Something I liked about the article was that it gave context to a technical social mashup idea I’ve been exploring, which is the increased use of near field communication (NFC) to increase one’s visibility in a meaningful way.  More specifically, people will use RFID tag readers in a mobile device like the iPhone to alert the world of their participation in entertainment experiences.

In The End of Solitude, Deresiewicz suggests the culture of celebrity is connected to the video camera, which I connect to broadcast television.  Regretfully, in the year when we could least afford it, reality TV gave rise to pointless distractions like the Balloon Boy and the White House Party Crashers.  But the article also describes the culture of connectivity as a product of the evolving use of computers and mobile communications in society.  As something of an evangelist for new media and a critique of old media, it is somewhat humbling for me to read Deresiewicz’s grouping of celebrity with connectivity in the contemporary self:

“Celebrity and connectivity are both ways of becoming known.  It wants to be visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah, then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is the quality that validates us, this is how we become real to ourselves — by being seen by others. The great contemporary terror is anonymity.”

The value of different participatory entertainment activities runs the gamut.  A film at your local movie theater requires you to only buy a ticket before the film is sold out and ensure you show up at the scheduled time.  Getting yourself twenty feet from the stage at The Dead on July 4th at Rothbury Music Festival in Michigan requires a significantly greater level of planning.  But the relative interest in the social grid in any given activity is less important than the simple declaration to the post modern self that you “did it.”  People want to shout from the top of their literal or figurative mountains, “I am about to (or have just)  ____ at _____.”

Given that a lot of people love to share their experiences, many are simply limited by the inconvenience.  I’ve given some detail to my sense that there is a big splash still yet to be made by Apple’s touch platform.  And that the Touch lineup of the iPod Touch, the iPhone and the iSlate we will see a revolution in mobile computing.  They will allow us to enjoy the impulses of the modern self which are to take part in connectivity and some element of celebrity.

A topic that hasn’t been explored enough is the effect of including an RFID reader in a breakthrough device like the iPhone.  There is reason to believe that an RFID reader will be incorporated in the near future.   I believe that the inclusion of such hardware will open up opportunities to more quickly identify and disseminate interesting information about the entertainment spaces we’re inhabiting.

To illustrate a point, when I was writing the above paragraph I searched twitter for “Sherlock Holmes” which premiered this past weekend.  The third tweet from the top was from a student I’ve never heard of or met named Nicholas King.  From his Twitter bio, we know Nicholas is a student at Eastern Michigan and studies business.  Quite simply, Nicholas tweeted:

A quick search reveals that Trillium is a cinemas in Grand Blanc, Michigan and Nick was keeping his followers up to date with a text message from his phone.  While a text message accomplishes the goal of updating his thirty or so followers, it falls down for a few reasons:

1. Part of being fully connected is also having your information quickly sorted and grouped with similar data.  Twitter provides a reverse method for grouping information through its search.twitter.com functionality.  Users are capable of directly grouping their tweets with hashtags.  Both of those methods suffer the potential for data entry error.  I wouldn’t have known about Nick’s experience achievement if he had spelled it “Shelock Holmes.”
2. Manually updating your followers with the activity you’re participating in requires extended effort.  If you’re walking in the door of an RJD2 show you might have a drink in one hand and a gaggle of pals pulling you forward with the other. It isn’t always possible or at least socially acceptable to whip out your phone and type out an update.

The concept is this.  Sherlock Holmes is being distributed to theaters by Warner Bros Pictures.  In addition to sending out reels of film, Warner Bros would also send a small stand up display that is to be placed near the entrance to the theatre showing the movie.  If Nick carried an iPhone with an RFID reader, he would need only to wave his phone at the entrance and it would automatically pick up his preferences for sharing his location and the movie title he’s seeing via Twitter or Facebook.  More interesting things would be to automatically enter you in a contest for people who attended an Sherlock Holmes on opening weekend.

Another illustration to the benefits of adding an RFID reader to the iPhone in the realm of participatory entertainment is in live music or very large public entertainment events.  For instance, scanning the RFID tag in your section at a football game will identify the mobile capability to an application that could cue everyone to hold up their phones at a given time, display a particular set of images on the screen and turn the entire stadium into a megatron.  At a music festival like Rothbury, it might allow people to collect virtual zoo keys which turn an already amazing Sherwood Forest into something that is digitally enchanted.

The total extent to what could be done with connected devices incorporating RFID tags in combination with the impulse to reinforce personal visibility is impossible to see right now.  What is clear is that culture, technology and the increasing value of participatory entertainment rapidly is converging with all-in-one devices like the iPhone and iSlate.

Update 12/30/09:  A few additional things: 1. There is a strong sense that RFID will be most valuable for payment and wireless financial transactions.  The basis of my interest in RFID has been from seeing the NFC-enabled registers at places like McDonalds and Regal Cinemas.   When I first started seeing them, I would ask how often they took payment using the NFC at POS and I’d get blank stares from the employees.  MasterCard’s PayPass and American Express’s ExpressPay have been around for a while but have mostly only survived market tests as far as I can tell.

To look at how NFC/RFID payments and entertainment overlap, I love what it could do to damage the secondary ticket market.  I’ve long felt that secondary ticketing and scalping does more harm than good on the average would-be live entertainment participant.  Locking tickets to phones is a great way to help track and possibly reduce scalping while still allowing some flexibility in transferability.

There are some articles about how an RFID, NFC enabled phone are useful outside of entertainment which are worth linking to.  Here’s one that simply gooses the idea.  Here’s a second article that talks explicitly in terms of marketing opportunities.

New Media: Facebook’s Privacy Settings Updates

Facebook has made major changes to how it handles privacy settings for users.  Most likely you are familiar with the outcry and acceptance around Facebook’s push to make your updates more transparent.

Facebook was conceived around the idea of sharing detailed content like photos and notes only with your social net, which was supposed to represent your core group of friends in the meatspace.  Twitter’s growth has been in addressing the extreme opposite: sharing 140 characters worth of insight with the entire world instantly.

Facebook relies on deep engagement with its users in order to get its advertisements clicked on.  Facebook was forced to change its strategy because it was losing opportunities for interaction with its users to Twitter.  In addition, Facebook is missing out on buzz because Facebook it is seen as lacking the real time relevance of Twitter.

The update to Facebook’s Privacy Settings is a tactic in the company’s strategy to get more Facebook users to share their updates with the public or at least make it obvious that users are welcome to do so.

The problem is that average internet users are not capable of building and utilizing a set of sophisticated privacy settings.  The result is that many are unwittingly sharing what they believe is private information.  Rafe Needleman makes a great point that the initial user interface designed to guide Facebook users does more to guide them to exposing their information rather than creating the controls they want.

If these ideas are to be accepted, it suggests that Facebook is knowingly creating conditions where the details of user’s personal lives are made public because it will lead the company towards greater market share and profits.

Old Media: Tiger Woods Endorsement Contracts

Let it be known that I am not a huge fan of old media.  To be clear, this includes broadcast and time shifted television advertisements, magazine advertising and  just about any electronic sign found in sports arenas like the Rose Garden. (Go Blazers.)  My reasoning is that old media too often lacks any real context and is more about blanketing the masses with the critical six exposures rather than seeking to engage individual interests.

Celebrity endorsements or testimonials are a classic tool of old media and I couldn’t help but notice the full page advertisement for Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer, which features their “official partner” Tiger Woods.

Woods is currently deep in allegations of adultery, and after being dropped from Accenture this past Sunday the Tag Heuer made the statement that Woods’ personal life is “not our business.”

So I had a closer look at this big magazine advertisement and the text reads: “I first swung a golf club when I was nine months old…Since 1996, my Foundation has inspired more than 10 million youth…Together with TAG Heuer, I’m helping young people believe in themselves.”

My question to Tag Heuer is if you’re going to have a representative for your brand make claims about his ability to connect with and inspire children, is your representative’s personal life really not your business?  It is one thing if you are going to depict your representative as a an accomplished athlete and another if he is going to be talking about his influence on kids.

Closing

I selected these to examples because I was interested in them.  Facebook is social media, which I enjoy and Woods’ sex scandal has become interesting because of the business aspect and the general extent of what he’s described as “transgressions.”

But the greater comment I’m after is that it is easy to say that Facebook or major media has taken away people’s right to privacy.  Or to believe that there is complete compromise in participating in social networking or great accomplishment that puts you in the public spotlight.

However, who controls your personal information and the judgement of exactly what is a constitutes “personal life” is a moving target.  New technologies and dollars and cents will affect what you get to keep private as much as evolving social mores.

As you might guess I’ve been following the redesign of Facebook pretty closely. My pal Bryan just posted a link to another great PC World article on Facebook “caving” to user concerns in the redesign. The article contains a good summary but also some important links worth checking out:

• Facebook’s Director of Product, Chris Cox official reaction (blog entry)
• Techcrunch shames Facebook for caving to users.
• The idea that while 2 million users complained about the redesign, yet that is only 1% of the userbase is highlighted here.

The main changes they will be making in the near term to satisfy complaints are:

• Live updating: One of the most common requests is the ability to see your stream update automatically. We will be adding the ability to turn on auto updating in the near future so you no longer need to refresh the page.
• Photo tags: In order to surface more photos you might like to see, we’ll be adding photos tagged of your friends to the stream. This will happen in the coming weeks.
• More choices for applications: We’ve heard feedback that there is a lot of application content appearing in the stream. We will be giving you tools to control and reduce application content that your friends share into your stream.

I have a theory that the live updates thing was supposed to be introduced at the same time as the major feed update.  I had actually personally contacted FB with my dissatisfaction resulting from having people’s favorite color thrust upon me.

I think that what the new design will receive a more favorable response once the manual page refresh is gone–especially with the this new icon based format.

I suspect that the design team / Zuckerberg felt it would be too much change at once and instead left off the auto-refresh stuff. This half-leap caused a lot of concern because it didn’t incorporate the full concept behind the redesign.

I have another theory regarding the sudden forced inclusion of friends’ application updates:

Application developers suffered greatly when the apps were moved from a person’s profile to the Boxes tab. I know because my own DMB FB app with 9000+ users took a major dive in traffic after the change.  I think that the forced inclusion of app updates in the retooling was meant to try and return the favor to app developers. Unfortunately, announcements from apps seem to be dominated by rather niche trivial quiz that no one cares about.

Coolwhip hair dude.

One of the most important parts of a person’s Facebook presence is their profile photo. This is displayed in the top left corner of a page. The photo can be a newly uploaded image or it may be drawn from any of your online albums.

Typically, a profile photo shows someone’s face, and appears in front of the light blue-grey line that connects from the left side of the profile to the left-most tab. View an example of a typical profile page with a normal photo.

Unlike Myspace, Facebook’s uses a common color and layout for every profile. This makes the site look better overall, but also limits your ability to affect the look of your profile. You can display Facebook applications on the left sidebar, and have them in tabs, but any changes to how the page’s style or how it is displayed overall are limited.

Download Rock Show, the Concert Posters app for the iPhone and iPad

Hacking the Facebook Profile Photo

There isn’t a legal way to ‘hack’ Facebook, but there is a method to changing your profile photo to make your profile look subtly different and cooler. It isn’t obvious, but the placement of a profile photo allows you to lightly innovate on Facebook’s sacred profile layout.

How does it work?

When you create a profile photo from an existing album image, Facebook lets you crop the photo down to whatever dimensions you choose. When you visit your profile the selected photo is displayed scaled down to a maximum height and width allowed by Facebook.

The first thing you need to understand is how much space you have to play with. Facebook displays profile photos at a maximum of 200 pixels in width. If you go beyond this, Facebook resizes your profile photo down to 200 while maintaining the aspect ratio vertically. Facebook will display a photo in your profile that is up to 600 pixels in height. This means that Facebook will happily display any image as large as 200 x 600 without otherwise changing or resizing it.

A Blank Facebook Profile Photo Background

Now that you know the maximum dimensions of your profile photo, the base trick is simple. Facebook is set up to display the top of an image 52 pixels north of the thin grey line. Normally, all profile photos are placed at this height above the line.

In order to achieve an unbroken line across your profile you need only create an image with a grey (#D8DFEA) 52 pixels below the top. In addition, you’ll need to paintbucket the area above the line to match the light blue (#EFF0F5) used in the profile header.

For more information about the colors used in Facebook’s style sheet, see this guide for Facebook application developers by Bill Konrad.  I wrote a Facebook application about a year ago, read about the DMB Facebook application here.

Subbing this blank template allows you to achieve something Facebook normally does not allow: the option to not display a profile photo at all. A new Facebook account with no profile photo displays a box with a drawing of a mystery person with soft-serve icecream hair on it. Using a blank lined template allows you to add a little ‘negative’ space to your profile that is normally not possible.

The fun begins when you overlay a photo or image on top of the blank template. The hardest part about doing this is isolating an image so that it can cleanly offset the background template. My suggestion for this is to use Adobe Photoshop to draw a selection area around your photo or image and then remove the edges.

Give Yourself a Living Room on Your Facebook Profile

There are a lot of fun things you can do pairing foreground cutout images with the background Facebook template. The first one I did was to create a sort of mini-living room for me to hang out in. Here’s a screenshot of my profile using this particular photo.

I wanted to do a play on the little grey line and decided to try to create the illusion that I was hanging from it.  I started by taking a photograph of me hanging from a doorway and then isolating the image. I then overlayed the photo on a longer version of the blank Facebook profile photo template.

Here’s a look at that process and the final result:

Creating a Hanging From My Wall Effect

And here’s a screenshot of my profile using this effect.

Another fun foreground image I used was a colored in Giraffe. This gave my profile a fun look and because it pushed down the information in my left sidebar, a lot of negative space around my wall updates.

A 200x600 Pixel Profile Photo Overlayed on a Blank Template

View a screenshot of the complete profile using the ‘giraffe hack.’

Playing with the Thin Grey Line

A lot more can be done with the look of the thin grey line, such as creating a jagged or curved edge that interacts with an overlayed image.  I got a little weird and created some stalactites over a green unicorn with the Earth floating above and below the header line.  View a screenshot of the complete profile using the ‘green unicorn hack.’

Image isolation in Photoshop is like using scissors to cut very closely around a photo torn from a magazine.  Photoshop has a magnetic lasso, a magic wand and a quick selection tool to help you. There are a lot of guides on how to perform selections, here are a few that will help you:

• A PDF on object selection and isolation
• A video on object selection and isolation
• A web tutorial with images on the Quick Selection tool.

I’m including the some example images to help you get started in a zip file at the end of this entry.

Hack Caveats

The hack falls apart a few different ways. The easiest is to post a status update that is long enough to wrap around to two lines of text. You can avoid this by posting your long status update, and then clearing it afterwards. View a screenshot of this problem.  This leaves your current status as blank, but the update will still appear on your news reel and the illusion of the hack will be maintained.

Another point of note in using this hack is the display of your profile photo in wall listings. The profile photo is shrunk down quite a bit. A plus of this is that if you choose a long, 200×600 photo, it can look rather cool and set you apart from other Facebook people when you’re shown in a list.

Conclusion and Downloads

For many, your Facebook presence is an important part of your online presentation of self.  You can differentiate yourself on Facebook by tweaking the look of your profile by using a specialized profile photo.

I’m making available a zip file that includes a number of original, layered .psd files that will help you get a quick start on hacking your Facebook profile photo.  I’d love to see some examples of other ideas people come up with.  Feel free to post or send me a screenshot of what you came up with and I’ll add it to this blog post.

• Digg this article if this was helpful / interesting to you or post it on your Facebook.
  
• Download the ‘Hack’ your Facebook Profile Photo Kit (includes the blank background template and some example overlayed images.)

What might the goals of a union of Facebook application developers be? It would help to look at what has stirred the pot recently. About two weeks ago someone posted a complaint that Facebook had unfairly bent the rules to give CBS’s Sports NCAA bracket application advantages for faster viral spread across the Facebook user base. Adding insult to injury, the thread also pointed out that the CBS Sports NCAA bracket application had a poor user rating.

Two days ago another developer posted a thread titled, “Facebook has stolen my idea!” which describes the recently added “Do you know these people?” page on Facebook. The developer suggests he feels “cheated” because the new Facebook page duplicates his own application’s functionality. The developer’s application was forced to comply with platform development rules that required an obstructive approval process in order work correctly.

Facebook’s “Do you know these people?” page circumvents this approval process because it is not subject to the rules independent application developers must follow. Facebook made a better version of the application a part of the Facebook experience by bending the rules that crippled the original developer’s work.

These examples illustrate that Facebook considers it a duty to nationalize or expropriate functionality if it is considered good for Facebook. Rather than something that needs to be declared, Facebook makes this right clear in the Facebook Developers Terms of Service:

“…You hereby grant us a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right and license, with the right to sublicense, to: (a) access, reproduce, display, distribute, perform, and store on our servers your Facebook Platform Application and any Facebook Platform Application Content, and to create derivative works of Facebook Platform Application Content, as may be necessary or desirable to make such Facebook Platform Application and Facebook Platform Application Content available to Facebook Users in accordance with the terms of this Agreement and the Facebook Platform Documentation and the Facebook Platform Application Guidelines; and (b) otherwise access, use and analyze any Facebook Platform Application Content for our internal business purposes (e.g., for the purposes of targeting delivery of advertisements or other content to persons who have viewed particular types of Facebook Platform Application Content).”

This paragraph basically says that Facebook can duplicate and meet parity or run with your application’s functionality and then integrate it into the basic Facebook experience. The second part basically says that Facebook reserves the right to monitor how much your application would be worth if Facebook were to take your idea.

I think a lot of independent developers get to sleep at night with the belief that Facebook wouldn’t expropriate their applications. These developers comfort themselves with the idea that “it happens occasionally–but only to applications with functionality that obviously belongs in the platform.”

The board of directors for the copper companies were probably counting the same sheep prior to the sweeping expropriation of copper mines by the Chilean government in the early 1970s. The result of that disagreement was that the United States pushed for and succeeded achieving economic sanctions against Chile. But the Facebook development community doesn’t exactly have sanctions on its list of tools of influence. What does it have?

For one, it would have to be part of a greater independent community of developers for all open social platforms. Only by having a union of developers that canvas’s all major platforms could it hold sway against any particular one. Such an organized group might hold sway by steering technical offerings, such as beginner guides, away from platforms that have a history of expropriating applications functionality unfairly. A strong independent application developer union might also be able dissuade or at least condemn social platforms that repeatedly expropriate functionality.

Representation at the table would help, when the biggest social networking application companies, RockYou!, are getting all of the attention. RockYou! has funding from Sequoia Capital, a company that wouldn’t take wholesale expropriation of their software lightly.

I’ve been interested in writing for Facebook for some time because I believe that companies need to be expanding their online presence into applications built for major social networking platforms. It is easy to say that people should pay attention to things like OpenSocial or Facebook’s API, there have been plenty of articles about it. But nothing can convince you like building and running one yourself.

My application began with only allowing users to choose a photo for their profile. Then I added the ability to select prior Dave Matthews Band shows. The problem came when people said they wanted to show their tour history further back than 2007.

I’ve been sourcing my data from the DMB Almanac, a site that I promote fairly heavily through the Weekly Davespeak’s front page and in the forums. I have a feeling I send them a good portion of traffic.

In order to get the application out as soon as possible, I decided to create my own numbering system for the shows–2007′s data was IDs 1-86.

The reason I didn’t use the almanac’s Show ID numbering was because the show id’s do not iterate consecutively. The band’s management adds shows out of chronological order. For instance they’ll announce the complete summer tour and DMB Almanac adds that–then additional dates like benefits get added.

Download Rock Show, the Concert Posters app for the iPhone and iPad

Using my own consecutive numbering meant that I could For loop through the list on a number of functions and random-access show information directly from the user’s show list. The refactoring meant building a translation table and script to update the old Show ID data, then change a number of functions from For to while loops that would handle non-sequential iteration the tour data.

Writing the translation script was a hurdle, I did a lot of debug output on the data I was generating to make sure it was working correctly.  You can see a bit of the verbose output here.

The application has just under 800 members now. I hope to have several thousand before DMB’s 2008 dates are announced. As the image above shows, the page has resulted in 163 new visitors, 21% of whom were new to the site. This is a low number compared to other site sources, but that may be because the app has not been in the wild for long and the skew is towards those who found out about the app from the Weekly Davespeak forums.