Category: web 2.0

Saving face, saving Facebook?

The folks at Facebook have upgraded privacy options for users in the wake of the user backlash about recent changes to the site that some see as an invasion of privacy.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg announces the change early, early this morning in an open letter posted on the Facebook blog. “We really messed this one up,” he says.

This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

Oh, I’m sure they will, Mark.

Student protests, the Facebook way

Or, All we are saying is give feeds a chance…

Facebook‘s recent changes that allow online buddies keep closer tabs on each other has half a million Facebook users — many of them college students — up in arms. The Facebookers fear the tweaks create a “creepy” and “stalker-esque” atmosphere on the social networking site.

The changes come in the form of news feeds that notify users when their friends have uploaded new photos or changed their profiles in some other fashion.

A disgruntled user has created a petition urging Facebook to go back to its old-school ways. As it currently stands, “We all know who has dumped who, who is doing what, and who doesn’t like something anymore. This is invasive, and while it is displayed for others to see, it is not meant to bombard their homepage.” (Source: Digital Micro Markets, which tongue-in-cheekedly likens the protest to the civil rights protests of the 1960s and suggests that “the thousands of unhappy, non-paying users of Facebook can … use their allowance pools to hack an online social networking cool app more to their liking!”)

Meanwhile, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is urging calm. “We are listening to all your suggestions about how to improve the product; it’s brand new and still evolving.”

I don’t get why the subscribers are so upset. When you join a social network on the web, you’re forfeiting quite a bit of privacy and are tacitly agreeing to live a fishbowl sort of life, at least to your closest online friends. But perhaps this will be a wake-up call for millennials to think about issues of privacy and use a bit more caution in who they let into their social networks.

Me, according to collegewebeditor.com

Karine Joly posts her interview with me today over at her tremendously informative blog, collegewebeditor.com, which is a blog everybody in higher education should read, and not just for the interviews.
I’m looking forward to meeting Karine in a couple of weeks at the CASE Annual Conference for Senior Communications and Marketing Professionals in Philadelphia. She’s one of the speakers we’ve lined up for this terrific conference. If you’re not doing anything Sept. 13-15, why not join us?

Five, seven or 17 rules for social media optimization (SMO)

Just getting caught up on the rules for social media optimization discussion that’s been bouncing around the blogosphere the past few weeks. (Social media encompasses “the online tools and platforms that people use to share opinions, insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other” via blogs, message boards, podcasts, wikis, vlogs, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, etc.)

The SMO discussion began with Rohit Bhargava‘s August 10 post of the five rules of social media optimization (hat’s off to PR Squared for the find).

Here are Bhargava’s original five rules, and snippets of his explanations:

  1. Increase linkability. “Adding a blog is a great step, however there are many other ways such as creating white papers and thought pieces, or even simply aggregating content that exists elsewhere into a useful format.”
  2. Make tagging and bookmarking easy. “Adding content features like quick buttons to “add to del.icio.us” are one way to make the process of tagging pages easier, but we go beyond this, making sure pages include a list of relevant tags…”
  3. Reward inbound links. “[L]isting recent linking blogs on your site provides the reward of visibility for those who link to you.”
  4. Help your content travel. When you have content that can be portable (such as PDFs, video files and audio files), submitting them to relevant sites will help your content travel further…
  5. Encourage the mashup. In a world of co-creation, it pays to be more open about letting others use your content (within reason). YouTube’s idea of providing code to cut and paste so you can imbed videos from their site has fueled their growth.

Easy peasy, no? Then why aren’t more of us (including yours truly) making a conscious effort to optimize our sites for social media?

Anyway, over the past three weeks, the SMO list has grown to 16 (or maybe 17, I’m not certain), and now there are rules for adding a rule to the list. I haven’t scratched beyond the surface of these rules yet, but I’ll delve in shortly and will be looking for ways to make my site more social media optimizationally acceptable.

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Friday Five: higher ed’s future, web buzzwords, the blogging boom, and garage rock

Five things on my mind this Friday:

  1. What’s really going to happen with the recommendations put forth in the Commission on the Future of Higher Education’s final draft (pdf)? The report calls for “a broad shake-up” (as The New York Times put it) of the U.S. higher ed system. But the report is a far cry from Chairman Charles Miller’s desire for a “punchy report that would rattle academia with warnings of crisis”; a number of educational groups are criticizing the report; and the lone dissenter on the 19-member panel, American Council of Education President David Ward, is getting considerable mileage out of his contention that the report is one-sided. At least one blogger — ePluribus Media — suggests the report is “just what the Chair (read: Secretary) ordered.” If you don’t have time to read the full report, read the Times article, and maybe take a gander at ePluribus Media’s commentary about the report.
  2. Web what-dot-evah. Morgan Davis’ erelevant blog is brand new, but he’s off to a great start. His recent post, Buzzword 2.0, takes a lot of us to task for tossing “web 2.0” around in conversations and on our blogs (guilty). His advice: “let’s work on using alternative words and phrases to describe the concepts that we mean by web 2.0.”
  3. 50 million blogs, 18.6 posts per second. Just a few of the fun facts Dave Sifri, the founder of Technorati, shares in his latest state of the blogosphere report. With lots and lots of colorful charts.
  4. Speaking of buzzwords … Here’s a new one for you: clique-through. According to this blog review of a presentation on marketing with social media, it means: “The degree to which an exclusive group hears and accepts your idea. Cliques are built upon norms and group culture. To be accepted means to be built into that culture. To be effective, focus on the clique, not the wide audience.” You heard it here first.
  5. Now playing: Runaway Bombshell, by the Fondas. Great Detroit garage rock for a Friday morning’s blog reading.

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