Posts about Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Geoff Livingston of NPTech Strategic consulting firm Zoetica held a little contest yesterday, and I won a copy of his book. The challenge? Explain, convincingly, why Google’s latest attempt at social networking, Google+, is not just a shiny object. Or why it is one. I chose the former, here’s my winning post:
This is a public service announcement (aka rant) intended for IT product and service reps. In a nutshell:
If your spam and cold calls haven’t resulted in a business relationship, tracking me down personally on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook won’t work either.
This article was first published on the Idealware Blog in May of 2010. (XKCD Cartoon by Randall Munroe) Facebook really annoyed a lot of people with their recent, heavy-handed moves. You can read about this all over the place, here are some good links about what they’ve done, what you should do and why it bothers some of us: Facebook’s Announcement (from their Blog) Understanding the Open Graph from Chris Messina Mark Zuckerberg’s claim that internet privacy is “over” from Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb Three Ways Facebook Will Dramatically Change Your Nonprofit (from John Hayden) Why I Don’t “Like” Facebook and Void Rage: Unable To Muster… Read More »How Google Can Kick Facebook’s Butt
Following is a guest post from Jon Loomer, offering a different perspective on Facebook’s privacy changes:
It took a few weeks, but internet rage over Facebook’s Like button and latest privacy ramifications is in full swing. Bloggers swinging at Facebook’s knee caps with aluminum bats seem to outnumber those who come to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s defense 20:1. And if a blogger does post a defense, duck and cover as soon as you hit “publish” because the rage will bubble up from the comments section.
Big changes are happening at Facebook, and they mean that what you do and say, on and off of Facebook, is now being more heavily tracked and more broadly shared. If you think that your Facebook data is somewhat private — e.g., shared only with friends and people you specify — you are wrong.
Long time readers of my ramblings here are aware that I drink the Google kool-aid. And they also know that I’ve been caught tweeting, on occasion. And, despite my disappointment in Google’s last big thing (Wave), I am so appreciative of other work of theirs — GMail, Android, Picasa — that I couldn’t pass up a go with their answer to Facebook and Twitter, Buzz.
Now, you might think that’s a crazy idea, but I think Buzz is about 80% of the way there. Last week, in my Google’s Creepy Profiles post, I made a suggestion (that someone at Google has hopefully already thought of) that it wouldn’t take much to turn a Profile into a full-fledged biography/lifestreaming site. Just add some user-configurable tabs, that can contain HTML or RSS-fed content, and add some capability to customize the style of the profile. Since I wrote that, I’ve been using Buzz quite a bit and I’ve really been appreciating the potential it has to deepen conversations around web-published materials.
Google unveiled a bold new product last week; one of critical and compelling import to anyone who believes that their online reputation is important. I’m not talking about Google Buzz. I’m talking about Google Profiles. This isn’t a new service — Google introduced the profile pages a few years ago. But the release of Google Buzz has illuminated how important they are in Google’s plans, and how important they can be for us. And if this profile is now a key pin in my personal branding strategy, I demand better tools to manage it than Google has provided.
…or you might. I find that, in a 25 year IT career that has always included a percentage of tech support, human nature is to use the features of an application that we know about, and only go looking for new features when a clearly defined need for one arises. In that scenario, some great functionality might be hiding in plain sight. Here are a few of my favorite “not very well-hidden” secrets.
| Social networks provide nonprofits with great opportunities to raise awareness, just as they offer individuals more opportunities to be diagnosed with information overload syndrome. To my mind, the value of tools like Twitter and Facebook are not only that they increase my ability to communicate with people, but also that they replace communication models that are less efficient. Prior to social networks, we had Email, phones, Fax and Instant Messaging (IM). Each of these were ideal for one to one communication, and suitable for group messaging, but poor at broadcasting. With Twitter and Facebook, we have broader recipient bases for our messaging. Accordingly, there’s also an assumption that we are casual listeners. With so much information hitting those streams, it would be unrealistic to expect anyone to listen 24/7. |