sit within your profile.

Connection Cloud

The second image pictured was created using Connection Cloud from my connections on Facebook. It’s a lot easier to see what’s going on in one of the larger versions – the colours indicate the sex of the person represented, red for female, blue for male and black if the information isn’t on Facebook. It’s pretty easy to spot where Beth is on the graph, as she is the red dot in the centre that connects together a lot of the other contacts. Below that is a big pile of connections which represent part of Beth’s family, so are all interconnected to each other. Interestingly there are also a couple of floating contacts, or groups, who are generally work contacts – the algorithm that produces the graph will place these groups and singles further from the centre. What the graph clearly shows though is that there are certain key contacts that link distinct groups together, but also that there are distinct groups of friends. If you look at this blog posting by the author of the application you’ll see that his social graph has two very distinct major groups, with little connection between the two.

Moving on, I passed over TouchGraph – but that’s mainly because it does rather a lot more. The basic concept is similar to Connection Cloud – indeed the author of Connection Cloud admits that he wanted to write something to put the cloud idea in TouchGraph into his profile. Where TouchGraph goes further is that it includes network information – so if you’re in a city network it will link in to that – and also works on photographs. What that means is that if you are tagged in a picture, it will find that too, indeed will track on from links in the pictures to find other people. It does all of that in a fluid constantly changing diagram that expands as you click through the links. It’s maybe not as interesting if you’ve got limited pictures, or if like me the pictures are elsewhere, but for visualising how your contacts connect it’s a really great little application.

What is worthwhile remembering as you click through is that TouchGraph is not doing anything much more than retrieving information from peoples Facebook profiles, and if you’ll forgive the pun, joining the dots. When you factor in that if you’ve filled out a lot of the interests questions, Facebook applications can retrieve that too, you can quickly see quite what a powerful tool the whole social graph that Facebook is building up can be to marketing departments.

Computers/Technology, Web/Internet

You Haven’t Got Much in your Facebook Profile

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Over the past few months it seems like everybody has been getting accounts on Facebook, indeed BBC News recently reported that membership has grown by more than 500%.

As with MySpace, I’d generally resisted signing up for an account, however the issue with Facebook is that only members can see information, so when groups I am involved in decide to use Facebook the only way people can access information is to sign up to Facebook – a classic example of the walled garden idea that AOL tried and failed with years ago. Unfortunately, the only way to access that stuff is to step into the walled garden, and hand your information to Facebook.

I’ve only put the absolute minimum of information in, and Beth hasn’t signed up at all. Needless to say, that’s produced some grumbling from some quarters, but I don’t really see the point in duplicating in Facebook a whole load of information that is elsewhere. Then I found out some more that made me really rather glad that I hadn’t provided anything else, and that Beth wasn’t on at all…

Jen was having a similar issue as me, with people she knew joining the networks and moving their online presence within the walled gardens. Then she discovered something altogether more worrying about Facebook policy.

First take a look at the Facebook terms and conditions:

By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

Basically, anything I might upload is automatically licensed to Facebook to do anything with for any purpose, and they can sub-license it to anybody else too. The next sentence states that you can remove your content and that revokes the license, but that they then say that your user content will remain in their archives.

But that’s not the really worrying bit – if you consider all the information you can add to Facebook it can produce a fairly detailed picture of you to allow advertisers to target adverts to your personal interests. The Facebook privacy policy says as such:

Facebook may use information in your profile without identifying you as an individual to third parties. We do this for purposes such as aggregating how many people in a network like a band or movie and personalizing advertisements and promotions so that we can provide you Facebook. We believe this benefits you. You can know more about the world around you and, where there are advertisements, they’re more likely to be interesting to you. For example, if you put a favorite movie in your profile, we might serve you an advertisement highlighting a screening of a similar one in your town. But we don’t tell the movie company who you are.

However the next paragraph is somewhat more worrying:

We may use information about you that we collect from other sources, including but not limited to newspapers and Internet sources such as blogs, instant messaging services, Facebook Platform developers and other users of Facebook, to supplement your profile.

Effectively they are saying that over and above what you give them, they will collect other information about you from outside Facebook including elsewhere on the internet, in newspapers and anywhere else.

Back in December 2005, two MIT students produced a paper looking at Facebook privacy – certainly worth a read in terms of the privacy issues, but also in relation to the amounts of personally identifiable information that some people reveal on the site. Just consider for a moment what a goldmine of a one-stop-shop for personal information Facebook could be…

Jen then posted a video which she had been sent. As she says, it is maybe a bit alarmist in places, but it does highlight the basic issues well…

On the basis of that video, Jen decided to remove her account – but it seems that Facebook is like the Hotel California in that you can “check out any time you like, but you can never leave.â€? The closest you can get is to deactivate the account, but if you log back in, it will come back to life again. Thankfully I’ve not given them much.

So hopefully that explains why I haven’t got much in my Facebook profile, and why there won’t be. It also goes to highlight once again how careful you have to be with the information you give out about yourself on the internet.