The Revolution Will Not Be Twitterized

I may be a really late in piping in about this Malcolm Gladwell article in the New Yorker, Small Change (Oct 12, 2010). I actually started writing this post and then forgot to finish it. I also decided not to say much at the time it was published to avoid the blogisphere kerfuffle about whether or not Mr. Gladwell dissed social networking sacred cows. Now that some time has passed I want to say that I feel the criticism was unwarranted and that Mr. Gladwell actually did some good in his attempt to set the record straight on the difference between activism and networking.

Yes, Mr. Gladwell comes on strong with the "we seem to have forgotten what activism is" argument. Still the article does a fine job of pinpointing the real value of social networks. That social networks are loose links and are great at creating communities. But if you want to bring that community to action then you need stronger links with clear direction, purpose and leadership, something social networks aren't built to do.

This goes back to an argument I've used many times, decide what you want to do first, then pick the technology that will support it. In other words, communication can be loose or specific, and some ways of communicating are more effective at bringing a group to action over others. The fact that there are new forms of communication does not exclude other forms. The article quotes historian Robert Darnton:

"The marvels of communication technology in the present have produced a false consciousness about the past—even a sense that communication has no history, or had nothing of importance to consider before the days of television and the Internet.”

In my mind this is really accurate and it sets up Mr. Gladwells premise: That there are many forms of communication that hold importance for what it can do for us. Confusing the ability to network more effectively with activism is doing both activism and social networks a disservice. Both have great value in this world but they are not the same thing.

Twitter, Facebook, and social activism : The New Yorker

I'm a Google social butterfly

Check out your Social Circle to see who Google links you to. This info is complied using:

• Direct connections from your Google chat buddies and contacts (3, 3 with content)
• Direct connections from links that appear on your Google profile (0)
• Secondary connections (282) that are publicly associated with your direct connections

For the full link URL : http://www.google.com/s2/u/0/search/social#socialcircle

Will the real Robin Sage please stand up?

"I had access to e-mail and bank accounts. I saw patterns in the kind of friends they had. The LinkedIn profiles would show patterns of new business relationships."

This is a quote from a ComputerWorld interview with Thomas Ryan, a security professional who created a fake persona to see how much information he could access via social networks. He stacked the deck by creating a young, cute, and highly intelligent woman, Robin Sage, and put her out on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The flirtatious cybergeek was able to make a few hundred friends in Intelligence and Government circles and gained access to sensitive information. It's an interesting lesson based on common sense: "The big takeaway is not to friend anybody unless you really know who they are." Like the recent Soviet Spy discovery, a cute face with a smarty pants background goes a long way in how we "trust" someone.

Fake femme fatale shows social network risks - Computerworld

Herre we go again...

Sigh, this is classic for anyone who's worried about data privacy when developing web-based apps. The WSJ reports today that:

The practice, which most of the companies defended, sends user names or ID numbers tied to personal profiles being viewed when users click on ads. After questions were raised by The Wall Street Journal, Facebook and MySpace moved to make changes. By Thursday morning Facebook had rewritten some of the offending computer code.

Advertising companies are receiving information that could be used to look up individual profiles, which, depending on the site and the information a user has made public, include such things as a person's real name, age, hometown and occupation.

So if you click on an ad from your profile page, the referring URL is sent to the advertiser without being scrubbed. Looks like steps are being/have been taken by at least Facebook, but this is a rookie mistake. To ameliorate the sting of yet another Facebook privacy smack-down, other social networks are doing the same:

In addition to Facebook and MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5, Xanga and Digg also sent advertising companies the user name or ID number of the page being visited. (MySpace is owned by News Corp., which also owns The Wall Street Journal.) Twitter—which doesn't have ads on profile pages—also was found to pass Web addresses including user names of profiles being visited on Twitter.com when users clicked other links on the profiles.

And don' tell me advertisers armed with URL referrers back to user profile pages are making sure they are getting user's consent before looking at the profiles.

Facebook said its practices are now consistent with how advertising works across the Web. The company passes the "user ID of the page but not the person who clicked on the ad," the company spokesman said. "We don't consider this personally identifiable information and our policy does not allow advertisers to collect user information without the user's consent."

A URL referrer (i.e., user ID of the page) is a technicality; if it goes back to the user's profile page then it is a breach of a policy not to divulge personally identifiable information to 3rd parties.

I repeat myself, I'm glad all of this is happening. The social media is growing up and it's the consumers that are ensuring that things are getting safer out there. Apparently when experts expose security issues the fixes languish:

The sharing of users' personally identifiable data was first flagged in a paper by researchers at AT&T Labs and Worcester Polytechnic Institute last August. The paper, which drew little attention at the time, evaluated practices at 12 social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter and MySpace and found multiple ways that outside companies could access user data.

I know it's hip to buck the established/academic technology world in social media tech circles, but sometimes these smarty-pants can actually help to prevent some embarrassing moments.

Facebook, MySpace Confront Privacy Loophole - WSJ.com