Posts tagged Facebook
I managed to break this post by trying to mess with the HTML in Tumblr, which doesn’t seem to like adding iFrames, except on my iPad. Weird.
Anyway, I’ve now incorporated “Likes” (as “Recommends”), the Activity Stream and Recommendations onto the blog proper, so you can see the results. Very simple.
I’ll write some thoughts on what this means at a later point … but, as I predicted, this year marks the beginning of the end for search, as new methods of discovering content are pioneered. Facebook have put their tanks on this big lawn.
Is the game up for online privacy? Is the new game about managing and massaging our identities online, rather than trying to keep our details off the internet? About exploiting the value of the data that we share rather than trying to hide it? That certainly seemed to be the view coming out of my interviews in California.
Remember the curious bemusement when Facebook first came along at the idea of broadcasting thoughts, ideas and photos online with acquaintances, however distant? My mum and dad are now on Facebook. Twitter seems to have turned the drip, drip of updates from Facebook into a gushing firehose of noise from my geekier friends. And we have new services that let us share where we are right now (FourSquare, Gowalla et al.), where we’re planning to be (TripIt), what we’re planning to do (Plancast), what we’re watching (Miso), what we’re listening to (last.fm) what we’re eating and how much we’re exercising (Daily Burn), how much we weigh (Withings) and even what we’re spending (Blippy). Is nothing private?
Why are people sharing this information, and aren’t they concerned about privacy? There’s no single answer, but in each of the examples above, there are benefits to sharing this information, either for the individuals or the community, or both. Benefits like getting recommendations for places to visit and things to listen to, watch and buy; encouragement and social pressure to achieve goals; meeting friends who happen to be in the same area. As well as plain-old showing off and striving for connection: perhaps we’re all more worried about being ignored than we are about guarding our privacy. Certainly, consumers seem increasingly comfortable with trading-off privacy for these benefits. And for the most part, my interviewees felt that the young in particular were the most comfortable with this exchange. Life, it seems, is going to get less private: we will be more open and share more.
There’s certainly value in this shared data for businesses. The ‘news’ that Visa can predict how likely you are to get divorced from your credit card transactions was widely reported. Marketers love this data to better target their advertising.
One interviewee commented that “We’ll all be like celebrities soon,” then corrected himself “actually, it’s more like we’re all going to be politicians.” His point: that details of our lives, good and bad, might be online, even if it’s not what we signed up to share. That we’ll have to live with the consequences, but that, perhaps, as a result of everyone’s dirty laundry being out to dry, we’ll be more forgiving of occasional slips, and maybe, just maybe, try to be better people knowing that our mistakes will be more visible.
So if we’re all public figures, we’d better get used to managing our brands online. Online Reputation Management (ORM) services have been around for companies for some years, and businesses like Reputation Defender are extending this concept to individuals.
Some interviewees saw the flipside to greater online openness being that anonymity will be increasingly viewed as suspicious. That we’ll need to carry our online identities with us to give our online voices weight. And everyone I spoke to seemed bullish about Facebook’s potential to be at the centre of those (buffed and polished) online identities, particularly with the advent of Facebook connect.
Where is all this going? What opportunities might it throw up for businesses? I’m particularly intrigued about the opportunities for highly-branded businesses whose value is tightly intertwined with self-perception and reputation? Any thoughts, leave a comment below.
