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.

Since I rarely see advertisements, I hardly ever investigate contextual advertising.  But given the sheer variety of products and services, I had to check out some of these:

• The Gold Cockerel Books company offers a chicken coop construction booklet at a mere $13.00.  Except they call it a “poultry house” which is surely a major step up for any fowl who grew up in a lowly coop.
• Google picked up on a keyword for a traditional Ethiopian clothing worn around Christmas but instead provided a few links for Chinese clothing.  That’s a pretty far off from Africa, but the wedding dresses were still beautiful.
• Perhaps the most confusing advertisement was the How to be a Manhattan Dad, which linked out to a blog by a father with two young children The City.  There are some rather cute videos of his children endorsing Barack Obama and a brief rant on paternity leave disparity.

I often get stuck in a cycle of reading my big news sites, my rss syndication and checking the analytics on online properties I control.  For those Gmail users seeking adventure, I recommend cruising some of your more colorful past conversations for odd destinations on the web you would otherwise never have considered.

Neutrinos just wrapped its second iPhone application, it is a 20 questions trivia game called iQ.  It is great step from our first app, TipTotaler.  For iQ, I took on the user interface design for the application in addition to my normal website design and marketing.

The amount of graphic design and image handling in iPhone development is extensive and I’ve already blogged about a tool to assist in the 3d iPhone application icon design.  But the most interesting stuff is happening in Interface Builder and in xCode that I’m not supposed to talk about here.

Apple has an NDA up with all developers that they can not talk about their experience with the SDK.

5. Confidentiality
5.1 Information Deemed Confidential
You agree that the SDK licensed hereunder, the terms and conditions of this Agreement, and any
other non-public information that You learn about Apple’s products, designs, research,
development, know-how, or Apple’s business, finances or personnel, or non-public third party
information, in connection with this Agreement or in connection with Your use of any part of the
SDK will be deemed “Apple Confidential Information” under this Agreement.

 Here’s a shout to Rob Teel who would appreciate the intersection of tech and law here.  Anyhow, there are a lot of people speaking up about the gag order that has been imposed on people who are developing for the iPhone.  ARS Technica condemned it with an article with weird images in it.  The leading macrumor right now is that it has to do with multi-touch patents.

Whatever the reason, the NDA hasn’t kept some people from posting insights and portions of source code they aren’t supposed to.  Yet, Apple isn’t closing the threads and I haven’t read any reports of people being kicked out for it.  The drama of coding within a new platform was there when I started working with Facebook applications.  But Facebook didn’t have this secrecy thing going on, which makes this a little cooler.  Analyst expectations that Apple will sell 4.47 milliion more 3G iPhones makes it hot.

If you or someone you know has an iPhone–tell them about  iQ.

One of my tasks with the release of our recently submitted iPhone application, TipTotaler was to select an icon for our app.  As you may be aware from Apple’s iPhone application submission guidelines, you must include a flat 57 x 57 pixel and 512 x 512 pixel image for use on the iPhone and iPod Touch home screen and for the iTunes store.

There are a couple of challenges for iPhone Application icon graphic designers:  First, it isn’t always easy to tell what will look good at both 512×512 and 57×57.  Second, having the developer rebuild and send updated screenshots is laborious as is monkeying around in Photoshop to eyeball how the images look at lower resolution with 3D effects.

In order to speed up the process, I put together an Adobe Photoshop macro aka ‘action’ that will quickly take any square image and apply similar 3D effects that Apple uses.  The 3D effects used on buttons on the iPhone home screen and the iTunes store application pages include rounded corners and a light sheen over rounded across the top third to one half of the button.  My macro automatically transforms any image into a 3D iPhone Application icon with these characteristics.

I’ve recorded a screen cast demonstration of how to use the macro using Jing.  You can view the screencast here.  Click the link below to download a zip file containing the Photoshop action macro and iPhone gallery image to test out your 3D button on.

Remember, your starting image must be a perfect square of any size prior to running the macro.  Questions? Watch the screencast above or post a comment.

->  Download iPhone Application Icon Preview Macro

The article separates the types of leaks into three categories: the malevolent, the benevolent and the accidental.

Grim’s article includes eleven leak sub-categories each with a different intention. If you are plan to communicate with or be a part of the fourth estate, you should probably take a moment to read them each in detail. Instead of touching on each sub-category here, I would like to highlight how fair-weather leaks are used as a method of strategic media control.

Fair-Weather and Bad-Weather Patterns

“When an organization is being run well, people tend not to look at things as leaks, but they tend to look at things as information specifically being put out for some strategic purpose. When things are not well, the information getting out there is perceived as leaks.

-Chris Lehane, of the ’92 Clinton campaign and later the White House.

This seems like a subjective impression to me, and I wonder how it could be quantified without defining exactly what it means for an organization to be “run well.” And Lehane’s idea seems to create a chicken-or-the-egg scenario: a well run organization incorporates strategy into leaks, while strategic leaks also seem to be the hallmark of a well run organization.

The In Rainbows Fair-Weather Leak

A recent example of strategic leaks that I noticed had to do with information surrounding which record company would score the new Radiohead album, In Rainbows. Just days after the digital release of the album, Tiny Mix Tapes was reporting on Billboard news that Radiohead was considering signing with ATO Records / Side One Recordings.

Realize that no one at Billboard or anywhere else could guess that Radiohead would look at ATO with a high enough degree of confidence to publish it as an industry rumor let alone a news story. So this was clearly a strategic leak. According to Grim’s article which type of leak was it?

Of the benevolent leaks Grim writes about, here are a few that could apply:

• The Trial-Balloon Leak
  This would only make sense if Radiohead’s management was behind the leak of the information. They tossed the ‘rumor’ to Billboard to gauge industry reactions to the news prior to going forward with it.
• The I-Scratch-Your-Back-You-Scratch-Mine/Relationship Leak
  This type of strategic leak could have come from either ATO or Radiohead’s management and would suggest that one of them was either buying back favor or investing in favor from Billboard, Hits, Tiny Mix Tapes, or perhaps all of them. Unfortunately, I’d say that the real news with In Rainbows was not the label signing, but rather the surprise announcement of the digital release. No one had the jump on that, so if media relationship needed to be built then sharing a whisper of information on the digital release would have been a lot more effective.

• Because-They-Wouldn’t-Say-It-on-the-Record-It-Must-Be-Newsworthy Leak
  This assumes that ATO/Red Light was behind this one. I think this is more likely because Radiohead’s management was focused on drawing out hype on its decision to go digital, not an impending traditional release.If the In Rainbows label signing leak falls into this category it likely means that the deal had been inked before the time Billboard and Tiny Mixtapes were reporting on it. ATO was worried that an official announcement would not bring the adequate attention. Instead the leak of a “possible” signing makes it appear that the band is in some underground bunker furiously debating whether to take the big money and sign with either Warner music or EMI or go with the progressive and responsible alternative of ATO.

When it comes down to it, I think that this last category is the most likely one. Was it effective, and does it demonstrate that a well run organization? I’d say yes. Not only did a ton of media outlets pounce on the news, but some of them tied the story to Radiohead’s quiet decision to do a live webcast for its fans.

A Time article included a quote from an American producer that reads as follows:

That’s the interesting part of all this,” says a producer who works primarily with American rap artists. “Radiohead is the best band in the world; if you can pay whatever you want for music by the best band in the world, why would you pay $13 dollars or $.99 cents for music by somebody less talented? Once you open that door and start giving music away legally, I’m not sure there’s any going back.”

Via Green Plastic

I’ve explained my feelings in depth that Dave Matthews Band has the potential to do an independent release, but this seals the deal in my eyes. Dave Matthews loves Radiohead and York just created an artistic milestone DMB could only dream of taking part in at this point.

I decided that I must have this new burrito. I finally got around to trying it out this afternoon, so here’s a quick review of the new offering from Baja Fresh.

First, you should know that Baja Fresh was bought by Wendy’s in 2002 for 245 million dollars. I graduated in 2003, so the timing makes sense given the hype around the company. However, in only a few years the business has become increasingly less valuable to the point where it was bought from Wendy’s for a song–David Kim of Anaheim, CA led a group of investors to buy Baja Fresh for only $31 million.

After closing a few stores, Kim has supposedly launched some initiatives to reduce wait times and refresh the menu with some new items. The Nacho Burrito is a part of this effort.

First, after I ordered the burrito I was offered some chips to munch on while I waited for the my food. I gladly accepted, even though it was only a small portion of chips. It did make me hit the salsa bar up earlier than usual. Anyhow, the burrito became ready and it was big. I’d say the nacho burrito is roughly the size of an adult hamster, only flatter. To my dismay, it did not come with chips. This meant I was picking through the small little bits I had left from my “wait chips.”

My expectations for a nacho burrito were different than what I experienced. When I saw the billboard, I was thinking that I would run into a lot of chips or crunchy parts while eating it. However, there were only a few small chip things in there. A bit of a let down, as crunch textures go well with burritos, (hence the need for chips). Unexpectedly, there was a strong hint of nacho cheese in the burrito.

How might this be unexpected? I don’t eat nachos. They are gross. I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting nacho cheese there it was. You couldn’t really see it, just taste it. I ate the whole thing and wasn’t grossed out but was way too full and the walk home was slow and plodding.

So I give the new Nacho Burrito at Baja Fresh a C+ because it had few chips inside, no chips outside and (admittedly my fault for not thinking this through) a strong helping of easy processed yucky cheese taste.

Forcing users to watch commercials, i.e. prior to CNN’s online video news is an ugly way to get consumers attention. People will turn their speakers down or multi-task to avoid unwanted messaging. People will eat creative content alive whether it promotes Burger King or Hanes underwear so long as it makes them feel good.

As people will get better at filtering out broadcast advertising the videos and print offered on Advertising For Peanuts represent the marketers future for mainstream appeal.

The changes were rolled out on January 18th and the response was violent “Tribe: New and Unimproved,” “Revert Tribe Now,” and “I Hate the New Tribe Look” sprang up and garnered members rather than the offically sanctioned comment tribe, “Tribe’s New Look.”

Many users of the site reacted by flaming the changes. The more interesting comments were those that voiced dissapointment in the change and commented that they felt especially wronged because of their personal investment or personal equity which they had invested.

Web 2.0 is all about community, and the response to Tribe.net’s changes is undoubetedly a warning sign for all those who venture into development of a community based website. In order to make it quickly to the top of the web these days, you must leverage the power of user-created content. But by asking users to put the skin on the skeleton of a web 2.0 project you’re opening yourself up to reactionary content creation if you end up threatening a user’s personal equity.

This is the problem Tribe.net is facing. Tribe has matured to the point of having a rather large userbase but has failed to keep up with the popularity of sites like Myspace and Friendster. In a move to come further into step with what works, they re-vamped the layout, interface and ad placement for all of their pages. But the popular opinion of their existing user base is that Tribe is headed in a direction.

The question defaults to how a Web 2.0 site like Tribe should treat user opinion manifested in reactionary content creation. Should the site address these tribes with a tailored message? Should virtual social-dissent be quashed? The answer lies in the loss of participation from core users and whether this can be balanced from new users expected from the “brighter and more friendly” interface.
Tribe.net isn’t the only site to experience growing pains from an organized malcontented user base, Flickr.com underwent similar criticism from its user base upon its aquisition by Yahoo! As sites become incresingly on each user’s free content contribution to propell them forward an obligation of honoring these user’s personal equity grows as well.

It will be up to each site to determine how far they can go against the opinion of internet denizens personal equity and how they will deal with the viral reactionary content creation that results from discontent.