Today is Steve Case’s birthday
Since it’s public knowledge that today is Steve Case’s birthday, I don’t feel too badly ‘outting’ him on this juicy bit of personal info. Steve has chosen to let his Facebook friends know this fact and since he’s been bopping around Facebook lately - I bet a lot of people know that it’s Steve’s birthday today.
Obviously not all of you are Steve’s Facebook friend - so the issue arises- “am I betraying Steve’s confidence, privacy and other ‘identity rights’ by stating that today is his birthday?”
Well this issue of privacy via info gathered on social networks is exactly what Denise Howell is talking about in her post Facebook’s data feeds a data leak?
Denise talks about an on-going debate about Facebook’s News Feeds and the many ways that URIs can get out and become public knowledge. This whole situation leads to many levels of corruption, misuse and at best - misunderstanding of what the technology can do. Clearly you’d better be careful in what you’re doing - cause everyone’s gonna find out.
I myself have found my InBox on EVERY social network I’ve ever been on - flooded with requests for so-called ‘friendships’.
Way back in the day - me and Joi Ito gamed Orkut to show that this whole game of ‘collecting’ friends - was a joke.
Clearly these names on a list aren’t my friends - and you can take THAT to the social capital bank! So why would you trust anything important or info that matters to you - to some random crowd of folks standing in a public square?
So this brings up trust and a whole ‘nother Pandora’s Box to close!
My solution to all this was to add granular levels of relationships in PeopleAggregator - and I certainly hope other vendors support his notion - as well.
One can be a Best Friend, Good Friend, Friend, Acquaitance and Stranger in PeopleAggregator. But relationships can be established - none the less. You just have to define what KIND of relationship you have with this person.
But this debate on identity rights, privacy and social networking doesn’t stop here.
I myself have been fascinated with the opt-in rights of end-users when they get ‘moved’ (along with the rest of their social graph) to new networks or systems. When I joined StumbleUpon today - I was given the option of deciding who I was going to ‘invite’ into the system. This is the dream scenario in social graph portability - that moment when I can import all my social capital - in full swoop.
But does everyone on that ‘friends list’ WISH to get imported?
I say we need an industry norm which allows folks to ‘opt-in’ to being moved to new networks. This ‘opt-in’ checkbox would come - ‘default off’ - and have to be explicitly checked on - before one could be exported from one system and ‘auto-invited’ into a new one. All systems/networks would/should support this ‘opt-in’ control and we’ll have handed the end-users another key link in the chain of open standards for social networking.
Final note: the screen shot below was SUPPOSED to be of the screen StumbleUpon shows me - when it came time to decide who to ‘auto-invite’ in - from my list of Facebook friends. But SumbleUpon’s Facebook app is down now. So instead I’m showing a partial list of Stumblers from Walnut Creek, CA.
Pretty coolio they got so many folks into their system! Props to StumbleUpon. Didn’t they get bought already?
Here’s that missing screen - it finally came up. This is what SumbleUpon offers you when ‘auto-invite’ in your Facebook friends - into StumbleUpon. No face should appear on this list - if they didn’t explicitly opt-in (is what I’m saying.)
August 21st, 2007 at 7:06 pm
Hmm. On the one hand, I like privacy as the default option. But isn’t requiring opt-in for importing to another social network just a return to the status quo of “Great, I’m on another social network and I have to re-invite all my friends?”
August 22nd, 2007 at 7:09 am
I like the range of “friendship” - similar to facebook’s different “how do you know this person” but significantly more useful (I insist on claiming that I “hooked up” with male friends on facebook to see if they notice).
The real rubber to the road in your range of friendship might be to require an action. Writing a a linked-in recommendation is a commitment of time that indicates a LOT more than a one click reply to a “be my friend” spam.
August 22nd, 2007 at 2:45 pm
Dear Friends,
A group of researchers at University of Nevada, Las Vegas, are investigating effects of Weblogs on “Social Capital”. Therefore, they have designed an online survey. By participating in this survey you will help researches in “Management Information Systems” and “Sociology”. You must be at least 18 years old to participate in this survey. It will take 5 to 12 minutes of your time.
Your participation is greatly appreciated. You will find the survey at the following link. http://faculty.unlv.edu/rtorkzadeh/survey
This group has already done another study on Weblogs effects on “Social Interactions” and “Trust”. To obtain a copy of the previous study brief report of findings you can email Reza Vaezi at reza.vaezi@yahoo.com.
August 26th, 2007 at 10:02 am
It was my understanding (which I could be very wrong about since I’ve yet to commit to reading Brad’s social graph white paper), that the social graph would be used to make it easier to find your friends on any new network you joined, not to simply facilitate import all of your connections from one network to another. Given that users some times register w/different e-mail addresses or difference user ids, either one of these identifiers alone isn’t sufficient to find one’s connections on a newly joined network.
As for the degrees of friendship thing, I’m not a fan of creating any sort of structure around this. If users really care about it beyond some simple default (which FB basically addresses w/3 levels), then a user s/b able to create their own groupings and add people into those as well as set that group’s data viewing controls. Sure it’s a lot of work if this matters to you, but no easy way around it. By the same token, I don’t believe any level of data access control will ever get us around the old adage that “you should never put anything online that you wouldn’t want any one to read”. Even the tightest control of all, e-mail, where you send your note to *one* person, frequently has a way of finding itself getting distributed w/o the author’s authorization. Why would any one think it would be diff on any social network?