Tag Archives: facebook

Thoughts on using Facebook Connect

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A former teacher of mine saw my recent post on 10,000 Words about The Washington Post’s news aggregation tool, Trove, and wrote me a concerned email. She’s interested in using the app, but doesn’t want to hand over all her information from Facebook. She asked for my thoughts:

I’m of the mindset that part of building the semantic web means being able to pass my information through various apps. That means giving up a tiny bit of privacy. But really, do I care about the kind of information they’re accessing (my interests, my likes, my jobs, my friends)? Not really. I don’t have a social security number and bank account stored in my Facebook.  We’re talking about information that I publicly write about on my blog and would happily tell someone about if I met them on the street. Trading that for access to content that’s custom-tailored just for me… that’s worth it.

So, what is “news,” anyway?

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In writing about this month’s Carnival of Journalism topic (increasing sources of news), I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about what exactly “news” is and what a “source of news” therefore is. I still don’t have a solid answer. (But maybe I shouldn’t waste my time dwelling over such questions in the first place).

News used to be defined by the act of publication. Information became news once it was published somewhere. Now we have tons of information and “publishing” can be as simple as hitting a “share” button on Facebook. News is being published in spurts every second, everywhere. Much like that old mantra that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” such is the case for news; it’s in the eye of the consumers and creators.

Blurring the lines between social networks

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We hear it over and over again: Nothing is truly “private” on the Web. But with the ability to set our profiles to “private,” we still tend to feel invincible and post photos/wall posts we’d never want employers to see. 

With the continually-changing interconnectedness of the Web, social networks continue to let down their walls, and that sense of “privacy” starts to diminish.

So my New Years resolution proposal to you, from one student to another: make your Facebook page more professional. And after you’ve done that, make more industry connections in whatever your field is.

  • If you’re active on Twitter and LinkedIn, your professional and social networks will begin to mesh
  • Be ready for the day when those lines begin to blur so you don’t have to clean up after yourself
  • Untag photos that may get you in trouble
  • Delete wall posts from nagging/gossipy friends with profanity etc.
The meshing of social networks into one big, interconnected web (of both professional and personal/social) is inevitable.

When Myspace and Facebook were new to the Internet, they were competitive (and certainly still are today). But more and more, networks are finding ways to work together instead of against each other.

Examples:

Twitter application for Facebook

 

Plugging Flickr, YouTube, Yelp, Last.fm, Hulu and more to your Facebook page


Embedding your blog, Slideshare onto LinkedIn


Traditionally, social networks have been organized as follows:

  • Facebook = personal, social
  • Myspace = personal, social
  • LinkedIn = professional
  • Twitter = a mix of both

But those distinct lines are now blurring. When a professional LinkedIn connection added me as a friend on Facebook,  I was momentarily baffled about what to do. Decline the friend and risk losing a connection? That would make it as though I have something to hide.

It became obvious that eventually, it would come to the point where I have to push aside privacy concerns and start opening my Facebook up to the rest of the world. As recruiters turn to social media, I can’t risk being anything less than professional. 

Now I’m starting to mesh my networks: my Twitter status is linked to my Facebook status — something I’d resisted for a long time because I didn’t think any of my personal, real-life friends would care about the same things as my Twitter followers.

As my Facebook expands beyond college and high school friends to include family (yes, the older generation is catching on), professionals and industry connections, Facebook is no longer about being social, but about maintaining and online identity and a personal brand.

Facebook: A newspaper's best and worst friend

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Guest blog by Ryan Chartrand

The problem

Newspapers have made some pretty desperate moves in the last few years. They’ve cut pages, cut staff, cut paychecks, but then decided to try to add social networking to their Web sites.

Sure, it was a great idea; the problem was they were too busy cutting and scrambling to notice that it was just another desperate attempt at “innovation.”

The turning point

And as much as I didn’t want to believe it, the turning point came in May 2008. When the once-messiah of digital journalism Rob Curley jumped ship from Loudon Extra, the forerunner in innovative community sites attached to a newspaper Web site, newspapers started to rethink the idea of community sites.

I work at a major newspaper in a major California city that felt the effects only a month later. Our community site hadn’t even left its “beta” stage before the paper abandoned it…partially (there are still some advocates left in the building, likely to be laid off soon anyway).

The saddest part of this little memory in digital journalism history is that a lot of people thought community sites would be what saved newspapers.

Bringing the community together in a fully-interactive space where they could have profiles, post pictures/video, talk to people with similar interests, become more politically active, etc. were all possible through these community sites once they got off the ground.

Sadly, “off the ground” was a marketing dream that eventually turned into “buried in the ground.”

The blame

So who’s to blame for newspapers’ last hope? The site that already offered all of this, of course: Facebook.

Newspapers rarely hire the right people for the Web, and they suffer because of it. At my paper, the technology used to develop the community site was clunky, bland, and not nearly as robust as Facebook.

Facebook has always been and always will be clean, easy to use, consistent, and very robust in its capabilities.

With that in mind, here’s what people wanting to get involved with social networking were faced with:

While newspapers had a lot of features to offer similar to Facebook (not nearly as many, of course), it seemed silly to join a social network that had 10 people while all of your friends partied in the Facebook castle next door. There’s simply no way to compete with these massive networks that have already claimed the territory.

Some newspapers were semi-successful in their attempts at generating communities, but the costs of maintaining these sites rarely exceeded the gain.Should newspapers completely abandon this innovative idea then? Is it truly hopeless? Once again, the answer lies in the beast that is Facebook.

Giving in

If you can’t beat ‘em, you might as well join ‘em. I really think newspapers are focusing their efforts in the wrong part of town, and if they actually went to where the people are, they’d have the potential to bring in the community they desire.

Should newspapers actually make the switch to Facebook, they’re going to need developers to build them applications. CNN and New York Times have a few cute applications, but nothing that really helps engage people, as they’re mostly RSS-generated info. (Although I must say, CNN’s public forum connection to Facebook is quite brilliant).

Considering the amount of information a newspaper receives daily, coming up with innovative ideas for applications should be simple; finding people to develop them, however, won’t come easy.

The future

But just imagine applications like the Washington Post’s blog Buzz Map (a map that geocodes keywords from blogs and news stories and places them on a map according to the keywords) that would also pull data from what its “fans” are saying on walls and notes. If a newspaper offered a dozen of applications like this on its profile and distributed them to fans’ profiles, people would actually be interested in connecting and “friending” a newspaper (which seems impossible, I know).

Or an application that shows breaking news or live blogs on your profile. People want ways to make their own profiles come alive, let alone the newspaper’s profile. And just to make advertising happy, how about an application that feeds off of the paper’s classifieds, showing the latest jobs or private party cars posted?

These are just a few random ideas, the point is that there is plenty of room for creativity and rethinking the newspaper and how it can be applied into a social network.

Online journalists think that because they’ve made poor replicas of Facebook that they’re being innovative and saving newspapers. What we need to do is put newspapers into an actual social network with actual people and see where truly innovative ideas can take the industry.

The idea of online communities merging with newspapers shouldn’t be abandoned quite yet; at least not until it’s tested in a real, populated social networking environment.

I think we could see a much stronger connection develop between newspapers and their communities through this relationship with Facebook. If we could just leave the tent outside and go where the communities really are, if we could just serve people the way they want to be served and where they want to be served, rather than trying to take them away from their networks, newspapers really could still have hope online.

Facebook's new application menu bar

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After Facebook was down for a few hours today (an inevitable consequence of the big switch to the New Facebook), users will find a major difference on their bottom menu: Application navigation.

Production manager for the new Facebook Mark Slee first announced the change in a blog yesterday:

We also heard that people were confused about how to find their applications, so we are moving the Applications menu to the menu bar at the bottom of every page. This will make it much easier to get to your favorite applications whenever you want.

Despite alleged complaints, the move may seem redundant to many Facebook users — the bottom right menu contains the same content as the menu on the front page.

The benefit though, as Slee noted, is that the menu stays at the bottom of every page, rather than only being located on the homepage.

The bottom menu is unobtrusive and can be hidden, exactly like the cooresponding notifications menu on the right of the toolbar. The new feature is interactive, allowing users to customize the order of their links. Items from the pop-out menu, however, cannot be dragged onto the bottom bar.