Matt McKeon has created a great infographic to explain what is now automatically public for anyone using the default settings:

The bloggerati are incensed. Jason Calacanis writes:

Over the past month, Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand. Facebook is officially “out,” as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realization that Zuckerberg and his company are–simply put–not trustworthy.

Video podcaster Leo Laporte tweets:

OK @jason has convinced me. I’ve deleted my personal Facebook account. I will delete the rest tomorrow during TWiG… http://bit.ly/aEgNVj

Peter Rojas – founder of engadget and Gizmodo – follows suit:

Just deactivated my Facebook account. […] You really don’t have control over your personal data and who it is shared with.

Geek opinion seems to be that the new social network Diaspora will offer users more respect and control. It is intended to run in a similar way to BitTorrent, with no central server and ‘friending’ equating to giving access to highly encrypted information on your own computer or hosted server space. It will be open-source and use open standards. So better?

I can’t really buy that. It may be a better solution, technically and even morally, but my father-in-law and ninety-year-old aunt are on Facebook: they will not be installing open-source software on their own server space. Facebook is the social network where I can communicate with non-geeks. (BTW, the non-geeks in my life are considerably more cautious than a lot of geeks about privacy online – very few of them have opted for public profiles). What’s more, on a technical level, Facebook already supports a raft of open standards such as OAuth and Open Graph Protocol as well as its Open APIs for creating third-party applications. If they saw demand, I’m sure they’d add more. I’d suggest that Facebook app vendors might think about creating services around privacy — ‘My Private Photos’, ‘Private Wall’, that sort of thing.

I’m not suggesting that the distress that’s been reported over declining privacy is a storm in a teacup. It’s not. But ultimately, the age-old advice that anything you write on the Web is in the public domain, so think before you post, remains a better solution than some kind of exodus to unknown and untried new lands. If one thing will persuade Facebook that it’s made the wrong decision and so reverse recent decisions on privacy, it would be people using it less.

It’s already a superpower on the Net; but it wants a lot more.

You’re probably already well-aware that the company introduced a couple of new features this week:

Community Pages – new pages around the hobbies, brands and favourite things you’ve included in your profile that automagically link from there. Your profile link will also appear automatically on these pages. You say you like ‘cooking’ – now you’re visible on the cooking community page.

More connected profiles – not just your favourite things, but also the places you studied at and the companies you worked for might have auto-generated pages. Again, your profile will be added to these pages without you having to do anything, such as make your own choice on the matter.

Like Button – instead of ‘become a fan’ buttons, there are ‘like this’ buttons. I actually appreciate this bit in some ways. Saying that I was a fan of a brand always seemed very fake. My relationship with most brands that I don’t hate is more along the lines of ‘it’s alright’. I would be 10X more likely to agree that I like them as opposed to being their bitch fan. The other side to this is that it’s available as a plug-in to third-party sites – giving publishers more information about yourself if you click their ‘like this’ buttons than you ever did by clicking on the old ‘share on facebook’ equivalent that you’re used to.

So, to sum up the changes…

What’s in it for Facebook?

Advertising placement opportunities: creating a page that links from your hobby of – say – archery allows archery-supplies advertisers to know that their ads are appearing on a very targeted page.

Better ad-profiling of your tastes through your ‘likes’ enabling more accurate delivery of behavioural advertising.

What’s in it for you?

Nothing.

Oh wait: the ‘like’ not ‘fan’ semantic distinction.

If you believe the hype, Facebook says that it’s “helping people find connections”. Like you need more random stalker opportunities and entrance vectors from spammers and malware distributors in social media.

How to get rid of it

You can switch off the automatic community and profile-connection pages in Facebook by logging in and then going to the Account menu (top right of the page), then Privacy Centre, then Applications and Websites. Once you are into that screen, select and switch off Instant Personalisation.

Robert Scoble, who took the picture above [thank you], is characteristically bullish about these announcements, but recognises that the company is treading on thin-ice:

So far I’m hearing all the right things from him and the employees around him. They know that this is a major, ambitious, move and they are going to move carefully and deliberately from here. They better or else we’ll see regulators move into control this business like we’ve never seen in our industry. One CEO, who asked not to be named, told me in the hallways today that Facebook is now a utility that the industry is going to rely on and he noted that utilities usually are heavily regulated to make sure that they don’t abuse the power they have over people and businesses.

I think that current regulation is sufficient, if it’s actually acted upon. The trouble is that few people understand their rights or are in a financial position to be able to fight for them. Furthermore, the existence of people who either can’t be bothered with Facebook or who have actively revoked their accounts means that the rest of the Web would be unwise to march in line behind a single leader.

If you look back a couple of years, nobody really expected that social games, like Farmville, Mafia Wars and Texas Hold’Em Poker, would be a particularly powerful force in social media. How wrong we were. Compare the stats in the graph below to any site you work for or deal with:

If that wasn’t horrible enough, you might like to think about their *minute* ongoing maintenance, development and content-production costs. To torture you a little more, their users might be seeing paid-for brand messages or, more likely, paying for imaginary goods that help them ‘advance’ towards infinity a little faster.

In the meantime, free-for-basic-use social network platform Ning is in the doldrums and cutting its free service. Not enough people were that bothered, it emerges, to get the extras that paying a pittance would allow.

Two-thirds of the traffic to Facebook is actually going to games within that site, according to a participant at a recent conference. The table above shows that Farmville has 73mn active users who check in at least monthly; more recently, it’s been estimated at 80mn users, with 30mn of those using the application every day. At this rate of growth, those February statistics are already very much out-of-date. Zynga, the company that produces the three games I’ve mentioned, will make over $100mn dollars revenue this year, thanks to micro-payments from players seeking faster success or a winning edge over online opponents.

Perhaps perversely, Zynga is now in a good position to offer Facebook advice on creating a business that actually makes money:

Facebook’s biggest partner had a suggestion for the adolescent social network: figure out what it wants to be when it grows up.

“Facebook is at a crossroads,” said Zynga CEO Mark Pincus. “They have to decide whether its more important to be the web’s social platform, to make their social plumbing pervasive,” presumably through an expansion of more open technologies and communications infrastructure such as Facebook Connect. It’s sort of like being the plumber for the online world.”

None of this was predicted by anyone supposedly in-the-know. Social media pundits got it wrong for a few reasons:

• Games are consistently viewed as childish and irrelevant by ‘serious’ media pundits and analysts.
• To be fair, that’s also true of their audiences. Serious media professionals don’t want to hear it. Games are juvenile and not worthy of consideration. Full stop.
• While brands were keen to create a Facebook presence, their efforts focused on fan-pages and branded widgets that appeared on users’ profiles.

Where’s there’s some hope in all of this for the rest of the media-sphere is the great support it gives to the idea of micropayments as a revenue source. If people are prepared to pay for a pretend-tractor, then surely a two-minute video clip isn’t asking too much?

Again, though, it’s about context. People have been paying 10p for less than two sentences for a long time: because those two sentences are important in the context. While getting that tractor will net you sufficient crops to buy a new make-believe barn right now, the video gets you nothing. Media still needs to work out why it’s valuable in the first place.

picture credit: mnplsbnut

First, what we might call the ‘good news’: as social media marketers have been telling us for the last five years, more useful, fun, non-pushy content is more likely to engage people than straightforward advertising.

The reports says the sponsored content was a St Patrick’s Day page containing a video and UGC. The video mentioned the brand sponsoring the content. ‘Give’ widgets let you create a present – like a badge or a greeting card – for friends. ‘Get’ widgets let you create similar things for your own profile page.

But there is a significant caveat here. Yes, people said they’d click links on sponsored content and give/get widgets to a greater extent than on banners, newsletters and non-interactive brand pages. But not by as much as you’d think. The ‘likely to click’ score for sponsored content is 3.3; for old fashioned banners it’s 2.8. That’s a 10% difference in impact. I suppose you might argue that it all depends on how good the content is, and how relevant it is to the site’s users: I can’t really comment on that since I haven’t seen the media used.

Sponsored content is a good thing, then, as far as getting people to click through is concerned. It’s good for awareness and improving sentiment. Unfortunately, there’s absolutely no correlation between this and persuading people to buy things.

Sponsored content was found to be the least successful in terms of converting exposure into sales. I’d imagine that this is probably down to context and the lack of any particular call to action. If you load up a flash game – some sort of Farmville knock-off – and it happens to be sponsored by Corona beer, I’d wager you might think: ‘oh yes, Corona beer – that exists’. If it’s a good game, then you might think: ‘Fair play to you, Corona. Nice one.’ What you probably don’t think is ‘Right, I’m off down to the shop to buy some Corona’. [Actually, that might have been a bad example. Mmm… beer.]

Better targeted, relevant sponsored content would presumably work better: a good example is the free recipe cards that supermarkets give away. If I worked for a supermarket, I’d be all over allrecipes.com with my free recipes, but not with a car-racing game.

The big winner for brands is having a profile page with fans. The ‘with fans’ difference is that fan pages give users a badge that shows on their own profile. Straight brand pages without fans are just there to look at, and are not so successful. The commitment – however slight it may seem – of publically saying that you like a brand turns out to be a fairly strong motivator to buy things from them. The report’s authors suggest that this is because people hate being seen as inconsistent, or displaying cognitive dissonance, science fans. If you’ve joined the Marmite fan page and then buy Vegemite, then that’s odd and wrong, even to you:

…once people purchase products from a brand, they report liking the brand more. But the reverse is also true – when people declare publicly that they like a brand (by putting a logo on their profile for all of their friends to see) they are more likely to buy from it.

This also explains why ‘Give’ widgets work better than ‘Get’ widgets. If you send your friend a virtual pot of Marmite, then that’s a much more public display of affinity than making one for yourself, so you’re more likely to stick to your professed tastes.

The full report is here [PDF]. via. MediaPost

picture credit: CaptPiper

We tend to imagine computer gaming as being about fantasy, but the really important thing that this new, commercially successful breed of games all have in common is the way they blur the boundaries between fantasy/online and meat-space. Farmville is about your real-life friends helping you out; Wii Fit is physical as well as virtual; Achievements is a meta-game about social status. Then we have Nectar points; Club Card points; Caffe Nero points; Petrol points; Alcohol Units (what? you’re not supposed to collect them?). Gaming is becoming ubiquitous.

The video’s URL is http://g4tv.com/videos/44277/DICE-2010-Design-Outside-the-Box-Presentation/ in case it doesn’t show. (Internet Explorer users. tssk).

From completely the opposite direction, the desire for authenticity in a world that is becoming increasingly more virtual is a theme Schell touches upon and has been a frequently mentioned topic on this blog.

My key piece of recent evidence: the renaissance of the ukelele. What’s that about if it isn’t a deep hunger for something (a) physical; (b) crafty and © nostalgic? More seriously, there’s so much stuff all over the place about hand-crafted this and authentic that. Crafting communities. Photowalks. Meetups. We’re mad for a spot of reality, an oasis of organic in the desert of digital.

Schell invokes this — and I really must get this book about it that he mentions — but then somehow segues between that and this approaching world order in which everything you do potentially scores you points. I’d agree that ‘gaming everywhere’ seems a likely future – one that’s already partially arrived, but I’m not sure that this will satisfy any of these other desires for a more real, visceral experience of life. So some sleight-of-hand there, I think. Brilliant presentation, nonetheless.

picture credit: Dreambagz

Late December and early January see the seasonal appearance of a popular type of blog post: ‘My Predictions for [Next Year]’. They’re a great stock-in-trade because you can say whatever you like and nobody can prove you wrong until the end of the following year, by which time everyone’s forgotten. I’ve written a couple in the past, but refrained this year, leaving the task to wiser heads than mine.

Heads such as those at analyst firm Gartner, which has just produced its own variation on the theme:  Key Predictions for IT Organizations and Users in 2010 and Beyond. Since they get paid thousands of pounds by businesses to be correct about the future, Gartner doesn’t offer many 12-month predictions, with several stretching to the six-year level – even high-paying subscribers won’t remember by 2015. ;-)

Anyway, the bold bits are from the press release. The regular text is my attempt at a quip or reaction.

By 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets.

Quite a lot of businesses own very few IT assets right now. The phone is still the key communications tool for plenty of bricks-and-mortar firms. But what Gartner is talking about is the Cloud, of course, or – more prosaically – leasing arrangements. I’m not entirely sure I buy this. I can see that there will be fewer server rooms, more leasing and more thin devices, but no IT assets is quite a stretch. As I understand it, most leased IT at present is basically the big printers that have come to replace photocopiers, which were always leased anyway.

By 2012, Facebook will become the hub for social network integration and Web socialization.

A safer bet here, I think – with 350mn subscribers already, Facebook could already make this claim to some extent. But Gartner is bolder than this looks – it means all web socialisation. That other social networks and websites will have to offer Facebook integration to survive. This goes against the common wisdom that the incumbent dominant social network will eventually go the way of Friendster, Six Degrees and Friends Reunited as fresher networks attract the restless young.

Nonetheless, I’m relatively happy with the suggestion that Facebook will remain a dominant force. I see more and more websites with Facebook Connect installed. I even installed a module allowing users to log into this site to make comments using their Facebook account. Albeit an open-standards model that will work with other OpenID providers.

It will be interesting to see how this pans out internationally, though. While Facebook dominates in English-speaking countries, there’s considerably more flux and variety elsewhere. Maybe Gartner meant “in the US”, though the text doesn’t say that.

Internet marketing will be regulated by 2015, controlling more than $250 billion in Internet marketing spending worldwide.

Woah. That’s a big push – but remember they’ve got six years for it to happen or for us all to forget. There are a couple of problems with Internet marketing regulation: (1) it already is regulated. Companies have to operate to the same standards they do in offline dealings. (2) But it’s regulated by local laws.Suing a dodgy dealer in Timbuktu in a UK court is all very well, but you still won’t get that herbal vi-gr– you ordered. (3) Increasing local regulation tends to be unpopular because it puts local businesses at a disadvantage compared to those in Timbuktu.

By 2014, over 3 billion of the world’s adult population will be able to transact electronically via mobile or Internet technology.

I can buy this. If anything, I think it will happen quicker. There are already 4bn mobile phones in use. The next iPhone is tipped to incorporate near-field communications. People change their phones at least every 18 months – so now everyone’s got at least a cameraphone with bluetooth. Chip-readers should surely become standard within two generations.

By 2015, context will be as influential to mobile consumer services and relationships as search engines are to the Web.

Pretty vague, but context here means the use of location, time, the accelerometer, near-field communications etc. So if I am walking into Tesco at six-o’clock, the phone loads an appropriate shopping portal that I can wave at the things I want to buy and reminds me to get washing powder, that sort of thing. And why not? Tesco has already got this sort of thing for desktops and dedicated appliances. If my mobile is four-generations better, then I don’t see why I shouldn’t have it there.

By 2013, mobile phones will overtake PCs as the most common Web access device worldwide.

As I’ve mentioned above, there are already 4bn mobile phones in circulation, versus about 1.5bn PCs. If those phones are two generations better, then they can probably do an OK job of rendering the web, maybe through micro-projectors and gesture recognition.

I’ll finish, though, with this video of mobile guru Tomi Ahonen about the next 4bn mobile users. One key point he makes is that the next 4bn are probably in developing nations and that they’ll still be using SMS and WAP for some time to come (he’s not very sanguine about the mobile web, full stop) – thus the biggest revenue opportunities for businesses aren’t the mobile web at all, but in far more down-to-earth, but universally usable applications.

photo credit: Panoramas

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is reported as having changed his mind about privacy. The recent set of changes to the site’s T&Cs in December – which rendered members’ names, profile picture, gender, network, fan pages and friends visible to the world unless they explicitly changed their settings – merely reflects societal norms,  Zuckerberg says. People aren’t that worried about privacy any more, he claims:

…in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information. People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people. That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.

“We view it as our role in the system to constantly be innovating and be updating what our system is to reflect what the current social norms are.

“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built, doing a privacy change — doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do. But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.

Facebook’s Zuckerberg Says The Age of Privacy is Over

As Read/Write Web points out, the suggestion that blogging and possibly Twitter have wrought a worldwide alteration in people’s attitudes to privacy seems disingenuous. While both are quite popular, neither forces people to reveal their identity to the extent that Facebook does. With 350mn users, largely concentrated in Western Europe and the US, the network holds considerably more sway over cultural mores than blogs. Facebook is not following changes in society, it is creating them.

And what is this suggested link between blogging and giving up privacy? There are plenty of anonymous blogs and pseudonymous Twitter accounts. Heck, there are plenty of personal blogs and Twitter accounts that don’t show as much personal information as a Facebook account. There’s nothing inherent in either blogs or Twitter that forces the disclosure of your friends, gender, appearance and affiliations, while it’s the raison d’être of Facebook.

The other thing is that right or not about social norms, Facebook has changed the rules mid-game. You’ve already disclosed whatever you decided to disclose to your friends on the network under the old rules. You didn’t opt-in for greater visibility than you initially signed-up to. While Zuckerberg may be cultivating a ‘beginner’s mind’, that might be less true of the people who joined the network before last December.

To be fair, Zuckerberg’s point of view, as expressed in this interview, is no different to that of most web-savvy people. If you go on the Web, then you leave an indelible digital trail — so get used to the idea and act accordingly. We’ve all known that for years. However, it is rather surprising to find Zuckerberg both acknowledging and promoting this view. The normal line taken by social network execs is ‘don’t you worry your pretty head about privacy – we’ll keep you safe.’ There’s commercial advantage in this. If people feel safe, then they’ll be more open about what they reveal about themselves. If people are more open, the social network will be able to better target users demographically and behaviourally. Its advertising will be more effective and thus more easily sold.

This new approach – ‘no-one cares about privacy any more: get over it’ – seems like a mistake to me, unless he is thinking that the traffic uplift from search engines will raise enough revenue to allow a swift IPO and exit before anyone realises what’s happening.

picture credit: Max-B

Top 10 Social Networking Websites & Forums — November 2009

Facebook gets four times the traffic of its closest competitor, MySpace. Twitter – so beloved of the media and apparently the word of the year – will need to increase its page views forty times to beat the top contender. It will need an increase of 50% to beat Tagged. And when’s the last time you saw that network mentioned on the BBC (five mentions of Twitter in the last week) or featured in the broadsheet press?

I must admit to being surprised to the extent that the big three networks dominate the area. Like many, my impression was that there was much more of a struggle going on.

Bear in mind, though, that this is US-only data. Bebo is more popular than MySpace in the UK and Ireland, while the Google-owned network Orkut rules the roost in Brazil and much of South Asia. In China, meanwhile, 51.com, Xiaonei and QQ have resisted western decadence with home grown decadence of their own.

The FT reports that The Economist plans to make headroads into social networks:

The Economist newspaper plans to acquire 500,000 fans on Facebook and 750,000 followers on Twitter within six months, in another sign that traditional publishers are looking to social media as a substantial source of web traffic and new readers.

via FT.com / UK — Economist eyes social network cash boost.

It may come as a surprise to some that the magazine is interested in such things. In many respects, The Economist is the great hope for paid-for printed magazine media. The title sells more than 180,000 copies of the UK edition alone, according to the latest ABC report. I do not have advertising figures, but the interim annual report posts profits of slightly over £20mn for the first half of 2009, under the toughest advertising conditions for years.

The reasons for The Economist’s success where other news media have failed and flailed are fairly clear: its content cannot be obtained elsewhere online; consequently it’s of high value; plus its target demographic is one that doesn’t resent the need to pay a cover price. That’s a reaadership that, fortuitously, is also of great value to premium brand advertisers.

But no reason there to ignore the rich pickings potentially available online. Paid Content reported earlier this year:

Economist.com [viz. the online magazine] increased its advertising revenue by 29 percent year-on-year, while page views increased 53 percent.

For me, the interesting part of this story is the magazine’s acknowledgement of social networks as a key part of its marketing strategy, but not by just advertising on those sites — though I am sure that in the case of Facebook, ads will also form a part of the plan. The interesting bit is their embrace of the social aspects. To gain the figures that they aspire to, the site will need to offer more and more free content and market it cleverly. Gaining followers and fans depends upon making people willing to share your content. And for that to happen, it needs to be good.

A far cry from the paywall route currently touted by Rupert Murdoch and the Johnson Press chain of local papers in the UK. Or the free-for-all route followed by competitors for that matter — The Economist magazine’s print content will remain subscribers-only.

Perhaps if other media owners were more able to offer uniquely valuable content, rather than paying their reporters peanuts and reprinting press releases, they might be equally bullish about the opportunies offered by the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

picture credit: Edgar Zuniga Jr.

The basic function of these sites is to show people you follow (receive updates from) who aren’t receiving your own updates.

So what’s the point of that, you ask?

Well, like a lot of social networks, on Twitter:

(a) the number and quality of followers you have is an indication of status in this rather insular social media world. (Let’s forget about the recent arrival of the UK’s current Stately Homo Stephen Fry onto the scene).

(b) following someone is an indication of like and respect. I care enough to hear what you’re up to.

So if you follow someone, and they don’t follow you back (you get sent an email to say X is following you), then it appears, sort of, that they don’t like or respect you very much.

You could do this quite easily before by clicking on the ‘followers’ link on your twitter home page, but these new sites make that information a lot easier to take in. A bit like in sites such as Facebook — you can see if someone hasn’t responded to your friendship request. But the thing is that Twitter itself has — historically — never shown any of that information in a way people could really take in and analyse. So it might come as a bit of a shock to some people that prominent twitizens (oh, yes) aren’t hanging on their every word.

People might get upset when they discover they are following people they thought had become friends (and probably are) but that those ‘friends’ are not following them.

However, there are a few other possibilities:

• they are already following 200 other people and the noise from that is enough, thank you very much.
• Dunbar’s Number — more than 150 people is more people than they can maintain stable relationships with. There are already 150 or more people they are paying attention to. It’s a psychological impossibility to take on someone else, no matter who.
• they like you very much, but going in and following you and dropping someone else is too much trouble.
• they auto-delete ‘new follower’ emails. A strong temptation if you get more than one a day.
• they forgot.
• they don’t care nearly as much about Twitter as you.
• they have already linked to you on Linked-In, friended you on Facebook and subscribed to your RSS. That is enough.
• they have a million far more important things to do that affect their ability to carry on working.

Elsewhere: Paul Walsh on the damaging effect of this and Charles Arthur on (slightly disputed) best practice.