Smalltalk with James Robertson

This is why I have my blog auto-post ton Twitter (and from there, on to Facebook) - otherwise, all that content is owned by someone else, and - if the service(s) in question die off, you're left with nothing. As Leo Laporte just realized:

It makes me feel like everything I’ve posted over the past four years on Twitter, Jaiku, Friendfeed, Plurk, Pownce, and, yes, Google Buzz, has been an immense waste of time. I was shouting into a vast echo chamber where no one could hear me because they were too busy shouting themselves. All this time I’ve been pumping content into the void like some chatterbox Onan. How humiliating. How demoralizing.

I use (or used, when they still existed) many of those - but I've always kept my blog (first the corporate one, and now, this one) front and center. That way, I have control over my own web history.

As Facebook continues to grow, MySpace is getting crushed:

The net research firm revealed that in May 2010, just 3.3 million web users visited the social network, compared to 6.5 million in May 2009. That's a 49 percent drop.

The big problem for MySpace now is perception - with that kind of reported drop, it's definitely "out", whereas Facebook is still "in". A new site might challenge Facebook at some point, but it's hard for me to see how MySpace will ever come back.

Technorati Tags: facebook, myspace

I've seen a bunch of chatter float by about Flipboard (a new iPad/iPhone app) this morning - it creates a "magazine style" layout for social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. It sounded cool, so I gave it a try. Sadly, it's already over capacity, and failed to add my Facebook account.

Hot tip - if you can't handle massive load, don't go for the huge splash launch....

Technorati Tags: flipboard

So Facebook updated their iPhone app to take advantage of fast app switching in iOS4. That's great for the iPhone, but - where the heck is my iPad scaled app? For a company the size of Facebook, can't they handle that?

Technorati Tags: facebook, iPhone

Julian Fitzell writes about the "siren song" of tweeting:

I'm pretty confidant that some ideas are better suited for tweets and others for blog postss, but the line can be fuzzy. And the temptation of laziness persists so I'm going to need to increase the temptation of effort to counter it. In the meantime, I'll be on Twitter throwing out undeveloped thoughts with everyone else.

I found that interesting, because i used to write a lot more long pieces - if you go back to my early archives on my Cincom blog, you'll find plenty of them. Over time, I've gotten to be much more of a "slap it out there" blogger.

I'm not sure why that happened, and i couldn't point to a when - it just sort of happened. I've also come to a different way of dealing with Twitter - I mostly don't post to it directly. Instead, I write here, my server auto-tweets what I post, and a Facebook app picks up my tweets and tosses them into my news feeds. I'll sometimes toss out a tweet directly from my iPhone; very rarely from my Mac.

Again, I'm not really sure why things evolved for me this way; they just did.

Technorati Tags: blog, twitter

Doc Searls has been talking about the limitations of "personal branding" for awhile now - this morning he linked to two people on the subject. The "manifesto" post by Maureen Johnson is the one that caught my eye - her message about "social media experts" is something I'm familiar with.

I don't know that I've given the "personal brand" thing a lot of thought over the years. I avoid some subjects on my blogs (partisan politics), simply to avoid having disagreements over things I'd rather not talk about in this particular forum.

I think the big divide in this area is between normal people and the advocates who spend all of their time telling you to "promote your personal brand". You know what? This isn't really that complicated. Write about what you're interested in. Even if - like me - what you're interested in crosses over into commercial promotion, that doesn't mean that you have to become a mindless shill. Listen to our podcast for awhile, and you'll see that Michael and I haven't been shy about noting various flaws in Cincom Smalltalk. We love the product, but we know where the bodies are buried, too. Lots of promoters like to pretend that their favored product/solution/brand has no flaws - that way lies the "mindless shill" tag.

Ultimately, you want to come off as believable. There are going to be plenty of people who disagree with you, and that's fine - no one has a monoploy on truth, or even on a better point of view. The best you can do is to have people realize that you stand behind your words.

When I hear about hiring plans like this one:

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said Thursday that his company has about 200 employees and expects this number would double this year.

It usually means a management team that's gone into empire building mode, and lost touch with reality. Some companies survive that kind of rapid influx of employees, but most don't. The style of management has to change dramatically - you need to move from ad-hoc, go with the flow style to having actual procedures and processes.

Nothing I've seen from Twitter tells me that they have the capability to do that :)

Technorati Tags: management, twitter

On the one hand, you have people worried that Facebook is exposing too much, and not giving users enough control over the process (never mind Zuckerburg's quite clear mindset on where privacy is headed). On the other hand, Facebook is still growing, and Foursquare has a million people per day "checking in" - i.e., letting the world now the minute details of where they are and what they are up to.

And then there's the dark side of all this - how third parties are trying to use that glut of information to learn more about you - and doing so incompetently:

One day, Greg was called in to see his manager and was told that his services would no longer be needed. He was asked to clear his desk and escorted from the building with no further explanation. His family hadn't even finished unpacking from the cross-country move, and Greg was faced with the shock of unemployment.

Thankfully, after some pushing Greg was able to learn that the company had fired him because the subsequent background check had uncovered a criminal background and outstanding warrants the company was unaware of. Of course, Greg was also unaware of the criminal background and outstanding warrants because the company had uncovered information on the wrong "Greg".

That's the sort of confused privacy world we live in. People are exposing more and more of their lives to the world, are vaguely worried about it, but keep doing it anyway for the immediate (perceived) benefits. I'm not sure where that's going to end up, but it's going to be different than it has been...

Technorati Tags: privacy

It's easy to blame Facebook for a lack of sufficient privacy controls, as Bruce Nussbaum's students apparently do - but seriously - if you post lurid details about yourself on a website you don't control, you shouldn't be shocked when other people find out:

Then Gen Y grew up and their culture and needs changed. My senior students started looking for jobs and watched, horrified, as corporations went on their Facebook pages to check them out. What was once a private, gated community of trusted friends became an increasingly open, public commons of curious strangers. The few, original, loose tools of network control on Facebook no longer proved sufficient. The Gen Yers wanted better, more precise privacy controls that allowed them to secure their existing private social lives and separate them from their new public working lives.

To some extent, that's like keeping a highly personal diary, and then storing it on your front porch. Sure, the porch is your property - but it's not exactly private. I sure don't have any illusions about how private something I put on Facebook (or any site I don't control) is - I run with a default assumption that "anyone can see it".

Acting otherwise is simply naive. Nussbaum's students have been smacked by reality. They may not like it, but they need to get used to it.

Technorati Tags: privacy, facebook

Sometimes I think Nick Carr is unaware of what year it is:

Imagine, Lanier said, a young Zimmerman trying to turn himself into Dylan today. Forget it. He would be trailing his online identity - his "one identity" - all the way from Hibbing to Manhattan. "There's that goofy Zimmerman kid from Minnesota," would be the recurring word on the street in Greenwich Village. The caterpillar Zimmerman, locked into his early identity by myriad indelible photos, messages, profiles, friends, and "likes" plastered across the Web, would remain the caterpillar Zimmerman. Forever.

This is in the context of Facebook (and social media in general) having a persistent impact on your identity. What Carr fails to notice is this: it's been less and less possible to "shed your identity" for eons now. Facebook is the least of it - there's your whole credit history, something that Dyland didn't have to worry that much about "back in the day".

It's not just Facebook, either. If you're the least bit prominent online, you have Google footprints. Good luck getting rid of those :)