August 7, 2008
It has started. Last year it was all MySpace in Perth, but I’ve started overhearing conversations about Facebook on the street and seeing kids using it on the computers at school. Then this morning, while looking for info on their super gross breakfasts for a top secret project, I found out that Hungry Jack’s (the Australian name for Burger King) is advertising it’s Facebook page on its website.
It’s still not as crazy as Toronto, but my gut feeling is that it won’t ever be. The way people use the internet here and the way people socialize just isn’t as compatible with the Facebook way of doing things. I have to think about the specifics more, but I think it has a lot to do with using mobiles (Perth) over the internet on a desktop computer and having lots and of cheap internet access in every home (Toronto). And, as Alex Leitch brilliantly pointed out, Toronto is already divided up in a networky way - with a bunch of very distinct neighbourhood nodes linked together by an excellent transit system. Torontonians are already thinking in a Facebooky way.
Tags: academic, facebook, thesis, australia, perth
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May 22, 2008
The other day, I was biking up the Bathurst hill and I passed the Telus billboard advertising Facebook mobile on their phones for the upteenth time. Fun fact: Rogers was the first to advertise their Facebook mobile service, followed by Bell and Telus. 
The billboard reminded me of sign I saw on the window of the women’s clothing store Smart Set at the Eaton Centre earlier in the week. It had a Facebook logo and was advertising some new fashion cubes application, where you can compete with your friends about who has the best fashion, or something equally ridiculous. I was taken by the “Add Smart Set Fashion Cubes to your applications!” that was under the Facebook logo. I think that was the first time I’ve seen such technical language on the outside of a women’s clothing store. It’s still super gendered (compete with your friends to see who is the hottest), but really, is anyone surprised? I looked out for more Facebook logos as I walked through the mall, and not surprisingly there where two more at the Bell World and Rogers stores.
But that’s not all! At the end of April, I saw a presentation at CaseCamp about the success of TD Canada Trust’s Facebook app. That same night, Bryan Segal, VP at Comscore did a presentation about the insane popularity of social media in Canada. According to Comscore, Canada is the “most penetrated country” and “we view the most content and spend the most time interacting with social media.” In this context, its not really a surprise that Toronto is madly in love with Facebook.
So, this all got me thinking. A clothing store advertising it’s Facebook app, and a bank has one too? And there are so many extra Facebook shirts in Toronto that random bike riding junk collectors are wearing them? What I’m witnessing here in Toronto is so obvious that it’s invisible to me. It’s the first time a social web service, or anything from the internet really (besides when the web itself became big and we started seeing URLs all over the place… but that’s more a protocol and less a commercial service), has become so tightly integrated into so many aspects of mainstream life. For Torontonians, Facebook is becoming the mediator for so many everyday interactions, between people and between people and companies, and its being done at level of penetration we’ve never seen before.
Moar!
Rogers TV ad for Facebook mobile
My growing collection of photos of Facebook appearing in real life around Toronto
Tags: toronto, academic, facebook, thesis
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May 21, 2008
There was a rather ratty looking guy with crazy dirty hair carrying a desktop computer, three rods of something, a half exploded tv-like electronic device of some sort and two bags of miscellaneous parts, all while trying to ride a bike… and he was wearing a blue FACEBOOK SWEATSHIRT.
Tags: toronto, academic, facebook, thesis
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May 6, 2008
there’s this guy that i started talking to… well… he started talking to me, at bathurst station, and we talked all the way up to claxton on the #7 bus.
he isn’t on facebook (he told me) and when i tried to google stalk him, there were no results. except for this other guy with the same name who seems obsessed with parachutes.
i kinda love it. people adding you on facebook that you just met is like a commitment. i mean really, it turns the world into a small town. everyone is so easy to reach. they’re right there. i like the mystery and freedom of space and time.
i’m also so careful about what and who i write about on here now. not like the olden days when i was writing to the vast unknown expanse of THE INTERNET. but i know i can write this and he probably won’t read it (oh just watch him now! uhh hi;) ).
but it’s also weird because googling and facebooking is so habitual to me now. i need my backgroud info on people. and pictures. lots of pictures, like everyone gleefully puts up at facebook so we can all look at each other. i feel like that telepathic guy from heroes when he tries to listen to people’s thoughts when the haitian mind blocker dude is around. cuz yeah, my super power is without a doubt the internet, especially internet stalking >:]
(i’m tempted to start writing in all lowercase again. it’s so much prettier. and it just flooooows when i write this way)
Tags: stalking, friends, academic, facebook, thesis
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April 11, 2008
At the end of last year, I decided to delete my Facebook account because I was so angry with how hard it was to delete your account (among various other common complaints about said site). For I while, I had no Facebook account. Now I have two, which I realise is really weird considering my feelings about Facebook. But, it’s complicated, like everything I guess.
At first I was curious to see what it was like to not have a Facebook account. This went on for about a month. I didn’t really miss it, but had to get Fono to look up events for me that were listed on Facebook. Then I decided it was stupid to be doing Facebook research without actually being on Facebook, so I created a fake account under a fake name which I would use just to talk to my close friends. My thinking was that this would maintain my privacy and avoid the context collisions that I had with my real account. I emailed everyone I wanted to add (using real email, not Facebook messages, because I didn’t want anything tying the real me to the fake me) and told them my alias. Some of the people I didn’t warn beforehand were reluctant to add me because they had no idea who I was (which highlights an interesting trend - people aren’t as willing to interact with strangers online as they were back in the days of ICQ random chat). The nice thing about the fake account was that I never had to add anyone I didn’t want. I’d just say that I didn’t have a Facebook account. This caused some problems though for professional contacts who I wanted to add, but if i did it would defeat the purpose of my fake account. But the most unexpected thing was that people didn’t treat me like me, they treated me like a character or a stranger. I think by not being me, I was disrupting a balance of power. People act as themselves on Facebook as long as everyone else does. If I’m cheating, so to speak, by hiding behind an alias, I’m gaining an advantage through anonymity. Thinking it might help, I changed my alias’s first name to my real name, but still maintained a fake last one. To my surprise, Facebook actually let me make this change, even though it was an entirely new name and was pretty obvious one of them wasn’t real. Not forcing people to call me by something other than my name seemed to help. I also started interacting with people again through the site (leaving wallposts, tagging photos etc.) which I had been avoiding doing to maintain my anonymity. I discovered that this increased people’s interaction with me in return. I’m not sure if I was building trust back or getting people used to my new profile or an unspoken rule that people will only interact with you if they think it will be reciprocated, especially in public/performative communication spaces like the wall.
This was all going well until I discovered that Facebook was having friends.get party and a developer’s garage at SXSW that you had to RSVP for on Facebook and they were checking IDs at the door. I needed to get in, but obviously I didn’t have any ID with my alias on it, so I grudgingly created a new account with my real name and added some people to make it look legit. I told myself I would delete the account after SXSW… probably… unless some really awesome people added me… then I’d have to think about it.
And of course they didn’t bother to check my ID, or even my name. Both events had the atmosphere that I imagine was similar to that found at Microsoft in the 90s. The party and the garage were both held at a trendy bar, filled with plasma screens showing a Facebook promo video. There were free unlimited redbull vodkas for all (very dangerous). Robert Scoble was there at the front during the developer presentations, recording everything. Everyone seemed super ra-ra Facebook and the sense of excitement was very contagious. Luke and I both felt the effects of drinking the koolaid (or the redbull vodkas…).
But a turning point in my thinking was this:
Mark Zuckerberg casually hung around after his presentation (still wearing his now famous fleece) so I went over and asked him why Facebook didn’t have multiple profiles that you could show to different people in different contexts, because the problem with limited profile is that people know they are on it - there is no plausable deniability. Zuckerberg replied that he thought it was dishonest (I think he actually used the word lie) to show people different things and that the most happy people, according to an academic study (which I cannot find - anyone know what it’s called?), are the same in all contexts of their lives. I argued that it wasn’t lying, just revealing different parts to different people but he didn’t agree. He told me they were going to have more “organic” controls that allowed for more granular control of who sees what (they’ve now added these. It’s the thing that allows you to make lists of who sees what. I wasn’t that impressed), but was not going to have multiple profiles because he basically thought it was an incorrect way of interacting. This was a fascinating revelation of how Facebook’s design is largely shaped by how Zuckerberg thinks people should act.
Even though I didn’t agree with his take on context management (or lack thereof), talking to Zuckerberg humanized Facebook for me… It was like meeting someone you’ve been having a flamewar with on the internet and seeing they aren’t all that bad. I had forgotten that it’s just people behind Facebook, people who are among the first to be designing the mainstream mechanisms and systems for online social networking… or whatever it is they’re building (I have a sense what we know as SNSes are just the beginning). A big part of my thesis proposal was looking at users and designers (a lot of research thus far has focused just on users and treated the technology as given, as if it could not have been made any other way), and this reminded me of how important it is to see that technology is not just that; there are people and ideologies behind it. They’re just making it up as they go along, and making adjustments based on seeing what happens. But there is still a tremendous responsibility on their shoulders, since they have the data of 70 million people in their care. Don’t worry, I’m not becoming a Facebook fan again, I’m just a bit more forgiving… or at least remembering to see the other side of the coin.
All this humanizing wasn’t enough to make me keep my new real account though. When I started adding new people to my account that I knew, I told them it was a professional profile, which signaled not to post stuff that was NSFW. The rest of the people I add are mostly professional anyway, so it goes without saying. This was what made me feel comfortable… it was clear what the purpose of my new profile was and what was appropriate to write on my wall. With my old profile, it had started out as a secret, guarded thing that only other university/college kids to see. Then it slowly morphed into being for everyone. How can you control expectations and contexts when the purpose and audience of your profile has changed? Different people that I knew from different contexts all had differing expectations of how to interact with my profile. By killing my first Facebook self, and making a new one with an explicitly professional propose, I’ve overcome the context *ahem* fuck (because it really was not just a collision) that was making me crazy. I’m also far more comfortable having professional stuff about me online, which somewhat addresses the privacy concerns I have with Facebook. As for IP issues, I just don’t upload anything I care about. All said, I still have major issues with how Facebook is handling privacy and intellectual property concerns. It really shouldn’t be up to me, the user, to sort all this stuff out.
Tags: sxsw2008, developer'sgarage, friends.get, sxswi, academic, facebook, sxsw, thesis
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March 17, 2008
Okay, so SXSW is so last week, but I hate blogging while I’m at things because I like to digest and reflect, but also, I like to actually enjoy things while I’m there (you can blog when you get home!). Thus, I present part one of my fashionably late reflections on Facebook from SXSW interactive:
Last year the geeks were all abuzz about Twitter, arguably making SXSW the tipping point in the sites’ success. Facebook’s only honour last year was winning in the oddly titled “Classic” category at the 2007 web awards.
Facebook wasn’t exactly this year’s Twitter, but nothing else was either. By this year’s SXSW, Facebook had already reached it’s tipping point, especially in major English speaking urban centres, like Toronto. So basically, Facebook is already normal and dominant and is normalizing the social use of the web by everyone. And when I say normal, I mean normal like you-don’t-even-think-about-it-anymore-and-neither-does-your-mother. A lot of the excitement I saw last year was because everyone had this sense that we were doing something new and groundbreaking. Ze Frank’s opening video from last year’s web awards captured this feeling. When they played it, everyone freaked out cuz it struck a chord. But this year, not so much. People weren’t even talking about Web 2.0 anymore (much to my eternal joy, because that term is so ridiculous and ambiguous), but were instead opting for the more reserved “social media” or “social networking” (which speaks again to the dominance of Facebook). Sure, there were way more people and the party lines were longer. But Yahoo! didn’t even have a party and the schwag was few and far between. No free geek tshirts for me doesn’t mean much to the average person, but the fact remains that SXSW is a good indicator of mainstream tech use, kinda like how fashion shows are extreme examples of what kind of clothes people are going to be wearing that season. When things are normal people don’t tend to care as much, which is probably why there wasn’t a ‘this year’s Twitter’ (or, the new Twitter is… Twitter.) Facebook and the web more broadly are becoming just like everything else, normal and boring.
And you know what? The people at Facebook know it (well, not the boring part. They still think it’s pretty exciting). This was evident at the developer’s garage and friends.get party (both hosted by Facebook) where there were huge plasma screens showing a Facebook promo video (that Luke awesomely recorded for me). Aside from being blatant ripoff/nod to last year’s “We Are the Machine,” the main thrust of the video was that Facebook is a normal extension of everyday life.
The message in this video is echoed by a recent ad campaign by Canada’s Roger’s Wireless promoting their mobile Facebook service, which let’s you “tell the whole story as it happens” on your Blackberry. Canadian mobile carriers are so far behind the rest of the world that if they’re pushing something, you know it’s huge.
Stay tuned for part two: rethinking my hate for Facebook (after a chat with Mark Zuckerberg. lulz)
Tags: sxswi, academic, sxsw, facebook, thesis
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February 20, 2008
I’ve been quietly doing my ethnography and have been naughty about blogging since being back in Canada (a.k.a. I haven’t). I think all the snow makes me sleepy. But! The coolest thing evah happened to me over the past two weeks. I was interviewed about Facebook for three very different newspaper articles, language, topic and geography wise (which I guess also goes to show how huge Facebook is getting).
Check it out:
Spain’s El Pais on how hard it is to delete your Facebook account: Abandonar Facebook, una misión imposible
Rwanda’s Sunday Times on the use of Facebook in Africa: Making friends with Facebook: Rwandans turn to the internet to get connected
Montreal’s La Presse on the meaning of friendship on Facebook et al.: Veux-tu être mon ami?
Tags: media, academic, facebook
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February 20, 2008
I’ve been back in Toronto since late December working on my social web ethnography, which - surprise surprise - has quickly evolved into just being about Facebook because people in Toronto are completely nuts for Facebook.When I left Canada for Australia, Facebook was huge in Toronto (we had the largest network in the world, but we’ve been overtaken by London) but not as huge as it is now. My friends have been teasing me because I still get excited when I hear someone on the street or at a bar mention Facebook. “I can’t believe you’re still surprised by that! It’s totally normal.”
Anyway, I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about how and why I used Facebook before I started formally researching it. I deleted my “real” account a few months ago, but created a new account under a different name which is invisible to searches for research purposes. Even though I’m still technically on Facebook, I’ve noticed my use of it and the way I think about it has changed… I’m much more distant and self-aware of what I do on it… it seems far less normal to me but far more normal to everyone else. I realise how much my view has changed in reading something I wrote last year about Facebook, a few months before I deleted my account:
i use facebook as a social utility to keep in touch with my friends. but most people don’t use it this way. people i haven’t spoken to in years add me. people who wouldn’t say hi to me at the mall add me. people who have met me once add me. i don’t know what to do in these situations. i usually have nothing against these people, but they aren’t people i’d share my personal life with. but not adding them is considered rude.
the biggest one i struggle with is people i know professionally who add me. i see facebook as my personal, private leisure space. allowing people i know professionally into that space is like inviting them over to an intimate dinner party with my friends. i can’t relax, i can’t be myself because i feel like i have to constantly perform professionalism. but at the same time, i usually like the person and want to keep in touch. and obviously, its not good to offend people you work with. worse still, i can’t explain any of this, since there is no “reason” box to write a message when you decline someone’s add.
this is further complicated by the fact that i don’t have entire control over my identity…my friends can add wall comments, or tag me in photos that i didn’t take
i was talking to greg about this… why doesn’t facebook have different profiles for different contexts, like friends filters on lj? it would make so much sense. maybe its part of their plan to make things more drama-rama and thus more exciting, like those reality tv producers
I no longer see Facebook as a leisure space or as something personal. Using Facebook feels more like feeding some giant slightly evil marketing AI robot that we are all creating but have no control over. But that’s probably only because I think way too much about it. Like most things in the world that are “normal,” I think most people use Facebook without thinking about it. As a cashier said to me the other day after she overheard me talking about the evils of Facebook “Is it really all that bad? I mean if people want to write stuff and ask people when they want to hang out, what’s the problem with that?”
Tags: toronto, canada, academic, facebook, thesis
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November 19, 2007
I did a panel at the Night’s Edge Cyberpunk conference last weekend about privacy and IP issues in the age of Google and Facebook. It ended up being a good summary of what I think is freaking everyone out about Facebook these days.
Anyway, since I have to write everything down or I’ll forget, I basically have a copy of what I said. Behold, for your reading pleasure, all that is fuct with Facebook:
***
one of the things i’m really curious about is the new and emerging social and legal challenges that arise from the popularity of sites like facebook. what’s so interesting about these challenges is that we are really still haven’t developed the social or legal mechanisms for negotiating or protecting our use of such spaces.
the most obvious of these issues is of course privacy. until recently, concerns about privacy primarily revolved around surveillance in public spaces or datamining, repurposing or even misuse of personal information being gathered by companies or financial institutions, such as for credits cards. when giving this information away, we often assume it will be used just to provide us with credit card services. we also have the sense that our information will be secure and private as we are sharing it with a reputable organization. when people started learning about datamining and identity left, i think we all became a little bit more wary about sharing our personal data.
now if you think about what we’re doing on facebook in this context, it seems a bit crazy. before we were concerned about other people watching us, or gathering or using our personal data wihout our consent. on facebook, we’re all giving it away freely and often with more detail than anywhere else. where else can marketers see where we live, our interests, our age, our contact details, our photos, work and educational history AND all the people we know? it’s like voluntary datamining.
i saw a blog comment the other day say that facebook was really a marketing platform disguised as social networking platform. and i think that observation is very apt. we all put in our details on facebook in good faith and we really don’t know what’s being done with it, or what will happen in the future. for example, facebook is introducing ads, much like gmail’s targeted advertising that are based on your profile content. would you have put in all your personal info if you knew that was going to happen down the road?
aside from marketing, facebook has not proven itself to be so great at maintaining users privacy. for years, facebook was only for college students and you needed a university email address to sign up to facebook. this gave users a sense of safety and that they would only be interacting with other students, or at worst, faculty. they could safely play on facebook without their mother or boss logging in and finding out. then, facebook decided it needed to grow its userbase so it opened its doors for everyone. suddenly, everyone’s grandmother, boss and ex boyfriend was using facebook and wanted to be your friend. its kind of like a bait and switch - you sign up because you want to interact with your university friends and then suddenly your profile filled with details aimed at your university friends, details that are not so appropriate for a professional context, are opened up to everyone.
this huge change to the service is not a surprise, given that the corporate culture at facebook does not seem to take the privacy of its users very seriously. just recently, it was discovered that facebook employees can see what profiles you’ve viewed. now this isnt some sort of feature that is required for their job and they are actively discouraged from using unless for work. no, this feature is actually presented as a job perk and employees do it for entertainment!
another concern with facebook is something most people don’t realise. facebook owns the intellectual property of everything you upload. so all those pictures you took, all the wall posts you’ve written, even the profile you created are all owned by facebook. i saw an IP lawyer talk about this very issue at web directions south a few months ago. he had gone through all the legal documents you are agreeing to when you sign up to facebook, and said it amounted to about 35 pages of text, single spaced in 8.5 font. he also thought the level of rights we are expected to give away when using facebook and similar services was wholly unreasonable and expected that the government might soon step in to legislate the area.
so after hearing all this, why aren’t we all leaving facebook?
the first answer is that the cost of non-participation is very high. ryan bigge, former editor at adbusters noted that non-use of facebook is almost the same as not-existing. and it’s kinda true, sadly, especially if you work in the web industry or are under 30 in a developed country. facebook as a mode of interaction for some people is more important than email or a phone. so it’s kind of hard to expect to people to opt out with such a high personal cost.
the other reason that people dont leave is that facebook is a captive community. if i decide i’m tired of facebook and i want to move to another service, i can’t take any of my profile content or friends lists with me. so, facebook maintains its dominance because no one wants to leave behind the profile that they’ve put so much time into.
in fact, as i recently found out, even just deleting your facebook account is a nightmare! you can deactivate on the site, but this doesn’t actually delete any of your content, and people can still tag you in photos or invite you to events. if you actually want your data gone, you have to email facebook. then someone will reply and tell you that you have to delete every piece of profile data yourself. every wall post, friend, image, note. everything. and if you’ve been on facebook for any period of time, this is a serious amount of work. and i’m pretty sure this requirements violates privacy laws somewhere, because facebook clearly the functionality to do it for you, but want to make it next to impossible for you to leave.
so, what can be done about all this?
some people are taking things into their own hands by creating fake accounts, so they can interact with their friends and still have a facebook, yet still protect their anonymity and know their personal data isn’t being misused. its believed that prince william uses a fake account this way. of course, facebook hates fake accounts because it undermines their value and actively deletes accounts they think are fake. In fact, it’s against their terms of service to use an alias.
more broadly, other social networking services are moving towards “open social networking”, such as google’s open social or people aggregator. the goal of all this is to give users ownership of their profile data and friends list by making them portable and interoperable. while this doesn’t necessarily solve the privacy issues because it could lead to your data more freely going all over the web across many services, it does allow users to easily leave a site if they are not happy. the growing coalition of platforms using open social - which includes Bebo, Friendster, MySpace, orkut and linked in - may be powerful enough to start pressuring facebook into shaping up.
***
Man, it’s so weird to think I used to be totally in LOVE with Facebook. But then we had to break up, because Facebook turned out to be a real asshole. The kind who stalks you, sneakily tricks you into giving him your stuff and then won’t let you break up with him. And even after you do break up, he’s probably still got all your MSN chats and naked photos which he will keep forever to potentially deploy at a later date for some unknown yet likely sinister purpose.
Tags: conference, night'sedge, academic, panel, facebook, thesis
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November 15, 2007
I held off writing this until I had actually done the deed. And I kept put off doing the deed because I knew it would be mind numbingly boring and time consuming for reasons I’ll elaborate on in a sec. But it is done, my Facebook profile is all deleted.
At first, they only let me “deactivate” my account, which is kinda like limbo for your profile. This means all your data is still there, and people can still invite you to stuff and tag you in photos, but no one can actually see your profile. And you can pretty easily re-activate it too, all you gotta do is log in. So I emailed some generic Facebook email and told them I wanted to delete my account. Guess what they told me. “Peter from Facebook*” said that if you want to actually delete your profile, you have to go in and manually delete every single bit of “profile content” by hand. I emailed Peter back and asked what exactly counted as profile content. Surprisingly, I got no reply (they love to make it easy, don’t they). But according to Canadian blogger Steven Mansour’s similar experience (he got Lucy from Facebook as his helpful helper), it means every note, every wall post, every friend, every group. Everything. For anyone who has used Facebook for a while, this would take many hours of fun to accomplish. It took me just under four hours, sitting there clicking delete delete delete. It also didn’t help that their software seems to get a bit screwy when you delete a lot of stuff fast. At one point I had left a bunch of groups, but it still had me listed as a member, but wouldn’t let me leave again because I wasn’t a member. Once you’ve had your hours of fun, you have to email Facebook again and ask them nicely to delete your accoun. I thought all of this was an insane requirement, so I emailed our friend Facebook Peter. The reply:
“We ask that users remove their own content so that you can be assured that this information has been cleared before we delete your
account.”
Right. A bunch of geeks who make one of the most popular SNSes can’t figure out a way to do a mass delete of my user data.
You know what’s ironic? I wasn’t seriously thinking about deleting my account until I got that email back from Peter and discovered how next to impossible Facebook has made the process.
*Anyone else notice that we speak of Facebook as an entity that has its own agency, rather than as a company with a bunch of people behind it? They sure do a good job of reinforcing that notion by making me interact with some guy who is from Facebook, rather than having a last name. Such a tired comparison, but it is totally like Big Brother. We don’t question what the Facebook people do, because Facebook isn’t people, it’s a neutral machine that just is.
Tags: academic, facebook, thesis
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