Why I don't do Facebook quizzes

When you toss a Facebook quiz my way and I ignore it, I’m not being standoffish. Just being careful with my privacy and that of my Facebook friends.

It’s not widely known, but every time you fill out a Facebook quiz or play a game, you’re handing over access to your profile info and other content -- as well as that of every one of your Facebook friends -- to the person or company that created the application. Those outfits -- marketers, advertisers, businesses, and lord knows who else -- then have access to a rich pile of personal data that you may or may not want to control.

NPR has just posted a quick read/listen 4-part series titled “The End of Privacy” that taps into just how much private information we hand over willy-nilly in exchange for online coupons or access to games and the like. Here’s the specific segment on the Facebook. It’s worth reading, even if you decide to continue with those “Think you really know ‘80s hair bands?” quizzes.

The theory behind Facebook making all that info available to marketers is that in exchange for providing “sticky” popular content that makes Facebook a fun destination, those companies can then better target their advertising to the people more likely to buy their stuff. The problem is the bar is pretty low in terms of who Facebook allows to create apps. If you’re skilled enough, you can create a popular app that spreads like wildfire. But what assurances do I have that you’ll do the right thing and keep my information safe and sound? None.

Yeah, some of the worries over privacy in an age of social media are overblown. But there’s a difference between being open and throwing caution to the wind. Our friends in Canada are concerned enough that they’ve ordered Facebook to be more transparent in explaining how user data is collected and shared. If that transparency is good enough for users in Canada, don’t you wonder why Facebook isn’t doing the same in the U.S.?

One last takeaway from the NPR package: People are MORE likely to hand over personal information to cheesy-looking sites rather than authoritative sites. Apparently, our guards are down when we think knuckleheads are building the sites. Scary, particularly for those of us who actually take care to guard the privacy of our site users. 

Update on Monday, November 9, 2009 at 9:33 AM by Logan Molen

MediaPost has an interesting story today about Facebook taking action against companies that are putting scam offers in popular apps:

"Facebook did not disclose which ad networks it suspended. Earlier this year, Facebook banned networks SocialHour and SocialReach for allegedly running misleading in-app ads and using Facebook member data on outside landing pages.

"The company said it had also "suspended or brought into compliance" more than 100 applications for ad-related violations in regions globally, over half of which had more than one million monthly active users.

" 'We recognize that monitoring ads isn't the first area of focus for an entrepreneur just getting started with social applications. That's why ad networks that don't play by the rules should expect to be our first point of contact in our line of enforcement," according to Facebook. The company says 70% of its 300 million users engage with apps each month."

Maybe there is hope that Facebook will do the right thing. 

More detail in Facebook's developers' blog.

Update on Friday, December 11, 2009 at 5:52 PM by Logan Molen

Facebook has just launched a fresh campaign to highlight the options its users have in protecting their privacy. This week, users began seeing messages that explain the tools they have to control distribution of their content.

PC World has several good pro and con takes. David Coursey walks one through the land mines, while Brennon Slattery bemoans these changes in a post titled "Why Privacy Concerns are Ruining Facebook."

What do you think? Am I a weasel in believing Facebook should give its users more control or is openness and truthiness simply the game moving forward?

Do we really need a book on Twitter? ... Actually it's a good read

I stumbled upon a book called simply “The Twitter Book” at the Kern County Library, and kinda winced. A Twitter book? Seriously?

I picked it up and saw that the respected Tim O’Reilly was one of the two authors, so took a deep breath and opened it up.

It's actually good stuff.

The Twitter Book is a breezy read with lots of great tipsThe book -- slightly larger than pocket-sized -- is a breezy read with visual examples on the left page and tips on the right, for 230+ pages. Not saying seasoned Tweeters need to buy it, but it’s worth checking out from the library.

(Safari Books offers a free sample of the first chapter, but that chapter really doesn't capture the value of the bullet point tips and examples).

For me, I’ve been using Twitter since shortly after it launched, althoPages alternate between visual examples on the left and tips and detail on the right-hand page. This page isn't representative of most pages, which are full of bullet items.ugh sporadically at times. I’m by no means a power user and found some of these tips valuable.

Here are some highlights I found interesting:

• Twitturly and Tweetmeme capture and rank urls being posted in Twitter.
• The Favorites feature on Twitter.com, which for some reason I’ve never used, allows you to bookmark good stuff to read later (will be of great help to me, because I tend to read Tweets in spurts, which results in me opening up interesting links in multiple windows, which start eating up processing power if I don’t read them quickly enough).
• Mr. Tweet and Who Should I Follow? analyze your Twitter activity and network, and ID others you might be interested in following.
• Retweeting, or reposting other Tweets, is a sign of worthiness and value in the Twittersphere. Retweetist and Retweet Radar are sites that collect the most-retweeted posts.
• Twittersheep shows what your followers are interested in.
• This is a Twittersheep tag cloud of my Twitter followers' interests.You can preschedule postings at Tweetlater.
• Automating posting of some Tweets onto your Facebook page makes sense. But, c’mon, do you want every Tweet on Facebook. Facebook has an app that allows you to pick and choose which Tweets to resend along to your Facebook faithful.
• Create mini-bios on profile pages if you have multiple people posting to a single Twitter address.
• The authors cited @Comcastcares as the benchmark for using Twitter for customer service.
• “@replies are usually seen only by people following both parties to the conversation. So if you want your reply to be seen by all your followers, don’t put the @ at the begging of the tweet.” 
• If you’re a business, post personal updates to reveal the human side of your organization. Don’t just push official company messages.
• Twist (apparently now known as Trendistic) is among business apps that provide insight onto gauging the popularity of one Twitter topic over another (their example was “American Idol” vs. “Lost”).

Finally, loved the acknowledgements page, which listed people by Twitter address. Cool.

As you might expect, the authors are continuing the conversation on Twitter at #TwitterBook. I also encourage you to follow the authors @timoreilly and @sarahm's @TweetReport.

Testing new Twitter tool

I got an alpha invite for a new Twitter app called Tweetboard that does a couple of things:

1. It surfaces my Twitter feed onto my personal site. To date, I haven't found a clean way to pull in Twitter feeds into my platform so this is a half-step in that direction. The Tweetboard window sits to the left side of my site, hidden under a "tweets" tab. Click on the tab and it opens up an adjustible screen. Click on the tab again and you close the screen. Voila!Tweetboard is an app that's simple to install and use
2. It also introduces the ability to host nested Twitter discussions within my site. I don't get enough traffic or comments yet to probably justify that feature but we'll give it a try anyway.

The Tweetboard tool itself was simple to install: Just had to slap some javascript onto my templates and tweak a few things. Took all of a few minutes.

The video above is a review of Tweetboard. It's kinda over the top, but highlights the general features.

Lemme know what you think, or better yet, toss a few posts in there to see what happens.