Herkko Hietanen, a Berkman Fellow, posted this to a mailing list. I’m reposting it with his permission, FYA (for your amusement):

I have been using Facebook for a while with an account name which is the Finnish equivalent to “Ano Nymous”. My aim has been to see how the service adapts to information that other people tell about me. I have tried not to tell anything to Facebook about myself. Or, well I did tell it that I was born on the Finnish independence day in 1917. Of course the service does know my 20 friends.

Today the system suggested that I should join two groups. One is “Cambridge”, which I guess the system determined from my IP address. The second one was “conspiracy theories” -group.

Is the irony of the service starting to get off the scale or what?

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It’s the 50th anniversary of what became, arguably, the first digital social networking tool, PLATO. In its honor, the PlatoHistory site has posted a list of what some of the current Big Names in computers were doing when PLATO Notes, its message board, went live. There’s also a free conference, with Donald Bitzer and Ray Ozzie keynoting; Bitzer created PLATO and Ozzie founded Lotus Notes which was originally modeled on Plato notes.

(For the record: in 1973, I was spending a year between college and grad school, being a handyman, writing badly, and pining. And you?)

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Imagine an alternative universe in which Mark Zuckerberg is born before Tim Berners-Lee, and invents the Web.

• Mark Zuckerberg forms a company and develops the Web as a commercial enterprise.

• MZ owns and controls the HTML standard. Nothing changes in it unless MZ thinks it’s a good idea.

• MZ owns and controls the client — MZ Explorer — that uses that standard. While other apps are permitted API access, the browser is whatever MZ decides to give us.

• Users can only create pages on MZ’s server, subject to MZ’s content policies.

• MZ decides how much about the author of each page is automatically disclosed, and he changes his mind every few months.

• There is no “View Source” so users can easily figure out how to become developers.

• Innovators’ creations are limited to the API access that MZ allows and are subject to the changes in policy and pricing structures that MZ decides on.

• Users have no systematic, assured way of transferring out of the Web all of the pages they’ve created within it. Do they even own the pages they’ve created?

• If the right deal is struck, the Web could be sold to a media company at any moment.

This alternative history writes its own ending: The Web would be a boring, small, and of little consequence. The real Web unleashed a world-changing renaissance because a modest researcher at a physics lab gave it to us as a gift — open and free.

The Web knows how pages are connected. Social networking sites know how people are connected. Both are obviously crucial. But, Facebook, for all its success, is not living up to the potential for social networking sites, not by a long shot. The social networking site that will do for the connections among people what the Web has done for the connections among sites is awaiting its own Tim Berners-Lee — a person or group that understands that control constrains, but gifts liberate.

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Marhsall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb doesn’t trust Mark Zuckerberg’s explanation of why Facebook is defaulting more towards publicness:

What makes Facebook think the world is becoming more public and less private? Zuckerberg cites the rise of blogging “and all these different services that have people sharing all this information.” That last part must mean Twitter, right? But blogging is tiny compared to Facebook! It’s made a big impact on the world, but only because it perhaps doubled or tripled the small percentage of people online who publish long-form text content. Not very many people write blogs, almost everyone is on Facebook.

…

The company’s justifications of the claim that they are reflecting broader social trends just aren’t credible. A much more believable explanation is that Facebook wants user information to be made public and so they “just went for it,” to use Zuckerberg’s words from yesterday.

I have no special insight into Mark Zuckerberg, but it’s plausible to me that he’s trying to be an idealist without recognizing that his self-interest is distorting his vision. (Who does?) And, yes, the state of his mind does matter, even if it’s not knowable.The presence of so many of our friends at FB creates an almost inescapable social gravity. But, if we begin to think that FB is not trustworthy or on our side, we will be more open to enduring the cost of switching platforms.

Meanwhile, I’m on the verge of taking drastic action with my own account. I made the early mistake of saying yes to everyone who asked to be my friend, primarily because I am pathologically adverse to rebuffing people. Not a good thing. As a result, only a tiny percentage of my FB friends are actually people I know. So, FB for me is all maintenance and no benefit. And I only do the maintenance about once a month. So, I should either nuke all my friends and start over (is there a one-click way to do that?), or I should “delete” my account and register under a different email address. Or leave and not come back.

Any advice?

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Facebook has settled a class action lawsuit and officially ended its “Beacon” program that posted into your feed news of what you’ve bought at other sites. Beacon was a contentious program to begin with, and was initially implemented with defaults that worked against users’ interests.

It was odd when Facebook introduced Beacon. As Ethanz recounts, Facebook’s privacy officer (I believe) previewed the announcement at the Berkman Center the day before it went public, and seemed genuinely surprised that we pushed back about the privacy implications, and about the fact that the system’s defaults were set to serve Facebook’s interests, not its users’. And this was not the first time that Facebook made changes that didn’t align with what their users want and expect.

The cheap irony is that Facebook exists because it enables its users to create and maintain intimacy (ok, intimacy of a sometimes weird new form), yet it seems not to be able to read the signals of intimacy. How does that happen? It might be that Facebook is a crassly commercial enterprise that cynically clothes itself in aspirational humanism. But my hunch is that that’s wrong. I think (based on little evidence, admittedly) that Facebook views itself as a noble enabler of what is best about us, but that it has a surprisingly tin ear for how its actions appear to its users.

The good news is that if Facebook suffers from Inflammation of the Tin Ear, the malady exists at the organizational level, and thus can be remedied at that level. The ending of Beacon and the creation of a non-profit to study privacy issues is a good step, albeit one that required the tough love of a class action suit. For a site that requires us to trust it with intimate knowledge, it’d help if we could believe that our love was requited, or at least that Facebook is always, implicitly and unveeringly on our side.

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Elizabeth Goodman of UC Berkeley is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk on a project she’s just now beginning. It is, she says, “half-baked.” She’s going to compare walled gardens in the computer sense to the original referent of “walled garden” and experiences of community gardens which often are fenced off. She says she comes to this from a design background, and has been looking at “how the metaphors we use shape the possibilities we imagine for them and how people can act in them.”

A walled garden was originally a commons, a common ground people can use. We use the term in tech talk because it is a common and concrete metaphor. But, “its salience relies on associations with imagined wall gardens.” Can we expand the “walled gardens” metaphor to make it a more useful tool for thought? Can we do so by looking at real walled gardens?

The initial uses of the term (first in 1680 and then in 1757) was very positive. But digital wall gardens lack openness, can’t share info across networks, that limits what you can look at, etc. Examples: Kindle, the AppStore, and Facebook. When people illustrate digital WGs, they tend to show beautiful, Victorian gardens…not at all like what you experience in your Facebook stream.

Elizabeth notes that walled gardens originally were created not to keep people about to create a microclimate. Fires could be set to raise the temperature. This should help us to see WGs as places of work and production. “So, is it useful to compare how we think about digital walled garden social network sites to how urban gardeners think about members-only community gardens?”

She studied community gardeners and park volunteers in the SF area for two years, because she was interested in shared management. She points out two things about the community garden photo she’s showing: Only members get in, and they’re not collectively cultivated. Each person gets her own small plot. “It is kind of like MySpace”: You can make your own plot as hideously designed as you want and no one will bother you, although if you don’t maintain your site, you get kicked out. (She notes that someone has insisted on distinguishing gardening from landscaping, a distinction she does not much care about.)

Q: [me] Does “gardening” vs “maintaining” when applied to digital realms imply gender? Were gender implications driving its adoption?
A: Probably yes.

Q: How about farming vs. gardening?

[Discussion has become quite conversational, which is wonderful for everyone except the liveblogger.]

Q: Walled gardens keep people out. Digital WPs keep people in.

Q: People in digital WGs have no sense of shared maintenance/management.

WGs are actually less communitarian than I had thought.

Q: First time I heard something called a WG on the Net was AOL.

Q: Is using Flickr, Facebook, or MySpace a faustian bargain?

Q: Urban dwellers really like living near a community garden even if they don’t garden in it. The walls are fences so you can see what’s there.

EG: And that’s a bit like Flickr: People can see much of what you post there.

EG: Here’s a photo of an unwalled garden by a master grower who is going something like a social display of his skill/artistry. But here’s a photo of community garden where a bean plot is next to a mixed flower plot.

Q: [me, summarizing the back channel] The first use of “WG” was for AOL, where the pitch was the order and safety of AOL vs. the wildness of the Web. Now WG seems to refer to locked places. I.e., garden vs. wild becomes walled vs. unwalled.

Q: WGs demarcate space for special creative uses.

[I am doing a completely lousy job here. The conversation is too interesting, plus there's the backchannel. I give up. Sorry. You'll be able to find the webcast at the Berkman site.]

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Brian Solis reports on Facebook’s claim of 250M souls, as well as on the social networking sites popular in various parts of the world.

Simply the map of the global distribution of Facebook users makes clear the danger of building our social nets in proprietary systems that don’t start from the premise that first they must interoperate.

[Tags: facebook social_networks ]

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Elizabeth Losh of UC Irvine is giving a Berkman lunchtime talk called “From the Crowd to the Cloud: Social Media and the Obama Administration.” She looks at “institutions as digital content creators.”

She begins by pointing to a Congressional hearing in which someone unknowingly referred to some footage from Battlefield 2, in which you can play on either side, as proof that Jihadists are recruiting on the Net.

In the 2008 election, McCain had a series of rhetorical disasters when using social media, Liz says. McCainSpace, she says, was “an unmitigated disaster.” She also points to the mashups done with greenscreen videos of McCain. The Obama campaign, on the other hand, used social media well. It used low bandwidth interactivity effectively (e.g., online tax calculator). And third parties injected memes.

So, how much change has happened now that Obama is president?

It’s not all that difference. She compares 4parents.gov, an abstinence site put up by the Bush administration. The Obama administration has kept it pretty much the same, except that some of the conversation starters have been slightly modified. Ready.gov/kids has moved from featuring mountain lions as the guardians of children (an odd choice, says Liz) to Muppets. The Bush admin did some health initiatives using SecondLife, she points out.

How much privacy? Whitehouse.gov uses YouTube.com and has responded to concerns about the privacy implications. When you leave a .gov domain, it signals that you are leaving a protected area. Liz wonders about the efficacy of using disclaimer language, however. At Change.gov, if you decided to apply for a job, you start getting a lot of emails from the transition team.

The State Dept. Blog, “unfortunately named DipNote,” has been expanded. They twitter now. On Twitter, they’ve responded to citizen questions. E.g., Rebecca MacKinnon pointed out that a Chinese citizen had been arrested. The State Dept. tweeted that they were looking into it, although that tweet was deleted from Twitter shortly afterward. Rebecca also noticed that State Dept. photos posted on Flickr were marked as copyrighted; State now gives them Creative Commons licenses. Liz points to the CC notice and the DMCA takedown notice on the same page at Change.gov and says that there we see the manifestation of the conflict between acknowledging the culture of sharing and the support of existing rules.

She worries about the “googlization of government,” i.e., commercial entities hosting info that is part of the public record. E.g., gov’t sites that use Google Maps.

At Recovery.gov, you are encouraged to “share your story.” But what happens to those comments? How are they archived? Which ones will be displayed. They say in six months they’ll start posting that material, but it’s not clear how.

Q: [me] Whitehouse.gov has started posting at Facebook where people can comment…
A: And this is a disaster for archiving.
Q: What would you do with comments at Whitehouse.gov blog?
A: I’d like to see moderated comments. I do understand that there are limited government resources. Creating digital versions of Congressional records would maybe be a better way to spend the money.

Q: By going onto Facebook, the Admin is reaching out into civic society. That conversation would have been in coffee shops and not part of the public level. So maybe this shouldn’t be archived. How do we draw the lines as the lines between public and private are being blurred?
A: It’s a complicated thing. Suppose there are responses from officials to comments on FB? These are always difficult issues. [Paraphrasing!]

Q: Does government data include the back and forth between citizens? If we say it’s part of the public record, the gov’t won’t be able to participate, or build helpful stuff, as quickly. Would we want an archived federal Twitter that was crappy but kept a permanent record? Should the gov bring more of these social tools in house, or use existing, commercial sites and give up on including everything in the permanent record?
A: I tend toward wanting more stuff in public and archived. Let’s think about harvesting some of the discourse going on in the crowd.

Q: It seems like they’re doing lots of experimentation without the backbone of a full, stable archive behind it. Is this experimentation is leading us into an unknown state…?
A: The Archive is archiving some material on third party sites. The WhiteHouse.com blog is impersonal and press-release-y, while the TSA blog (started under Bush) is folksy. So, some of these experiments have histories.

A: I’d give Recovery.gov low marks for transparency because the PDFs are packed with charts that are not reusable.

Q: Social media is relatively new but and people express things that they don’t want known 5 years later…
A: A student applying for a job as a police officer found that they looked at his FB page and the pages of his friends. In the old days, they would have called his friends and asked questions.
Q: We’ve shifted the line between public and private life. Are we going to be able tor retract things from the public record?
A: That will be an issue.

Q: Any examples of the next frontier or participation, namely direct democracy
A: They still count emails. It’s quantitative, not qualitative. I worry about pseudo-interactivity, such as town hall meetings and the use of the Internet for political spectacle. That’s why I worry about these “share your stories” sites.

Q: During the Malagasi coup, people in Madagascar started talking about the deposed president finding sanctuary in the US Embassy, using Twitter. That could have flash-mobbed the embassy. Within 7 mins, the US embassy had responding, tweeting that the rumor was false. Can we give Obama a little bit of a break? All of us engaged in social media will screw up dozens of times …
A: That’s why we shouldn’t be cheerleaders. “I’m impressed by many of the social media efforts, but I think this form of criticism is important to do.”
Q: How do we encourage people to experiment in these spaces? As people go into these tools, they’re inept at first. At what point does the criticism discourage government officials from experimenting?
A: Many of my criticisms are that they’re not doing enough. Not enough commenting, with data representation, experimenting with new forms of participation.

Q: How much of out-of-the-box thinking are they doing with social media?
A: Theyre usually using them the way people already do. I wish they’d be more experimental.

Q: A crowd consists of the people who are uninformed. Government is about managing uncertainty. But if the info you get is biased and uninformed, you can’t manage. What’s the role of the crowd?
A: I don’t take as dark a view of the crowd. You can create political spectacles where a crowd is just a display, but you can get more participatory forms. There can be smart mobs. There are ways they can participate that are meaningful. The Obama admin is trying to take advantage of social occasions that are oriented around civic identity, not persuasion. “As a rhetorician, this is an interesting administration to watch.”

Q: Are Republicans inherently bad at social media?
A: Not at all. Sam Brownback had a great Web site. It does not divide easily along partisan lines.
Q: It depends in part on the demographics of the party. Libertarians have an incredible presence on line.
Q: Markos Moulitas says that Republican’s political philosophy leads them to be uncomfortable with bottom-up media…
A: Republicans do seem to like talk radio, where only a few get to participate.

Q: There was a time when there were a small number of leftwing political blogs and they bemoaned the fact that they had so little Web presence compared to conservative and libertarian blogs, around 2002-3. The populist element is present in all parties and drives a lot of social media. Some believe that the Dean campaign derailed because it thought the comments on its blog were representative of the world…
A: The postmortems are still being done.

Q: I’m not sure how I feel about the gov’t investing enough in social media to do it well. Experimentation is great, but totally botching it at the federal level isn’t good for anyone…
A: Good search on gov’t websites should be a top priority. To get all of Bush’s signing statements, you’d have to know to search on “shall construe.”

Q: Don’t you need a proprietary company to provide those services?
A: We need to be asking questions. [Tags: egovernment egov e-gov social_media facebook twitter transparency ]

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To me, the coolest thing about WhiteHouse.gov going all social media on us is not that it shows that the White House knows about this stuff, or even that it understands that we now want the news to come to us. It’s that at the White House Facebook page, the comments are turned on.

I do understand why the WhiteHouse.gov site has been reluctant to allow us to leave comments on the official site. Oh, sure, you can fill out a form and submit it, but this knowingly commits the Fallacy of Scale, i.e., believing that anyone is going to read your message. We want at least to be able to read one another’s messages. But, I assume the staff is afraid that open commenting on White House blog posts will enable situations that are sticky beyond escape. What do you do when people get racist, anti-Muslim, and all around stupid? There are answers, but none are as good (from the White House media point of view) as not enabling the problem in the first place.

So, now WhiteHouse.gov is cross posting to its Facebook page. If you want to comment, go there. Because it’s not the White House’s site, trashy comments don’t littering the White House lawn. Facebook allows WhiteHouse.gov to distance itself sufficiently from the commenters to enable commenting. It’s a great step forward.

The next step: WhiteHouse.gov should respond to some of the comments, either in the comments area or in blog posts themselves.

Meanwhile: Well done, WhiteHouse.gov! Well done.

[Tags: white_house whitehouse.gov egov e-gov cluetrain e-government blogging facebook ]

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Remember how the media leapt on the study that showed that being on Facebook lowered your grades in school? The study was, shall we say, flawed. But it was a media-seeking rocket. Now, 2.5 weeks later, Josh Pasek, eian more, and Eszter Hargittai have published “Facebook and academic performance: Reconciling a media sensation with data” at First Monday, a peer-reviewed site.

Here’s the abstract:

A recent draft manuscript suggested that Facebook use might be related to lower academic achievement in college and graduate school (Karpinski, 2009). The report quickly became a media sensation and was picked up by hundreds of news outlets in a matter of days. However, the results were based on correlational data in a draft manuscript that had not been published, or even considered for publication. This paper attempts to replicate the results reported in the press release using three data sets: one with a large sample of undergraduate students from the University of Illinois at Chicago, another with a nationally representative cross sectional sample of American 14– to 22–year–olds, as well as a longitudinal panel of American youth aged 14–23. In none of the samples do we find a robust negative relationship between Facebook use and grades. Indeed, if anything, Facebook use is more common among individuals with higher grades. We also examined how changes in academic performance in the nationally representative sample related to Facebook use and found that Facebook users were no different from non–users.v

And what are the chances that the media are going to trumpet these results that are based on actual data and careful analysis?

[Tags: facebook social_networks media ]

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