Years of Tomorrow: Social Media and Tech

Complete Guide to Facebook Timeline for Pages

2012-03-30T11:55:00.002-04:00

If you own or administer a Facebook Page for a business, organization, or other entity (not to be confused with your personal Facebook profile), you might have seen a strange notice at the top of your page this month. Unlike many of the notices and notifications Facebook tends to put in that area, however, this one is important. Over the past few months, you might have noticed that some of your friends' profile pages have been changed to a new layout, called "Timeline". Facebook is now giving Facebook Pages the ability to use the Timeline layout as well.

However, for Pages, switching to Timeline is mandatory - all Pages will be automatically moved over to the Timeline layout today, whether they're ready or not. There's no way to opt out or to delay it; Facebook wants you to use the new layout and they won't take "no" for an answer.

Moreover, time is running out - Facebook will begin automatically moving pages to Timeline at 11am PST today! This is your last change to make sure the page is ready before the transition; however, even if you don't make the deadline, you still have to fix up your Facebook Page for Timeline as soon as possible. Now, what exactly does that mean for your page?

New Visual Design and Layout

First things first, you're going to have to change your images. One of the most noticeable changes in Timeline is that the tall, vertical profile image is no longer the main visual element of the page. Instead, the position of prominence is given to the all-new "cover photo", a wide banner image which will almost certainly be the first thing visitors see.

The profile image remains, but now becomes a square image which is also automatically resized by Facebook to act as the thumbnail for your page's posts, and plays a secondary role on the main Timeline page. If you don't take action, your page will have no cover photo when it automatically transitions to Timeline, and the profile photo will be poorly resized by Facebook in order to cram it into the new square shape; all-in-all, it looks pretty terrible, so coming up with new images is practically required.

Cover Photo

The proper size of the cover photo should be 851x315. This isn't a hard-and-fast rule; Facebook will automatically scale it up or down if it's too wide or not wide enough, and allows you to crop images vertically if they're too tall. However, Facebook's ability to resize the image is limited and it won't even accept images that are a lot smaller than the target size, so you should try to get your image size at least close to the Facebook Timeline standard.

What should your cover image be? Well, that's really up to you. If you'd like, you can go with a logo or some branding. However, the Timeline layout is really set up to encourage visual creativity, so I like to pursue something more representative of the actual work your company does, or perhaps something to foster an emotional connection. This will be the first thing visitors see, so make a good impression!

As a side note, it's best to put very little marketing text on the image; Facebook prohibits putting things like price information or calls to action on the cover image, so careless advertising could get your page in big trouble! Be sure to familiarize yourself with the new Facebook Page rules and regulations if you plan on putting more than a few words of text on your cover image.

Profile Photo

Now that you've done that, your next step should be the profile image. Aside from appearing at the top of the page, this image will show up next to every post your page makes, so you should focus on emphasizing your brand. The target size is 128x128, but Facebook has a limited ability to resize images that don't quite fit that mold, so you don't have to be too exact about it. If your previous profile photo was square, you can simply reuse it. Non-square photos look absolutely terrible in the square frame, and should be avoided.

If your page had a Welcome tab, prepare to be disappointed: Facebook has removed the option to change the default landing page. New visitors to your Facebook page will always land on the main Timeline. In addition, all apps (including Facebook defaults like "Photos") no longer appear as tabs but instead as boxes under the cover photo.

While you can display up to 12 apps on the cover page, only 4 are visible at first, and the user must click a button to expand the view and see the remaining 8. This is, of course, a major blow to Facebook pages that relied a lot on page tabs and apps. You can rearrange the order of the apps (except for "Photos", which is always first), so make sure that the ones you most want visitors to see are in the top slots that will appear by default!

Posting from the Past

One of Timeline's chief innovations, and the one that it was probably named for, is the ability to add posts to dates in the past, as well as making it easy for viewers to navigate through the history of your organization. When you post a status update, picture, or video, you can change the date associated with it, and it will be added to the appropriate point in time. Facebook has also added a new update type called "Milestones", which appear as large status updates with optional pictures, designed to emphasize significant events in the history of your page and are easier to navigate to via the historical navigation on the right side.

Before you can use this date-changing feature, however, you must add a "beginning" date for the thing your page is about - for example, the founding date of an organization, the birthdate of a person, or the date production began on a movie. These kinds of things allow you to add flavor and history to your page, especially for older organizations which can now put their hundreds of years of history on a month-old Facebook Page.

New Posting Tricks and Tips

By now, you've done everything you need to do to make your page look acceptable for the Timeline transition, so you can go ahead and switch it over now or just wait for the automatic rollout later today. However, there are a few more features you should keep in mind as you begin to post to your Timeline page.

First of all, Timeline emphasizes media. Photos, photo albums, and videos are bigger and look much nicer in Timeline than they did on the previous Facebook layout, and enhancements have been made to make them easier to view and use as well. For example, videos can be played right in the Facebook window, and photo albums will show thumbnail previews of multiple pictures within the album, with the preview layout depending on post size and the number of photos.

Moreover, you now have options to emphasize specific posts. First of all, each post now has a button shaped like a yellow star. Clicking that button will "highlight" that post, which doubles its width and increases the size of both the text and any attached content. Photo album previews change their layout when this is done, and videos will expand to the normal Youtube size and made fully functional so that they can be played directly in that post. The surrounding posts will automatically shift to ensure that the layout continues to flow well, but these shifts can still sometimes result in big blank areas if you've got too many posts of differing sizes, so I'd advise you to keep an eye on the design as you highlight posts and make sure the results look good.

The other major option available to you is the ability to "pin" posts, which will sticky them to the top of your feed for one full week even if they're not the most recent post. A post can't be pinned and highlighted at the same time, and the limited duration of pinning is a problem, but it's still a much-requested feature that can be useful at times - for example, to keep an ongoing contest or upcoming event at the top of the feed. How you use this, or even whether you use it at all, is up to you.

Engagement in the Timeline Era

Recommendations, posts, and other activities involving your page are now shown right at the top of the feed, so driving engagement is more important than ever. If you're going to talk about a page that you've liked or a person that's liked your page, type an @ and then the first few letters of the name, and a menu will pop up displaying names/pages that fit those letters; choosing one will automatically insert a link to that profile or page as well as letting Facebook know that you are talking about that person/page (it's not smart enough to notice unless you do this). This widely-underused and mostly-unknown feature is one major tool for engagement, so don't neglect it - but don't abuse it, either.

Lastly, think outside the box, but don't forget your customers and your business. A creative page is always a big plus, and can help tremendously in attracting and keeping viewers and readers. However, in the end, you're mostly trying to engage with your customers and potential customers. Not all organizations should go overboard with Facebook Timeline; the nature of your group and the demographics of your subscribers will determine the kind of tone your Facebook Page needs to take. And always be ready to react quickly to Facebook changes, especially major ones like this!

The USB Flashdrive Isn't Dead Yet

2012-03-21T10:35:00.002-04:00

As technology continues to advance, change is inevitable, and no technology will remain on top for long. But is it really time to say good-bye to the humble USB drive so soon, as some have suggested? I'll admit that it's been a couple of weeks since the last time I even touched a flashdrive, and I use Dropbox for transferring small files between my computers and my phone at home. But is the cloud ready to completely replace USB drives just yet? I'd say "No way" - the cloud is certainly better than physical drives at some common tasks, but it's impossible to ignore the fact that it's much worse at other tasks.

One major disadvantage of the cloud, and the one that affects me the most, is speed. It's typically much faster to transfer files via USB than over the internet, especially if you're using a residential connection, which is poorly suited for cloud services. Even if you paid your ISP extra for a faster connection, most residential internet plans provide much lower upload speeds than download speeds, since ISPs work under the now-outdated assumption that users don't really have any need to upload files or anyplace to upload them to, so an archive only a few dozen megabytes in size can take an hour or more to become available on Dropbox. Word documents are so small that they reach the cloud pretty much instantly even on dial-up, but any heavy-duty file-sharing will go far slower than it would through a direct USB connection. As a result, although Dropbox and other services are good for basic office tasks, it's still far too slow to replace physical media completely.

Another major difference between the cloud and the physical is security. While you can share specific Dropbox folders to other Dropbox users, sometimes you've got to transfer files to a computer that doesn't have Dropbox installed. In that case, you can use your username and password to access your files via the web interface. It's pretty easy to do once or twice, but because your entire Dropbox account and everything in it will be exposed if your password is stolen, a complex and secure password is essential, and you'd better hope there aren't any keyloggers on the client machine.

When you don't have much control over a machine and can't be assured of its security, it's much easier and safer to just plug in a flashdrive with only the files that absolutely need to be transferred. Even a badly infected machine can't do anything worse than copy those files and put autorun viruses on the flashdrive, which certainly isn't great but is easy to handle if you're expecting it. Even those problems can be avoided altogether if your drive has a read-only switch.

Of course, one issue that always comes to mind when talking about the cloud is that it's only accessible via the internet. Nowadays, we find ourselves assuming that pretty much every computer is connected to the internet, and to be fair, it's usually a pretty good bet. However, that just means we're likely to be caught completely unprepared when we do eventually run into a computer that doesn't have internet access. Maybe the machine's being kept off the internet for security reasons, or maybe it's still being set up and the network drivers haven't been installed yet, or maybe the network is experiencing technical problems and is temporarily offline, or maybe the client simply doesn't have internet service. Whatever the reason may be, using physical media is the easiest way to overcome it and do what needs to be done.

Generally speaking, the advance of technology doesn't lead to obsolescence, but to diversity. While old tools eventually fade away, they don't completely disappear until long after the thing that replaced them has itself been replaced. Even now, more than a decade after the release of the iPod, CDs and CD players are still being sold on the shelves - and so, for that matter, are CD burners. USB flashdrives will remain a common pocket storage device long after they become obsolete; the ease of use and convenience guarantees that we'll be using them even after the cloud advances to the point of being a viable replacement.

Measuring Twitter Performance: Tools and Tricks

2012-03-08T11:12:00.000-05:00

"How do I analyze the performance of my Twitter account"? If you've ever done any kind of social media marketing, you've probably asked yourself this question or been asked it yourself at some point. After all, Facebook bombards page owners with extensive and complex graphs along with per-post view counts, and Google Analytics provides detailed in-depth information about every aspects of every visitor.

Twitter, on the other hand, offers just three statistics - number of tweets, number of accounts followed, number of accounts following. You're notified when someone mentions you, but no overall count is given. The only per-tweet statistic tracked is how often a particular tweet has been re-tweeted. With that in mind, it's no surprise that people have looked everywhere in search of ways to get more detailed information...but do we really need them?

There are dozens of third-party tools out there designed to provide metrics of Twitter performance, each claiming to give a reliable measure of how well your campaign is performing. Some of them, like Klout, position themselves as essential measures of social media influence, while others, like Crowdbooster, promise to be the biggest help you can have for tracking the performance of your tweets. Each one uses different numbers and formulas to come up with their results, and no two tools are exactly alike. Some will output their information in beautifully-designed charts and graphs perfect for inclusion in a spreadsheet, while others will give simple numerical scores to provide a one-glance measure of each aspect of performance. However, all of those utilities have one thing in common: they don't have any information that you don't have.

Twitter doesn't have any secret analytics info that these apps can access, nor are there any special tricks they can use to get info you wouldn't normally be able to see. Each and every one of those sites simply grabs the publicly-available information from Twitter, such as number of followers and number of mentions, and simply either graphs them for you or runs that data through secret formulas to come up with their results. There's no doubt that many of these sites use clever techniques and formulas. In most cases, though, it's simply using complex mathematics to confirm what you could already figure out from simply checking your Twitter account daily.

Twitter doesn't give you much data, but if you look at what info it does provide, it tells you what you really need to know. To measure how many people are seeing your tweets, you don't need daily tweet-by-tweet charts or a mysterious "Total Reach" statistic - just look at your number of followers and how often you get retweeted. To measure engagement, just look at how often people retweet, reply, and mention you and your tweets. These techniques may seem a little too simple, but it's exactly what the third-party tools do to come up with those same numbers. Sometimes they modify their numbers using things like the ratio of tweets to mentions or the ratio of following to followers in order to get an idea of how frequent engagement is and how authentic the followers are, but a human that's been running the account for a few weeks shouldn't need to use math to figure those out.

That's not to say that Twitter analytics apps are useless - they're simply not essential. If you've been newly assigned to a social media account or don't have the time to keep an eye on it directly, they're a great way of getting a quick summary of the account's performance. Some tools can evaluate social media accounts you don't have the credentials for, which is great for competition research or just to satisfy some curiosity. And if you'd like to show off how well an account is performing, it's far quicker to use a tool to create the fancy charts than to do it yourself. On the other hand, some of them can use unreliable methods to determine their scores; Klout, for instance, is known to increase your Klout score if you use certain functions on their own site.

Although tools can be helpful at times, it's quite possible to live your social media life without relying on an outside tool to tell you how your Twitter account is performing. In particular, it's almost always a waste of time to try to game the statistics, since your focus should be on improving actual engagement and influence rather than trying to cheat third-party measures of probable engagement and influence. If you find yourself worrying too much about what goes into a particular app's scores and categories, it's best to step back, take a deep breath, and check your account's fundamental stats on the main Twitter site to determine whether there's really a problem at all.

The social media world is constantly coming out with tools and apps to measure and quantify performance, but most of them focus on providing as many numbers as possible and end up distracting you from your real goals. Engagement, conversions, and brand awareness are the most common social media goals, and the only one that really requires outside tools to track is conversions. The level of brand awareness being created by your social media posts can be estimated from the number of followers, and the level of engagement is something you should know without needing to look at metrics. Of course, the more detailed numbers created by outside tools are good for reporting the stats to others, but the person actually maintaining the account shouldn't need third-party metrics for day-to-day monitoring.

How Word Spreads On Social Media

2011-10-21T00:55:00.000-04:00

Having seen a new social media news site and magazine being announced on G+, I think it will likely make a good case study in the power of social media. After being announced by a social media professional, many of her followers saw it and doubtlessly subscribed to is. They also shared it for all their followers to see, which is how I found out about it (thanks to +Robert Scoble ). I will be adding it to my RSS reader, and am also resharing it to my followers. I'm not as influential as the original sharers, and a lot of my followers aren't in the target demographic (an important point that many neglect!), but it still has the potential to be read by others.

Even after those echoes die down, there will be an ongoing effect. Most of the readers they got through social media, as well as many from other sources, will share articles they like or wish to discuss, and each "Like" or +1 could be the one that convinces someone else to check it out. If somebody even so much as comments on one of those articles, it will be reshared to all their friends. And it just keeps on spreading, and spreading, and spreading. And if they post it to multiple networks, the effect is even larger - especially since many people tend to interact with a different group of people on each social media account. Sounds easy, right? Unfortunately, it's not quite that simple for most of us.

The original update that kicked it off was from a social media personality with thousands of followers, and even then, I only saw it because it was reshared by someone who happens to be in the top 50 in terms of Google+ followers. And I probably wouldn't have heard of that person, let alone followed him, if not for the fact that he's influential in a field I happen to have interest in. That leads to one of the most basic principles of social media marketing: target the influencers!

A comment or retweet from someone with ten followers isn't worth much, but the same thing from someone with ten thousand followers is golden, and it becomes virtually priceless if they're well-known in a field related to your product or service. If you wow them enough that they begin mentioning you regularly, that's just about the biggest success it's possible to have; you can't buy that sort of coverage! That's the whole reason that services like Klout and Crowdbooster exist - to identify influencers to be targeted, and aid advertisers in getting their attention and interacting with them regularly. They're like celebrities, and many companies treat them like celebrities, burying them in gifts and attending to their every need. Just one favorable mention is worth all that trouble and more!

Are the Amazon Tablet Hopes Misplaced?

2011-08-31T11:34:00.002-04:00

In the tech industry, it's common practice to bet on - or at least write articles betting on - the most shocking result the writer can think of. This is especially the case in major markets, where many of us love to fantasize about the new replacing the old. Because of that, I'm not surprised that people are failing to keep their skepticism at the ready when they approach the recent claim by Forrester Research that Amazon's upcoming tablet will be the one true threat to Apple's dominance of the tablet market.

Surprised that you haven't heard much about this tablet? Well, that's because barely anything is known about it at all. In fact, the only evidence we have that it even exists is some rumors from "people familiar with the matter" - no official announcement has been made. Considering that the iPad has so far been able to flawlessly maintain its near-total control of the tablet market, defending itself easily against all challengers, I'm not buying anyone who thinks that a completely unknown tablet that doesn't exist yet will revolutionize the market. Many tablet manufacturers have made such claims, and each has seen their efforts end in humiliating defeat. One common anecdote I've seen lately is that people don't want tablets, they want iPads, and that sums up the current state of the market quite well.

Of course, considering recent events, it's not shocking that so many are forecasting that a cheaper tablet might see success. After all, it's only been a week since HP dropped their poorly-selling TouchPad's price and watched the remaining stock practically fly off the shelves. However, there have been other Android tablets that performed poorly despite being cheaper than the iPad. What most analysts seem to overlook is that the TouchPad wasn't a $100 tablet - its hardware alone was estimated to be worth at least $300, and the current price point is easily far less than it's worth. It isn't as good as an iPad, but it's still a quality product that's worth far more than what it's currently selling for.

Why exactly do I focus on the quality, you ask? Well, much noise has been made about a study showing that nearly half of potential tablet buyers would consider buying a $300 Android tablet over a $499 iPad, and a shocking 79% of respondents would consider a $250 Android tablet over an iPad. However, that's not quite accurate, and relies on a misreading of the survey question. Those people were not indicating that they would choose a $300 Android tablet over an iPad, they indicated that they would choose the $300 tablet "with similar features" to the $499 iPad. In other words, Android tablet makers have a clear path to victory: they simply have to make tablets that are comparable to the iPad for just half the price.

The Amazon tablet rumors, if true, imply rather strongly that the end result would be a low-cost tablet which undercuts Apple significantly, selling the hardware at a loss in hopes of making a profit on software and content sales. The Forrester report assumes that the final result would be an Android tablet that costs less than $300. But while price is important, it's not the only thing that matters. We know from surveys and studies that a <$300 tablet with "similar features" to the iPad would be quite successful, but the rumors suggest that the Amazon tablet won't come anywhere close to meeting those conditions. Supposedly, both the design and the manufacture have been outsourced to Asian factories, a lower-quality touchscreen with inferior multitouch will be used, and the camera will be omitted entirely. What little we know about it makes for a rather worrying picture.

Can Amazon deliver a $250 tablet? Honestly, I think they can. But even if they eat a loss on the hardware, they can't do it without cutting so many corners that the end result is appallingly bad. The phrase "there's no tablet market, only an iPad market" isn't just a response to the popularity of the iPad and the failure of everything else - it also implies that people think "iPad" when they hear "tablet", and expect all tablets to be at least somewhat comparable to the iPad. Because of that, I suspect a tablet that's built for the sole purpose of being a bargain-bin tablet won't perform nearly as well as analysts would expect from its price. Low specs, bad build quality, cheap materials, imprecise screen, minimal features...even at half the price of an iPad, something like that could be far less attractive than the market currently assumes.

Certainly, the current crop of Android tablets is too expensive, and manufacturers' half-baked efforts can't compete at the same price as Apple's premium iPad 2. But are lower prices at the expense of quality really the answer?

Google+, Identity, and Your Real Name

2011-07-25T12:02:00.002-04:00

For many years, a storm has been developing in the hidden recesses of the internet, the darkened nooks and crannies that few dare to enter. The choice of whether to use a real name or a fake one has existed since the very beginning, and as the web became more accessible to the general public, most websites avoided the issue by letting the users choose whatever name they wished. It wasn't a perfect system, and invited quite a bit of abuse from mischievous troublemakers, but it worked out well enough that it's still in wide use today.

Unfortunately, that decades-old practice is finally beginning to show its age. In the nineties, it worked well because the internet wasn't yet an integral part of our real lives yet. People devoted themselves to online hobbies and games, but for most of us, the web was still a resource or a source of amusement. If you applied for something, you expected to get your response via phone or snail mail. Wi-Fi was a brand-new technology that hadn't been widely deployed, dial-up internet was still widespread, and many people didn't even have cell phones. Instant messaging was nothing more than a novelty way of chatting with close friends and distant strangers, and it was common knowledge to closely guard our personal information.

As the new millennium passed, however, the world experienced a massive wave of consumer-level digital innovation that completely changed everything we thought we knew about the internet. While Silicon Valley rode the fortunes of the tech market through its highs and its lows, however, the two extremes of online identity were soon to appear from the most unexpected of places.

In 1999, a Japanese student created a website called 2channel, an innovative new style of message board. Founded under the principle of anonymity, it allowed users to participate without providing any name at all, and didn't even provide unique user IDs to tell who was posting what. Because no two posts could be determined to have come from the same person, users didn't just have anonymous identities - they had no identity at all. The carefree style of posting enabled by that lack of identity was a big hit, and led to many spinoffs and imitators around the world. In the English-speaking world, the most notable of those knockoffs is unquestionably 4chan, which is best known for being the birthplace of Anonymous as well as the origin of many widespread memes.

The other end of the spectrum is, of course, Facebook. Launched in mid-2004, it began as a virtual directory for Harvard students, helping them to meet classmates with similar interests. Although it soon opened to a wider array of colleges and even high schools, its Network system initially restricted people to connecting only with others who had attended the same school. And in keeping with that real-connections-only policy, Facebook was one of the first sites I know of to have and enforce a real-name policy. Although registration has since become open to the public, the rules continue to ban pseudonyms and false names. And by becoming one of the most popular websites on the internet, Facebook got us used to sharing far more than just our names.

Thanks to Google+'s Facebook-esque policy on pseudonyms, combined with the service's rapid rise to popularity and Google's surprisingly strict enforcement, the issue of identity has finally become a major concern. Some people want their identities to be "free as in freedom", while others simply wish to use an identity separate from their real one. But there's nobody stopping you from having control of your identity. Google just doesn't want you to do it on their site.

Like Facebook, LinkedIn, Foursquare, and most other modern social networks, Google+ is focused on the real you. I don't mean "the person that you actually are", I mean "the person that you are in real life". The first reason for this, of course, is because they want to sell your data to third-parties and deliver accurately-targeted ads. However, that's not the only reason. At an ideological level, they don't believe in an online identity that doesn't match your real one. To the people running these sites, a social network is to connect the physical you with other physical people. To quote a Google spokesperson, "Google Profiles are designed to be public pages on the web, which are used to help connect and find real people in the real world"; they don't expect or want you to be connecting to someone you don't know personally. Social networks are made with the expectation that you'll only be connecting with people that know your real-life name.

Most of the arguments for pseudonyms on social networking sites are dubious anyway. Dissidents, the typical example, have much more to worry about from Google than putting their real name on a profile. For example, Google has put a backdoor access system into Gmail for the sole purpose of providing your email to governments as needed, and is known to comply with more than 50% of government requests for user data. If you're really desperate to flip the coin and put your life up on Google, rely on G+'s effective privacy controls to hide any posts you don't want read, and pray that nobody sends them a court order. But if you really need to express yourself anonymously online, there are plenty of better alternatives, ranging from identity-optional boards such as 4chan to anonymized darknets designed to hide one's behavior from governments. The fact that social networking sites don't fit your anti-identity needs isn't an indicator that there's something wrong with those sites, it's a warning sign that you're using the wrong kinds of sites.

How Facebook Changed The Meaning of "Privacy"

2011-07-20T11:53:00.001-04:00

Privacy, privacy, privacy. It's a term you hear a lot nowadays, as the social networks fight it out for marketshare - and for user data. Certainly, personal privacy has always been a major concern on the internet, and is considered important enough by users that most sites voluntarily include privacy policies. Unfortunately, it seems like the meaning of privacy has changed in the last ten years, with the result being that people are no longer nearly as careful with their personal info as they used to be.

The old definition of privacy assumed that you didn't want anybody to see your information without your consent. While we certainly didn't want our friends and family to see our private details, we also didn't want our data to be used by third-party marketing companies - or even the site we were submitting that info to - for their own nefarious purposes. However, the social networking wars have made it absolutely clear that the definition of privacy has changed, and not in a good way.

What do I mean? Well, consider the case of Facebook vs Google+. Facebook, of course, is notorious for being bad on privacy...but Google+ is receiving nothing but praise for its own "privacy" features. By the classic definition of privacy, however, Google is just as bad as Facebook is - if not worse. After all, both sites are in the business of making money off your personal details, both sites actively use your info to "improve the user experience", and both sites make allowances in their privacy policies for sharing your info with third-party "service providers" or "trusted businesses".

While Facebook's privacy policy is somewhat more open to sharing personal information than Google's privacy policy, neither one is bulletproof. Which is important, since both sites store information about you even if you don't use their services at all. And while they both claim to anonymize your data before sharing it, it should be noted that Google's procedures have been declared by European privacy officials to be "insufficient to guarantee adequate anonymisation" and Facebook's procedures are probably just as bad.

So if that's what people don't mean by "privacy" these days, then what do they mean? Well, you can find a nice big hint if you look at Google+'s flagship features. Circles, which grants users precise control over which of their contacts can and can't see each individual post, is clearly the cause of all the praise for Plus.

In other words, while pre-social media privacy meant being able to prevent companies such as marketers and "service providers" from snooping through or selling any of your data without your consent, the modern definition of "privacy" is the ability to choose which people have access to each individual piece of data. Last decade's privacy would mean keeping Google from reading your Gmail and Dropbox from opening files in Dropbox Folder; this decade's privacy settles for merely keeping Google from making your Gmail public unless you opt-in first.

To be fair, that kind of control is certainly important in the age of social media, where careless sharing of information can lead to far worse than just being on a spam list. Indeed, Facebook's constant data control slip-ups have caused plenty of damage to people's lives. But I can't help but feel bothered that the standard for privacy has dropped from "won't show anyone my data, not even employees or marketing partners" to "won't make every detail of my personal life available to world+dog".

And why has the definition changed like that? Well, it's almost certainly Facebook's fault. Not just Facebook, of course - the other social networking sites of the mid-decade period share some blame, as well as Google and other early cloud services. The targeted advertising boom definitely plays a part as well. But there's no contesting that Facebook was really the site that really got most of the world used to sharing our entire lives in an easy-to-read format.

Google did the same, of course, but at least they had to work to read useful data out of emails and search queries; Facebook were the ones that taught us to put everything about ourselves in a nice and neat little database to make info-grabbing as easy as possible. And, of course, Facebook was the site that enraged us by sharing that personal info with the entire world so often that we forgot that there was any other way a website could possibly violate our privacy.

We're simply so battered and worn-down by Facebook's horrible data protection screwups that we're numb to the dismal state of personal privacy today. We don't even care anymore how many companies know where we ate lunch last Tuesday, we just want to be sure that they're not going to post it on their public webpage and announce it to the world without our approval.

What are your thoughts on the subject? With two of the biggest data-collection companies in the world falling all over themselves to gather user feedback on their services as they gear up for what looks to be a no-holds-barred competition for market supremacy, this might just be the perfect time to start a dialogue on privacy. Who knows? Maybe they'll listen. If not, then at least we'll all come out of it having read different perspectives on what privacy really means these days and how much it actually matters.

Badges: A Glimpse At Google's Future

2011-07-15T09:43:00.003-04:00

UPDATE (Jul 15, 5:30pm): Facebook is rumored to be in talks with news sources for a news-related feature of their own. Looks like I may have been a little early in saying that social news wasn't something Facebook could copy, but this just confirms my predictions of competition-fueled innovation.

Today, Google has announced - and released - a new Google News feature for US readers: Google Badges. Put simply, as we read Google News articles, we will earn achievement-like "badges" based on the subjects we read about, which can be shared with other users. It's not terribly exciting on its own, I'll admit that much. It might be an amusing side feature for those who still use Google News, though I get most of my news via RSS and Twitter these days. What's important here are the implications of this move, and what it suggests for future Google plans.

After all, Google has removed a few features in recent weeks, such as the social Realtime Search and the Maps traffic estimation. Long-known impending features like Google Offers continue to go through beta testing. Of course, it's hard to forget the freshly-launched Google+ social networking system. But this News addon feels different, somehow.

Rather than a standalone feature or a News addon, it seems to me to be a way to integrate Google News with Google Plus. They're not being too loud about it yet, but the intent is clear. Although the sharing options don't appear to be implemented yet, it's obviously a way to make a "single-player" news service into a social experience by recording your news preferences and giving you the option to post them to Plus.

Now, the thing that's likely going to strike a chord with a lot of people, given the G+ discussion so far, is the fact that this is something that Facebook doesn't do! And unlike Circles and Hangouts, this sort of news integration is something that Facebook can't really do without extensive modifications to their service, because Facebook doesn't have a news aggregation service. Even though it's a pretty boring feature, Google finally has what the blogosphere would call a "Facebook Killer" - something unique that Facebook and the other social media sites can't just copy for themselves.

What gets me more interested, however, is that other ways to socially integrate Google services are almost certainly in the pipes. Are we going to see more badges? Almost certainly. Reader badges, Books badges, Youtube badges; six months from now, I wouldn't be surprised if I get badges for reading my email. A Foursquare-like integration of badges and Maps is definitely a likely service as well.

But what else is coming? Google has done a LOT of experimentation in the social universe, and they didn't knock it out of the park with Plus just so they could turn around and add achievements to everything. They've got to have something more interesting in the works...but with the wide variety of Google services available, the vast amount of data we push through Google's services every day, and the versatility of the G+ stream, there's no telling what they might have come up with. While they've certainly gotten to an underwhelming start, I think it's time to break out the crystal balls and 8-balls and start guessing at what their bigger plans in the shadows are.

Of course, since privacy is a major concern, I should note that the badges are only earned if you have Google Web History turned on (allowing Google to track you), and are kept private by default. They aren't shared unless you expressly choose to share them, and they don't show your actual article history or anything. As a result, the only people that can see your badges are yourself, Google, and anybody else you choose to share them with. No Facebook-style flubs here, your data seems as secure as it is on any OTHER Google service. Whether that's actually secure or not is something I'll save for an upcoming article on privacy and anonymity in the world of social media - it's a whopper of a subject, and this post would quickly grow into an essay if I began talking about it here.

Google+: The Facebook Killer? Or Just A Monopoly Killer?

2011-07-13T08:13:00.006-04:00

Ahh, Google Plus. Currently populated mostly by the earliest adopters, the people that Google prioritized when they handed out invites: tech journalists, then social media gurus, then (by crowdsourcing the invite system) anyone else who was the slightest bit interested in the field. With an initial userbase like that, it's not surprising that the internet was abuzz with detailed analysis of the Google Plus system and features from the very beginning. What is surprising, though, is that most people didn't really seem interested in Google+ itself. Rather, they just wanted to argue back and forth about whether it was a "Facebook killer". Its virtues, its flaws, its unique features - none of them escaped being compared to other social media offerings.

Of course, it's a widespread practice in tech reporting to declare that one company or another has "killed" all competitors and crowned itself absolutely supreme. The laptop has been declared dead, the netbook has been declared dead, and just about everything else from fax machines to the Web have had their obituaries prematurely posted over the years. Yet even the humble telegraph remains in use in this era of widespread wireless, and portable cassette players were in production as late as last year despite the existence of the MP3 player. Old tech may no longer overwhelmingly dominate the way it did when it was new, but it still commands a respectable marketshare, and even ancient tech still thrives in its various niches.

Similarly, the chances of either Google+ or Facebook dying off anytime soon are virtually zero. After all, even Orkut and Buzz still matter depending on what you're doing; Orkut is notoriously popular in Brazil, while Buzz still features prominently on the standard collection of social media buttons that just about every site on the web has nowadays. Google Wave would probably still have a few percent worth of marketshare if Google hadn't gone out of its way to kill it off.

With that in mind, it's nothing short of sensationalist to say that either Facebook or Google+ will be in danger anytime soon. They're far more likely to share the market, with each holding 50-80% marketshare (remember, it's quite possible for a single user to use more than one site, and many already do!) - just like every other social media site does. It's not like Facebook is stifling the likes of Twitter or LinkedIn, and while Google+ is admittedly much more of a direct competitor to Facebook, I don't think they're so similar as to be mutually exclusive.

What will this lead to? Probably, a more diverse social media ecosystem. Just look at how many features Facebook announced in the days following the Google+ launch, many of them in direct response to the new features that Plus brought to the table. It seems clear that the intense competition about to begin will bring plenty of rapid progress to the social universe, and the group that's likely to benefit most from this fight is the users. We might just be looking at a "Golden Age" of social media innovation, and the rapid change that such a battle will bring may very well be enough to convince users to use BOTH sites for various purposes.

In the unlikely event that either of the two sites "wins" and manages to completely crush the other, the winner will have changed and evolved so much from its current state as to be almost unrecognizable - so regardless of what you think, any predictions based on the sites' current states aren't likely to be reliable. Especially in the case of Google+, which is still in development, so it's a still little early for self-proclaimed prophets to announce their predictions. And with any luck, an overwhelming victory won't happen like that anytime soon, or else the victor will take their domination as an excuse to let their site stagnate.

Space Shuttle: The End of a Mediocre Era

2011-07-11T10:50:00.002-04:00

Soon after the end of the Space Shuttle program, space lovers all over the world are reacting quite strongly to the end of the a program that has been flying since before I was born. Massive crowds intended to go see the last launch of Atlantis, and I'm sure STS-135 will become a a famous occasion commemorated by parties among space geeks. I'd like to throw a party as well - an "it's finally over" party. Though the future of US manned spaceflight is certainly bleak, the shuttle program represented pretty much everything that's been wrong with NASA since the Apollo program ended, and the long break between now and Orion might very well give us a chance to clear off the weight of the last few decades and fix the deep institutional problems in their manned spaceflight division once and for all.

In theory, a reusable launch vehicle is a great idea. After all, the Saturn V moon rockets weighed nearly seven million pounds fully loaded and cost over a billion dollars after adjusting for inflation, yet they were only good for one mission! The idea of a comparable craft which could do mission after mission for nothing more than the cost of a fuel top-off seemed like an ideal goal back in the late sixties, when our goal of a moon landing was well within our reach and NASA's budget was already beginning to shrink.

If you don't think too hard about what's involved in spaceflight, it's a great idea. Unfortunately, current space travel means that the rocket must endure a laundry list of extreme temperatures and forces both inside and outside the craft, and manned spaceflight makes it even more difficult by tacking on a bunch of extra weight in the form of crew compartments and supplies for its extremely fragile human payload. And while it's one thing to build a rocket that can withstand all of that once, it's another thing altogether to build one that can safely go through those stresses dozens of times. We couldn't do it back then and we still can't do it today.

Now, I won't say it was a COMPLETELY doomed effort from the start. But considering that they were building a craft completely unlike any previous rocket design, there was no way they were going to meet their ambitious goals within the budget they were given, and they knew it. Even the scaled-down plan that eventually became the space shuttle was probably too much to handle with the resources at hand, but NASA staff really wanted a reusable vehicle and made many cost and performance estimates that proved to be far too optimistic.

The finished product proved to be significantly more expensive than it was on paper, and carried smaller loads less often than had been planned. Moreover, it required months of refurbishing and repair between flights. The thermal tiles had to be replaced after a reentry, and major engine components had to be similarly rebuilt before they could be deemed safe to fly again. All of those problems, however, would have been forgivable if not for the usual cultural problems in NASA that led them to insist on the shuttle program no matter what, even going so far as to ignore safety issues caused by vehicle defects.

In order to justify keeping the shuttle, NASA used it for as many missions as possible, even though most of them amounted to little more than "space trucker" jobs, hauling satellites or supplies that could have been handled more efficiently by a less expensive unmanned rocket. In fact, the existence of the space shuttle and NASA's willingness to use it for station resupply are probably what prevented the US from developing an unmanned freighter similar to the Russian Progress resupply ship or the European Automated Transfer Vehicle.

And the real kicker of it all? Many of these problems were predicted before Columbia's first flight!

On a more somber note, whatever your opinion is on any particular aspect of the space program, we shouldn't forget the men and women who make it great - not just the astronauts who fly the rockets and the engineers who build them, but the thousands of staffers and workers who turned a pile of half-assembled parts fresh out of a factory into a high-precision machine sitting on a complex launchpad system.

While preparing for the last launch of Endeavor, the launchpad suffered its first fatality since the launch of STS-1 in 1981, when worker James Vanover committed suicide by jumping from the launch complex, due to experiencing health problems and being laid off after almost 30 years of work at Kennedy Space Center. Unlike the final crews of Challenger and Columbia, he won't be a national hero mourned by the entire nation, and his name won't appear in the history books. Will anyone remember his tragedy after a week? The end of the shuttle program and the lack of any immediate successor means a whole lot more than just not launching any astronauts for a few years - it means that hundreds of dedicated space industry workers will be getting pink slips with nothing to show for it, and most of the country won't even notice.