Category: web 2.0

Friday Five: Facebook fallout edition

Was this the week the Facebook backlash reached a boiling point? It sure seems like it. The boil-over comes on the heels of concerns over Facebook’s decision (last month) to allow community pages. This created quite a bit of angst among Facebook page managers in the higher ed community. (For more on this, see Michael Fienen’s post, Facebook Hates Your Brand, and Jessica Kryosa’s follow-up, Facebook Communities: Now What?, both on .eduGuru.)

The bigger issue for many of us, however, is the continuing erosion of privacy for Facebook users. Here are five posts from some pretty smart people that ought to concern you, if you care about privacy matters.

  1. The Big Game, Zuckerberg and Overplaying Your Hand, by Jason Calacanis. “Over the past month, [Facebook creator] Mark Zuckerberg, the hottest new card player in town, has overplayed his hand. Facebook is officially ‘out,’ as in uncool, amongst partners, parents and pundits all coming to the realization that Zuckerberg and his company are–simply put–not trustworthy.” Hat tip to Michael Stoner for directing me to this blistering rant that outlines who’s been “Zucked” and how.
  2. Gizmodo offers the top 10 reasons you should quit Facebook. This one’s pretty blistering, too. Hat tip to Sasha Wolff for this one.
  3. Facebook and Privacy: What a Mess, from PC World, discusses new controls the company has initiated in an attempt to counter the backlash. But as PC World points out, “Neither [of two new controls] … does anything to fix the massive mess with how Facebook is handling your personal information.” (Via Mark Greenfield.)
  4. Facebook Fail: Publicy Backlash is Stowe Boyd’s analysis from last Saturday of the social network’s shift from privacy to “publicy.” “Facebook’s shifting policy from private as default to public as default is a reflection of the open web. … However, because Facebook is in a sense trying to track a general shift in the web, it is such a large player — and with so many users that aren’t at the forefront of this trend — a lot of innocent fingers are getting crushed in the machinery.” (Via Andrew Swenson, aka @wordpost.)
  5. Is There Life After Facebook? Leave it to old media stalwart The New York Times to ask such a heretical question.

Friday Five: social media-savvy schools

Sometime during the Winter Olympics, CollegeSurfing.com decided to host some winter games of its own and came up with the Web 2.0 College Olympics to identify the most social media-savvy campuses for prospective students. But instead of limiting their competition to single gold, silver and bronze medalists, the CollegeSurfing.com folks listed their top “50 social media innovators in higher education.” Here are the top five from that list, with links to their Twitter feeds. If you’re looking for examples of how to do social media in higher ed, these are the top of the top — the gold standard.

  1. Tufts University gets kudos for its twittering dining halls, vibrant Facebook group and my favorite, Spark, a site devoted to the campus’s social media tools.
  2. Johns Hopkins University is cited for its “prolific” Twitter feed and “gets props for letting the Twitterverse in on its tongue-in-cheek swine flu lexicon.” (After these Olympics, Johns Hopkins earned my further admiration by pulling off the cleverest and most elaborate university April Fool’s prank of 2010.)
  3. Ithaca College is lauded for a lighthearted approach to Twitter “and more than a dozen blogs are easily accessible from the school’s home page.”
  4. Butler University. “Kudos to Butler for letting its mascot, an adorable bulldog, run his own Twitter account.” ‘Nuff said.
  5. Case Western Reserve University’s Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing. The only school within a university to earn gold medal status, this school earned notice for live-Tweeting a disaster drill for flight nursing camp students and for their own YouTube channel.

Special thanks to Georgy Cohen (@radiofreegeorgy), who first pointed this out several weeks back.