Facebook | An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook | An Open Letter from Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook evolves by reverting, it would seem. As Zuckerberg’s letter explains, Facebook is doing away with regional networks, which were added when the popular social networking site moved beyond its student base. Now they are implementing more privacy controls, but the options swing wide–share with friends, friends of friends, or everyone. That’s a big jump from friends of friends to everyone. It seems to me that the regional network is in between those categories. So, I can’t share with Cleveland unless I open up my posts to everyone in the world. Yikes.

Part of the logic for doing away with regional networks is that 50% of Facebook users are in regional networks. Say what? Perhaps that means that a lot of people like a regional network, as opposed to, say, the whole world. It’s big, but not too big. Zuckerberg is promoting the move as controlling your privacy, but is it a move to get more people to open up to the whole world, instead?

I don’t know what to think, yet.

Filed under: blogging, social network , Facebook

twitter experiment makes the rounds

An interesting experiment I heard about on Twitter, of course, from Gardner Campbell at Baylor (http://www.twitter.com/GardnerCampbell). Here’s his blog commentary and a few other responses to the experiment:
“Twitter in the history class, and the ‘uni’ in ‘university’”: http://www.gardnercampbell.net/blog1/?p=840

“The Twitter Experiment: Bringing Twitter to the Classroom at UT Dallas”: http://kesmit3.blogspot.com/2009/04/twitter-experiment-bringing-twitter-to.html

Comments on the experiment from Monica Rankin: http://www.utdallas.edu/~mrankin/usweb/twitterconclusions.htm

Derek Bruff’s discussion of the project on Teaching with Classroom Response Systems: http://derekbruff.com/teachingwithcrs/?p=250

Filed under: blogging, communication, digital literacy, education, free stuff, instant messsaging, social network, teaching, technology

love the cloud, fear the cloud

I had two interesting experiences with clouds yesterday–as in those spaces on the Internet where you can access software as a service (SaaS) and store files, for example.

I sync my Outlook calendar (Entourage, really, on my Mac) with my Mac iCalendar and then with my Google calendar, so that I can always see what I should be doing when I don’t have access to the school network. In addition, it allows me to embed my Google calendar on my personal web page, so others can see where I am. All my information and the syncing process works through my account on Mobile Me, an Apple service that provides email, calendar, and storage.

Well, something went wrong yesterday, meaning I did something wrong. Wasn’t paying attention. Said yes when I should have said no. In an instant, all my calendars were empty, and I realized how much I depend on them to guide my work and schedule. I had some frightful moments, until I realized I had published my iCal as a web page for sharing and that it still existed, but I didn’t know for how long. So I subscribed to it and then went about fixing everything in a backwards fashion. So, yesterday, was clearly an example of the love/hate relationship with one cloud in my sky.

Later, there was a flurry of discontent on every social network about Facebook’s new terms of service which spelled out what seemed to be a right to everyone’s posted material, such as photos and videos, forever. Here’s how Mark Zuckerberg explained the situation, and let’s see if he objects to my using the photo he uses on Facebook:

Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear. Read the rest . . . .

As I noted on Twitter yesterday before this was posted, to quote myself, “I sorta figure when I post any content that I am tacitly agreeing to share it with anyone who can right-click–what’s the FB difference?” So, it didn’t come as a surprise to me that Facebook made clear that it was one of anyone. Some people were talking about how to delete your entire Facebook account, but in social networking, aren’t we making the first step of trusting the network itself? Sure, there are ways to work safely, to be selective in the information you share, but if you fear the software/application/site/etc. you are paralyzed. I’m not worried about my content on Facebook, but I can tell you that I do not share everything. I am not playing the 8, 16, 20 or whatever number things-you-don’t-know-about-me game that’s going around. Let’s leave some things unknown and still socialize for our own reasons.

P.S I could have posted any number of page images from Facebook to illustrate my post, but decided on the Tri-C libraries fan page, in case you didn’t know about it and wanted to be a fan.

Update 2/18/09: Facebook reconsiders its TOS, reverting to the old TOS in the meantime:

Filed under: Web 2.0, cloud computing, communication, computers, social network

why Twitter?

It’s been a year since I first posted about Twitter. I was harsh, unkind, suggesting that we were twits, me included. Yet, I gave it a long chance to become part of my daily technology-reading routine, alongside reading RSS blog feeds, online news, email, calendar agenda.

During that time, I thought a lot about whether it could usefully be an educational tool, and I think that it has developed into one, not limited to a prescribed use, but open to your imagination.

Twitter is a tool for microblogging. Micro, because you are limited to 140 characters. Go over and get a warning, meet the 140 exactly and you’ve created a twoosh. Blogging, because you are publishing, and if I must remind you again, a blog is not a discussion board. You publish for your own reasons and replies are gravy. On Twitter, you may get a reply, a re-tweet when someone wants to let more people know what you said, a direct message that is not public, or you may get nothing at all. On occasion, your tweet will create a ruckus and it will spread like a virus, but virality is not something you can control.

I use it personally and professionally by carefully picking people to follow whom I know personally and/or professionally or would like to know. I follow around a hundred and that’s plenty for me, because I like to keep up with what they are saying, and that’s not as hard as it sounds because there are a host of applications and plugins that make it easy to stay connected. I often have both Tweetdeck and Twhirl open, or might go to the Twitter web page, using the Firefox plugin Power Twitter, because it shows pix and videos inline. Another Firefox plugin, Twitterfox, pops up with new Tweets from the browser status bar. You can have Twitter update your Facebook status through a Facebook app, and you can install a Twitter gadget alongside your Gmail.

Professionally, I benefit from hearing about new technology, following links to neat blogs and articles and videos about technology, as well as hearing appeals for answers to complicated technology problems, or news about successes. And along the way, these professional voices become a community I belong to, not one that is all work and no play.

What can you use it for in your classes? Well, I hear that it can work as a classroom response system if all your students are equipped with computers or web-enabled mobiles. You would “collect” the responses on the Twitter web page if you wanted to display it.

Although I’m not a fan of using Twitter to create threads, hash-mark tagging (#your keyword) allows you to see all the comments with the same tag. So, you can create a tag for your group or class and then see them all on the Twitter search page. You might allow students to create what’s referred to as a backchannel in the class, an ongoing Twitter discussion of participants (students)–such use of Twitter is now common at conferences and large meetings, or at national events like the recent election or last night’s Grammy Awards.

I’ve gone way over my 140 character limit. Give it a try, a good long try, and let me know what you think.

Filed under: blogging, collaboration, communication, free stuff, social network