Two Slashes

Congratulations to anyone who followed that link from my Facebook status.  You’re a shining example of a person who randomly and trustingly clicks links from friends without considering whether they’re spam or not.  Either that, or you already recognize that domain…that section of the post at the bottom is especially for you.

Ordinarily, I wouldn’t be posting about my experiments here, as they’re not at all related to the topics I regularly discuss.  However, together with a little help from a friend or two, I’ve tried to poke and pry at people’s online habits with my past few tests.  What did I find?

The Birthday

Ah yes, my birthday was last week.  (Any and all birthday comments will be deleted and/or edited.)  Of course, only a few people even bothered to remember or acknowledge it (alright, so perhaps even the majority of my family didn’t care, but that’s beside the point).  For this experiment, I spent the two months prior scrubbing almost every reference to my age or birthday I could find from the Internet, well ahead of any search engine bots that may want to cache it as my birthday drew nearer.  The test?  To see whether people really rely that much on notifications from web forums or social networking sites to keep track of trivial facts like birthdays.

Granted, a birthday is nothing to be excited about, and in its own right might be considered useless or trivial information, depending on how well you know the person (and it’s more or less useless in an online perspective, but I digress).  And just to make things interesting, even after all of the information I removed (and now need to remember to re-add), I decided that I would cough up a few subtle hints.  (Alright, maybe my definition of ’subtle’ is skewed, but I’m not going to argue that point here.)  Net results:  A single congratulatory tweet (and what probably would have amounted to a second had I qualified a number in one of my tweets), one response via Skype after making it almost painfully obvious (you know who you are), and absolutely no response from any of 269 Facebook users friended with me (which is, admittedly, just a little pathetic).  All in all, a quiet great birthday by my standards (I don’t want the attention, so perhaps my motives were a little flawed…)

Now that I’ve confused you enough, let’s try to take all of that and try and sum it up into something simpler:  Apparently people find Facebook (and other social networking sites) suitable replacements for a calendar.  Admittedly, there might be some benefit in having your friends make sure THEIR birthday is correct rather than have you transcribe it into your agenda a week early, but ultimately anyone who could and/or should have remembered (by my expectations) failed.

The Bait

With my birthday said and done, a friend of mine suggested that we play with some heads on Facebook by intentionally leading people to think that my birthday was a day later than it actually was by coughing up the appropriate status messages and wall posts.  Again, not a single person took the bait and left anything resembling a birthday greeting.

The thing to note about this, though, is that the friend I worked on this with only shares a portion of my friends mutually, and so comparatively there’s a much smaller pool of people to attempt to draw from.

Facebook Link Check

As you might have surmised from the leading line of this post, I decided to try one more test with Facebook simply to see if anyone was paying attention.  The action was simple:  click a link to visit this website.  No URL shrinking, mentions of rewards, or anything - just a link to Two Slashes.  And even though it’s been about an hour and a half since I posted that link, people have clicked it at least a few times, including while they were in the middle of searching through other peoples’ photo albums (actually, there are two referral links already).

Since this experiment is more or less still in progress, I’ll come back to edit this post if anything interesting or unusual comes out of it, but I don’t think there’s going to be anything all that exciting to discuss.

On the other hand, though, this eagerness for people to visit my site without too many hints that I even control it demonstrates once again that people are blind to what could happen should one of their friends get phished and start sending out some spammy URLs.  Not just on Facebook, but anywhere in general.

Conclusions

All of this makes me think of a single line from Men In Black:

Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.

Well, from my experiences, I’d be willing to go so far as to say a single person is just as intelligent as the collective (and that’s stupid).  And that’s especially amusing to me following this short on why the Internet is making people more cognizant.

As much as I’ve ranted and raved about how much the current generation of “social networking” (aka “whore-yourself-out-and-see-who-knows-(or-doesn’t)-know-the-most-people” networking, I’ve also realized that they’ve become a part of Internet culture that may very well be just as much a necessity as an instant messenger screen name, or even more importantly your e-mail address.

A pair of students conducting video interviews stopped me today to ask my opinion on Facebook’s recent decision to open up profiles to search engines. (Which if you couldn’t tell already was the inspiration for me delving a little deeper into the issue here and now.)

In a way, I see social networking as not only a necessity, but a beneficial one. Picture your favorite social networking site as a gigantic phone book, only filled with the information people have volunteered. Picture the friends list on that site as a personal address book; those listings out of the “white pages” of the site that you know personally, and have a lot of contact with, but the difference between this address book and a standard paper or personally-kept one is that instead of you updating your information, your friends do it all for you.

Like I said, the interviewers were asking opinions about Facebook opening up profiles to search engines. Having recently acquired an account myself (yes, I know what you’re thinking), I’ve been able to poke around with the site and see exactly what information people have a habit of posting or not posting.

I see the decision as double-sided, really; on one hand, it makes it even easier for the people you want to find you to, well, find you. Perhaps a long-lost elementary school friend will finally catch up with you and get back in touch.

On the other hand, this same information is available and potentially being presented to potential employers, your mother, and anyone else who punches your name into a search engine. And with the ever-increasing rate at which the “background check” for a job includes a Google search to see how much and how well-standing a presence on the Internet you have, it becomes essential that you not only be creative and show your personality, but maintain your dignity and uphold the idea that you actually have a maturity level beyond that of a giggly fifteen-year-old girl.

For most people who have common sense, the content of their profiles is benign, but I would like to point out that I have seen plenty of profiles that could use a bit of a sanity check to more appropriately represent their owners, and in some cases to protect their identities. Let’s be mature and smart about what we do, people.

For example, setting your cell phone number and home address to be visible to the world are probably not the most intelligent things one could do. So to help you stay safe, I’ve compiled a short list of recommendations to help you avoid being the biggest target for miles.

• NEVER, EVER list your street address, and depending on the size of your city, it might be wise to even avoid listing your that. Bigger is better, obviously, since there’s more of a “needle-in-the-haystack” problem with each additional person in your town, but you never want to be able to have anyone come right up to your door without you having given the location to them. I really don’t think I can emphasize enough the importance of this one single bullet.
• AVOID using your phone number(s), especially mobile phone numbers, in a profile. These are very easy to harass (prank phone call anyone) and can often be problematic, not to mention in some cases cell phones can be traced. Instead, use e-mail addresses, and perhaps a seldom-used instant messenger account, both of which you can ditch or filter for unwanted attempts at communication, with no further effort required beyond the “Block” button.
• NEVER post anything that might get you (or anyone you know) charged with a crime, be it something that could get you in trouble with a police department, or even simply your school. And I’m talking anything. And with the movement to online mediums such as social networking sites, it makes it even easier for universities to keep an eye on students and their activities. (Remember how I just pointed out the address book image about how people’s information comes to you? Same thing…all they have to do is wait.)  So, as an example, don’t go around posting pictures of yourself or your best friend holding a beer…someone will find it and you’ll be caught.
• DON’T post anything that you might later regret, even to the slightest extent. Remember, this is the Internet, and news travels faster than the light shining out of my laser pointer. The moment you let someone know, you’ve pretty much let the world know, and that can mean a world of pain when it comes to your romantic or professional lives. And now that Google can come in and read portions (if not all) of your profile, it can be archived for future public consumption, even after you’ve removed it from your profile.
• DON’T add everyone who asks to your profile; there’s a reason they ask you to confirm the friendship - it’s to confirm that you actually know and trust the person requesting to be your friend.  By “whoring yourself out” you introduce hundreds, if not thousands, of people you don’t know to a free-for-all access to all the information you have posted.  So think before that random hottie sends you a message asking to be your friend; chances are it’s not even a female but an obese guy with three layers of skin on his stomach and flies buzzing about his head.

I’m not saying that social networking should be bland and boring; it’s at the heart a form of self-expression, albeit one demonstrated to the world. The problem is that most people just don’t know when to quit - and end up committing the virtual equivalent of streaking around.

Eons ago, I vowed never again to write an article bashing MySpace or social networking. As you can see, my favorite topic to bash has once again made an appearance. So much for promises…

Judging from the growing popularity of all manner of social networking sites and the increasing rate at which they seem to be introduced, it’s a hard point to make saying they’ll be disappearing anytime soon. For a world that once prided itself in being separate entities, it almost seems as though everyone wants to remove those borders in their attempts to communicate with the world. I’m not just talking about blogging; people of all shapes, colors, nationalities, religions, and any other classification are reaching out not just to each other, but to other people.

Yeah, yeah…your response is a resounding “No s**t”, right? The funny thing though, is that even though better, more polished options continue to be released, people still continue to flock to the big names like Facebook and MySpace. My question is, why go for the bottom of the barrel when there are much more suitable and professional options available?

If I may, I’ve compiled a list of what I feel are the biggest reasons why people seem to flock to the crappier solutions.

1. Popularity. Yes, the user count. The number of people who actively use the service and have accounts. For places like MySpace, I would not be suprised that the service has more members than there are people in the world. Why? For starters, people seem to enjoy creating bogus profiles in the names of their friends, enemies, and even random people they meet on the street, either making them seem like they’re better people than they actually are, or defiling them into a smoldering pile of garbage.

   Of course, there are more than your average users. How about the numerous people who sit around scamming people out of their passwords and e-mail addresses simply by recreating a login form in the image of the site they’re on. I mean, how stupid do people have to be to not realize that even web development today has evolved beyond inserting your username and password into the URL string or having to enter them every time you want to do something. Or, while I’m mentioning URLs, the fact that most sites have a “login” domain or similar for just this purpose.

2. Customization. Sure, flashing backgrounds that alternate between bright pink and lime green might look cool to you, but to most people they merely trigger their epilepsy. There’s a reason the “smarter” sites only give you one theme, or a choice of a few predesigned ones. They look well with other profiles, and they don’t drive anyone blind trying to read the text. Not to mention it (again) makes things too easy for people to make fake pages. In short: Not everyone’s a designer; that’s why you hire professionals to make sure things look good rather than trying to do everything yourself…especially when you don’t have an eye for it.
3. Friends and the Popularity Contest (not to be confused completely with number 1). Why would someone join a service that their friends are not all on, and that they can’t use to prove to their friends that they’re the most popular person they know? What’s more disturbing is that this popularity isn’t all based upon real friends either; it’s a mess of random people asking others to indicate their friendship merely out of trust and a desire to increase their numbers. After all, who needs friends like these? And those are just the tip of the iceburg; I’m sure everyone is friends with a pair of ladies’ panties or someone who appears in the same picture displayed on a few different profiles (single person, aka portrait, not group photo where it might actually make some sense…)
4. Backend and Coding Language [geeky]. Why is it that the crappiest sites need to be written in such a way that always causes them to break? MySpace is example numero uno, complete with buggy scripts that need to constantly be “updated” by Tom to handle the constant breakage that occurs. Now, for sites like Adobe’s where they use ColdFusion (even though the site doesn’t exactly look the best) and there are probably just as many hits per day on the same script, I’d like to know why MySpace can’t keep their stuff working. It’s not a server problem, and bulletins don’t just start posting their f**king damn selves for no reason…it’s called write the code so it works, and don’t introduce “bugs” into it so you can claim it’s dead and take it down for a while. For example, Pownce is still in beta, and it hasn’t once given me trouble, unlike my MySpace account (Note: Notice that MySpace ISN’T beta?) which suddenly began informing me that all the friends in my list were banned last night as I was flipping through old bulletins. Maybe it’s just me, but people seem to find these bugs almost attractive. I’m drawn to stuff that seems odd or out of place, but I don’t mean in poorly-coded computer-oriented areas; I mean real-life stuff.
5. Sharing. Sharing information. Sharing files. Sharing…well, anything that might be interesting or necessary. And in one respect, the bigger the site, the easier it is to find anything you’re looking for with fewer problems. Ironically, I’ve yet to see anyone allow the sharing of anything beyond an MP3 and the entire contents of one’s phone book. But it seems for some concepts (ideally, the ones most people don’t bother with, but would be more interesting to someone with interests outside the realms of looking like a complete idiot) people looking for such a sharing capability are lost. Take MySpace’s new download section, for instance. Sounds like a great place for a freeware developer like myself to be - all these people running amok - it’s any traffic analyst’s dream…right? Yeah, right…take one look at the utilities on that page and explain to me just what reason a person needs to see a list of downloads for that stuff for. Why can’t people, erm…share…their work…even if it’s made of bits and bytes of assembly, script, or anything along that line? (Admittedly, it might be a security measure, but all the same it could be set up so that people can add to those lists if their software passes some sort of inspection.)

Alright, I think I’ve gone on enough. And considering I didn’t keep my promise this time around, chances are there are several more articles that will be posted. But that’s a post for a different day altogether.