Posts tagged facebook

I think it’s the beginning of the end of the valley as we know it. Silicon Valley historically would invest in science, and technology, and, you know, actual silicon. If you were a good VC you could make $100 million. Now there’s a new pattern created by two big ideas. First, for the first time ever, you have computer devices, mobile and tablet especially, in the hands of billions of people. Second is that we are moving all the social needs that we used to do face-to-face, and we’re doing them on a computer.

And this trend has just begun. If you think Facebook is the end, ask MySpace. Art, entertainment, everything you can imagine in life is moving to computers. Companies like Facebook for the first time can get total markets approaching the entire population…

…But Silicon Valley is screwed as we know it.

If I have a choice of investing in a blockbuster cancer drug that will pay me nothing for ten years, at best, whereas social media will go big in two years, what do you think I’m going to pick? If you’re a VC firm, you’re tossing out your life science division. All of that stuff is hard and the returns take forever. Look at social media. It’s not hard, because of the two forces I just described, and the returns are quick.
Steve Blank, professor, Berkeley and Stanford, discussing the Facebook IPO with the Atlantic. The Golden Age of Silicon Valley Is Over, and We’re Dancing on its Grave

It's a Facebook World

Via Experian Hitwise:

  1. Facebook.com received 9% of all US Internet visits in April 2012.
  2. Facebook.com received more than 1.6 billion visits a week and averaged more than 229 million US visits a day for the year-to-date.
  3. 1 in every 5 page views in the US occurred on Facebook.com.
  4. Facebook.com has received more than 400 billion page views this year in the US.
  5. The average visit time on Facebook.com is 20 minutes.
  6. The Facebook.com audience skews more female (56%) than male.

Read through for nine more Facebook stats.

Abraham Lincoln Filed a Patent for Facebook in 1845

dbreunig:

Nate St. Pierre writes:

Lincoln was requesting a patent for “The Gazette,” a system to “keep People aware of Others in the Town.” He laid out a plan where every town would have its own Gazette, named after the town itself. He listed the Springfield Gazette as his Visual Appendix, an example of the system he was talking about. Lincoln was proposing that each town build a centrally located collection of documents where “every Man may have his own page, where he might discuss his Family, his Work, and his Various Endeavors.”

He went on to propose that “each Man may decide if he shall make his page Available to the entire Town, or only to those with whom he has established Family or Friendship.” Evidently there was to be someone overseeing this collection of documents, and he would somehow know which pages anyone could look at, and which ones only certain people could see (it wasn’t quite clear in the application). Lincoln stated that these documents could be updated “at any time deemed Fit or Necessary,” so that anyone in town could know what was going on in their friends’ lives “without being Present in Body.”

A patent request for Facebook, filed by Abraham Lincoln in 1845.

I’ve long argued Facebook is working towards natural or timeless (for lack of better words) human interaction. That their central idea is relevant in any age should not be surprising.

(Though it is astounding Lincoln was imagining a nearly identical privacy system.)

(Via The Next Web)

FJP: Color me fascinated — Michael.

UPDATE: Like most things too good to be true, so too is this. Yes, we reblogged before checking into it. Yes, lesson learned.

dbreunig

Facebook Social Reader Engagement is Cratering Via Buzzfeed: The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a “frictionless” social reader app, which launched last year. If you use Facebook you’ve probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication. If you decide to click on a link it doesn’t take you to the story. Instead, it shunts you over to a signup screen for Social Reader, which you have to accept if you want to make it through to the site. This forceful behavior is how the Post’s reader app gained tens of millions of users in a few short months; it’s also how, as Jeff Bercovici at Forbes pointed out this morning, the Washington Post seems to have worn its readers — or Facebook — out. They’re annoyed, and they’re quitting in droves. Via CNET: Even worse, the tool had been getting more than 4 million daily users as recently as the second week of April, but ended up near zero for most of the rest of the month and is currently wallowing at around 220,000 daily. The publication’s social reader is advertised with this catchy plug: “News travels fast on Washington Post Social Reader. Get articles from the Web’s best sources, instantly share the stories you read with your friends, and see what your friends are reading. Start spreading the news!” But what seems clear is that the only thing that’s spreading is a viral disgust with the application. The same seems to hold true of other social readers. Dailymotion, which is a video site that features a social-reading app, also seems to be hemorrhaging users, dropping from a high of about 3.5 million in early April to about 670,000 today. And The Guardian, which topped out at nearly 6 million monthly average users and was still at 5.5 million last week, has now fallen to 3.9 million monthly average users. FJP: Possible cause — interface design within Facebook is annoying. A user shares an article, you’re interested so select a link but instead of going to the article you’re brought to an interstitial page where you’re required to sign up for the app in order to access the content. Second possible cause — as we share and share and share, we’re beginning to realize that a lot of what we read is a bit silly and it might be better not to share so much. Third possible cause — as suggested by the Washington Post’s Engagement Producer Ryan Kellet, Facebook’s “Trending Articles” feature is superseding Social Reader stories by decreasing their prominence and bucketing “most important” stories all in one place. Again, an interface issue. — Michael

Facebook Social Reader Engagement is Cratering

Via Buzzfeed:

The Washington Post was the first publication to experiment with a “frictionless” social reader app, which launched last year. If you use Facebook you’ve probably come across it: it manifests as a clustered list of stories that are almost completely unrelated except for the fact that they all come from the same publication.

If you decide to click on a link it doesn’t take you to the story. Instead, it shunts you over to a signup screen for Social Reader, which you have to accept if you want to make it through to the site. This forceful behavior is how the Post’s reader app gained tens of millions of users in a few short months; it’s also how, as Jeff Bercovici at Forbes pointed out this morning, the Washington Post seems to have worn its readers — or Facebook — out. They’re annoyed, and they’re quitting in droves.

Via CNET:

Even worse, the tool had been getting more than 4 million daily users as recently as the second week of April, but ended up near zero for most of the rest of the month and is currently wallowing at around 220,000 daily. The publication’s social reader is advertised with this catchy plug: “News travels fast on Washington Post Social Reader. Get articles from the Web’s best sources, instantly share the stories you read with your friends, and see what your friends are reading. Start spreading the news!”

But what seems clear is that the only thing that’s spreading is a viral disgust with the application.

The same seems to hold true of other social readers. Dailymotion, which is a video site that features a social-reading app, also seems to be hemorrhaging users, dropping from a high of about 3.5 million in early April to about 670,000 today. And The Guardian, which topped out at nearly 6 million monthly average users and was still at 5.5 million last week, has now fallen to 3.9 million monthly average users.

FJP: Possible cause — interface design within Facebook is annoying. A user shares an article, you’re interested so select a link but instead of going to the article you’re brought to an interstitial page where you’re required to sign up for the app in order to access the content.

Second possible cause — as we share and share and share, we’re beginning to realize that a lot of what we read is a bit silly and it might be better not to share so much.

Third possible cause — as suggested by the Washington Post’s Engagement Producer Ryan Kellet, Facebook’s “Trending Articles” feature is superseding Social Reader stories by decreasing their prominence and bucketing “most important” stories all in one place. Again, an interface issue. — Michael

U.S. Patent No. 8,171,128 — “Communicating a newsfeed of media content based on a member’s interactions in a social network environment” – Filed on August 11, 2006, and granted on May 1, 2012.

Facebook patents the News Feed, via ZDNet.

The question then becomes: will they use the patent offensively or defensively against other social networks that display news feeds in much the same way (eg., Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, etc.).

Via ZDNet:

Reading the patent more closely, you’ll see Facebook discusses how to let users see certain status updates, pictures, links to videos, and even actions friends take. The social networking giant describes keeping a profile of each person on the social network in a database, identifying relationships between said users, generating “stories” based on the connections, and then creating a News Feed for each user.

Last but certainly not least, Facebook watches what actions the viewer takes in response to the stories (such as Liking, Sharing, or commenting), and then uses that information to serve more stories. It’s also noted that content can come from outside the social network and that users can change preference settings to filter in or out what stories they see.

Nathan Jurgenson in the latest issue of The New Inquiry (to which I just subscribed): On Pinterest, we do not collectively fail at creating a “real self” as we do on Facebook. The curated Pinterest pinboards of perfectly prepared cupcakes, flawless bathroom designs, and precious haircuts make no claim to represent the full complexities of reality or self-identity. And Instagram, too, makes obvious an image-mediated unreality that’s precisely the opposite of Facebook’s claim to be the sum of one’s whole life. Facebook is a lot like identity performance offline—our online and offline identities were never that separate to begin with. We propagate the myth of identity as being natural, authentic and spontaneous and forget what thinkers like Erving Goffman and Judith Butler have painstakingly illustrated: identity, on and offline, is a performance.  FJP: It is quite an enjoyable read. On a side note, well done digital subscription strategy. First the cover design intrigued me. Then the only $2 per month for digital/ipad issues hooked me. Then the “It’s easy! If you have an Amazon.com account, you don’t even need to pull out your credit card,” got me in. Plus the issue is all about digital things and humanities things. The best! —Jihii Bonus: Check out the Arguing the Web Mixtape to accompany this issue. 

Nathan Jurgenson in the latest issue of The New Inquiry (to which I just subscribed):

On Pinterest, we do not collectively fail at creating a “real self” as we do on Facebook. The curated Pinterest pinboards of perfectly prepared cupcakes, flawless bathroom designs, and precious haircuts make no claim to represent the full complexities of reality or self-identity. And Instagram, too, makes obvious an image-mediated unreality that’s precisely the opposite of Facebook’s claim to be the sum of one’s whole life.

Facebook is a lot like identity performance offline—our online and offline identities were never that separate to begin with. We propagate the myth of identity as being natural, authentic and spontaneous and forget what thinkers like Erving Goffman and Judith Butler have painstakingly illustrated: identity, on and offline, is a performance. 

FJP: It is quite an enjoyable read. On a side note, well done digital subscription strategy. First the cover design intrigued me. Then the only $2 per month for digital/ipad issues hooked me. Then the “It’s easy! If you have an Amazon.com account, you don’t even need to pull out your credit card,” got me in. Plus the issue is all about digital things and humanities things. The best! —Jihii

Bonus: Check out the Arguing the Web Mixtape to accompany this issue. 

Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum writes about the ethics of social news apps. In particular, he notes that while there’s much we may want to share, most people don’t understand the extent of what we share. For example, one partner in a relationship reading an article about breaking up that then appears in his or her Facebook timeline. Facebook calls this frictionless sharing. Chittum believes that publishers need to be more transparent about what their Facebook apps are going to do and share. Using the highly successful Washington Post app as an example, he writes: The tagline [to the app] is “share what you read with your friends!”, which sounds innocent and useful enough. I like to share links to stories I think other people should read. Up high it says, “Okay, Read Article,” and when you push that button, it installs the app. There’s nothing telling you directly that you’re installing an app. A box in the bottom corner says “This app may post on your behalf, including articles you read, people you liked and more,” but how many people actually read that?… …Not only does this stuff show up in my news feed several times a day (Yahoo’s app is also a frequent offender), but you can also go in there and click on your friends who have the app to see what they’ve read. The history goes back months. Jeff Bercovici reported back in the fall that even if you set the Post’s Social Reader to not let anyone see what you’ve read, friends can still go in and see what you’ve read. That’s egregious. The solution, of course, comes back to the reader. First, monitor your app settings. Although, the Bercovici article gives pause as to whether that would even work. Second, contact publications about their apps and the concerns you have with them. Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review. The Ethics of Social News Apps.

Over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum writes about the ethics of social news apps.

In particular, he notes that while there’s much we may want to share, most people don’t understand the extent of what we share. For example, one partner in a relationship reading an article about breaking up that then appears in his or her Facebook timeline.

Facebook calls this frictionless sharing.

Chittum believes that publishers need to be more transparent about what their Facebook apps are going to do and share. Using the highly successful Washington Post app as an example, he writes:

The tagline [to the app] is “share what you read with your friends!”, which sounds innocent and useful enough. I like to share links to stories I think other people should read. Up high it says, “Okay, Read Article,” and when you push that button, it installs the app. There’s nothing telling you directly that you’re installing an app. A box in the bottom corner says “This app may post on your behalf, including articles you read, people you liked and more,” but how many people actually read that?…

…Not only does this stuff show up in my news feed several times a day (Yahoo’s app is also a frequent offender), but you can also go in there and click on your friends who have the app to see what they’ve read. The history goes back months. Jeff Bercovici reported back in the fall that even if you set the Post’s Social Reader to not let anyone see what you’ve read, friends can still go in and see what you’ve read. That’s egregious.

The solution, of course, comes back to the reader. First, monitor your app settings. Although, the Bercovici article gives pause as to whether that would even work. Second, contact publications about their apps and the concerns you have with them.

Ryan Chittum, Columbia Journalism Review. The Ethics of Social News Apps.

The sale of Instagram brings a harsh reality into focus, the realization that the secret rooms or private spaces online where we can share, chit-chat and hang out with our friends are fading. The few safe havens that do exist are quickly being encroached upon or are next on the shopping list for a company like Google, Apple or Facebook. The few proposed alternatives are still in their infancy… And it is clear that our personal data and online interactions are so valuable that they are powering the Web’s future.

Jenna Wortham uses the sale of Instagram to raise the question, is there anywhere on the internet where we can just hang out with our friends and enjoy our privacy?

Read more: Digital Diary: Instagram and the Internet’s ‘Secret’ Places - NYTimes.com (via onaissues)

FJP: If you’re concerned about how Facebook might use all the data that Instagram collected from you (checkins, geolocation, etc.), The Next Web has an article showing you how to export your account and all that’s in it before deleting it in its entirety.

The New York Times

Mailbag: Google+ & Social Media Edition

A graduate student at Indiana University emailed in with these questions. 

Could you introduce yourself briefly?

I’m Michael Cervieri, creator of the Future Journalism Project. I used to teach media and technology at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and at the university’s School of International and Public Affairs. In my non-FJP life I run a media technology firm with my brother Peter.

Do you like using other social media platforms other than Tumblr? What is your feeling about social media?

Tumblr’s the primary platform I engage with, then Twitter, and then Google+ and Facebook about equally… Which is to say not very much. Through the FJP I’m also playing with Pinterest and Storify.

What do I think about social media? For my personal use it’s a bit of a time suck and I have to remind myself to step away from it, head outdoors and wrap my mind around something more substantive than the flurry of information I find myself in.

For professional use it’s integral to the FJP’s ability to build audiences and engage with them. I can’t think of how we would be able to accomplish what we do without it.

Societally, I’m a big believer in tools and platforms that allow people to connect, organize and share information. Social media increases the speed with which people can do so more than any other tool in history. This is great.

My fear with it though is that people will increasingly build information silos around themselves and only hear and expose themselves to information that they want to hear, and from a partisan perspective from which they’d like to hear it.

Do you use Google+ to communicate with your friends or family members? What is your feeling about Google+ Compared with other social media platforms?

Yes, but not very much. When I signed up for G+ I purposefully put people in Circles who I was not exposed to on other platforms. When it launched I thought of almost as a social media reset button where you could start from scratch and, for me, that was a good thing.

I like its feature set and think it great in developing conversations. There are only so many places though that you can spend your time online and G+ remains probably third on my list of places to engage.

After Google+ launched it was criticized for being a clone of Facebook. What do you think of that? And what features of Google+ do you think are unique compared with Facebook?

I wouldn’t call it a clone. Instead, I think social media has a distinct, baseline feature set.

Obviously, Facebook already had them and equally obvious was that if Google was going to launch a social network it would need those specifics as well. Circles, though was an innovation. So too what they’re doing with Hangouts.

I think Google and Facebook are pushing each other to innovate and become better. This is a good thing.

Google+ Hangouts platform opens to independent developers this week. Is that a way for Google to get more out of its chat feature? Do you think is that an imitation to Facebook?

I think any time you can open your platform for third party developers to work and interact with it you’ll see an explosion of innovation and use cases that weren’t previously thought of before. I don’t think it’s an imitation of Facebook. I think it’s a recognition that opening up APIs to third party developers is something every platform needs to do if it wants to be sustainable.

The competition between social media websites is increasingly fierce. What areas do you think products of Google+ should enhance in the future?

I think it’s just further refining what they currently have. For example, they just announced that with Hangouts they’re going to allow for larger audiences rather than the previous 10 maximum that they could handle. Previously, the integrated Google Docs into Hangouts to ease onlnie collaboration.

That said, I think it’s important to think of Google as an online identity system more than as a social network. Or at least to give its desire to be an online identity system equal weight to its being a social network. That’s how its chairman Eric Schmidt described it last summer.

Facebook Buys Instagram for a Reported $1 Billion That’s billion, with a ‘b’, in cash and stock. Via Mark Zuckerberg: [I]n order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook. That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people. Glad to see they’ll keep it independent. — Michael

Facebook Buys Instagram for a Reported $1 Billion

That’s billion, with a ‘b’, in cash and stock.

Via Mark Zuckerberg:

[I]n order to do this well, we need to be mindful about keeping and building on Instagram’s strengths and features rather than just trying to integrate everything into Facebook.

That’s why we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently. Millions of people around the world love the Instagram app and the brand associated with it, and our goal is to help spread this app and brand to even more people.

Glad to see they’ll keep it independent. — Michael

These Are Girls Around Me (literally).


First answer these:

1. Is your Facebook page public?
2. Do you use Foursquare?

Then you’re probably game for search results on the app Girls Around Me, a geolocation based maps app that alerts you to girls (or guys) around you, based on your location. Using foursquare check-ins, the app finds girls in your neighborhood, and pulls their Facebook profile information for your viewing pleasure.

We tried it out and found these girls (above) around our office in NYC. It’s a little bit horrifying but a perfect example to consider the question we raised yesterday: how to decide what is public/private on Facebook and Twitter. Twitter seemed fair-game for pulling information from public tweets. But Facebook, once again, is complicated.

How many people actually bother to change their privacy settings when doing it seems so complicated?

via Cult of Mac:

Girls Around Me isn’t an app you should use to pick up girls, or guys for that matter. This is an app you should download to teach the people you care about that privacy issues are real, that social networks like Facebook and Foursquare expose you and the ones you love, and that if you do not know exactly how much you are sharing, you are as easily preyed upon as if you were naked. I can think of no better way to get a person to realize that they should understand their Facebook privacy settings then pulling out this app.

FJP: Now, if you want to make your Facebook private: Here is some help.

Photos: screenshots from the FJP’s trial run of the app.

News Orgs: their Fans and Followers, March 2012

The Onion, holding its own.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, this is US-based. H/T: Ben Piven.

How to Decide What is Public/Private on Twitter & Facebook.

Another internet ethics question. What’s acceptable to publish when sourcing information from social media networks that wasn’t originally intended for publication? 

via Poynter:

Most journalists agree that Twitter is inherently public, and anything said on Twitter is generally fair game to be reported upon. This is evident with the rise in popularity of tools like Storify, which allows reporters to aggregate public tweets around a breaking news event or other story.

Public tweets seem to be fair game. That’s the point of Twitter, after all. Anything shared privately should require asking the person to go on record.

One professor, however, worries about the risk of bad journalism from pulling tweets out of context. Jacqui Banaszynski, a professor of journalism at the University of Missouri and editing fellow at Poynter, says:

If I’m going to quote someone, the smart journalistic thing to do is to be in touch with that person beyond what you pulled off that site. Journalists should let people know when they’re performing journalism. I also think that pulling something off a site without contacting [a] person further doesn’t allow the journalist to do deeper reporting or put the comment in context. It’s very easy to take just 140 characters out of context – and that’s bad journalism.

Facebook is a bit more tricky. Because its privacy options are so complicated, users don’t always realize their profile or comments are public. Banaszynski thinks:

If it’s a public fan page, I have no problem looking at that and pulling from that. But if it’s a post between friends, I would hope a good journalist would contact the person, verify their identity and let them know they are using that info.

Until standards are set across the industry, Poynter suggests considering the following questions when deciding what’s fair game to publish:

  • What was the author’s intent? If shared in a closed group or personal profile, was it intended to be kept private?
  • How did the source respond when you asked about including the information in a story?
  • Is the author a public figure? How public? There is a difference between a school principal and a professional athlete.
  • What harm could come to the individual if the information is made public? Is that harm justified by the public benefit of the information?
  • What alternatives do you have for getting similar information? 

FJP: Good Questions. 

newyorker:

We just launched our Facebook timeline! We unlocked pivotal pieces from our archives to mark the milestones in our eighty-seven-year history. Take a look and tell us what we’ve missed, or what you’d like to see, and we may unlock your article, story, or poem and add it to our timeline.

FJP: And there goes any work I thought I might get done this afternoon. — Michael

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