Tag: facebook

A New (Old) Social Media Rule

I’ve been following the whole Scoble / Facebook blogstorm today. As one of Scoble’s “Facebook 5000” I have to say, I’m a little miffed that he felt entitled to scrape all his contacts’ personal data out of Facebook and drop it into Plaxo.

It gets to the nature of our connection and what exactly “friending” means between people who don’t have a pre-existing offline relationship. I wouldn’t care if one of my real-life friends decided to grab my email address out of Facebook and put it into their Outlook address book, for example. So why am I annoyed that Scoble did it? Because 1) he’s not a real life friend and 2) he didn’t ask first.

Seems to me it’s time to remind folks that, just as in the real world:

Don’t take more than you’re given. And if you’re not sure what the line is, ask first.

If you give your next-door neighbor a set of keys to your home, that doesn’t give them the right to walk in unannounced any time they feel like it. They still need to ask your permission. So too in the online world. Just because someone ‘friends’ you online does not give you an unlimited right to do as you like with their contact information. Yes, it’s annoying to have to manually re-friend people if you move from one social application to another, but it’s the polite – and the right – thing to do.

Allen Stern seems to feel the same way. And of course, Loren Feldman‘s take on things is blunt and touches on another troubling aspect to this — why was Scoble doing Plaxo’s testing for them?

UPDATE: The inimitable Lisa B over at Bruce Clay did a much better job of getting the point across than I did.

It’s not “Facebook Fatigue”, it’s the price of fame

So in cruising through Techmeme recently, one issue that keeps popping up is “Facebook bankruptcy”. Jason Calcanis has had enough. Om Malik thinks he has a point (although Scoble doesn’t). I think they are asking the wrong questions.

It seems to me the issue is not so much whether or not Facebook sucks — for the record, I don’t think it does — but the nature of celebrity in a connected world, and more specifically, of celebrity in a realm where the downside of fame is less a part of the mental map.

It’s expected that for an actor or a singer or even a sports star, part of fame is that people want to know you, in any way they can. You’ll be accosted by fans looking to shake your hand, get an autograph, or pose for a photo. Your phone number and home address (not to mention your e-mail) will be a guarded secret. I could go on, but this stuff is so widely known and accepted that I really don’t need to belabor the point.

On the other hand, only a tiny number of people in the tech world have ever had to deal with the fame effect on a regular basis. Until social networks came along, that is. Now, people whose day to day lives were previously normal are experiencing the Internet version of the fame effect. And no surprise, they don’t like it.

I suppose I don’t blame them. I’ve only been recognized once, years ago, on Long Beach Island the summer I was doing stock theater there. It was a weird feeling.

A Few Facebook (and LinkedIn) Thoughts

I’ve been mulling around a post on Facebook for a day or so. I signed up for Facebook sometime this past winter, but didn’t really do much of anything with my account there until April, when I realized that my 20-something cousins were using it heavily and that if I wanted to stay in better touch with them, that was a way to do so.

Since then, I’ve started checking Facebook more frequently and gotten more aggressive about adding friends. Along with LinkedIn and Flickr, I’m checking it more or less daily now. Sadly, though, my social circle doesn’t seem to be the Facebook target market, because after exporting my entire Thunderbird address book (more than 250 e-mail addresses in all) I found fewer than 20 of those people actually on Facebook. That was disappointing; especially as many of those addresses were classmates from USF. I don’t really expect that my old college friends or my relatives would be on Facebook, but I am a little surprised that so few grad school friends were there.

Aside from not finding a whole lot of my friends there, I like Facebook. It’s easy to use and entertaining, and it lets me share things about myself that I can’t or don’t want to share on LinkedIn. Nick O’Neill has some thoughts on this issue, and suggests that Facebook might “bury” LinkedIn, if they so choose. It’s possible, although if Facebook goes public and gets a big enough warchest, they might just as well buy LinkedIn instead.

This is a really good example of the never-ending dynamic flow between disintermediation and reintermediation, actually. How do you hit the right balance between the costs and the benefits of spreading your information across multiple social networks, versus having everything in one place?

Anyway, if you’re on Facebook and want to friend me, please feel free to do so.

UPDATE 7:30PM: After posting this, I ran across Danah Boyd’s excellent article on the class division developing between Facebook and MySpace. It’s well worth reading.