Unwanted Social Exposure

The volcanic growth of Facebook has not gone unnoticed by people very used to being in the public eye. Prince William is rumoured to have a profile somewhere on the site, albeit under a nom de plume, various BBC journos and media celebrities can also be found interacting with their public, updating their status and sending each other fish for their aquariums. Whilst such individuals may have come to accept their images being in the public domain, many of us more insignificant mortals find ourselves increasing losing control of our online identity.

Facebook has a lauded interface for restricting privacy. One can customise their profile so that only their closest friends can view their photos, post on their wall and find out what books they have just read. This control even goes so far as to hide your Facebook presence from particular members.

Where these controls come unstuck is in the sensitive area of posting photos; a paradigm not restricted to Facebook of course. It is perfectly possible for your next door neighbour to post a picture of you on their profile featuring you sunbathing in your garden in the kind of bikini that would make Jordan blush. They can then tag this photo and share it with the rest of your street. Worse than that, there is nothing to stop someone defaming your character on their wall, something that must happen with monotonous regularity amongst Facebook’s younger user-base.

That there is nothing on Facebook to stop these actions occurring is not the end of the story. Fortunately the British and European legal system is, for once, moving quickly to adapt. Fuelled perhaps by the thought of celebrity action and the associated fees, lawyers are lining up to unleash legislation not just on the operators of such sites but on the users themselves. Of course, under such circumstance you can bet that Facebook would be defended and a recent article by Ashley Hurst (a member of the media litigation team at Olswang) suggested that e-commerce law could provide that such operations are simply hosts of defamatory material and it is the users that are responsible. Now that’s not particularly sociable of them.

It’s at times like these that we’d all do well to stop inviting our friends to become pirates and tickling vibrating hamsters and spend some time reading through the legals on the sites instead. When we sign up we’re reminded that “content that Facebook deems to be harmful, threatening, unlawful … [etc] “ should not be uploaded or transmitted. Of course, such catch-all terms and conditions can only be invoked to remove content when it has been spotted and objected-to. In the Web2.0 era this could well mean that the image has been circulated or the statement copy and pasted widely before action is finally taken at the source. The fact remains that users only have control over the content that they post and, this is often overlooked, this extends to people who have so far resisted the urge to join.

Facebook recently announced (although you may have missed it) that profiles were to become searchable from Google. Although this can be switched off by users, once again you cannot control whether your ex-girlfriend’s profile can be uncovered by your prospective girlfriend’s Google search and her bitter rants about your sexual prowess poured over and dissected at will.

All this only serves to fuel Facebook’s near-exponential growth. The only defence is ‘attack’, or at least vigilance. If you’re not a member you’ll not know what people are posting and saying about you. Best you get yourself signed up, who knows you might even uncover something delightfully salacious yourself.

smorgasbord-design ... three months on

Facebook had started to take over my web time until a week or so ago when I realised I'd not done anything on Last Chance Saloon for a while. Then I realised I'd not posted our wedding website yet either. Then it became clear that I was falling behind on the stuff I actually get paid for too. But frankly that doesn't seem to matter as regardless of how far I fall behind on that stuff, the other people who'll plug it all together behind the scenes are even further behind and even more under-resourced than I am. So where to focus my attentions?

Well, the invites went out for the wedding and since then it's been a bit of a whirl of RSVPs, sorting out groomsmen's attire, stag events (thanks Robin), website stuff (Marisa and I are getting there on that) and more. Floristry and church arrangements seem to be a never ending saga with the former causing the most headaches both financially and logistically. I'm sure we'll get there in the end but it's hard to think that I'll not resent the money and hassle on the day when I look around at all the hours of work and £s of cash that have been poured into it all. It's all well and good starting the whole wedding process with intentions of project managing the whole thing to within an inch of its life but it's another thing when you reflect on some of the principle reasons it was never going to work that way:

1. I'm not a project manager. In fact I'm not even half a project manager. I'm a thoughtful creative type who's easily distracted.
2. I no-longer live with my fiancee and, worse still, I live 3hrs away in Norwich.
3. My fiancee couldn't be less interested in the whole affair as she's got bigger fish to fry throughout the courts of England now.
4. Two years of intermittent planning enthusiasm is enough to stall the momentum of the best laid plans.
5. Financially it's all become so obscenely expensive that the scattering of luxurious touches has just been turned into paying someone a King's Ransom to re-arrange the deckchairs on the Titanic.

That said, there are moments of brilliance. The band, the invites, the reception venue, our enigmatic priest, my shoes ... so I'm quite sure it'll become more than the sum of its parts. I only hope SWMBO's employers let her have the day off now to enjoy it.

Wedding aside, Last Chance Saloon is careering along at a pace. A frankly bewildering generosity from the many nooks and crannies of The Company has ensured that much of the expense for our ludicrous project to drive to Rome in a tired old Volvo has been borne by generous benefactors. Some creative writing, a smattering of mediocre photography and a few long train journeys to Surbiton have resulted in an update this morning which starts to reveal more about the direction we're heading in (predominantly South West after we pass Paris).

The lack of a commute (Shank's Pony now gets me to work in under 5 minutes) has killed off my inspirational out-of-work thoughts around user experience and the intensity of the laborious projects i'm engaged on at work has stiffled some of my much needed thinking time. In a desperate attempt to nod myself back in that direction I have resolved to pick up listening to IA podcasts and have been networking on LinkedIn as well as joining the Information Architecture Institute to try and become part of a wider knowledge sharing community.

My intention this week was to write a lengthy piece about why Facebook has captured the imagination and web-time of millions of people who never before would have considered signing up with and dedicating time to photo-sharing, blogging and general social networking. Why, for example, is Facebook's growth causing people to peel away from Friends Reunited and MySpace in droves? I think I know why and, if you're lucky and I start to find some time amongst cars, weddings and work, i'll explain all next week.

Questioning if price is everything: The moral low-ground of price comparison.

So, uSwitch are in a bit of trouble. It appears that there may have been an attempt to encourage users of their site to switch providers by artificially presenting the results. To me this highlights a a growing concern about comparison engines and aggregators which is that they are not providing the sort of philanthropic experience to which they allude, and may actually produce inaccurate quotes/cover. These sites encourage you to compare primarily on price, they have commoditised - particularly in the insurance aggregator market - bespoke products. They encourage customers to compare apples with oranges and don't seem to take into account the all-important ancilliary factors such as customer experience, product features and loyalty discounts. By fueling a market where everyone switches all the time to the cheapest provider all that happens is that prices fall and margins are squeezed tighter and tighter to the point where the service you could have expected to receive in the past now resides in a poorly trained off-shore call centres, costs £s per minute to call and is increasingly unsympathetic to your individual needs.

Users and customers seem to be forgetting that sites like uSwitch, moneysupermarket and Confused have to make money. They make money when people switch and comission gets paid. Companies are rapidly wising up to this fact and are paring back their loyalty discounts and long-standing service standards to hack money off at the front-end and encourage more footfall through the front door.

Analogous to this have been the supermarkets. You can go into Tesco and see the price of an item compared to the equivalent in Sainsburys and Asda. The price transparency is thus designed to show how great they are at providing value for money. But once again this price-led marketing ignores the human at the heart of the shopping experience. Humans are not calculators and choose to buy a product through a subtle blend of price, product and emotion. Focussing all the attention on price leaves us all the poorer in terms of product and emotion. Take the current TV promotion for Iceland's frozen Christmas food range (feat. Kerry Catona). Touted as a cheap alternative to the traditional Christmas experience the marketing encourages us to spend less and indulge in a christmas of re-heating re-constituted meat and preservative-laden deserts, insisting that this must be better than the wholesome creation of a well-cooked dinner full of natural, fresh well tended meat, vegetables, sauces, spices and so on.

There's no doubt about it, premium insurance products, traditional utility products and organic food are all over-priced products that could do with having a tighter squeeze on them. The problem lies in the mass-market, middle-england purchases for which price transparency serves only to blinker the customer into considering short term financial gain and not lifetime value.

Emerging on the horizon to provide an alternative to this approach is a site called Wesabe. Wesabe is a community-based site for the review and dissemination of advice around personal financial services (read the Wesabe FAQ). A site that takes customer generated content to provide appreciable human comparisons of such products without dwelling on price, price price. Currently a touch US-centric, an increasing number of British and European visitors will bolster the relevance of the advice and experience for the rest of us. To me, these are some of the most encouraging uses of Web 2.0 thinking and I only hope that they gain traction and compete amongst the emotionally impoverished comparison engines.

“The Sleeper Curve”, MySpace provides tangible evidence of an increasingly intelligent generation.

Last week I wrote an email to Steven Johnson, I didn’t get a reply. I don’t blame him for not responding, my email was a rambling list of questions and half-baked theories that, if I’d bothered to read pages 116 to 124 of his book I would have found the answers.

My thoughts had been centred around the use of social network sites and were building on ideas mooted in this blog about the “Noble Savages” of the web, the teens and tweens immersed in the likes of MySpace, Bebo and Faceparty. They were building too on themes discussed in the previous 115 pages of his book which talked of a rising “Sleeper Curve” of complexity in the social and cognitive functioning of recent generations. Johnson points to the scale and complexity of online gaming in virtual worlds, the multiple threading of plot lines, character complexity, reduction in signposting and chronological fracturing seen in modern popular television (Lost, 24, Sopranos) and the Emotional Quotient demands of that most-maligned genre of entertainment, ‘reality’ TV. I wanted to ask him whether he thought the mindless surfing and banal bedroom postings of teenagers in Woking really constituted evidence for an increasingly intelligent generation.

As it happens, I got to the end of the email and had started to answer my own questions anyway. Taking place within these social networks are a myriad of interactions the principle aim of which is to create more links, to find more people who are like you, who like the same music or can introduce you to new ideas, cultures, crafts and stimulation. In effect, people to whom you can relate. The manifestation of this is the buddy list, a publicly viewable incentive and tangible sign of success. Here, at work on the most ‘cutting edge’ popular technology, is that most rudimentary facet of personal development, conditional learning. The user learns with subtle, slow experimentation that adding a given song, mentioning a brand, blogging about a person, citing a celebrity or slating a school friend will encourage someone else to request to be added to their list. Over time these ‘new’ social skills are honed and polished in such a way that the most prolific of MySpace users can demonstrate a who’s-who of buddies, displaying the great and the good of their community.

Perhaps some of these kids (though by no means all of them are under 21) would have demonstrated these skills and abilities offline in a different time, but I contend that these sites have taken away some of the physical limitations of real life (time, distance, health and beauty) to allow a greater number of people to become popular in a world that previously would have excluded them.

[note: the image on this post is a Univ. Claifornia visualisation of a social network on Friendster]