Archive for September, 2011

  • 28 Sep

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    A world of difference

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    FACEBOOK has been busy rolling out changes to its site this past month, the biggest of which was revealed at the annual F8 conference in San Francisco, California, last week.
    The new changes seem to have divided the social network’s userbase – while many users threaten to jump ship, there are a few who praise the changes that Facebook has brought on. Me? I was completely thrown off for the first eight minutes, seeing the top right corner of my screen taken up by a new ticker that perpetually feeds me the actions of my friends.
    Obviously, that’s not the biggest change, but for me, the ticker’s the most visually arresting and divisive part of the evolution. I’ve seen more than one friend bemoan the constant distraction the ticker provides and the added busy-ness it adds to the page.

    The new Facebook is a joy ... or is it?

    Another person asked: “What’s wrong with the notifications icon already on the top of the page?”
    Well, the short answer is: “Nothing!”
    The new, urm, “social ticker” doesn’t just alert you whenever you are tagged or mentioned in a post – it indiscriminately pulls all your friends’ updates – to themselves, to their friends or to their grandmothers – and feeds them to you. Seriously. You’ll now automatically see messages like “Alice likes Bozo’s Burgers” or “Robb commented on his own status.” Stuff you may or may not have wanted to know in the first place.
    The underlying change is in the disposition of Facebook to the average user. In the past, friends threw sheep at each other and posted drunken pictures of one another. People didn’t care much about privacy settings or lists to enable different users to see different things, and you were relatively confident that the only people seeing your drunken pictures were your 56 close friends.
    However, as time went by, things changed. Companies have come onto Facebook and used it to start engaging their “fans”. Celebrities made Facebook a way of reaching out to people who wanted to know about them, but they in return, didn’t want to know much about. And suddenly, Twitter happened – a place where anyone could be a celebrity!
    Facebook has now finally responded to Twitter by introducing the “Subscribe” button. The change is fundamental.
    Everyone now on Facebook can essentially be a public figure. You don’t have to “friend” everyone, you can just let people subscribe to you. To cater to this, when you’re posting updates on Facebook now, you can stipulate if you want to post to “public” or merely to “friends” or “friends of friends.” Sorta like Google+.
    This means that Facebook is no longer exclusive only to symmetrical relationships – where being someone’s friend is reciprocal. You can follow people who don’t follow you, and people can follow you even if you don’t follow them. Most of all, people don’t need your permission to subscribe to your public posts – so long as you’ve turned on the “subscribe” feature.
    This, combined with the new ticker, means Facebook is suddenly this place that’s awash with a tonne of updates from every direction if you’re bothered to look. But wait, there’s more. Not only can you subscribe to people now who may never want you as a friend (I subscribed to Mark Zuckerberg but he isn’t my friend), but Facebook also wants you to share more.
    Front and centre of this is the upcoming ability for companies to take Facebook’s “Like” button, and change the verb. You don’t have to “Like” everything anymore; you can “Want” things soon. Or “Love” people. Or “Disagree” with a company’s position. The “verb” button will then reflect on your handy new ticker and broadcast your actions for the world to see. With your permission, of course.
    Zuckerberg calls this “frictionless sharing” where sharing where you are, what you’re doing and the content you’re making is simply effortless. Think about it this way – let’s say you were surfing a website that had a very nice dress that you want, and it had a spanking new Facebook “Want” button next to it – clicking on that button will send an immediate post to your friend’s ticker to let them know that “your friend wants this”.
    Most of this will no doubt be automated to a high degree as far as web and application developers can take advantage of Facebook’s APIs. But there’s got to be a limit somewhere. It’ll be really cool, for example, if I had a camera that would automatically update my photos via WiFi to my Facebook account and tag an action to the pictures and geography. My friends would automatically see where I’ve been or what I’ve been doing on my holiday, and I won’t have to manually do the uploading.
    But it would be way less cool for one of those WiFi enabled bathroom scales to weigh me and post an update on my Facebook wall on my behalf saying, “David Lian weighed himself and now weighs 67kg.”
    Or would it?
    The last piece of the puzzle, if indeed it is one gigantic puzzle to turn around the Facebook experience is the newly announced Facebook Timeline feature last week. Short of reading what I have to say about it, surf over to http://www.facebook.com/about/timeline and see what it’s about.

    But if you don’t have the Internet handy, Facebook Timeline is basically a new way to view the information you’ve put on Facebook – in a timeline format.
    Facebook Timeline has taken that age-old desire to be able to remember exactly what we were doing on Oct 10, 2010 and present it in a beautifully designed render. Then, the weighing machine makes sense, particularly if weight is one bit of information I’d like to record automatically.
    It may not be far off, but in the future, we could be recording everything about our lives through APIs like this. How about a fridge that detects what you’ve stored and uploads it to your Facebook Timeline automatically?

  • 14 Sep

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    Backtracking your thoughts

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    By NIKI CHEONG

    OVER the past few years, netizens have been obsessed with their cyber trail, making sure to log off from personal accounts, clearing their caches and deleting their browsing history, among others.

    When social media entered our consciousness, this obsession moved beyond just personal data – what else are we putting out there? A lot, apparently. There have been calls by many people, myself included, for a more active participation by users.

    Basically, think before you tweet. Apart from making sure you don’t fall prey to the foot-in-mouth disease, there are also much more serious implications in the form of privacy issues. Over its few years as the social media network du jour, Facebook has kept changing its system’s ability for users to have more control over their information.

    For other people’s safety, Google+, the latest kid on the social network block, has a policy where only real names can be used for its accounts. There are many more examples, of course. Users, too, have been more aware of the implications, thanks to personalities from around the world getting caught out via social media on some of their less proud moments.

    Facebook has changed its systems ability many times over the years.

    However, I would like to add another element to this discussion – should we not be equally worried about what kind of cyber trail we are leaving behind when we die? Excuse the morbidity but it is something many people rarely think about. In the past, paper documents can be destroyed. And in many cases, over the years, these documents just disappear or disintegrate.

    With digital technology, however, this is unlikely to happen. There is a common saying that what goes on the Internet stays on the Internet. Even if you delete something, it might have already made it onto some cache somewhere. Otherwise, someone might have already downloaded it or captured it and saved it onto their desktop. The reality is that the Internet runs on millions of servers and computers around the world, many of which serve as backups of backups.

    Chances are, anything you put online has already been duplicated several times. Scarier still, none of these disappear even after you are physically gone. I lost an aunt and a friend, both of whom were rather active social media users (on Facebook and Twitter) recently and it freaks me out to see their names and faces appear on my timeline because of a reminder (like birthdays) or when a friend leaves them a condolence note.

    Even worse, when someone you know who has passed on, is “suggested” to be a friend. A couple of years ago, Facebook introduced the ability for family members to get profile pages of their loved ones turned into a memorial profile but not many people use this function. But even in this case, much of the deceased’s memories and past actions remain. This might be comforting for those who want to hang on to the memory of someone long gone.

    That said, I cringe at the idea that some information, which might make sense now, would be accessible to the generations that come after me. Just imagine your grandchildren Googling you and discovering that you were a massive Justin Bieber fan (or worse, Rebecca Black!).

     

    What happens on the Internet, stays on the Internet.

    Not only that, as opposed to my parents’ youthful days of courting via letters (which can be destroyed), these days we shamelessly leave potentially embarrassing messages of affection on each other’s wall.

    Or worse, bad pick up lines. These will be forever immortalised.

    Mashable editor-in-chief Adam Ostrow presented this thought at a TEDGlobal (technology, entertainment and design) event where he spoke about what would happen to one’s social media presence after one dies. He said: “Our descendants … will have at their fingertips a deep digital archive of information that we created ourselves.”

    More so than this, Adam suggested that with the amount of data and information that we would have left on the Internet by the time we die, there is a possibility of something more dangerous, sinister even, developing.

    In an accompanying article on his TED talk for CNN Interactive, he wrote: “I think as the quantity of content we’re producing and technology’s ability to make sense of it continue to expand exponentially, it will inevitably become possible to not only define our own legacies, but to recreate very lifelike representations of ourselves.” Yes, folks, he is talking holograms.

    And who knows how technology will advance in the future and we are able to “download” all this information into a cyborg of sorts. Or worse still, clones.

    I don’t mean to scare anybody but considering how fast technology is moving, there is a possibility that this day will come.

    But don’t start to freak out and go deleting all your information (it’s too late, by the way) just yet. It all starts with being a little bit careful with whatever information we put out there, who we are sharing it with and whether or not we have thought things through before clicking the “send” button.

    After all, who knows by the time anyone looks back at our data, we might be long gone and couldn’t care less any more. Or maybe our legacy would be so amazing because that is what we choose to leave behind.

    It doesn’t hurt to be more aware of what kind of cyber trail we’re setting as we move along with our lives. Worst comes to worse, our future self might just have to come back – via time travel, of course – and warn us.

     

    Niki is in London to do his MA in Digital Culture and Society. You can find him online at http://blog.nikicheong.com and www.twitter.com/nikicheong.