Lame Facebook quizzes

Sometimes I look at the ridiculous online quiz results people post to Facebook and roll my eyes. "What's your old-person name?" "How weird are you?" "Which 90s sitcom hairstyle are you?" Most of them seem lame and absurd, certainly not worth my time and very likely not worth anyone else's time either.

However, despite my disdain for them, I won't put anyone down for posting them, because I think they serve another purpose, too: introspection. These days, we spend far too little time thinking about and observing our own behaviour critically. We just kind of let it happen and tell people it's their problem if they don't find us acceptable. These quizzes are the only introspection some people get, and the only hint that they might not be perfect - that there might be some room for improvement in their lives.

From that point of view, I consider it a good thing that lame Facebook quizzes exist. Even though it's done somewhat in public, it encourages the kind of private, critical self-reflection that is so rare in the world these days.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I still won't take any of them myself.
PPS - Well, hardly ever.

Ice challenge vs troll status traps

A few "challenges" and games have been going around Facebook in my circles lately, as tends to happen from time to time, and they're often put forward as non-optional for people you've either deliberately dobbed in or who have fallen into a trap of some kind. I'd like to mention two that came my way to illustrate the differences.

The first was the "ice challenge". The idea (at least in the mutant version that came my way) is to either donate $10 to charity and tip 3 buckets of ice water over your head or to donate $100 and stay warm. I opted to go for the ice, because I thought it would be more fun to participate than to chicken out, with or without charity donations. I posted the video, donated the money and nominated 5 friends, 2 of whom took on the ice and 3 of whom made no response at all. That's their right. This isn't law, but I thought it was a bit of fun, and since there was charity involved, I figured I might as well participate.

The other "challenge" was a plain old trolling trap of a status update. One person posts a worrying status from a pre-written list, then anyone who likes or comments gets stabbed with the same list and a demand that they, too, post one of the worrying statuses without any explanation. I commented just to see what was up, and found out. I declined that particular challenge, because it just felt like pure troll-bait to me. You get your friends worried about you, or at least confused and curious, then when they express their concern, you punish them for it. There didn't seem to be much positive fun in that, and I said so. I'm not going to propagate something like that.

Is there a difference between the two? From some perspectives, no, not really. They're both somewhat involuntary to get into, and they both propagate among friends like a meme. On the other hand, the difference I see is that one is a "gotcha" game of trolling and one is more of a dare where charities benefit. Maybe the difference is subtle. I don't know. I just know that I'm not going to bait my friends and family into expressing some misguided concern, then attack them for it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - No offense meant to anyone who has played along with the status trolling game.
PPS - If I hadn't had friends opt out of the ice challenge, I might have just played along with trolling, too.

Facebook Save proves Facebook doesn't like to share

I'm not a huge fan of the way Facebook wants to be a "roach motel" on the internet: content checks in, it doesn't check out. It's a problem on the mobile app more than the desktop website, because sometimes I'll see an article I want to read, or a video I want to watch, but I can't right now. From that point of view, I'm glad they've introduced "Facebook Save", which is a glorified bookmarking feature to let you save an article for reading later, into a special feed on the Facebook site.

What bothers me is that this plays straight into their roach motel business model. See, there are plenty of other bookmarking tools out there, and plenty of services to save articles to read later. I use one of them often. It's called Pocket, and it's fantastic. This Facebook one could very easily be replaced by Pocket, if only the Facebook mobile app had a "share" function that worked with the normal Android "share" channel, instead of assuming that Facebook is the only place I would ever want to share something I found on Facebook.

This was clearly not the easier path for Zuckerberg Incorporated. Adding a whole new level of functionality to Facebook should not be the default behaviour. It's big, it's potentially buggy, and it reinvents the wheel. The only reason to behave this way is to avoid the suggestion that there's anything on the web but Facebook itself. In other words, Facebook went to a lot of trouble and expense to keep you on their site, rather than learning to share.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I've checked for the new function but I can't find it yet.
PPS - Functions like this tend to roll out slowly.

The roach motel content sharing model

The "walled garden" is the online model of the old days of AOL and Compuserve, back when your ISP tried to run every service you would ever need, without any external interaction. That's not how we do it these days, because that model, rightly, failed. These days we have a different kind of walled garden, which I call the "roach motel". Content checks in, but doesn't check out.

Think of Facebook. It is possible to pull in anything from any other website to share on Facebook. Videos, pictures, articles, you name it. What you can't do, however, is take what you saw embedded on Facebook and share it elsewhere. That's what every big service online wants to be these days. The gravity well towards which everything online flows. All roads lead to Rome, hail Caesar Zuckerberg.

My concern is that it seems to be working so far. I can't see the catastrophic failure at the end of the rainbow, and that bothers me. One day, you see, Facebook will go away, one way or another. If it is where we kept everything, then everything will disappear.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The only possible end I can imagine is a competitor just as big, stealing all the users.
PPS - That's not so much an end as a transition, and a very unlikely one.

Facebook doesn't do news well

For me, at least lately, Facebook is a terrible way to get official news. It's buried under cat videos and Candy Crush invitations and I'll often skim right over special-interest news I would otherwise very much like to read. For companies looking to get the word out, Facebook is terrible in a different way. When you post something to your company Facebook page, it only goes out to 5% of your followers - people who have deliberately sought you out and linked their profile to your page because they want news from you. Apparently, if you pay Facebook a gatekeeper tax, they'll bump that number up to 10%. So, basically, Facebook is terrible as an official news channel.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm also not on Facebook every day, so I miss news that way, too.
PPS - And I don't always read my whole news feed when I'm there.

How Facebook will retain dominance

How should Facebook combat open social networks as a business threat? Two possibilities. One, just be the better product. Use your head start to keep adding the features that people want in their social networking. Two, allow one-way interaction. You could view anyone else's external feed integrated with your Facebook page, but nobody can view Facebook anywhere but Facebook itself.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - So far, the threat of other social networks to Facebook is minimal at best.
PPS - And they're already doing one-way interaction of a sort.

Distributed social networking

What would Facebook look like if it were actually secure, wasn't entrusted to just one company, and couldn't be taken away from us or changed at someone else's whim? We'd all be publishing our own social stream on our own servers, wherever we wanted, including statuses, photos, likes and dislikes. We would be running our own software that downloads and aggregates those streams from our friends, who have chosen to share their publishing details with us and allowed us access. Instead of building up one massive database of valuable personal data for one company, our data would remain our own. We could cut off someone's access and never let them back in.

Security would have to be built into this distributed social network publishing standard, along with strong encryption, because a distributed network like that is vulnerable to hijacking of individual nodes, but that's no different to individual Facebook accounts getting hacked. The only difference is that individuals, or the hosting companies they use, would be responsible for that security, rather than Facebook.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is like distributed social networking taken to the extreme.
PPS - It's the interaction of individual "social networks" of one person each.

Escaping harassment on Facebook is not easy

How are you supposed to escape from harassment on Facebook? A person who is stalking you or otherwise bothering you can be blocked, but can then set up another account and harass you from there. Do you just have to block every new person from sending you messages? Are you supposed to abandon your old profile and start a new one for greater privacy? Somehow I doubt Facebook wants us to throw away profiles that are heavily-laden with juicy marketing data only to start again and lock everyone out.

You need a way to disconnect a certain identity front - a kind of nickname - from a Facebook account so that nobody looking for that nickname would ever find you. But to make that method effective, the nicknames need to be the only way people interact with Facebook.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - That level of privacy protection will not happen.
PPS - It's too much work for something that Facebook does not value.

I want to like Google+

I haven't been using Google+, though I was quite interested in it at the beginning. Why not? Well, all my friends stayed on Facebook, because Google+ isn't much different. Until that changes, I'll still be on Facebook, like it or not.

But I want to like Google+, so every month or so I'll open it up and see what's up. Today I opened it on my phone, and it showed me a long list of links from "my" circles that were half made up of people I absolutely do not know. I tried de-selecting "What's Hot" and "Nearby", just in case Google+ had decided I would be interested in something without consulting me first, but every single link remained firmly in place. I closed it again within a minute. If you're curious, that amounts to approximately 0.0003% of my total time I spend on Google+, and that's after accounting for sleep time. Google is fighting a very long uphill battle with this one, and if Google is having a hard time competing with Facebook, what does that say about Facebook and monopoly status?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Someone needs to compete, convincingly, with Facebook.
PPS - I just wonder who that will be and how.

Facebook Timeline is less than readable

My main objection to the Facebook Timeline view is that it's just really hard to read. Because events can appear on either side of the centre line, the only "correct" way to read it is to scan the line looking for dots, look left or right when you get to one, go back to the line and scan down again. We already know how to scan text. We do that a lot. Adding the line as an extra step wouldn't be so bad if all the articles were on one side of it. Then the line just adds a time scale context. Instead, the decision to put breakout boxes on both sides turns the line itself into the only possible central focus, with nothing on it but dots that lead to items you might (or might not) find interesting. You can't know until you drop your focus on the line to read the story.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Until the Timeline view is more readable, I'll try to stick with the older layout.
PPS - But that's not up to me for individual pages.

There's no reason to use Google+ yet

There is not yet a compelling reason to use Google+, and as long as Facebook has the critical mass, that is unlikely to change. It's "Like Facebook, but without all the people". What good is that? The people are why I'm on Facebook at all. Until they start on Google+, I have no reason to leave, and neither do they. If Google wants people to move to their platform instead of the current establishment, we require compatibility more than equivalence. That's tricky to write into software, but did you think changing the world would be easy? Rather than "if you build it, they will come", you get "if you build it second, they will ask Why Should We Change?".

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's a valid question.
PPS - And the answer is never implied.

Federated social network software

Social networks need to be interoperable. If it's not an open platform that anybody (meaning a new social network website) can join, then one site will gather all the users as other sites die off, and that site will become impossible to budge from its monopolistic position. To keep any one site from becoming too powerful, we need them all to operate on one free, open source protocol.

To an extent, however, you can fake that if you have good enough desktop software that presents one interface across all social network sites. It would need specialised plugins for each service, and they might be difficult to write if the sites are deliberately uncooperative, but it could be done. After that, the barrier to entry for new sites is much lower, since the desktop software can work with any of them, and you don't need to stay exclusively with one just because your friends are still there.

Yes, it would be complicated behind the scenes, but doing complicated things while presenting an easy user interface is what computers are for.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't think this should be provided as a website.
PPS - But that's a different rant.

Cross-site social network desktop software

I would like one desktop program that manages my social network profiles through one interface. I don't want another website for this. The precedent is Pidgin that manages three different chat protocols for me: MSN, Google Talk and Facebook chat, or Thunderbird that can access my work email (Exchange) or GMail. So what I want is a program that accesses Facebook and Google+, representing their common features in a standard way so that it doesn't matter whether a particular friend is on Facebook or Google+, and I don't have to check both to get all my updates. In a few years, more people will be fed up with Facebook and they may have moved onto something else, so this kind of standardisation is going to become more necessary as time goes on. I'm not holding my breath expecting standard cross-platform protocols for social networking sites, so this would be the next best thing.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This is a big advantage of general-purpose computers.
PPS - And open programming interfaces for websites.

Social network federation

Social network federation, or compatibility, is a good goal for users, but the main barrier to its implementation is that the big players - Facebook, for example - have an active interest in not supporting open standards. Keeping people locked into Facebook because all their friends are there has been the main competitive strategy of social networking sites from the beginning. The business plan is basically set up a website, attract a self-sustaining critical mass, then lock it down so the competition has no hope.

Federation means that it doesn't matter what network someone is on. It makes step 2 (critical mass) moot and openly mocks step 3 (lockdown). That's just not going to fly with the big players unless, for instance, the open network of competition grows far beyond them. That's the point that the critical mass shifts from Facebook to the open network, then everyone starts maintaining two profiles, and eventually abandons Facebook because not everyone is on it any more. So if you, as a small social network, want to topple Facebook, your best bet is to throw in your lot with the rest of the federated network and be part of the new majority.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Then Microsoft, in their Microsofty way, will "embrace and extend" the standard.
PPS - Their proprietary extensions are compatible in one direction only.

Google+

I took a look at the Google+ website, just to see what it's like. Compared to Facebook, there's not much different. You have "circles" instead of friend groups, though I suspect they work a lot better, and the "spark" feed of things you'll probably like. The thing that really caught my eye was "hangout" video chats, which is an idea I quite like. The closest equivalent on Facebook is text chat, and that's a bit more attention-intrusive to my mind. You need to check who's online, see if they want to chat, and type for every sentence, which is nothing like real life.

Hangouts looks friendlier, like just turning on your webcam while you watch TV so that friends can virtually drop in and say "hi" or just sit there with a live video feed of you to keep them company. I think I've mentioned always-on video chat as the next step up from always-on internet, and this is getting to that point. Or it could be very useful for business conference calls, too, especially with the way it displays the current speaker big at the top. I approve.

The other side of this whole argument, of course, is that Facebook is well entrenched now, and it will take a giant heave to get it out of the way. Google+ might be capable of that, or it might just be a little blip. The most I am willing to hope for now is a fire lit under Facebook's collective rear ends when people ask "Why aren't you doing XYZ like Google+?" And that's a good thing. Competition is good, and Facebook has had far too little competition for far too long.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - The progression from one social network to another is part of their life cycle.
PPS - Maybe Zuckerberg missed his big chance to sell, like MySpace did.

Facebook, openness and reputation

Someone needs to topple the Facebook monopoly. The only way it stays down is with open standards. We need a social networking protocol rather than a website; a networking standard rather than a walled garden. Eventually Facebook will be too big, and they'll become a monopoly on social networking. We need to get worried about that possibility long before that happens because then it will be too late. Maybe it already is.

I think one of the biggest things we can gain from this idea is the beginning of a reputation economy online. When we are able to tie everything to our own social network, and that network is not controlled by or limited to www.facebook.com, then we can use our network to figure out what our friends trust and do not trust online. All we need is for our friends to start using that new social protocol to indicate that they Like or Dislike certain things, and they will develop an online reputation automatically. And because the recommendations come from your own friends, you're more likely to trust them.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - This doesn't work if you have 4000 "friends", none of whom you truly know.
PPS - Or if you're looking at something really new.

Opposing monopolies

Products that oppose monopolies are important, such as Google's Android phone operating system, alternative web browsers like Firefox and Chrome, and the Linux OS. It's never a good situation for consumers when one company holds a monopoly - actual or just practical - over platforms and distribution channels. That's why Apple and Linux are important for computer operating systems and it's why iTunes and Facebook are such problems. It's not that they are bad, as such, just that they have no external point of reference.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - It's the capitalist version of the contrary point of view.
PPS - Without that opposition, products and services grow stale and evil.

Privacy and security

It's important not to confuse privacy with secrecy. Privacy is control over who has access to what information. Security is the mechanism by which we exercise that control. This is important to remember when Mark Zuckerberg claims Facebook users do not want privacy. He's not ONLY saying they don't want their information to be secure, but claiming further that they do not want to be able to control who sees what on their Facebook profiles, which is crazy talk of a whole different level.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You can have privacy and security together.
PPS - And you must aim for it.

Facebook address book

The oldest entry in my blog drafts file is titled "No More Address Book". I wrote it in 2006, and it describes doing away with the need for address books and synchronisation by keeping one central service where we keep references to people. They change their addresses on their own, and we just use that central reference to find out how to contact our friends. I did note, however, that such a system would be ripe for the plucking by spambots and other advertisers. Fast forward 4 years and we all do this through Facebook, including the advertisers. Facebook is much more than that, of course, but it does exactly this too. Funny, isn't it?

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm not sure why I never posted that.
PPS - I might have wanted to write more about it, or polish it some more.

Facebook is a worry and a chore

Sometimes I find Facebook a chore, and sometimes it just seems like a bad place to be. For instance, there are things I might want to share on Facebook that aren't appropriate for people outside my family, and while I know I can set up the privacy settings and things like that, it's just more of a hassle than doing nothing. Sometimes I think my friends who have fewer people in their lists on Facebook have the right idea: limit yourself to those people who you want to share EVERYTHING with. Then there's never a question of whether or not you should post that photo or make that update. But then there are people who I want to remain connected to, but don't want to share absolutely everything with. In the end, it's just easier to keep things off Facebook than put them up, because keeping them private afterwards is too hard.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I like being on Facebook.
PPS - There are just some times when I wish it was different.