Why Facebook Won’t Be Friendster

This weekend I got another firsthand view of why, despite suggestions that today’s kids will chase after whatever is the next new shiny toy, Facebook will have long-term staying power.

I witnessed scores of young ladies (the young men were much less active in this) taking pictures of each other and their dates at the Austin, Minn. High School Prom. Then two of them who are really close to me came home the next evening and started uploading dozens photos to Facebook, and tagging all of their friends.

So, for example, here is a pre-prom picture that showed up in my news feed, after Bekah tagged me:

And here’s a partial group picture from one of the early Saturday evening events:

Some observers warn that Facebook will become uncool because people like me (or at least in my age group) can be members. Others say the concern is that with Facebook being a “walled garden” in which your data goes in but doesn’t come out, users will rebel because they want data portability.

I don’t buy either of those arguments. Facebook’s variable privacy settings (as described in Facebook 210) mean people of all ages can coexist in the same social networking space, just as we all formerly used the same land-line phone network and now use interoperable digital cell phones with text messaging.

Just because we have the technical ability to interact through cell phones doesn’t mean I’m regularly “texting” people of my daughters’ generation. But it doesn’t stop us from peacefully coexisting in the same digital spectrum. And if I needed to reach one of them in an emergency, being able to send a message through Facebook may be just the ticket.

Likewise, I only know one of their peers who’s using Twitter. This tool of the geeky set has a lot of potential, but hasn’t broken through to mass appeal in anything like the numbers that Facebook has, partly because a lot of people look at it and can’t immediately see what good it will do them. But if they ever discover Twitter, they won’t let the fact that Robert Scoble and I are using it keep them from taking advantage of its wonderfulness.

They don’t have a problem figuring Facebook’s functionality, though, which is why it’s the top photo-sharing site on the Internet. It’s just simple to use, and over their high school and college years they will load lots of memories to these servers.

Unlike the data portability purists, who want the ability to integrate data from all sorts of yet-to-be-invented services into whatever container site they desire, my daughters and their friends just want to be able to connect with each other easily. And they LOVE Facebook Chat. Data portability means nothing to them. Functionality does. They want to be where their friends are, and they don’t particularly care about the identity of Facebook’s other 70 million active users.

As long as Facebook keeps developing and improving its service and doesn’t violate their trust in a way that creeps them out, the likelihood that many of its younger users will bail for another network is remote. And as they see how friend lists can make it reasonably easy to separate personal and professional networks in one site, they’ll be less inclined to join a network like LinkedIn.

I still think LinkedIn is likely to do well in the long term, because it has a critical mass in business networking. But with 14 million photos uploaded to Facebook daily, I see its critical mass continuing to grow as well. People aren’t going to lightly leave a few hundred friends and their photos behind.

What do you think? The growth in Facebook’s reported number of active users seems to be slowing somewhat, but do you see anything on the horizon that would cause it to decline? Any possibility of a recession (two quarters of negative growth) for Facebook?

Blogging 131: How NOT to Shoot Web Video

The Flip video camera, which I reviewed and demonstrated in Blogging 130, enables you to easily shoot and quickly edit video to be uploaded to YouTube and embedded on a blog.

But as my friend Jane likes to say, “Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”

Or, at least you should get training and follow some basic principles so you can produce better-looking content.

Here’s an example of the wrong way to shoot web video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AnwR_h2Sd1E]

The main problem (aside from needing a better spokesmodel), is the brightly lit window behind me at the Seattle airport. It makes me all shadowy. Even so, you can still distinguish some of my features and it’s not completely intolerable (although you can weigh in on that in the comments), but it’s definitely not high quality shooting.

Here’s a better example, which comes from just turning the camera the other way:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmMeMJDWYHk]

The subject matter isn’t any better looking, but at least you get a more accurate map of the creases created by four-and-a-half decades of smiling and laughing (and squinting in the sun).

I’m also temporarily password-protecting this post, and making the videos on YouTube only visible to me, to see how that works. I’ll remove the password protection later.

Updated: Here’s what I learned. By setting the videos as “Private” in YouTube, that overrides the other setting I had done to allow embedding within this blog post. So if you have video you only want to share through a password-protected post, you can’t use YouTube embedding to display it. It has to be public on YouTube to be embedded in a post. I’ve now removed both the password protection on this post and the privacy on the YouTube videos so you can learn from these stellar examples.

 

Blogging 113: Comments Policies for Blogs

In Charlene Li’s presentation yesterday, she showed the JNJ BTW blog, and its comments policy, which reads in part:

All comments will be reviewed before posting. Since this blog is about Johnson & Johnson, comments that don’t directly relate to the Company or to topics covered on this blog won’t be posted. That said, some comments may be forwarded to other people within the Johnson & Johnson Family of Companies for follow-up as appropriate.

We generally won’t post comments about products that are sold by the Johnson & Johnson operating companies. Product questions should directed to the companies that sell them. A list of the products sold by our operating companies is available on the Johnson & Johnson website.

If you’re starting a corporate blog, I think this is a good example of a “plain english” explanation for comment moderation, and also highlighting that some of the issues that may be raised that would be more appropriately handled 1-1 with the customer will be done that way, instead of on the public blog.

The Marriott on the Move Blog also has some good language in its Terms of Use:

The primary rule when commenting is to be relevant and respectful in your postings. Just as we would not allow someone to stand in one of our hotel lobbies shouting profanities or engaging in other disruptive behavior that upsets guests, we will not allow that same type of action here. While Marriott assumes no duty to pre-screen or regularly review posted content, the blog will be moderated by an Editor and an Editorial Board who will have the right to refuse to post or remove any posting that they believe violates these Terms of Use.

These are good examples of ways you can set expectations for your blog, so that if you want to moderate comments and be able to deal with an individual issues off-line, it doesn’t interfere with the overall conversation.

What do you think of the JNJ and Marriott comment policy examples? If you have other examples to share, please add them in the comments below.

Speaking of comments, I may publish a Terms of Use or a Comments Policy for SMUG as a separate page, too, but for starters here is the policy I follow:

  1. I LOVE comments. If what you have to say relates to the topic of the post, I’m delighted to have you join the conversation. That’s why I don’t use a Captcha, because I don’t want to make it harder for real people to comment.
  2. I use the Akismet anti-spam service, which is part of WordPress.com and has spared me 42,792 comments so far. It’s really good, and I don’t even check the Akismet queue any more. In medical lingo, it’s both highly sensitive and highly specific. It catches most spam, and it rarely falsely labels a legitimate comment. So if your comment gets caught by Akismet, it’s not going to be posted. I won’t even see it. But if you’re a real person instead of a spambot, that’s not going to be a problem.
  3. Negative comments are fine. I don’t even really mind personal attacks. In fact, I published a highly negative comment from a reader here, and it caused me to do this follow-up post. If you use profanity, however, I will delete the expletives and do the cartoon representation (such as &#@!) to maintain a family-friendly atmosphere.
  4. I don’t moderate comments in advance, but I might take them down or mark them as spam if they fall into Category 5 or Category 6 below.
  5. If you’re just selling something and not adding value to the conversation, I may not mark your comment as spam, but I will take it down. So, for example, if I’m reviewing the Flip video camera and you are the manufacturer of a competitor, I would welcome you to comment, talk about your camera’s capabilities and feature differences, and include a link for more information. But if you’re running an on-line store for various video cameras and just post a link to your site, with no other value added, I will remove the comment.
  6. If you’re selling Viagra or its alleged herbal equivalents, and if somehow your comment and link makes it past Akismet, I will mark it as spam to ensure that you will be caught the next time you comment on an Akismet-protected blog.

Since SMUG is an on-line university dedicated to the exchange of ideas, our comments policy is more open than is appropriate for a big brand or a corporate blog. If you have thoughts on this draft policy and its appropriateness for a personal blog, or ideas on something I might be missing, I’d be glad to hear those in the comments, too.

Charlene Li Forrester Web 2.0 Presentation

I had the pleasure yesterday of presenting at a Web 2.0 Summit sponsored by Kaiser Permanente. Our panel was moderated by Ted Eytan, M.D., who also presented on his blogging experience from the last four years as part of Kaiser’s sister (or cousin, or some other relation I don’t completely understand) organization, Group Health. He’s an interesting guy who also has a passion for LEAN in Health Care, which is the topic of the other blog on which he is a collaborator. I also got to meet and hear Tim Collins from Wells Fargo, whose company has official blogs that include Guided by History, The Student LoanDown and one that supports Stagecoach Island, its virtual world. TIm says Wells Fargo was the first big brand in Second Life, but that they got out just as many others were starting to get in. Now they have a world of their own.

Charlene Li from Forrester Research opened the Summit with an overview of Web 2.0. She’s also the co-author of Groundswell, a book I just bought at Audible.com (It’s also here on Amazon, and I’ll be reviewing it after I listen to it over the next few days). Before her presentation, we got to talk about our experience with audio books, and I recommended some from Patrick Lencioni that I think most people in business would find extremely helpful (and which I have reviewed on this blog): The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and Silos, Politics and Turf Wars. (I thought I had reviewed Death by Meeting, too…but I guess that’s on my to-do list.)

I’ll have my full review of Groundswell, but meanwhile here are some of the high points and recommendations from Charlene’s presentation:

Focus on the relationships, not the technologies. At Forrester, they have developed a four-step process using the acronym POST. You should consider:

  • People – for those you want to reach and with whom you want to interact, consider their characteristics and what kinds of social media involvement they have already. Getting seniors into a 3D virtual world may be a mismatch, unless the group you’re targeting is retired Microsoft or IBM engineers.
  • Objectives – Decide what you want to accomplish
  • Strategy – Plan for how relationships with customers will change
  • Technology – Decide which social technologies to use

Charlene’s blog has a fuller discussion of POST, and I’m sure Groundswell will be even more detailed.

Part of analyzing People is determining where they are on the Ladder of Participation.

Charlene had a lot of other great material in her presentation, but she closed with some Keys to Success:

  1. Start with Your Customers.
  2. Choose Objectives You Can Measure
  3. LIne Up Executive Backing
  4. Romance the Naysayers
  5. Start Small, but Think Big

I particularly like that last point, because it fits with the SMUG (It’s all Free) philosophy. It’s possible to start small because the barriers to entry are practically non-existent, but you should plan for success to that you can scale up as necessary.

For example, you can start a blog hosted on WordPress.com and map to a domain or subdomain of your choosing for $10-$20 (and can extensively customize your look and feel for another $15). Later, if your blog is successful and you decide you want to host it elsewhere to allow more use of Flash and embedded widgets, you can just download and install WordPress from WordPress.org and re-map the domain, and you won’t lose any of your links. I’ll have more on that as I build out the Blogging curriculum.

A Tale of Two Pregnancies

On Friday I got some delightful news from my oldest daughter, Rachel. My previously unknown grandchild now has both an identified gender and a name, thanks to the medical advances of ultrasound. Meet Evelyn Grace Borg, who is scheduled to make her appearance on the seventh anniversary of 9/11. (Her aunts, whose birthdays are 8/31 and 9/14 are hoping she’s a birthday present for them instead.)

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7749271792776786660&hl=en]

The news from Rachel and Kyle made this story from yesterday’s Star Tribune all the more poignant for me personally. It’s an example of how a blog begun in advance of a tragedy has helped to bring comfort and support to Matt, Madeline and their family. After reading their story, I’m praying for them, and a little bit harder for Rachel, Kyle and Evelyn, too.