Disruptive Conversations

Remaining connected... to the dead?

Here's another piece to the social media/uber-connected-society puzzle we need to work out as we continue this grand experiment we are all a part of...

what happens to our social networking connections when we die?

Today a former colleague asked to connect to me on Plaxo Pulse, but when I approved his request, Plaxo Pulse put up an error message saying the connection couldn't be established right now. However, since the request message also disappeared, I decided to check my list of Plaxo contacts to see if this person was, in fact, added (he was, despite the error message).

In doing so, though, what did I see on the top of one of my pages of contacts but this:

Now, as many readers may know, Marc Orchant passed away back on December 12th. He and I had been corresponding via Robert Sanzalone's PacificIT Skype group chat and at some point in there while we in the chat were all trying out the new (at the time) Plaxo Pulse, he and I became connected there.

The Pulse connection, of course, survived his death.

Marc and I were not connected directly on LinkedIn, but I do note his profile is still there. If he was on Facebook, there does not seem to be an account there. The question remains, though, what happens to all of your connections when you die? Do you have a plan for someone to go in and remove all of your accounts? Or should they just live on forever?

Technorati Tags: social media, social networking, plaxo, plaxo pulse, marc orchant, death

Calling all developers - Social Dev Camp East - May 10th, 2008 - Baltimore

If you are developing applications in the social media / social networking / web 2.0 space, you should know about Social Dev Camp East, coming up on May 10, 2008, in Baltimore. Some info is in PBWiki, although most of the activity is happening on the Facebook event page. It looks like some great topics and events and given that Dave Troy is one of the organizers, I expect it should be good. Dave's the guy behind Twittervision and several other sites and is also the one who put the open source Asterisk PBX running on top of a Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner (seriously... "Press 1 to start sucking"!).

On the wiki there are already a bunch of folks signed up and I look forward to hearing about what happens. (I won't be able to attend due to other commitments.)

Technorati Tags: socialdevcamp, applications, socialmedia, socialsoftware, facebook, facebook platform, development, programming, barcamp

LinkedIn rolls out "company profiles" with unique data mining info

How could you improve on the basic "company profile" if you had access to a ton of information about the employees of companies? LinkedIn this week aims to show what can be done as they rolled out their new "Company Profiles" feature that provides information about companies in LinkedIn's massive database of users.

In the past, when you looked at someone's "full" profile in LinkedIn (here's a pointer to mine, but you need to be logged into LinkedIn and click the button on the bottom of the page to see my "full" profile), the names of each company listed in your "Experience" area were links that, when clicked, did a search of LinkedIn for other users who included that company name in their profile.

Today, clicking on a company's name in someone's profile may instead give you a "Company Profile" page if that company is one of the 160,000 companies profiled thus far (as mentioned in LinkedIn's blog entry). If the company is not one of the 160,000 profiled so far, the link will perform the same kind of search as before. How do you know if a company has a profile? As shown in the image to the right, in my profile there is a "document" icon next to "Voxeo Corporation" but not next to the "Voice Over IP Security Alliance (VOIPSA)". The icon provides a visual cue that Voxeo has a company profile while VOIPSA does not.

The company profile begins with the typical kind of information you would see on pretty much any "company profile" on the web. It has a standard description, some stats about where the company is, the number of employees, etc. But then the company profile goes beyond what you might see in other places and makes use of the incredible amount of data that LinkedIn users have entered in to all their profiles. You get a list of employees at the company in your LinkedIn network... and then the "New Hires", listing new people at the company. Also "Popular Profiles" based on who has visited various profiles within LinkedIn.

There is also an interesting section showing where people have come from before joining the company and after leaving the company. The image on the left shows this section for Mitel (which was more interesting than Voxeo's). From looking at a couple of company profiles, I'm guessing that the before and after lists are probably compiled based on the number of LinkedIn users joining and leaving a company. It also brings out some interesting stats - who know that Mitel employees are most connected to Brasil Telecom Internet?

The Company Profile also contains interesting info about job titles, top schools, median age of employees as well as median tenure for employees in the company. (Again, see Mitel's page for an example.) Now, obviously, this is only calculating this info based on employees with a LinkedIn profile so it's not 100% accurate. Still it is indeed interesting data about a company.

How widely used will these profiles be? I don't know, but I could certainly see them being used by candidates evaluating a job with a company (or by people looking to understand the background of someone being considered for a position).

Regardless, I find it an intriguing use of data mining to make use of all the info LinkedIn has by aggregating all the information we are putting into the site. Cool to see. (As my mind thinks of all the other statistics they must be able to glean from their massive database.)

By the way, here's a video the LinkedIn folks put up to describe the feature:

What do you think? How useful do you see these company profiles being?

Technorati Tags: linkedin, socialnetworking

Chris Brogan's free eBook on "Social Media Starting Points"

Chris Brogan yesterday released a free eBook "Social Media and Social Networking Starting Points" that does a nice job outlining what you need to think about as you look at starting to use social media and social networking for business communication. It's a well-done piece. As I commented, the only additional item I thought should be included was a comment policy, but that's mostly due to my recent experiences with the need for one! However, I'd still definitely recommend this eBook to people... it's great that Chris is putting together material like this.

Technorati Tags: chris brogan, chrisbrogan, socialmedia, social media, socialnetworking, social networking, howto, tutorial

Google's orkut to launch application platform based on OpenSocial

Does anyone still use Orkut?

Obviously some people do and the first visit to my page in eons showed me that a couple of people I know had actually been by there recently. But in the grand "battle" between Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, etc., orkut doesn't seem to get much mention these days. I know that I joined orkut back in 2004 when it launched and you had to have an invite to get in. But a year or so later I had basically left it behind (except that my account is still there and now and then does get friend requests).

So I was a bit surprised to encounter over on Official Google Blog the post "orkut going more social" that contains this text:

"Starting this month, we're enabling developers to make their social applications available to orkut users. We'll start ramping up to more than 50 million people over the next few weeks.

To prepare for this growth, we're now accepting social applications. For a while now, developers have been able to write, test, and play with applications on orkut. Later this month, however, we're going to start rolling them out to orkut users. OpenSocial developers can submit their completed applications (deadline: Feb. 15).

To help developers ready their applications, we're offering engineering support and training. We've scheduled orkut hackathons on Feb. 14-15 from 10 am-6 pm at the Googleplex in Mountain View and via videoconference in New York. For more information or to RSVP, please email hackathon.rsvp@gmail.com. If you can't attend, we hope to see you in the OpenSocial forums or on chat (irc://irc.freenode.net/opensocial)."

The post obviously has more information and the relevant links.

That Google is doing this is no surprise given their backing of the OpenSocial initiative. It is interesting to see the note about "ramping up to more than 50 million people". Is that the current number of active orkut users? If the Wikipedia entry is accurate (that states 67 million users in August 2007) that would certainly be plausible.

Regardless, it is great to see another social network indicating that they will have working support of OpenSocial apps soon. The more there are, the more incentive it is for app developers to develop for OpenSocial.

Technorati Tags: google, opensocial, orkut, socialnetworking, applications, application platforms, apis

LinkedIn launches new research platform for financial markets

Over on O'Reilly Radar Tim O'Reilly writes in "LinkedIn Announces New Research Platform" about LinkedIn's new "LinkedIn Research Network" to provide primary research to financial markets:

"The big difference is that GLG has crafted a stable of hand-picked experts, while LinkedIn will be data mining its database of millions of users to find potential experts. This is significant because hedge funds and other financial firms get little advantage if they are all taking to the same people, even if those people are the top experts in the field. Competitive advantage, referred to in financial markets as alpha, only comes when you have information that others do not. <text snipped>

Because of its Web 2.0-scale pool of connected individuals, LinkedIn hopes to provide insight from unexpected sources. He also pointed out that the social network helps you to evaluate people promoting themselves as experts: Let's say you're considering an investment in a mining concern in China. You see someone who claims to be an expert. Then you see that he's connected on LinkedIn to the CEOs of the top three zinc producers and has in his network 80% of other people you've identified as experts."

It's an intriguing move to me to see another way that LinkedIn might perhaps monetize it's massive database of people and connections. The launch of this LinkedIn Research Network is apparently a few months out and one will assume that we LinkedIn members will hear more about it (and whether we can opt in or out)... but to me it's another interesting experiment... and if it helps LinkedIn continue to be financially viable and continue to offer their service for free to all of us, so much the better.

Technorati Tags: linkedin, socialnetworking, research, linkedin research network

MySpace enters the "application platform wars" against Facebook

So today MySpace squares off against Facebook with the release of the MySpace Developer Platform. One of the key features of the "MDP" is that it is supporting the OpenSocial initiative and has a lengthy page explaining the interaction between MySpace an OpenSocial. They also provide some nice tutorials starting with (of course!) a "Hello World" and then getting right into creating an OpenSocial application.

It's intriguing to me that MySpace is not launching this with any existing high profile apps. It's really just providing a box of parts and saying... "here, have fun, go nuts!"

In fact, serious application deployment is being put on hold for a one-month period while developers try out the platform. Apps are limited to being installed by 10 users during this one-month development period, which, as other sites are mentioning, has the effect of "leveling the playing field" and giving all developers, large and small, a chance to work with the platform before it goes "live" and mass deployment of applications to MySpace's hundreds of millions of users can begin.

It will indeed be very interesting to see what developers actually do with all of those parts and what applications emerge. We'll have a clearer picture in a month, eh?

More coverage on the announcement that I found useful:

• Mashable: MySpace Developer Platform Launches; Levels the Playing Field for App Builders
• Read/Write Web: MySpace Platform Aims to Pick Up Where Facebook Left Off
• TechCruch: MySpace Developer Platform Goes Live (Sorta)
• ZD Net: MySpace Developer Platform launches (for a quick summary)

(Now, the question for me personally is this... will this be enough incentive for me to actually pay attention to my long-neglected MySpace profile? Hmmmm.... )

Technorati Tags: apis, applications, opensocial, myspace, facebook, myspace developers platform, platforms

Don't understand why we NEED "data portability"? Watch this video...

If you don't yet understand why the walls need to come down between social networks, here is this great video from Michael Pick of Smashcut Media (first seen on Particls.Blog):
DataPortability - Connect, Control, Share, Remix from Smashcut Media on Vimeo.

Indeed... this kind of portability is exactly what we need. We need to have control over our own information and network. Join the conversation over at DataPortability.org....

Technorati Tags: attention, data portability, dataportability, dataportability.org, identity, social media, social network portability, social networking, social networks, walled gardens

May the walls start to come down... Facebook joins with Google and Plaxo in joining Dataportability.org

As I've written about in the past, I continue to remain concerned that social networks are really just "walled gardens" that are isolated from each other. Late last week, Robert Scoble getting temporarily kicked out of Facebook brought the attention of many of us to "DataPortability.org" and its "dataportability-public" Google Group. Now, today brings word that Facebook, who has usually been a holdout in "open" announcements to date (like OpenSocial) will be joining in to the Dataportability.org project. The news can be found here:

• Particls Blog: "Individuals from Plaxo, Google and Facebook join DataPortability.org Workgroup"
• Read/Write Web: "Bombshell: Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org"
• TechCrunch: "Facebook, Google And Plaxo Join The DataPortability Workgroup"

The news is outstanding, really, for those of us who want this kind of data portability. To have basically all the major players working together will be excellent. It would, indeed, be great to have the walls start coming down...

The devil, of course, lies in the details... time will tell whether true actions will emerge out of the DataPortability.org initiative.

Still, it's a great way to start - and I've definitely joined the GoogleGroup mailing list to join in the evolution. Let's see if the walls can shake a bit, eh?

Technorati Tags: facebook, dataportability.org, dataportability, data portability, social network portability, social networks, social media, social networking, google, plaxo

LinkedIn also releases their application platform (or at least talks about it more)

I've been too busy to comment on LinkedIn's announcement of their "Intelligent Application Platform" but there are certainly tons of others who have (see also here). Some of the posts I found most interesting were at VentureBeat and GigaOm.

LinkedIn, naturally, had a blog post with an introductory video that explains the platform.

While Facebook obviously has an enormous lead in terms of developers, it will be interesting to see what traction Linked does or does not gain. They indicate they will be supporting OpenSocial, which will allow developers to make apps that run in other OpenSocial-compliant social networks as well. They also have a strong user base within the business/professional community (include me) which could be quite attractive to developers as well.

In any event, I look forward to watching the announcements from LinkedIn as they roll out this developer program over the next few months.

Technorati Tags: facebook, linkedin, applications, apis, platforms

Open Web Awards - What sites would you nominate for "Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks"?

What sites would you nominate for "Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks" for the Open Web Awards? As I described earlier, this site is one of the places you can nominate candidate sites. Please do so by leaving a comment with the word "NOMINATE" at the beginning followed by a dash and the site name. For instance "NOMINATE - Facebook.com".

Mashable.com doesn't yet have a post out with specific guidance, but in the information that they have sent to us to date they have indicated that this is basically "anything else"... social networking sites for communications professionals, anyone? hobbyists? specific fan sites?

Feel free to nominate any kinds of social networking sites that you think might fit this broad category. Please feel free to make multiple nominations - and if someone else has already nominated your site, please feel free to leave another comment with the same nomination. (Mashable.com has asked us to pass along the number of nominations we receive for each site.

Let the nominating begin! (Nominations will be closed at 11:59PM Pacific time on Tuesday, December 4th)

Technorati Tags: openweb, openwebawards, open web awards

Open Web Awards - What sites would you nominate for "Mainstream and Large Scale Networks"?

What sites would you nominate for "Mainstream and Large Scale Networks" for the Open Web Awards? As I described earlier, this site is one of the places you can nominate candidate sites. Please do so by leaving a comment with the word "NOMINATE" at the beginning followed by a dash and the site name. For instance "NOMINATE - Facebook.com".

As described in this post on Mashable.com, this category is for the large networks:

In last year’s social networking awards, Pete wrote “… we think that Facebook will continue to grow strongly in 2007.” That has certainly been the case, as the network has exploded in popularity since opening up to everyone that wants to join and launching a developer platform. However, recent concerns over its new advertising system and privacy issues have critics questioning the long-term prospects of the site. Meanwhile, MySpace remains #1 in terms of traffic, with other network such as Bebo, Hi5, and LinkedIn all sporting impressive growth in the past year.

Who do you like best? Facebook? LinkedIn? MySpace? Others? Please feel free to make multiple nominations - and if someone else has already nominated your site, please feel free to leave another comment with the same nomination. (Mashable.com has asked us to pass along the number of nominations we receive for each site.

Let the nominating begin! (Nominations will be closed at 11:59PM Pacific time on Tuesday, December 4th)

Technorati Tags: openweb, openwebawards

Joining in the Open Web Awards - nominate your candidates in the posts that follow...

As readers are aware, I've been writing both here and over on my Disruptive Telephony blog about "mashups" and how the future of communication belongs to application platforms, open standards and such. Mashable.com has long been one of the main sites I've followed to stay up on what is happening in the rapidly evolving world of mashups and applications and so when they announced the creation of the OpenWeb Awards I thought I'd join in helping promote the awards. There are now 30 blogs joining in, including many that are much more popular than I am and whom I read all the time! As the site indicates, the Open Web Awards are about:

The Open Web Awards, hosted by Mashable.com, are the first ever online, open collaboration awards event, to recognize the best online communities representing web 2.0. This unique approach to an online event is about communities, so we've taken a collaborative approach to finding a winner, enabling other blogs and websites to take part.

I have committed to soliciting nominations and votes for the following categories (FOLLOW THE LINKS to nominate a site in a particular category):

1. Mainstream and Large Scale Networks
2. Applications and Widgets
3. Social News and Social Bookmarking
4. Social Search
13. Niche and Miscellaneous Social Networks

And I will shortly be posting notes about each of those soliciting nominations. PLEASE POST YOUR NOMINATIONS IN THE POSTS FOR THE INDIVIDUAL CATEGORIES so that the Mashable folks can easily find the nominations.

Thanks for your participation and assistance.

Technorati Tags: mashups, openweb, openwebawards

Privacy and Social Networks... a great video from the Privacy Commissioner of Canada

Thanks to a tweet from Donna Papacosta, I learned of this great video from the Privacy Commissioner of Canada called "Privacy and Social Networks":

The terms of service the speaker references is the hideous ToS of Facebook, which I discussed previously and continues to make me concerned about what information I upload into Facebook.

Technorati Tags: facebook, privacy, socialmedia, socialnetworking

Still thinking about Google's Open Social... does it truly tear down the walls of social networks? Or just make widgets work across socnets?

Unless you have been under a rock for the past few days, you should by now be aware that Google released an API called OpenSocial. There is a new Google blog that had the announcement, which included this:

OpenSocial is a set of common APIs that will work on many different social websites, including MySpace, Hi5, Ning, orkut, and LinkedIn, among others. In addition, this allows developers to learn one API, then write a social application for any of those sites. Learn once, write anywhere, if you will. And because it's built on web standards like HTML and JavaScript, developers don't have to learn a custom programming language.

The list of OpenSocial partners is quite extensive... basically everyone in the social networking space except Facebook, but also including other companies such as Salesforce.com and Oracle. Having the big players like MySpace and LinkedIn is definitely key. Google has also provided a wealth of information:

• FAQ
• Articles (including tutorials to help get started)
• Documentation
• Developer's Forum

I find it all intriguing. There is a great amount of talk in the blogosphere about how this "tears down the walls" of social networks... and it does - in one aspect. It seems to me that this is really a direct shot at the Facebook Platform in that it gives application developers the ability to create applications that work across multiple networks. So from the point-of-view of a developer, this truly does open up the world of social networks. You can now write an app that is not just restricted to the confines of Facebook's walled garden, but instead can run in any of the other social networks out there (that support OpenSocial).

So it solves part of the problem out there in social networking... and it looks like quite a compelling way to do so. I'm certainly going to be reading the tutorials and experimenting with sample code.

But please let's remember that there are other issues with the walled nature of social networks. For instance:

• Why do I have to sign in with a different username and password to each of them? Why can't I just have a common (and secure) username/password that I use? (such as OpenID)
• Why do I have to recreate my friends list in each social network? (something the "social network portability" folks are looking at)

OpenSocial lets apps be created that work across multiple networks. I commend the folks behind it and supporting it. But let's please remember that it solves only one part of the overall "open" issue.

I need to really play with it more before I can comment further. In the meantime I'm capturing here a number of links related to OpenSocial that I have found useful:

• Marc Andreessen: Open Social: a new universe of social applications all over the web - and also a screencast and screenshots
• It’s Official: Google + MySpace = OpenSocial
• Facebook’s dilemma: To be OpenSocial or not to be
• Read/Write Web: OpenSocial: Three Big Concerns
• Read/Write Web: Confirmed: MySpace Joins Google's OpenSocial (includes link to video from Scoble)
• Wired: Salesforce and LinkedIn: OpenSocial Means Better Business-Centric Apps and Services

Stay tuned for more...

Technorati Tags: apis, applications, facebook, facebookplatform, google, opensocial, socialmedia, socialnetworking

O'Reilly - Facebook apps aren't as hugely successful as some would like you to think!

Over on his O'Reilly Radar blog, Tim O'Reilly pierced a bit of the Facebook application hype with his post last Friday: "Good News, Bad News about Facebook Application Market: Long Tail Rules" where he notes this:

The good news has already been widely disseminated: there are nearly 5000 Facebook applications, and the top applications have tens of millions of installs and millions of active users. The bad news, alas, is in our report: 87% of the usage goes to only 84 applications! Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users.

He subsequently noted that he did mis-use the "Long Tail" term a bit... the story here really is that the "short head" is where all the action is. Tim is careful to note:

This doesn't mean that Facebook won't become an important platform for developers, just that a throwaway Facebook app is not the ticket to quick riches. Embracing the Facebook opportunity requires more than just optimism.

Translation - all of those out there hyping the Facebook platform as the greatest invention since sliced bread need to slow down a wee bit. The Facebook platform is very cool and is an evolving application platform. It's definitely a space that people need to pay attention to... and it very well may be a place where your application may be a runaway hit - but it may not bring the instant riches that your startup's business plan envisions. At least... not yet.

Good to see this kind of data emerging and I would expect that we'll start seeing similar reports emerging from the mainstream analyst houses. Kudos to O'Reilly for being the first one I've seen out there on the topic.

P.S. I should, of course, note that Tim's blog post references the report published by O'Reilly Research: "The Facebook Application Platform" which is available for purchase for $149.

Technorati Tags: applications, facebook, facebookplatform, oreilly, oreillyradar

LinkedIn succumbs to the Facebook effect and adds a profile photo

One of the reasons some people have cited about going over to Facebook is that Facebook allows you to have a photo on your profile. LinkedIn always seemed to resist, with some people mentioning that it was more "professional" in that you weren't getting into seeing how people looked.

Whatever the past rationale, LinkedIn announced on their blog Thursday that users would be able to upload profile photos. The interface is pretty simple. In your "Accounts and Settings" area under "Profile Settings" there is a link for "My Profile Photo":

Add in a photo and you now have the option to display that photo to your contacts or to display it publicly:

The LinkedIn blog entry goes into more details. Personally, I'm quite glad to see it primarily because over time I find I've lost track of who some of my LinkedIn contacts are and it would be very nice to have a photo to remind myself of exactly who they are. Also, in a global namespace with people having similar names, it's nice to have the visual confirmation when searching that the profile belongs to the person you know. Now it will be interesting to see how quickly people do or do not upload photos.

Technorati Tags: facebook, linkedin, socialnetworking

Facebook brings the twin taboos of politics and religion into the workplace

Some time back I became a Facebook "friend" with someone I had known professionally for several years. I did not work with the person all that much, but had great respect for the person based on the several dealings I had had with them. However, now that we were "friends" I was almost immediately exposed to two pieces of information that they had included in their Facebook profile: political affiliation and religion. As it happened, this particular person's views were pretty much completely opposite to my own and before I could really think about it I experienced a deep knee-jerk reaction of "Oh, you're kidding, he/she is not really one of them?" For a brief moment, until my brain could re-engage, my respect for that person plummeted through the floor. A moment or two later, the rational side of my brain kicked in and reminded me that I had had a great amount of professional respect for the person 10 seconds before and nothing had changed that should have altered that. Still, there was that deep emotional response.

Politics? Religion? In the workplace? With professional colleagues? Huh?

At least here in North America, those are two topics that are generally taboo in the work environment. Verboten. In fact, in most areas you are not legally allowed to ask employees or potential employees about those topics. Within a work place there of course may be lunchroom discussions about recent politics and so you may learn of others viewpoints. Religion might come up, but again probably with people with whom you work closely.

But with customers? Or partners?

Never. At least in my experience.

And why should it come up, really? When you are buying a product/service from someone, or selling it to someone, what do politics or religion matter? (or gender or race?) If you are partnering with someone to deliver a service/product, again, why does it matter? What matters is whether both of you can work together and deliver the product/service - and presumably make some money through the deal.

Religion and politics should not matter in business dealings.

Now, of course, there are "business directories" that many churches offer trying to connect people within the church community, but that's a different matter as it is within that community and trying to help each out. There are also websites out there that can help you steer your business toward companies with similar views as yours. But in general, the political leanings and religious preference of a supplier or customer do not factor into the normal course of business.

Yet here we are in Facebook choosing (or not) to provide all that information to (potential) customers.

I recognize that there are a good number of folks out there who are apathetic about all things related to politics and/or religion. They don't care at all about what someone's religion is or what their politics are. I've met many. Often they say they don't care about religious/spiritual issues, haven't attended a church (or spiritual service) in years (or ever) and haven't voted in any elections. Religion and/or politics mean nothing to them and so they take no offense or don't even notice when someone states their political or religious preference.

Leaving the completely apathetic aside, though, most people have some opinion about politics and some view about religion/spirituality. The stronger those views, of course, the more deep the emotional reactions. A hard-core liberal in the US may have (or at least appreciate) a bumper sticker "Friends don't let friends vote Republican". A hard-core conservative may view all liberals as traitors and the source of all the country's problems. A strong "born again" Christian may see that the problems of the world are because people have not accepted Jesus Christ as their lord and savior and need to do so. A strong atheist may see that the problems of the world are because of the very existence of religion and that it is the root of all evil. These are deeply-ingrained views:

Politics and religion are part of our core identity that helps form who we define ourselves to be.

When that part of our identity is confronted by a polar opposite, we naturally react. Conservative Christians will have second thoughts about atheists, and atheists will have second thoughts about conservative Christians. Ultra-liberal Democrats will instinctively distrust ultra-conservative Republicans - and vice-versa. It's just part and parcel of being human and building these beliefs into your identity.

Within the work environment, though, these twin areas of politics and religion have not been part of normal discourse... but yet, if you choose to fill out those fields in Facebook, they are suddenly exposed to all your "friends".

It works the other way, of course. Some time back I added another "friend" whose politics and religion closely aligned with me. Again, without any rational thinking, the thought popped into my brain "Oh, he/she's that. No wonder why we got along so well." In the mass of people out there, we seek out those communities of like-minded people... those affinities that we can use to build stronger connections.

Which is why having fields for politics and religion make so much sense for Facebook's original audience of college students. You are about to land in a campus of 10,000 people, of whom you know basically no one. How do you find new people? How do you find potential friends? Searching on "interests" is one way... but searching on political views or religion is another great way. Odds are that if they claim a similar religious view (or upbringing), they probably have a similar world view to yours. Likewise if they have similar political leanings, you probably have more in common upon which to potentially build a friendship. It makes total sense in that environment. Likewise, if Facebook is just used among your "friends", odds are that they probably already know these views about you. But today we are overloading the term "friend" and so now it encompasses true "friends", family... and business contacts.

So it's one thing to share political/religious info with friends, family and classmates, but in business? I don't know... on the one hand there is the greater "transparency" and the chance to make connections with other people. On the other hand, there is the strong chance of potentially alienating others.

In any event, the fields are there in your Facebook profile if you choose to fill them out (and many people seem to during the process of signing up). Of course, you are limited to the choices that Facebook provides for politics. They don't offer the "It's Complicated" choice that they have for relationships, which would be quite useful. The "Religious Views" field is free text entry, so you can really write whatever you want there. It seems to me that you really have four choices:

1. Leave them blank - probably the safest choice, but potentially then losing out on some networking possibilities.
2. Enter generic choices - you could be safe and choose "Moderate" and write in something vague for a religion.
3. Fill out only one - you'll see I have a political entry but not a religious entry.
4. Fill them both out - embrace full transparency and let the world know (or at least your "friends") your affiliations and beliefs.

To me this is just yet another one of those areas where we don't fully understand the full impact of the profiles of Facebook and, in fairness, all the other social networking services. In the rush to join these services, we just fill out all sorts of information, not necessarily taking the time to think about the potential impact exposing that information may have.

What do you think? If you are a Facebook user, have you filled out those two fields? Do you think people should in an effort to be more transparent? Do you think we understand the full ramifications of exposing information like this? (Or do you think the issue I raise here is really not an issue?)

Technorati Tags: culture, facebook, politics, religion

Facebook brings the twin taboos of politics and religion into the workplace

Some time back I became a Facebook "friend" with someone I had known professionally for several years. I did not work with the person all that much, but had great respect for the person based on the several dealings I had had with them. However, now that we were "friends" I was almost immediately exposed to two pieces of information that they had included in their Facebook profile: political affiliation and religion. As it happened, this particular person's views were pretty much completely opposite to my own and before I could really think about it I experienced a deep knee-jerk reaction of "Oh, you're kidding, he/she is not really one of them?" For a brief moment, until my brain could re-engage, my respect for that person plummeted through the floor. A moment or two later, the rational side of my brain kicked in and reminded me that I had had a great amount of professional respect for the person 10 seconds before and nothing had changed that should have altered that. Still, there was that deep emotional response.

Politics? Religion? In the workplace? With professional colleagues? Huh?

At least here in North America, those are two topics that are generally taboo in the work environment. Verboten. In fact, in most areas you are not legally allowed to ask employees or potential employees about those topics. Within a work place there of course may be lunchroom discussions about recent politics and so you may learn of others viewpoints. Religion might come up, but again probably with people with whom you work closely.

But with customers? Or partners?

Never. At least in my experience.

And why should it come up, really? When you are buying a product/service from someone, or selling it to someone, what do politics or religion matter? (or gender or race?) If you are partnering with someone to deliver a service/product, again, why does it matter? What matters is whether both of you can work together and deliver the product/service - and presumably make some money through the deal.

Religion and politics should not matter in business dealings.

Now, of course, there are "business directories" that many churches offer trying to connect people within the church community, but that's a different matter as it is within that community and trying to help each out. There are also websites out there that can help you steer your business toward companies with similar views as yours. But in general, the political leanings and religious preference of a supplier or customer do not factor into the normal course of business.

Yet here we are in Facebook choosing (or not) to provide all that information to (potential) customers.

I recognize that there are a good number of folks out there who are apathetic about all things related to politics and/or religion. They don't care at all about what someone's religion is or what their politics are. I've met many. Often they say they don't care about religious/spiritual issues, haven't attended a church (or spiritual service) in years (or ever) and haven't voted in any elections. Religion and/or politics mean nothing to them and so they take no offense or don't even notice when someone states their political or religious preference.

Leaving the completely apathetic aside, though, most people have some opinion about politics and some view about religion/spirituality. The stronger those views, of course, the more deep the emotional reactions. A hard-core liberal in the US may have (or at least appreciate) a bumper sticker "Friends don't let friends vote Republican". A hard-core conservative may view all liberals as traitors and the source of all the country's problems. A strong "born again" Christian may see that the problems of the world are because people have not accepted Jesus Christ as their lord and savior and need to do so. A strong atheist may see that the problems of the world are because of the very existence of religion and that it is the root of all evil. These are deeply-ingrained views:

Politics and religion are part of our core identity that helps form who we define ourselves to be.

When that part of our identity is confronted by a polar opposite, we naturally react. Conservative Christians will have second thoughts about atheists, and atheists will have second thoughts about conservative Christians. Ultra-liberal Democrats will instinctively distrust ultra-conservative Republicans - and vice-versa. It's just part and parcel of being human and building these beliefs into your identity.

Within the work environment, though, these twin areas of politics and religion have not been part of normal discourse... but yet, if you choose to fill out those fields in Facebook, they are suddenly exposed to all your "friends".

It works the other way, of course. Some time back I added another "friend" whose politics and religion closely aligned with me. Again, without any rational thinking, the thought popped into my brain "Oh, he/she's that. No wonder why we got along so well." In the mass of people out there, we seek out those communities of like-minded people... those affinities that we can use to build stronger connections.

Which is why having fields for politics and religion make so much sense for Facebook's original audience of college students. You are about to land in a campus of 10,000 people, of whom you know basically no one. How do you find new people? How do you find potential friends? Searching on "interests" is one way... but searching on political views or religion is another great way. Odds are that if they claim a similar religious view (or upbringing), they probably have a similar world view to yours. Likewise if they have similar political leanings, you probably have more in common upon which to potentially build a friendship. It makes total sense in that environment. Likewise, if Facebook is just used among your "friends", odds are that they probably already know these views about you. But today we are overloading the term "friend" and so now it encompasses true "friends", family... and business contacts.

So it's one thing to share political/religious info with friends, family and classmates, but in business? I don't know... on the one hand there is the greater "transparency" and the chance to make connections with other people. On the other hand, there is the strong chance of potentially alienating others.

In any event, the fields are there in your Facebook profile if you choose to fill them out (and many people seem to during the process of signing up). Of course, you are limited to the choices that Facebook provides for politics. They don't offer the "It's Complicated" choice that they have for relationships, which would be quite useful. The "Religious Views" field is free text entry, so you can really write whatever you want there. It seems to me that you really have four choices:

1. Leave them blank - probably the safest choice, but potentially then losing out on some networking possibilities.
2. Enter generic choices - you could be safe and choose "Moderate" and write in something vague for a religion.
3. Fill out only one - you'll see I have a political entry but not a religious entry.
4. Fill them both out - embrace full transparency and let the world know (or at least your "friends") your affiliations and beliefs.

To me this is just yet another one of those areas where we don't fully understand the full impact of the profiles of Facebook and, in fairness, all the other social networking services. In the rush to join these services, we just fill out all sorts of information, not necessarily taking the time to think about the potential impact exposing that information may have.

What do you think? If you are a Facebook user, have you filled out those two fields? Do you think people should in an effort to be more transparent? Do you think we understand the full ramifications of exposing information like this? (Or do you think the issue I raise here is really not an issue?)

Technorati Tags: culture, facebook, politics, religion

Do you travel a lot? Joining Dopplr can help connect you to others in the same location...

Given that I tend to travel a good bit (and expect that to continue with most of the jobs I might take), I often find myself sending messages like the one I sent today to a group of people saying "Will any of you be out at the Podcast Expo next week?" Some of them answered... for others it was just an another annoying email in their inbox.

Wouldn't it be nice to simply know where your friends/colleagues are? (Assuming they shared that information with you?)

One approach is what you see with Facebook Events, where people can RSVP into the Event inside of Facebook. You can then simply look through the list and see who is there. Upcoming.org works in a similar fashion as do probably half a dozen other services.

The challenge is that they are all about events. But what if you are going to be in Boston for one event and a friend/colleague is going to be in Boston for another event? By these event-driven sites, you won't necessarily know that.

Dopplr, on the other hand, is location-driven. When you enter in a trip you are taking, it ties it to a standard geographic location. The advantage to this is that you can then look in the city you are going and see: a) who among your circle of friends lives in the city; and b) who will be traveling to the city (provided they are sharing their trip information with you. From their "About" page:

How does Dopplr work? It lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you're planning to visit. You can use the service with your personal computer and mobile phone.

It's an interesting idea to me, given how often I'm going places. To be useful, of course, it needs to have a certain mass of people using it. If you do use it, my URL is http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/DanYork If you would like to try it out, drop me a note and I can send you an invite.

P.S. Congrats to the Dopplr team for receiving early stage funding from an impressive group of investors!

Technorati Tags: dopplr, location, socialnetworking, travel

Hmmm... Plaxo's Pulse lets me see people's 'stream' without them agreeing to me being a connection!

In experimenting with Plaxo's Pulse in the past few days, I noticed one disturbing little thing.  In signing up, I let it import my Gmail address book and when it informed me of who among my contacts also were Pulse users, I agreed to send them requests to connect.  Two of those people were Chris Brogan and Alec Saunders, both of whom I know from various contexts.  So I wasn't terribly surprised when I started seeing their updates in my "Pulse Stream":

However, there's a wee little problem with this.  You see, when I click on their names, I get this:

and this:

Do you see the problem here?  I see all their stream items (presumably for their "Business Network" feed) - but THEY HAVEN'T APPROVED MY CONNECTION REQUEST YET!

Oops.

There's a security/privacy issue here in that basically I can go and, it would seem, make a connection request to any other Pulse user.  I won't see the user's contact information yet, but I will see their stream items in my Pulse Stream. It would seem to me that you would not want the user's stream items to appear in my stream until the user has actually approved the connection between us.  Right?

I realize that the Plaxo Pulse service is still in beta and so presumably this will be fixed.  If not, I'd love to hear someone explain why this is desired behavior.

Technorati tags: plaxo pulse, plaxo, pulse, privacy

Somewhat reluctantly joining Plaxo's Pulse.... (and some initial thoughts about feeds, grouping contacts and lifestreaming)

 Somewhat reluctantly, I have now joined Plaxo's "Pulse beta".  If you are a Pulse user and I know you, please do add me as a connection.  It's precisely this last sentence that is why I have been reluctant to join Pulse, despite the many raves in the blogosphere of late - I have to rebuild my entire network in yet-another-social-network.

Now, granted, Plaxo makes it easy to find other people through importing various different lists of contacts: GMail, AOL, Yahoo... take your pick.  You can even buy the Premium version (or do the 30-day free trial) and import your LinkedIn contacts.

But I don't really want to go through the aggravation.  I've been a LinkedIn user for now about 5 years and have a nice network there of contacts.  In my daily life these days, it seems that Facebook, Twitter, and my various blogs are the communication tools/sites I use.  Do I really need another one?

Not really... but over time I admit to have become curious enough based on comments from people I know (such as Robert Sanzalone) to break down and open an account.  There's a couple of reasons.  First, with my interest in identity, I'm admittedly a sucker for a major site that allows OpenID use:

but that alone is of course no reason to try out the site.  More, I was intrigued by Plaxo's "PulseStream", which seems to be a much more open and useful version of Facebook's "Newsfeed".  With just a single glance at a page, I can see the information from the people I find interesting... what their latest blog posts are, what their tweets are if they use Twitter, new contacts they have made.  All aggregated on one page.  Simple and easy. 

I also do like that Plaxo allows a more granular segregation of "friends" than the other sites.  Right now, with Facebook, for example, people are either "friends" with full access to the site or you can make them a "friend" but give them only access to your "limited profile".  That process though is a bit klunky, in my opinion.  And you have basically one "limited profile" for all your "friends" (if I understand the process clearly).  However, in Plaxo, contacts are divided into three categories: Business, Family and Friends:

Note that you can put a contact into multiple groups, which is nice.  As you work with the site, this segregation has a couple of benefits. On your "Pulse" page, for instance, as shown at right you can choose to only see updates from the appropriate groups (or everyone, or just yourself).  It is also extremely easy to only expose certain information to one of those three categories but not the others. For instance, in the picture on the left, I am choosing to include my Flickr stream into my "Pulse Stream" and specifying that it is available to the public, but note the various choices that I have.  (I am assuming that if I choose "Nobody" it will only be available to me when I view my Pulse Stream.)

I am sure there will be folks who want more than three groupings.  And there will be undoubtedly some who say "I never use this site with family members, so why can't I remove that group?"    Allowing grouping like this will surely just invite people to say that they want more groups or want to create their own arbitrary groups.  (Which, to a degree, are we then getting back into groups like Facebook has?)

Regardless, it is nice to be able to group contacts accordingly rather than just labeling them all with the overloaded term "friend".

Now, it's intriguing to think that Plaxo's Pulse might be a tool for "lifestreaming". It certainly allows the aggregation of feeds (like Tumblr does)... but it's still a walled garden like Facebook.  In order to see the "Pulse Stream", one has to login to Plaxo Pulse.  Does this make it any better than Facebook's NewsFeed?  Not really.  Now I've heard rumblings that there may be an RSS feed in the works for your PulseStream, which would then let you pull it outside the Pulse Walls and do something useful with it like put it on your blog or in a widget.  We'll see.

In the meantime, I'm there on Pulse, at least for some period of time.  If I do know you, please do feel free to add me as a connection.

Technorati tags: plaxo, plaxo pulse, pulse, social networking, lifestream, walled gardens

Facebook: All your email belongs to us! (Inside of the walled garden... and do your recipients know that the Facebook ToS lets them do anything they want with your email?)

Back in May, when I wrote my "Facebook is a walled garden" post, I wrote this:

We've gone from the closed communities of email services to the complete openness of Internet e-mail and now seem to be returning back to those gated communities, with email/SMS helping keep us aware of updates. 

I was talking at the time how Facebook let you only send messages to those within Facebook.

Well, today Facebook took an interesting step.  As noted as in the Facebook blog, you can now send email to people on the outside who don't have Facebook accounts:

If you're like most people, you may have a few stubborn friends who haven't joined Facebook…yet. This can make reaching friends complicated—there are some friends you can send a Facebook message, and others you have to email. Not anymore. Now, when you're writing messages, you can send the message to people on Facebook, and to people not on Facebook.

Now you can enter a friend's email address into the To: line when you send a message or share an album, and Facebook will email them the message. Your friends will be able to reply without signing up, and they will be able to see content you share with them. Keep in mind that all rules of privacy still apply; some Facebook content that you share (photos, groups, notes, etc.) won't be visible to your friend.

It does work, as you can see in the screenshot below (click for a larger image):

Over in my Gmail account, it comes out like this (click for a larger image):

The sending email address shown for my Facebook message is: "notification+o46j2=yc@facebookmail.com".  I can reply back and the reply winds up in my Facebook inbox.

On the one hand, I applaud Facebook for allowing communication to go out through the walls and come back in.  However, two points:

1. You still can't forward messages from inside Facebook out to external recipients. Perhaps this is part of the whole "privacy" thing, but there are times when it would be great to get something from inside out to someone on the outside; and

2. Do your external recipients realize that anything they send in becomes the property of Facebook?  The Facebook Terms of Service are still dated as of May 24th, and that's well before I posted my note/warning about all your content belonging to Facebook.  Now I'm not sure what Facebook would realistically ever do with all the content... but I think it's fair to be sure that people on the outside realize that whatever they send in becomes the property of Facebook to do with it whatever they want (if they so chose).

 The Facebook blog entry concluded with this:

As we continue to make Facebook more useful for everyone, these changes mean that there's no need to switch between Facebook and email for your daily communication needs.

Translation:  Just use Facebook as your portal for everything.  No need to go out to those pesky Gmail, Hotmail, AOL accounts...

Luke, a Facebook engineer, is never using email again. Ever.

 But, of course, Luke is using email... just email inside of Facebook.  We've gone from walled gardens of email to open standards and then back into walled gardens of email.  Strange world we're in.

Technorati tags: facebook, social networking, walled gardens, email, webmail

Identitude - using your Facebook account for an OpenID identity!

What if you could use your Facebook login as a source for an OpenID identity?  Courtesy of a Facebook status update by Aswath Rao, I learned of Identitude, which does exactly that.

Here's how it works.  First, within the walls of Facebook, you add the Identitude Facebook application to your profile.  After you do that, you claim your OpenID URL essentially as you would with any other identity provider. For instance, my Identitude OpenID identity is:

http://danyork.identitu.de

(Note that the URL ending in ".de" (Germany) looked strange to me until I realized you are supposed to read the whole URL similar to "del.icio.us".)

So now, when I go to any site that allows me to login via Open ID (directories here, here and here), I simply enter my Identitude URL as my user name.  Identitude, as the Identity Provider, then checks with Facebook to see if I have approved sharing my identity with this site.  Assuming I'm logged into Facebook already, I'll then get this screen below (when I went to Twitterfeed.com and logged in with my OpenID):

where I will then approve the usage of my identity with this site.  If I click on "yes" (for a one-time approval) or "always" I will then be logged into the site (Twitterfeed in this example) and be able to use the site's services. 

The developer, Armand Du Plessis, posted his own explanation in the (internal to Facebook) forum for the app:

It creates a new OpenID but uses Facebook for authentication and identity details.

You can use <yourname>.identitu.de on other sites (or Relying Parties) that supports OpenID. You'll be authenticated with Facebook and if the site requested Simple Registration details like your name etc, it pulls that info from your Facebook profile.
It's still a prototype but the next version will be documented better :)

On the privacy side. The only information stored is the Facebook identifier used to link the user to an OpenID and to lookup the user again later and a session key as required by the Facebook API.

The process flow is basically something like :
You enter your Identitude OpenID on a Relying Party (RP) site e.g. jyte.com.
The site look up your OpenID server (Identity Provider) by parsing that OpenID url you supplied above and it resolves to http://identitu.de/openid in this case.
It establishes a session with the IP which is a small process and asks it to verify you.
At this stage if you are logged in to Facebook I will just lookup and supply your details(first asking you to confirm that you trust the RP with your details) If you're not logged in it will first ask you to login to Facebook before sending the info back.
The RP will either log you in to their site or register you.

Okay, "so what?" you may be saying, what does this really do for me?

Well, as I've written about before, services like OpenID are trying to address the issue of having to login to each and every website with a different username and password.  Or, for instance, having to fill in your user information to comment on a blog (like this one).  What if you could have just one identity that you used across all of the various websites you use?  (Or maybe two identities - say, one for work and one personal. ) And what if that identity could be secured so that you only had to remember a single password - yet that password wasn't shared across all those websites? 

That's the whole concept behind OpenID.  (Here's a great screencast from Simon Willison that explains it in more detail and here's a Security Round Table podcast with which I was involved that dived into the issue as well.)

You can get an OpenID identity from any of a zillion identity providers.  You can use your AOL screen name.  You can use your LiveJournal account.  With a tiny bit of HTML code, you can use your own domain name.  You have many different choices.

Now... with this Identitude application inside of Facebook, you have one more choice: your Facebook account.  Since most Facebook users will probably already be logged into FB as a part of their regular daily activity, it's very easy to then login to other sites via OpenID. Just one authorization screen and you are logged into the site in question.  (Now, the same could be said of using AOL or LiveJournal for an OpenID identity because AOL and LJ users are typically logged in on a daily basis.)

So you have one username and password you have to remember - your Facebook account.  That's it.

It's rather cool to see this come out.  As the developer indicates, this is still a prototype:

A prototype OpenID provider allowing Facebook users to leverage their Facebook profile detai