Social – Page 12 – ɔimoɈɒ

Character and Social Networking

I’m a firm believer in a society founded on a results-based economy. Now that may be a term used by financial whizzkids out there in the real world, but what I mean here is that in your interactions with people daily, you should be considering the end result – what you want to get out … Continue reading “Character and Social Networking”

Now, that sounds terribly cynical in black and white and I must stress that I’m not advocating that we start categorising our friends and acquaintances on what we can get out of them because that would be a horrific application of the idea, but rather that we judge our own actions on the results that may occur. If I do this, what will happen?.

It’s this philosophy that gets you out of arguments by just apologising rather than scoring points. When I argue, I like to sulk for a little – just a few minutes of self-indulgence when all the witty and cutting remarks I didn’t say in the argument swim around my head. The result is the same – with these remarks I would have completely won that argument, but what would I have lost? Having won this argument, will I congratulate myself in my ivory tower, alone and proud?

Aldous Huxley, my flavour of the month, wrote:

And the prevailing philosophy of life would be a kind of Higher Utilitarianism, in which the Greatest Happiness principle would be secondary to the Final End principleâ€“the first question to be asked and answered in every contingency of life being: “How will this thought or action contribute to, or interfere with, the achievement, by me and the greatest possible number of other individuals, of man’s Final End?”

Seeing as Social Networks are now the ~~bubble~~ rage, how do you apply a social results-based economy to social networking? We see a little of it in social networks at the moment with the granting of “friend” status though some, like Robert Scoble, have popularised the friend status to the point that it becomes worthless. How can you complain about a limit of 5000 friends? Get over yourself. LinkedIn does a little better but is such a narrow niche and the recommendation system becomes reciprocal. You’re more likely to recommend someone who has recommended you, but who takes that first step?

With the Identity Crisis looming (and yes, it’s a crap name for my theory but you try churning out good names. We need Tim O’Reilly to popularise it and make a book!), we have to consider the consolidation of our various online identities into one semantic entity so that “the system” knows who we are but only provides that information to those we permit, to those who have some relevance to us. I don’t relish the idea of OpenSocial being the panacea there because it’s an advertising engine and I don’t see any of our governments stepping in to create something that they, by default, cannot control and mis-use.

The Jabber model works for me. I have the passwords which link my various online identities into one Island (server, service, online shopping portal). Other people verify this online identity is “me”. They have tenuous virtual connections to me through these other services which may or may not include an entry on my “Island”, we just may be strangers in strange lands elsewhere.

This post has rambled on long enough but the gist is: making your choices carefully and not based on reaction is what separates us from the animals. Being able to build social networks beyond the immediate family (or the Dunbar number) is a quality unique to humans as a consequence of our technology. The actions we take identify us as a person – they give us character. Through this display of character, we may be able to make connections to other people and have other people make connections to us on a basis of recommendation.

It would be nice to know that the people I associate myself with online all display good character. But in truth, I have no way of knowing and some of the people you’d expect to be fine, upstanding citizens simply are not.

17/100 After the Event – Carrying the Conversation Forward

I may be a tad old-fashioned but if someone gives me their number or their email address, even in the form of a business card, then I assume they want me to use it. The Business Card is an amalgam of the Visiting Card and the Trade Card. Wikipedia provides: Visiting cards included refined engraved … Continue reading “17/100 After the Event – Carrying the Conversation Forward”

I may be a tad old-fashioned but if someone gives me their number or their email address, even in the form of a business card, then I assume they want me to use it.

The Business Card is an amalgam of the Visiting Card and the Trade Card.

Wikipedia provides:

Visiting cards included refined engraved ornaments and fantastic coats of arms. The visiting cards served as tangible evidence of the meeting of social obligations. The stack of cards in the card tray in the hall was a handy catalog of exactly who had called and whose calls one should reciprocate. They also provided a streamlined letter of introduction.

With the passage of time, visiting cards became an essential accessory to any 19th-century upper or middle class lady or gentleman. Visiting cards were not generally used among country folk or the working classes.

Trade cards first became popular at the beginning of the 17th century in London. These functioned as advertising and also as maps, directing the public to merchants’ stores, as no formal street address numbering system existed at the time.

When I started out, I was a lot less comfortable with making these lukewarm calls. It’s not the same as a cold call because there’s been some contact but it’s certainly got a chill about it.

If you’re not sure about the call, then attempt another way to remind the contactee. Using services like LinkedIn or FaceBook can be a good way, even if they don’t accept you as a contact or friend. You’ve made contact. Just pipe an email to them through the built-in invitation features and wait and see. The problem with this is that you have to have your LinkedIn or FaceBook presence updated. That’s easy enough on LinkedIn but be aware what “friends” can see. It’s not just that a potential contact may be offended by the photos of you in your gallery bench-pressing barmaids with the tagline “Absolutely shitfaced on the company tab and loving it” which might be career suicide in many cases, but also what people write on your Walls. Remember also that your friends can see your friends which means that a lot of the content produced by the eejits who shared your trip to the Canary Islands will be on show as well. I’m not telling you who to have as friends or to edit out friends who might be embarrassing, but if they are likely to be putting up photos of you dressed as Freddie Mercury with a racoon in your boxer shorts, then you might want to reconsider using FaceBook or any of the non-professional-oriented web sites. There’s always LinkedIn which is a lot more no-nonsense!

The old cliches are true, of course.

Women can smell desperation, and so can Venture Capitalists and other business operators. It’s not about getting the money or the business, it’s about doing the right thing for your business. Treat it like a child. You want to nurture it, not raise it to literacy and sell it into slavery.
The one about the chickens and the hatching? Conversations are just words. Just because you start off a conversation with someone, it doesn’t mean that you have to see it through. Business is about taking a few eggs and keeping them warm. Depending on the heat you apply, some of them will hatch. Some of them will burn. And some of them are really nice with toast and a little salt.
You’ll wait for an age for a bus, then three will come at once. Remember that you don’t have to get on any of them. You can be choosy with your business deals and I’d recommend that if you are sensible you can avoid picking up business partners that will, in the long run, bugger things up.
Any landing you can walk away from is a good one. So it failed, so it bollocksed up. You’ve still got your health, right? There’s always tomorrow? The rule I live with is that it’s okay to make mistakes, as long as they’re not fatal mistakes.

The point being, don’t be afraid to take the next step. The next person you meet might be the person who changes your life. And maybe it won’t be today, it might be in a years time when you’re in a different place.

But if you don’t make that callback. If you don’t make that first step, then you’ll never know.

[Chris Brogan’s 100 topics]

So who owns the data in your address book?

Damien Mulley calls the recent Scoble-FaceBook spat a “gnat on a rhino’s arse”. In short, Scoble took copies of 5000 identities using an automated script from those Plaxo folk. Damien says: I gave Facebook permission to store my data, I give it to Google. They give me some lightweight guarantees that theyâ€™ll be careful with … Continue reading “So who owns the data in your address book?”

Damien Mulley calls the recent Scoble-FaceBook spat a “gnat on a rhino’s arse”. In short, Scoble took copies of 5000 identities using an automated script from those Plaxo folk. Damien says:

I gave Facebook permission to store my data, I give it to Google. They give me some lightweight guarantees that theyâ€™ll be careful with it. Plaxo and I are not friends and they have not asked to hold or transport or fondle my data. Robert gets rewarded in ways with our friendship by being able to access data but this doesnâ€™t mean I wanted him to harvest it.

Coincidentally I was asked for the contact details of an ex-employee by one of the guys who work for me. I swore at my iPhone because you can’t email or SMS a contact to someone (Come on Apple, for feck sake). I flipped open my laptop, opened Address Book, dragged a VCARD to Mail with a little bit of ExposÃ© trickery and sent it off. As it sent I wondered whether keeping an address book on a computer, even as an individual required some sort of controls, registration under the Data Protection Act?

Scoble is a relatively benign example but with 5000 friends on FaceBook he was able to scrape a lot of information. Enough to be a competent identity thief. And when someone asks to be your friend on FaceBook, do you really think about it in that way? If a friend of a friend asks to be your friend, would you accept?

I’m pretty glad I wasn’t Scoble’s friend.

Social networks make us more stupid

David Brin writes for EDGE on their 2008 question: I certainly expected that, by now, online tools for conversation, work, collaboration and discourse would have become far more useful, sophisticated and effective than they currently are. I know I’m pretty well alone here, but all the glossy avatars and video and social network sites conceal … Continue reading “Social networks make us more stupid”

David Brin writes for EDGE on their 2008 question:

I certainly expected that, by now, online tools for conversation, work, collaboration and discourse would have become far more useful, sophisticated and effective than they currently are. I know I’m pretty well alone here, but all the glossy avatars and video and social network sites conceal a trivialization of interaction, dragging it down to the level of single-sentence grunts, flirtation and ROTFL [rolling on the floor laughing], at a time when we need discussion and argument to be more effective than ever.

I agree that social networks are trivialising communication, the quality of the human species which really sets us apart. Our ability to formulate ideas would be wasted without the ability to share them. It’s therefore unfortunate that the vast majority of FaceBook conversation seems to be in comparing trivia knowledge, attacking each other with virtual werewolves or using the platform to spread the latest YouTube hit about some girl baring her breasts on webcam when her dad walks in (and I certainly believe that each and every one of those was staged).

I ache for meaning in conversation. Some old fashioned conversation about The Selfish Gene or the Null Hypothesis of Alien Life. Conversation where my preconceptions might be challenged, firing my imagination and igniting something in my poor brain long thought dormant.

Funwall? Fuck off.

12/100 How Schools Could Use Social Media

At first glance, the association seems obvious. School is all about learning but also about socialising with other human beings (in the sense of trying to make you sociable). Pastoral care can also be a term generally applied to the practice of looking after the personal and social wellbeing of children under the care of … Continue reading “12/100 How Schools Could Use Social Media”

At first glance, the association seems obvious. School is all about learning but also about socialising with other human beings (in the sense of trying to make you sociable).

Pastoral care can also be a term generally applied to the practice of looking after the personal and social wellbeing of children under the care of a teacher. It can encompass a wide variety of issues including health, social and moral education, behaviour management and emotional support.

– link, Wikipedia

Judging this, about utilising the positive aspects of peer pressure, the power of social media would seem to be greatly beneficial in a school or formal education setting.

Schools in this country, on the other hand, take a different view. They routinely block access, just like big companies, to social media web sites and punish those who try and access their services. The advantages of social media in terms of collaboration is rigidly controlled – and espouses a lot of the negatives. I loathed group homeworks because I knew that I’d end up doing the vast majority of the work because some people you could never depend on (probably because the peer pressure to not do the homework was greater than the pressure to do the homework).

Another negative aspect of social media was the recent suicide of a teenage girl who was harassed on Myspace by the parents of a girl in her school. Again, surprisingly these adults are not being incarcerated for cyberstalking at least.

By bringing social media into the classroom where it can be also viewed by teachers as well as parents, we could hope to get some increased transparency into the lives of our children as they grow and develop into young adults. By relegating it to an after-school pursuit, exercised while the child is at home and the parents may be trying to make dinner or just catch a breath after a days work, it becomes the province of the child alone. Parents and educators need to be embracing it – to use it as a way of spreading awareness and education, to help their wards make friends and at the same time, be on hand for when things turn nasty.

In the most simple terms I wish my kids schools would update their web sites regularly and would it be too much to ask to put together an RSS feed? I’ve done some work in this area for the campaign to improve Colby Park Playground in Four Winds and also with the What’s on Where for Kids web site. Having a school blog with comments open to parents would provide a very effective method of feedback and provides the simplest form of the read/write web, the essence of social media, turning the web into a conversation.

[Chris Brogan’s 100 topics]

11/100 My Children Will Do it Differently

I remember, about 100 years ago, in 1983 I was in school and being coached into writing a letter in French to a French person in return for a letter back in English. I remember not being utterly thrilled with the idea. About two years later a Spanish girl at a resort foisted her home address onto me as I climbed onto the bus to leave for home. She then followed me onto the coach and refused to get off unless I kissed her. I was horribly embarrassed as forty passengers on the coach sighed a collective “awwww” at the prospect of such young love. I was fourteen, she was sixteen. And it went nowhere. Making long distance friends just wasn’t convenient back in the 80s.

Due to life I made a lot of friends on the Internet over the years – some I got to know beyond their internet handles and some remain a bit of mystery. Some, I miss – like Coral and Wildeyes – and others I just keep good memories of. Making long distance friends had gotten a lot easier but because net access seemed to be restricted to diehard geeks and people in college, you might find that you lost track of people as soon as they graduated. And some people may not realise you were friends because your username now is utterly different to the username you had in college.

Later still, when I became single again, I made some more friends across the Internet. Some like Jared, Zach, Lewis, Stefano, Lynda, Ali, Suzi, James, Waleska and I’m sure there are others I could mention, have become regular friends. The girl I’m going to marry in 2008 I also originally met on the ‘net though it took a year of on-off real world friendship for us to become more than that. I love you, Arlene x.

What I’ve noticed about FaceBook, in the few months I’ve been there is that it adds very little to my online experience. It, and other sites, provide an online connecting experience for people where they can message each other, find old friends, make new friends and keep alive a tenuous connection which may become a friendship but may equally also remain as just a coincidence (oh, so we went to school together. How….quaint.) I’m not in touch with any of my classmates from school. I don’t know how it happened but I just didn’t have anything in common with them and it means that now school is a (very) distant memory, I see no reason to suddenly hook up with these people who, let’s be honest, I didn’t like much when I was 17 and I see even less in common with them now. The sentiment of “I knew you once” just doesn’t cut it.

I understand my experience to be comparatively progressive. While I’m impatient with the standard of social networks at the moment (FaceBook, Friendster, FriendsReunited, FaceParty, Bebo, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn and others), it’s more because I was using an analog of instant messenger and chat rooms back in 1991 with text-based MUD/MUSH games. QUB was surprisingly negative about the phenomenon but then their policies have always been short-sighted and their facilities excellent but crippled by jobsworths. Having friends online only has never been an obstacle for me. I have about 200 people on my buddy lists and though seldom more than 20 are online at any one time, I get enough feedback about them from their presence and seldom feel the need to actively communicate. Passive communication can be enough.

My kids are already waking up to a world where their playmates are not in the house next door. Whether it’s doing homework across a videoconferencing link, sharing ideas via email or instant messenger, meeting online with the Mii avatars to play online games or even just beating up Cogs in Disney’s MMORPG “Toontown” with other cartoon-themed players, they’re not going to be cognisant that in the “olden days” we had to travel to a friends house in order to play. Traveling will be one of many options – and I think it will be important to reinforce the importance of face-to-face play.

But this world of tenuous but less ephemeral connections I fully expect my kids to retain these coincidental friends for much longer on their buddy lists. Where I am wowed by the possibilities of the computer in my hand, I find non-technologists to be under-awed. Their understanding of what went before and what is possible now is not connected. They don’t necessarily realise how hard it is to build these networks and services – as much as I don’t really understand how a TV works.

I want to actively encourage their participation in these online worlds of connected presence. Where the four of them will have an online protected identity, connected securely to their friends and family.

[Chris Brogan’s 100 topics]

Digital Nomads

I’ve spent a lot of time in the past talking about “Going Bedouin”, an idea of working that I adore and which I have tried to do for several years, while working for a large telecoms company and also while working for my own company. I feel it helped the company pay for my productivity because as I embraced the flexibility to work from home, the company also received the benefits of me being available possibly 24×7 because I didn’t begrudge the call at 2 am (unlike the call at 2 am I got last night which I certainly did begrudge). It meant I was happy to help people out and most importantly I didn’t feel the need to demand extra money for the privilege.

Chris Brogan’s blog has an interesting post on how to become a digital nomad which is as much a marketing term as “Bedouin”.

Smartphone

It’s important to stay in contact if you’re going to be Bedouin. This means choosing your technology carefully. It’s no longer good enough to carry a pager and mobile phone. The expectation now is that you’ll get your email too and with the release of the iPhone comes the first mature implementation of a browser in a handheld device. It’s relegated my laptop for a lot of the day to the laptop bag.
Online apps

While I recognise that online apps do provide a lot of power and sometimes a lot more potential for collaboration, I’m still very much a fan of rich clients. I don’t want to use primitive web app user interfaces which haven’t really changed recently. For what they offer, it’s a lowest common denominator model. It works, but it ain’t pretty.
Centralising

This makes a lot of sense and I’d clarify by saying that as well as centralising some of your services it’s worth considering outsourcing those which don’t add value. Get everyone accounts on the same domain with the same reliable provider and keep these production services separate from your development servers and off your own machines. The economies of scale make it worthwhile.
Online/Offline Storage

Just do backups. Don’t mess around with your data. That’s one of the beauties of laptops and PDAs, for the most part they have insuffient storage for keeping all of your data. My laptop has a 160 GB drive in it which is a tenth of what I need for storage. My iPhone has 8 GB of storage which really isn’t enough for anything other than current email. And the odd movie. Keep regular backups and consider keeping your data in the cloud – so you can access it from anywhere.
Messaging/Presence management

If you’re not using instant messenger applications in business then you’re behind the times. I have no doubts that Skype and iChat will make it onto the iPhone which will make my phone the hub of my communications network rather than my laptop. I don’t believe for a second that Twitter and similar wanky apps are going to to be the core of the semantic web. They’re missing everything to do with context. I don’t wast to know only a short message about someone. I want to know where they are, how they are and whether they want to meet for coffee. FaceBook or Google would seem to be the contenders here for writing the meta-app which will fulfill your context needs. I just don’t really want content delivered as a side order to a main course of advertising.
Plan your gear

This means not only making sure the kit you have is the right kit, but making sure you invest in ways and means to keep that gear running. I get a full day out of my always-on, incredibly busy iPhone. That means, if I’m planning ahead, always making sure I have at least got an iPod connection cable handy for a quick juice-up if I’m running low. For laptops you have to consider most have a battery life of 2-3 hours with some stretching it out to 5. So that’s more bulk to lug about. You’ll also have to get less shy about using power points in coffee shops and airports. The staff in the places I have been have never objected to me plugging in. Scope them out and make a beeline for them if they are free. Power is a more valuable commodity to a mobile worker than WiFi. Think about that.

For me it’s a waiting game. I’m waiting to see what will be possible with the iPhone when the SDK is released as I’m filled with ideas on how to manage this, how to add to what is already out there. I’m less and less keen on FaceBook and their constant barrages of crap but they are in the best position to start providing an implementation of the “digital shadow” (as PJ called it.

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