Things We Can Learn From Facebook
Are you pleased, angry or indifferent to Facebook developments (photograph taken at Kelvingrove Museum, Glasgow) Looking at the Evidence What is your take on recent Facebook developments? Are you feeling angry and have perhaps already deleted your Facebook account as have one or two of my Facebook followers?
Or perhaps you are indifferent or even unaware of recent Facebook developments. In which case you are probably just using Facebook as a tool and aren’t taking part in the discussions about Facebook and privacy. Shortly before a trip to Glasgow this weekend I asked for suggestions on places to visit and things to do. I decided to use my three main social networks in order to gain some anecdotal evidence on current usage of Twitter, Facebook and Google+.
In response to my query I received three responses from four people on Twitter (including one who suggested that I should visit Edinburgh!), 16 comments from fifteen people on Facebook and four comments on Google+. Whilst that would suggest that Facebook is the most effective social networking environment for me, there is a need to related the numbers of responses to the size of the social network.
But since I have 2,583 followers on Twitter, 625 friends on Facebook and 417 followers on Google+ this seems to confirm the personal value of Facebook to me. But what about the bigger picture? In a post entitled “ Why Facebook’s new Open Graph makes us all part of the web underclass ” by Adrian Smart and published recently on the Guardian Web site Adrian argued that “ If you’re not paying for your presence on the web, then you’re just a product being used by an organisation bigger than you “.
This was, I felt, a very elitist article, with the suggestion that: When you own a domain you’re a first class citizen of the web. A householder and landowner. What you can do on your own website is only very broadly constrained by law and convention.
You can post the content you like. You can run the software you want, including software you’ve written or customised yourself. And you can design it to look the way you want. suggesting that you are a second class citizen if you primarily use your institutional Web site or, as I do. on the WordPress.com site which constrains the plugins used and look-and-feel for this blog. Actually, you’re worse than a second class citizen: When you use a free web service you’re the underclass.
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At best you’re a guest. At worst you’re a beggar, couchsurfing the web and scavenging for crumbs. It’s a cliché but worth repeating: if you’re not paying for it, you’re aren’t the customer, you’re the product.
In this elitist view, it seems that unless you control your own domain you’re a member of the underclass. The article goes on to take a sideswipe at Facebook, in particular.
But it was amusing when I saw the tweet from the Guardian’s @currybet (Martin Belam) which pointed out that : That “peril of Facebook” post by @ adrianshort has 2,000 Likes and has been read nearly 3,000 times in our Facebook app http://bit.ly/pUKVXP Yes, it seems that the “Web underclass” is willing to share their engagement with their peers using a Facebook Like or the walled garden provided by the Guardian Facebook app – and in quite large numbers. Avoiding The Echo Chamber I have described a polarised situation in which posts describing the various problems with Facebook such as the reasons series of articles which have described how Facebook tracks you online even after you log out , Facebook denies cookie tracking allegations , Facebook fixes cookie behavior after logging out and US congressmen ask FTC to investigate Facebook cookies .
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But whilst Nik Cubrilovic, author of the post in which he accused Facebook of tracking its users even if they log out of the social network has subsequently written a post on how Facebook made changes to the logout process in which he describes how the cookies in question now behave as they should (they still exist, but they no longer send back personally-identifiable information after you log out) we are still seeing tweets in which the initial findings are being repeated. We also seem to fail to hear other perspectives including the comment from Facebook engineer Gregg Stefancik: I’m an engineer who works on these systems.
I want to make it clear that there was no security or privacy breach. Facebook did not store or use any information it should not have. Like every site on the internet that personalizes content and tries to provide a secure experience for users, we place cookies on the computer of the user.
Three of these cookies on some users’ computers included unique identifiers when the user had logged out of Facebook. However, we did not store these identifiers for logged out users. Therefore, we could not have used this information for tracking or any other purpose.
In addition, we fixed the cookies so that they won’t include unique information in the future when people log out. I feel there is a need to have a better understanding of the complexities of the issues and be willing to listen to the views of others and not just respond to views expressed on ‘ echo chambers ‘ such as Twitter.
What Can We Learn From Facebook? In order to move the discussion on from the Twitter echo chamber I’d like to summarise some aspects of Facebook which should be considered in more depth. “Seamless sharing” could be an appealing concept : A recent post on the Bashki blog announced “ Facebook Wants to Change the Way You Share ” and described how “ Facebook wants to remove as much friction from sharing as possible so that it’s seamlessly integrated with a user’s online activity “. When I heard the term ‘seamless sharing’ it reminded me of the JISC’s vision, over 10 years ago, for the Distributed National Electronic Resource (the DNER as it was initially referred to).
As I described in a poster entitled “ Approaches To Indexing In The UK Higher Education Community ” presented at the WWW 9 conference in May 2000: “ The DNER aims to provide seamless access to electronic resources provided by JISC service providers “. The ideas in the paper were a reflection of the vision for the DNER described by Reg Carr, Director of the Oxford University Library Services who, in a paper on “ Creating the Distributed National Electronic Resource , argued that “ if the DNER is to deliver the goods in the way envisaged, it will have to do so in a carefully integrated, flexible and seamless way “.
Let’s be honest and admit that in higher education we too are looking to provide a seamless sharing environment. This is a positive term and we should avoid misinterpretting this term. We want to understand and respond to user interactions : I recently attended a meeting on learning analytics which Wikipedia describes as “ the measurement, collection, analysis and reporting of data
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