Clear Night Sky explores themes of digital communications and culture from a variety of sources and points of view and is brought to you by Clear Ink.
Social Networking
The Strong Force in Social Networking
Submitted by David Burk on Tue, 2008-09-09 14:09. online culture | privacy | profile | Social Networking | social networksIn the spirit of the imminent discovery of Higgs boson during the powering-up of the Large Hadron Collider in CERN tomorrow, I thought I would use this opportunity to speak of the physics of social networking.
I heard yesterday from a dear friend something I've heard all too often--"I'm not doing Facebook or any of those social networking things on purpose. I don't want my life open for all to see." Of course, I was corresponding with this friend because they had joined Plaxo, but that’s not the point. For companies and individuals, social networking is a very simple, very strong force if they remember two things: profile and privacy.
This isn’t a geeky post; this is a post to be sure that marketers aren’t reacting to myths. The fact is that you control what is in your profile, and any social networking tool worth a damn allows you to control your privacy as well. And that’s the beauty of it. While the model, like Scott McNealy, predicts that there will be no privacy (“Get over it!”), the reality is that you can control your coming out as you get more comfortable.
Companies have many privacy and profile tools at their disposal, so not taking advantage of the Strong Force of Social Networks is equivalent of setting your privacy to “no one”. But isn’t that putting your head in the sand?
Social Media: Loosening the Grips on Personal Identity
Submitted by Steve Nelson on Tue, 2008-08-05 12:44. employment | Facebook | identity | social media | Social Networking | soulI'm starting to form some ideas about online projections of personal identity and the degree to which an employer can say "yea" or "nay". Here’s a post by a fired CNN blogger Chez Pazienza that includes CNN's new "Policy Regarding Personal Writings Online”, where CNN spells out what an employee can and can’t say on a site such as Facebook.
In my collection of Facebook profiles of friends and colleagues I see very few that are designed to represent only their corporate side; something about the medium induces them to project a more complete view of their character in full.
Yet companies such as CNN interpret this view through a very special filter: this soul is mine.
Personal blogs by people who also happen to work for someone have been around all decade (and then some), and their mass may be mined to determine what’s in the head of any individual. But the physiology of Facebook is based on a structure that reveals more about an individual in fuller context, very digestible. Yes, you’ll see someone’s work network and associates, but alongside their college buddies, neneighbors and lifelong friends. You’ll see the business books they’ve read on the same shelf as their manga or pulp novels. You’ll see their next business conference and their next kegger. You’ll see who they work for and who they’ll vote for. You’ll see who they really are.
Among other things CNN doesn’t want you to list your political affiliation on your Facebook page, because they don’t see CNN as being a part of you, but you are a part of CNN.
I don’t think the new social media is going to work that way; I see people developing a wider sense of free agency. Their character does include their employer, but is more widely defined. Of course, CNN is ultimately free to make their own rules as to who they will hire or fire, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea.
Perhaps the middle ground (at least in the case of Facebook) is that an employer can establish standards for employees who wish to identify with the employer’s network (a Facebook-specific construct requiring a company email address). Identifying with a network is voluntary, but can also be seen as a privilege based on accepting certain conditions. You don’t accept them, OK, you’re free to express yourself, but not fly the network tag.
Is this actually a new turn of the page, has the medium changed the rules, or does the old work-life balance still prevail?
In my collection of Facebook profiles of friends and colleagues I see very few that are designed to represent only their corporate side; something about the medium induces them to project a more complete view of their character in full.
Yet companies such as CNN interpret this view through a very special filter: this soul is mine.
Personal blogs by people who also happen to work for someone have been around all decade (and then some), and their mass may be mined to determine what’s in the head of any individual. But the physiology of Facebook is based on a structure that reveals more about an individual in fuller context, very digestible. Yes, you’ll see someone’s work network and associates, but alongside their college buddies, neneighbors and lifelong friends. You’ll see the business books they’ve read on the same shelf as their manga or pulp novels. You’ll see their next business conference and their next kegger. You’ll see who they work for and who they’ll vote for. You’ll see who they really are.
Among other things CNN doesn’t want you to list your political affiliation on your Facebook page, because they don’t see CNN as being a part of you, but you are a part of CNN.
I don’t think the new social media is going to work that way; I see people developing a wider sense of free agency. Their character does include their employer, but is more widely defined. Of course, CNN is ultimately free to make their own rules as to who they will hire or fire, but I don’t think that’s such a good idea.
Perhaps the middle ground (at least in the case of Facebook) is that an employer can establish standards for employees who wish to identify with the employer’s network (a Facebook-specific construct requiring a company email address). Identifying with a network is voluntary, but can also be seen as a privilege based on accepting certain conditions. You don’t accept them, OK, you’re free to express yourself, but not fly the network tag.
Is this actually a new turn of the page, has the medium changed the rules, or does the old work-life balance still prevail?
Yahoo! Announces oneConnect Social Address Book
Submitted by Mark Celsor on Tue, 2008-02-12 16:30. Mobile | Social Networking | Yahoo mobile 
I blogged on Friday about Social Network Consolidation and Google's Social Graph API. I feel that social network aggregation is going to be one of the big themes in 2008 and today Yahoo! threw it's hat into the ring with Marco Boerries' demo of it's oneConnect system at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. oneConnect is an address book system that pulls together information from social networking sites, email, instant messenger service and even GPS data to build a rich picture of what your friends are up to. oneConnect is build on the Yahoo! Mobile Developer Platform so it should work on most cell phones. They even did a demo on an iPhone showing integration with its native address book. It sounds like cool stuff and a great tool for stalking your friends.
IDG writer Peter Sayer has a more in-depth description of the demo in his article Yahoo Shows Off oneConnect Social Address Book on the New York Times site.
Social Network Consolidation and Google's Social Graph API
Submitted by Mark Celsor on Fri, 2008-02-01 16:32. google | Social NetworkingAt Clear Ink we check out a lot of different social networking sites to connect with our friends and look for advertising opportunities, but there eventually reaches a point where all of the different accounts, contact lists and other information start to get difficult to keep. I'm currently signed up for Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Blogger, Flickr, YouTube, Yelp, Hi5 and a bunch others that I can't remember. Some of them send me notifications all day and I use some of them so infrequently that I don't even remember my passwords. As social networking sites get more and more popular it seems like the fragmentation is going to get worse and worse.
What I really need is a single place where I can check the activity of all these different services. I've tried subscribing to RSS feeds from the different services and setting up iGoogle widgets but I really feel like an industry-leading solution is going to emerge in the next year. I saw a post earlier this month on Slashdot called Social Network Aggregation, Killer App in 2008?. Plaxo and some other players seems like its headed in this direction, pulling together information about you from other sites. Today Google announced its new Social Graph API which it hopes will help set some standards for relating profile information across different web sites that developers can use to make social network aggregator and other applications. Here's Google's video explaining it.
Open Facebook - A Half Step to Social Independence
Submitted by Tod Rathbone on Tue, 2007-09-18 17:09. Facebook | Marketing | Open Architecture | Open Source | Social NetworkingWith the unleashing of the Facebook open source onslaught, developers, industry pundits and economists have been quick to sing the praises of a new open range in the tech frontier. But where does that leave the user of this new and improved social construct? Certainly there are more users as Facebook leaves the restricted confines of the higher education world so anybody can join. And certainly there are no end to the gadgets we will be swimming in, although initially they seem to be of the silly variety, like choosing if you are a pirate or a ninja. But really, in the end, it is another network to join. Another username and password to keep track of. Another host of friends to find and invite to the new party. The element that seems to be missing most, at least for now, is real connectivity. I find the ability to search, find and connect with all the different people in my life (work, family, alumni, hobbies, etc) still somewhat restricted. And the ability to connect with non-Facebook people (i.e. as an invitation to join) isn't present at all. Which brings me to the point about social networks. How many can we really support? I find that after two, a person starts to experience slight vertigo as to where they should be. Is that friend on MySpace? Facebook? Yelp? ILike? LinkedIn? What I truly wish for, and I hope Facebook is the one to do this, is social independence. Can we free our identities from the constrains of a walled garden and free float on the web? Can we create self-contained identity files that link and unlink with various groups at will, relying on large central open-source tools to search and find friends, keep track of all of our photos, show off our opinions, without having to stay constrained to a single administrative universe? Network creators can still maintain the cool communities and social apps our identities want to stay involved with, they just won't own the identities themselves.
