Usability Shark

On Privacy and Security, Or What's up with Facebook?

 Unless you've been living in a cave thus embracing the life of a true Luddite, you've probably heard about Facebook's recent war against privacy. For the past fews months it seems as if every other day America's biggest social networking site has done something new to chip away at the already ill-defined sense of privacy within it's trenches. Here's something of a brief summary, in case you have been in hiding:

Awhile back, Facebook quietly made your status updates indexable by Google. In a bid to be Twitter, this feature surprised the user base that had never really realized that their statuses were potentially going to be public knowledge. Uproar occurs for a few days then dissipates as people quickly forget about caring.

Later, Facebook introduces a way for other websites to consume your data. That's right, Facebook quietly started sharing your interests and information with websites you may not even know about, generally without telling you. 

A couple of days ago, Facebook launched a feature to link all of your interests to actual pages, spamming your wall with new advertising, and sharing your information with those pages as well. In this case there was a opt out option, but it never really explained what the feature was to begin with. Opt out is hardly useful without proper knowledge. 

Learn about some of this at PC World

So what's the deal? Not long before all of this, there was a very public kerfluffle when Google launched it's social sharing system Buzz. Buzz made a relatively grievous mistake at launch, automatically making your whole contact list privy to what you were sharing on Google Reader and whatever else you linked into Buzz. It didn't at that time make it clear what was happening, and the fall out was pretty swift. People freaked out at a level that was somewhat astonishing. Yes, it seemed from this example, that people cared about their privacy. 

Some background on Buzz's launch.

Google and Facebook are hardly the only ones flailing about in this game, although they are the most visible. Netflix slipped into this quaqmire when the company was sued over it's latest recommendation improvement contest for allegedly outing an in-the-closet lesbian mom based on her movie watching history. Money management site, Mint, had problems when it announced that your shopping history, although aggregated and anonymous, might be sold to marketing research firms. Some people canceled their accounts with great speed.

What's interesting to me about much of this is how surprised people are to realize that what they are doing on the web is potentially going to make itself public. I myself have always treated Facebook, despite it's privacy setting options, as data that I would not be devastated about becoming public. That's me though, and I've been playing this game for quite some time. People unfamiliar with the internet, young users and older users in particular, don't really understand what's going on when they post things to the web. New users to Twitter are often surprised to realize that everything they tweet is public knowledge. At the very least people's grasp of exactly who is included in "the public" is pretty slim. Take the young guy who was offered a job at Cisco and promptly lost it when he tweeted: "Cisco just offered me a job! Now I have to weigh the utility of a fatty paycheck against the daily commute to San Jose and hating the work." 

That's right kids, your employer and your mom are both part of the public these days. Watch your step.

A lot of these privacy missteps, both on the part of the companies involved and those kids foolishly posting public photos of themselves shot-gunning beer at parties and then wondering why they didn't get that plush job, is simply a failure to grasp what's going on. These are mistakes, and much of the time, the companies are quick to take corrective action. Google responded to the Buzz complaints within hours. Netflix canceled its contest pretty promptly. There's one company though that seems to flaunt it's issues with privacy, and that's Facebook.

Facebook wields a lot of power. It's the first social networking site that's really collected such a vast and diverse user community that truly actively participates. Each user is a font of delicious information about interests from movies, food, books, tv shows. Each status message is another bit of data telling Facebook where you like to go, what you like to do and who you like to do it with. It is a marketing company dream database, and we are all quietly working to make it more impressive everyday. The truth of it is, Facebook does not really think of us as customers of their site but as unpaid employees entering data in a constant stream. Thus why they are so alarmingly cavalier about how they handle that data. 

The cynical among us have know this for years, but what's sneaky about Facebook is the front it puts up. It somewhat slyly pretends to care about your privacy. There are account settings where you can set the privacy level for any number of aspects of your Facebook posts, but here's the problem: how easy is any of this to set up? When it comes to UI design, I'd be the last person to give Facebook any awards, but far and away the most confusing part of the deeply complex interface is the part that ought to be the most clear: how to ensure that your data is protected. 

There is this concept in usability called an "evil interface". When you've learned enough about design you aren't just capable of delivering designs that are easy to use, you are also capable of designing interfaces to be purposefully obtuse. A naive designer makes mistakes, and evil designer doesn't make mistakes so much as he or she makes your life difficult because they do not want you to accomplish the required task. It is in Facebook's best interest (at least from their perspective) for your data to be public and for them to be able to sell it. Given that, what reason would they have NOT to make the privacy settings confusing. 

EFF has a great article about Facebook's Evil Interfaces, that I highly recommend.

We designers are told from the very beginning that we need to design interfaces that are transparent and easy to use for everyone. I'm often in my work struggling to take a step back in order to try and look at things from the perspective of a technology novice. It's an ethical responsibility as much as it is a skill to do everything we can for our users, especially when it comes to something as delicate as private data. 

So should you quit Facebook? That's up to you, naturally, but you should be an evanglist for your friends on Facebook. Many of them won't really know what the truth of this is, and Facebook certainly isn't going to tell them. It's up to us really, so spread the word. When I publish this post, I will almost assuredly share it on Facebook. 

On Interconnecting Social Networks

I have a large number of accounts at various types of social networking sites. Partly this is due to my curiosity to see what's being done, how it differs from other sites, and what makes it special. Sometimes it is due to actual, genuine interest in the site's concept or content.  Here's a listing of sites I actually use with some frequency:

1. Facebook
2. Twitter
3. Livejournal
4. Flickr
5. Librarything
6. Ping.fm
7. Google Reader
8. Google Groups
9. Delicious
10. Linkedin
11. reddit

That's a lot to keep track of right there. I also have languishing but existing accounts with:

1. MySpace
2. Digg
3. Orkut
4. Yahoo Groups
5. Plaxo
6. FriendFeed

Why am I bringing up this increasingly daunting list of sites? Because in my life it is starting to become something of a usability nightmare to handle all these various accounts. Certainly, I could make my life easier - pick a site and use it exclusively - but not one of these sites gives me everything I want in one package. Furthermore, there's no one site that all of the people I want to connect with use. Thus, my problem, and a continuing problem for perhaps everyone who makes much use of the internet today.

Facebook has been making something of an effort to bring your different social networking accounts together in one place. In theory, I should be able to share a news story on Google Reader and have that update reflect in my Facebook news feed. However, that connection (as well as the connections with other sites such as Flickr) has over the past several months proven to be at the best of times not particularly usable or smooth and at the worst times simply broken.

This is where things for the user become really frustrating and complicated. I'm in Google Reader and I find a story that I just need to share with my friends. It's a one step process to get everyone following me in reader to see it, but what of my friends on Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter or what if I'd also like to post it to reddit. It's time consuming and takes too much effort to:

a) decide where to post the story and

b) get the posting accomplished.

I have a vision of something much more seemless, that sits above all the other sites and acts essentially as a manager or your activity. Ping.fm, but with a broader use case.

Pause for a second, and I'll chat about Ping for those that have not used it. Simple set up - create an account and link in all your various other accounts. Once you've got that taken care of, you can post status updates to Ping and they'll be automatically sent to every account you've linked in. Having this in my life as at the least made posting status updates easier. No longer do I have to maintain different statuses for Twitter vs Facebook.

That's great, and I do love Ping. However, it doesn't solve the use case above of wanting to share out say - an interesting piece I read in the NYT. True - I could limit myself to sharing links as status updates, but that is not my general style. Additionally, it won't link in reddit or Google Reader which don't have a concept of status updates.

What about FriendFeed then you say? FriendFeed and Plaxo are great aggregaters of content posted at a variety of sites, but they don't feed the content you post there back out to other places. Aggregaters are great, and they can make life a bit easier, but it doesn't solve my problem.

No, what I want to see happen is a site where I can manage my various account and set up rules for how an action taken on one account will reflect in another. For example, a possible set of rules for a given action:

When I "share" an article in Google Reader take the following actions:

• Share the same article in Facebook
• Submit to reddit if the article URL is not already submitted
• Add link to the article to Delicious

There are a lot of possibilities here. What actions could be taken when I post to Flickr or Librarything? Perhaps I could even have a browser plugin that would let me adjust the rules on the fly for certain content.

I think this concept is a long time coming. It's relatively unreasonable to assume that users will at some point decide on a single site and stick to it. There is almost assuredly always going to be this wide array of sites that we play with and update, each with particular strengths or particular audiences. I don't want Facebook to become my RSS Reader, but I do want it to play nice with Google Reader. I don't want Twitter to become Flickr, but maybe I want to let people know when I post new photos without going out of my way.

Individual sites can make a start at this, building Facebook applications and Twitter bots and the like, but I think you won't see a real solution until someone takes the initiative to really bring sites together in a happy playground.

Something to ponder.

Next time, I'll speak to a related topic. Tagging people in Facebook statuses and how that may interfere with, or potentially enhance, @replies in Twitter and how it all works together with Ping.fm.

In the meantime, enjoy this battle of the social networking sites:

On Karma, Oh What is it Good For?

I don't believe in karma. At least, I don't believe that people demonstrably get what's coming to them based on their past behavior. Still, that's not what we're here to talk about. We are here to discuss internet karma.

Karma is that elusive number, setting, hidden voodoo that many sites of the Reddit and Digg variety use to elevate certain users above the wild fray. Karma, in theory, encourages users to submit quality content with the hopes that quality will equal higher karma. Higher karma, in turn, can also be used by the site itself to push content submitted by those users up higher than those submitted by newcomers or trolls.

Sounds pretty good doesn't it? Well, many many things have a tendency to sound good in theory and to then fall apart when us irrational human beings actually get our hands on it. Internet karma is no different.

Karma is intended to work as an incentive system, and for a lot of people it certainly does just this. That little number can become an obsession. Getting it higher, getting to be the highest, can turn into a goal that undermines the essential point of a site like Reddit. How so you ask? Well, it's the karma whore issue you see.

karma whore: originally coined at slashdot, a karma whore plays to the prejudices of the masses to get positive moderation on their comments (via urban dictionary).

There are, of course, folks who take that definition to the very extremes, but to small degrees almost every member of an online community is going to end up at least a little susceptible to this phenomenon. The reason is, after awhile posting content that doesn't see a lot of traction and never makes it to the front page, a user is likely to take one of two paths:

1. Leave

2. Start posting content they know the community likes.

So, thusly, the community feeds it's own interests and only those who are willing to play along see their karma increase.

This isn't that different from how we interact with other people offline of course. Like minds hive together, that's human nature, but what if we wanted to see something different happen in cyberspace? What if we wanted to create a community that instead of feeding our existing interests and beliefs expanded and challenged them? Karma, the way I've seen it used today, is an ideology that keeps that from happening.

On Reddit, karma accumulates if the net up votes on your submitted content goes up. Imagine a situation in which instead, the level of controversy on your content resulted in a karma increase. Instead of incentivizing the user to submit content they know will appeal to the beliefs of the community, this encourages the user to submit content that will be polarizing in some way. Net result will be a very different picture of the overall content submitted to the site. Certainly, you can view the controversial items on Reddit, but there's no system that outright encourages users to submit that kind of content.

Maybe we can go the other direction entirely. After all, the best way to firm up your beliefs is to have them challenged. Try this site idea on for size: instead of positive karma, we encourage negative karma. The more down votes you get the higher your score. 

Clearly, there's still a failing in all of these systems. That failing is that it is still always possible to game the system. So what if we abandon the idea entirely, at least as a visible, measurable entity. Hide the karma from users and tweak the algorithm on the back end to get your desired results. Will users still submit content if they aren't 'rewarded' in some fashion? I think so, provided your algorithm still works well enough that interesting, varied content crawls its way to the top. 

So, karma, be it good or bad or controversial, certainly produces interesting dynamics in an online community. I'd love to see it used in a more varied or dare I say, backward fashion.

Keep it real guys, and keep your karma whoring to a minimum.

Addendum to Social Networking Demographics

Interesting things happened today that I felt impacted some of the things I talked about in the last blog post.  First, Facebook bought FriendFeed. What's that got to do with anything? Well, that particular bit of news lets us know that Facebook is doing anything but standing still. Buying FriendFeed gives them a great deal of talent more than anything else. After all, FriendFeed doesn't have anywhere near the usage that Facebook does. What it does have, is a bunch of very smart people working on it who are now working on Facebook.

I theorized last time that the demographic numbers indicated that potentially older users were moving from Twitter to Facebook. It seems that Facebook may actually be gunning for those very users by pushing Twitter features on their platform. 

See here: Facebook Launches Realtime Search

The Mashable article mentions that along with realtime search that will easily compete with Twitter's search, Facebook will also allow users to post their status updates publicly - essentially making them into Twitter tweets.

In any case, there is a lot of interesting movement going on in this space. Keep your eyes open.

On Social Networking Demographics

I've spent more time than is potentially healthy thinking about Twitter recently. This is partially due to conversations at the office about the popular micro-blogging service, but it's ever-presence in the news over the last several months is keeping it on my mind as well. Last time I waxed a bit poetic about how Twitter has become ingrained in our communication system today. This time, it's going to be all about demographics and statistics.

Huh? Here's the thing. Twitter has a really interesting demographic makeup. A demographic makeup that has me really curious about a few things.

My interest was piqued when I saw a set of two fine articles put together by Peter Corbett at iStrategyLabs. The first was a summary of the demographic breakdown of Twitter.  Dig around in the numbers and at least one really interesting thing pops out:

More than half of Twitter users are over the age of 35

Why, you ask, is that so interesting? Well, traditionally speaking, social networking services are the playground of the young. Folks under the age of 35 have, in the past, been the early adopters of this kind of technology and have continued to make up the bulk of the user groups. Thus why marketing attempts on Facebook or My Space are geared to a younger audience.  So - that has me thinking, why it Twitter different?

Ok, first I'll bet you want proof of some kind that it actually is different. That brings me to the second article, which helpfully provides a breakdown of Facebook demographics. We can see here that around 70% of Facebook users are under the age of 35. My Space, although a service that is falling out of favor, skews even younger with over 30% of its users clocked in at under 18 and around 75% total under the age of 35 (that data was pulled from this presentation). So - Twitter is something of an unusual animal in that landscape.

Some folks have speculated that this is a result of the apparent inbred narcissism of the younger generation. Those much-maligned Millennials and member of Generation Y (my own horribly named generation) "realize that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless" (read more about a 15 year old analyst who made that pronouncement). I alluded to that a bit last time, that Twitter is a communication device equivalent to shouting into the void. Do younger people find such shouting dreary since the likelihood of anyone shouting back is so small?

The preference of the young does appear to be with services that provide a more immediate feedback mechanism. You post a status on Facebook and your friends comment on it. You link to something interesting, they comment on it. Wait though, it isn't as if this isn't possible with Twitter. I can post an update and my friends or followers respond with a friendly @rknickme. It isn't so different is it?

But it is actually. See, there is so much more you can comment on in Facebook. Twitter on the other hand feels, to someone used to that flexibility, like a status update mechanism without much else going on. Heck, you can't throw a sheep at someone on Twitter can you? (Personal aside: I detest Superpoke).

So, that's my pet theory. Young users want a wealth of features at their fingertips. Twitter by its nature isn't any more or less narcissistic than Facebook or My Space. All the services are ways of broadcasting yourself and awaiting feedback and justification from the masses. What's really different is this:

1. Number of Features

2. Customization

3. Simplicity or lack thereof.

Twitter could not be more simple to get the hang of. Make an account, post a tweet. The tweets can only be 140 characters, so even that initial barrier of looking for something of substance to say is pulled down quite a bit. It is uncluttered with applications and add ons. There isn't (or wasn't until recently) much confusion surrounding privacy settings. Facebook, in comparison, is a landmine of confusion with an interface to match. That, I propose, is why Twitter has become the playground for over 35s.

What's a bit magical about that is it leads to another interesting statistic from those Facebook demographics I mentioned. The fastest growing group on Facebook? 35 - 54 year olds with the over 54s a tight second. Why the influx? Maybe it is as simple as this completely imaginary story:

A 40 year old woman is surfing the web looking for information about why her Comcast internet isn't working. She stumbles serendipitously onto ComcastCares at Twitter. She decides to try this new fangled thing out, and creates a Twitter account in order to ask the kindly people running that service what the deal might be. Now she's in. Before you know it she's sending tweets out multiple times a day, and she's following a slew of celebrities along with her family and friends.

Later, a well loved nephew or niece tells this woman about a service she's only vaguely familiar with. It's called Facebook, and the kids say you can do even more with it than the magical Twitter. They say she'll be able to add applications like Visual Bookshelf so her friends will know what she's reading. They say she can connect to her Netflix queue and everyone can see what she's watching. A couple of months ago all of that might have sounded complicated and overwhelming, but our friend has been twittering for awhile. She knows the basics of how this stuff works. The barrier to entry has been effectively lowered.

Maybe that's part of the picture. Surely, there are a number of intersecting reasons for all those juicy statistics, but the view that it can all be summed up as an effect of those narcissistic 20-something is extremely limited. The landscape of social networking on today's internet is a grand and multifaceted picture.

Of course, if I'm partly right, and the growth on Facebook may in some way be attributed to the already strong numbers of over 35s on Twitter, what does that mean for the future of Twitter? Will we start to see usage slip if people migrate from one to the other?

I doubt it, but I do think we will see an evolution in the way Twitter is used. We're already seeing an increase in marketing and customer service use on the site, and I'm confident that will continue. Could Twitter eventually be overrun by celebrities and companies shelling their personal lives and goods for our consumption while we, the unwashed masses, hide away in Facebook to share when we're going grocery shopping or are attending some rad rock show?

It's hard to predict, but in another year, the internet, Twitter and Facebook will be a completely different animal than the one we see today.

On Twitter Fails and Internet Panic

Today, Twitter was down. Down down down. The internet nearly imploded with anxiety. Why exactly? Do we really need Twitter to get through a few hours on a Thursday morning in early August? How important is Twitter really?

It's actually quite an intriguing question and gives us some insight into the nature of communication in our culture. Global communication culture actually. Worries and complaints filtered in from New York to Brazil to Russia to Hong Kong. Some amused and curious as to what happened. Others a bit panicy. A favorite comment of mine on the Wired blog: "Down in Maryland 10:43 AM, and I’m freaking out. I was about to Tweet “How do you confirm Twitter is down without Twitter?” before I realized Twitter was down….."

For every message like that, there is another one telling everyone else to get a life. Twitter is charmingly polarizing in that way. A potent drug to a large number of people, and an annoying fad to another. One thing that can't be denied though: when Twitter goes down, everyone (at least, everyone with a computer) notices.

Let's think for a moment about communication technology. Here's a ridiculously brief history:

1. The Postal System - Letters, taking weeks at times to reach the recipient.

2. Telephones - took some getting used to, but instant connections between two people.

3. Email - instant delivery, but not always instant receiving. Also limited to defined recipient groups.

4. IM - Like phones, instant connection, but again, limited recipient groups.

5. Twitter and it's kin - instant, global communication. The cyber-equivalent of shouting your message to the world where it will most likely dissolve into a haze of other shouted messages.

That's part of the beauty of it though. Being able to shout into the void, and the glorious wonder of seeing the Hive Mind of the void form as a result. That is a unique and new form of communication. Inherently global, and surprisingly useful. It isn't anything we thought we'd need or even want a couple of years ago, but technology moves faster than our desires do. Now here we are, attached to Twitter and reliant on it's servers for a previously unrealized and unnoticed need for connection.

So, on a standard Thursday morning, we hunt the web for news to explain the outage. We scour the blogs for confirmation that we are not alone. We create as best we can a Twitter without Twitter.

Pause for a second, what would have happened if a decade ago the telephone network went down completely for four or five hours? We don't actually have to wonder. Plenty of large scale phone outages have occurred in the past. As I was researching this article, I read this story about a fire at the Illinois Bell Central Office in Hinsdale, Il circa 1988 (source here). That wasn't a complete outage, but certainly was enough to cause panic amongst the public. Police were sent out in the affected area so residents without service would be able to report emergencies. Society by this point had become reliant on the phone service.

Now, I don't mean to imply that Twitter going down is something as severe as that incident. It clearly wasn't. What I mean by bringing up the comparison is to show that once we have a technology in our hands, we become reliant on it faster than we may realize. We have adjusted our lives to let that technology in, and losing it is disruptive. Look at the way Twitter was used during the Iran election. The State Department actually stepped in to request Twitter delay it's scheduled servicing in order to not disrupt usage during the upheaval.   

What is most fascinating to me to consider is, if this relatively recent technology can so quickly become indispensible to so many, what on earth will come next?

Meanwhile, visualize the panic of Twitter outages in this brilliant video from SuperNews:

Being on a Twitter kick, next time I think I'll talk about demographics and what that might mean for the future of Facebook and Twitter.