Two Slashes

I actually had another (much more interesting) post lined up for today.  I sent the post to two friends for opinions, but I haven’t heard back from one of them yet.  (And yes, you know who you are!)

I have a hunch...

A few weeks ago, I got wind of a new startup called Hunch.  Without even taking a glance, I dismissed the site as being only minimally useful. Crowd-sourcing only works so well, and it doesn’t take much to game the system (see Mechanical Turk) and get people to dismiss your site just as easily as 4chan.  I was also highly skeptical of the idea of leaving all of the suggestive power to the users.  (Yes, there’s a difference between having a company provide results that might have been sponsored or biased, as that’s identifiable, and having a spammer help push up results that are biased differently, potentially anonymously.)

After reading about some of the interesting correlations Hunch was making about its users, I decided that it might be worth a quick stop by.  (To be honest, I just wanted to see if they would share any more wacky associations that could be made between users. I’m lame like that.)  For someone who finds useless trivia mildly entertaining, it seemed like a good choice at the time, if only to kill some.

However, I quickly realized that Hunch is an excellent aggregator of  personal information.  After all, the entire point of the service is that you voluntarily cough up details about yourself to a corporate entity.  It may not be things like your social security number or your mother’s maiden name, but it’s still personally-identifiable information all the same.  Furthermore, when you think about it, all that’s standing between any other company in the world and your information is a few bucks.  I haven’t heard anything about how Hunch plans to monetize the service, but I see selling information as the only really profitable option.  And I won’t even get into what the ads could be like if the company serving them knew that you were a sucker for brunettes…

The site is also only as useful as the information that gets submitted to it.  (That’s the point, of course.)  Most of the questions are supposed to be user-submitted and users can recommend responses to these questions, but I found that some questions were poorly answered or didn’t properly take all of the responses I had given into consideration.  One question regarding instant messaging clients, for example, suggested I use Adium after I blatantly told the website that I was using Windows.  The last time I checked Adium’s website, the only version of the client available (and it’s quite good, by the way, don’t get me wrong) was the OS X version almost every Mac user already has.  (Also, I should apparently try Botox even though the number of answers against it is greater than the number that support it.  Go figure.)

Really? You're going to tell me what video game I should play based upon a few simple questions and the fact that I like green eggs and ham?

The lack of feelings of legitimacy I get from the site gives me a rather creepy feeling that I’m still hanging out on MySpace, the social network just about everyone with a brain ditched years ago in hopes of avoiding survey after survey detailing how many movies you’ve seen.  Like I said, a lot of the quizzes are pointless or leave much to be desired, and it’s only a matter of time before Facebook and Hunch pair up to display people’s suggestion results in their timeline.  Social suggestion is nothing new (#followfriday, anyone?), but something tells me you’ll get better suggestions from people who actively know and interact with you than you ever will with a website that pairs people off by their love of vegetables.

Site content and utility aside, I know creativity is really hard to find these days (Hollywood, I’m talking to you), but it’s not difficult to avoid ripping off the design of another Web 2.0 startup. Anyone who’s been reading this blog since February has probably realized by now that Hunch seems to have taken a design cue from Plinky…by copying the navigation system.  (To the developers:  I realize that the organization scheme you’ve chosen is natural, but you barely bothered to change the order of anything and it just looks tacky.  In the future, you might want to do a little more research before you end up plagiarizing bits and pieces of other newly-released applications.)

Hunch may be backed by one of Flickr’s co-founders, but I get the feeling that Caterina Fake is more of a one-hit wonder than a repeat trendsetter.  Only time will tell, but this is one website I’m not expecting myself to come back to.  And I have a hunch that most of you won’t be bothering to head over, either.  (I have three invites to hand out if you REALLY want to check it out, though.)

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If you're a student in Britain, chances are you'll be sending messages like these at some point. (Oh, who am I kidding? They'll all read "@somefriend Wanna hang out?" instead.)

Math, literature, gym, and history.  These are all staples of the education system no matter where you are.  America, Spain, Russia – they cover cover all of these topics at some point.

If you’re of school age and happen to be living in Britain, it sounds like you might be adding a more thorough understanding of computing and the Internet to your curriculum.

TechCrunch is reporting that skills and tools useful in an online/social networking context, a la tweeting, blogging, and podcasting, are to be added to the elementary school curriculum to bring kids up to speed with the Internet their older counterparts are already experts at abusing.

I remember my computing classes back in elementary and middle school (at least, I remember some of them).  There really wasn’t any point to the class, as most of the work assigned was either grunt work or designed to benefit the teacher more than the student.  (Yeah, it happens.)  There’s only so many times you can print greeting cards or type up the same lame one-page story up before you’re an “expert” at using the computers, and as most of these classes, at least the ones in elementary school, were held using near-antique systems (I mean this in terms relative to when I was 10, mind you), they weren’t even relevant when I was attending them.

But while my youth may have been wasted away word-processing tales of dinosaurs and making birthday cards for my teachers, it seems as though somebody’s finally figured out what all that computing time could be used for.  However, I’m not entirely sure that Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking sites are the things to be showing first graders around.  (I’m not entirely sure they’re for older people, either, but that’s a discussion for a different day.)

Let’s think about this for a second.  Companies still add legal disclaimers to their television advertisements telling kids to ask their parents before they go online.  This isn’t just to make sure mommy and daddy sue the company for telling their kid to rack up dial-up charges (heaven forbid they’re still on dial-up), it’s to remove any liability that they might have as far as disturbing and obnoxious people who might appear on the site.  It’s not a possibility that they’ll come into contact with some unsavory character; it’s guaranteed to happen at some point, and with the state of things, almost daily, too.

I also didn’t bother with cell phones until I left for college.  Now, considering little Timmy and Tori over there are probably already text messaging each other hourly, I can see how showing them things like Twitter might seem to be a natural extension of what they’re already doing.  However, factor in that little kids tend to be incapable of discretion, and all it takes is one misplaced “I’m at the park!” for things to get ugly.  (No, I’m not talking about that.  I’m saying that it’ll be extremely easy for mom and pop to pick up on where their offspring has been recently.  Alright, maybe your idea is more valid.  Much more valid.)

Most of the Twitter arguments work with the general blogging case, too.  Unless these schools are intending to be putting up their own copies of Laconi.ca and WPMU for the students to mess around with explore while making sure the general public doesn’t get to cause too much trouble as a result of what’s posted, I have some major issues about letting these kids loose on the web.  (TechCrunch also mentioned podcasting, but I’m not entirely sure that such an endeavor is feasible enough to be worrying about it.)

Yeah...this seems more like an elementary schooler to me.

There is a positive effect to the (micro)blogging idea, and that would be that students would be encouraged to write and proofread their work (well, unless they default to “wrtng lke thyr n a phn”).  Microblogging would also be a great way to train students in how to “trim the fat” from their writing because of the small character limit.  However, I don’t see these as pros that outweigh all of the cons.

In short, I find the cause to be noble, but a school with limited supervision is not the time or place to be letting kids explore their social life, even if it’s a Web 2.0 social life.  So let them deal with their reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic, because that’s all they should be working on at their age anyway.

I’ll admit:  Skittles rank pretty high on my list of treats.    I’ve been known to cough up a few dollars at a time for those colorful candies without too much thought about what they might be using that money for.  After being directed to their “new website” today via Twitter (thanks to Keri from Curious Cloud), I have since been considering a boycott. Why?

This is what you get greeted with when you first visit the new Skittles website. It's quite the warm welcome, isn't it?

Frankly, you should take a look for yourself so you can get a thorough firsthand experience of the horror, but to save you the torture, I’ll cover it with as much detail as possible.  Essentially, your first visit to the “redesigned” Skittles.com website requires you to fill out a form stating that you’re of an appropriate age (which they don’t explicitly state) and that you agree that you can’t hold Skittles responsible for anything you see.  Wait, what?

Getting past the age request (or, amusingly enough, looking to what’s behind it, as it loads in the background before you confirm that you’ve agreed to Skittles’ usage policy), you notice that you’ve been brought to Twitter’s search portal, where (of course) “Skittles” has been pre-entered for your enjoyment and there’s a floating Flash movie in the corner for you to use for navigation.  Flipping through the various options on the top of the panel, you quickly find out that the only reason Skittles.com seems to exist anymore is as a quick access station for Twitter (Home and Chatter pages), Facebook (Friends page), Wikipedia (Product Information page), Flickr (Media page), and YouTube (Media page).

And although I typically tend to blow by the idea myself without consideration (though I might have a little more of an excuse than a company), I don’t think the site design offers itself well to people with disabilities.  As I recall, Flash doesn’t cooperate well with screen readers, and the fact that the website is more or less a terrible mashup of every major social media platform with extra navigation doesn’t do too much to suggest they’ve taken this into consideration themselves.

No offense to Mars, Inc., but I can just as easily go to Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, Flickr, or YouTube without any help from you (or that annoying Flash panel).  In my opinion, what they’ve done feels tacky, and I can’t help but make the assumption that someone’s cousin’s friend’s son got paid for this mess.  (“Bueller?”)  For future reference, here’s a hint:  When you’re a multimillion-dollar company, you don’t skimp on your advertising and presence budget.

I wonder how many other people are making the same face that this gentleman and I are sharing.  It’s quite becoming, isn’t it?

Excuses, excuses.  I was in the middle of writing this post when I was commissioned to sit on the phone keeping people awake on their train ride home, causing me to seek refuge in silence away from a computer.

With a little nudging from Nick S., who’s busy at work on The Next Big Thing™, I ended up keeping tabs on the press conference (call) Facebook held earlier today regarding their ever-changing service agreement.  If anything, it gave me a better idea of just how generally clueless some of the people running the scenes (and even some who are not) are.  Of course, this all comes after a giant uproar over Facebook changing their terms of service such that it read that Facebook now owned any user-submitted content.  Permanently.

While I don’t have a personal issue with Facebook utilizing the content I have uploaded to the service (namely, the same image of myself you can find on this site or any other service I use), I have several friends with interesting and original content who might be offed by just how many rights the social networking site was granting itself with the new policy (in theory).  I know that they wouldn’t like having their content ripped off, and I’m sure most of the people reading this would have similar issues.

I find it funny that people are willing to put up with all of these antics, though.  I guess I shouldn’t be all that surprised given that people deal with the Fail Whale, tolerated MySpace’s surefire “Oops, we had an error!” pages, and can generally use the Internet without the requirement of a computing license, but it still amazes me that people can be so blatantly ignorant when it comes to the things they share with other people and the methodologies they employ in doing so.  It’s because of stunts like these (alright, that’s the number two reason behind the fact that the services are designed that for reason) that I post pictures to Picasa, videos to Vimeo, and generally harbor my content all over at sites that put the creator’s rights before their own.  Besides, it’s not a wise idea to put all your eggs in one basket.

Facebook seems to be trying to take  recent events into consideration, as their latest blog post states that they’re going to try a more democratic system for some of the policy changes they enact across the site, in particular anything that might cause controversy.  Nick and I both came to the immediate conclusion that this may not be the best policy, as you’re asking the same people who have no common sense to vote one way or another.  It’s like giving a six-year-old a Presidential ballot (the fact that this is unlikely notwithstanding) – they’re ill-informed and incapable of making a sensical decision based on knowledge or reasoning, so their vote could more or less be attributed to pseudo-randomness.  Unfortunately, it’s a first-hand chance to fight for proper rights provided by few other platforms.

Like I said already, the conference didn’t exactly show a stroke of genius among either the reporters asking questions or the people in charge over at Facebook.  As an excellent example (and to end the post), I leave you with this short, unrelated question and the nonsensical answer provided straight from Facebook’s founder.  What a bright bunch.

Stacy Kramer (Paid Content): How important is this financially?
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook): This is all about trusting our users. And it will result in the best outcome: the best community.

I was going to write about something else, but this is more time-relevant.  Therefore, that other post will get put on a back burner (and probably end up not seeing the light of day).

Today marks a monumental day in the history of the Internet.

The first thing on everyone’s mind (or mine, at least) is the trial of masterminds Anakata and Brokep (also known as Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde, respectively), which starts tomorrow.  If you don’t know, they’re the two people most responsible for the day-to-day operations of The Pirate Bay, the Internet’s favorite public tracker and torrent search site.

According to TorrentFreak, a large press conference was held today in hopes of answering questions before the trial got underway.  Overall, the reported questions and answers were boring, but this response from Sunde caught my attention:

I do not believe The Pirate Bay will be a major player in five years. But I think BitTorrent technology will improve. File sharing will always exist. I think people will tire of the debate.

This statement has some interesting connotations, especially coming from one of the administrators of a site that just won’t stay down.  Sure, the existence (or lack thereof) of TPB is something that needs to be checked and double-checked on a daily basis, but there’s a certain truth that bigger and better things should be expected.  (You can look at the evolution of other sites like Suprnova, Mininova, and IsoHunt if you don’t believe me or if you find the topic interesting enough to continue pursuing.)

As a computer science major, I’m also intrigued by the suggestion that BitTorrent will be around.  It’s a novel technology at heart (err…pun unintentional?), but if you look at the road that we (as a civilization) followed to get to this point, a better wheel is bound to come along at some point, if only to satisfy the human desire for the distribution of information.  It’s just a matter of when.

Trials aside, on the other side of copyright law is a blackout movement in protest of New Zealand’s newly-adopted and overzealous copyright law.  If the vague definitions of an ISP (which just about anyone with a website falls under) don’t get you, surely you’ll find yourself accused by a neighbor anyway (and left without an Internet connection, to boot).  In my opinion, that’s even worse than the current police state of bandwidth caps and filtering we have going on here in the United States.

While I won’t be participating directly (you try changing your profile picture on a few dozen sites all at once only to change them back next week; it was bad enough trying to eliminate my birthday), feel free to black out any avatars you have and show some support (if you think it will do any good).

I suppose an alternative course would be to change your avatar to the Pirate Bay logo as an indicator of your support for the trial.  Of course, that’s still a lot of profile images to cycle out.

One question I hear on occasion is whether I think blogging is a dead medium.  With the popularity of sites like Twitter (*cough*) and the recently-purchased Pownce, I can understand the thought process leading to such questions.

Most recently, the question came up in a discussion on a WordPress development mailing list where contributor Paleo Pat voiced his concern for the medium as a whole after having read an older article on Wired.  (My apologies for the link sandwich there, but I figured every breadcrumb needed to be covered.)

The Wired article essentially states that blogging is dead and that people who contribute or develop them are merely wasting their time at this point:

Writing a weblog today isn’t the bright idea it was four years ago. The blogosphere, once a freshwater oasis of folksy self-expression and clever thought, has been flooded by a tsunami of paid bilge. Cut-rate journalists and underground marketing campaigns now drown out the authentic voices of amateur wordsmiths. It’s almost impossible to get noticed, except by hecklers. And why bother? The time it takes to craft sharp, witty blog prose is better spent expressing yourself on Flickr, Facebook, or Twitter.

The sheer number of platforms available (WordPress, Movable Type, hlscript (and the Justin Frankel/Cockos fork hl--), and Expression Engine, just to name a few) mean that just about anybody with a few dollars in their pocket (to pay for hosting, of course) can get set up with a blog of their own.  And if even the money is an issue, there are even services willing to take care all of the setup for free (a la WordPress, Blogger, and Vox, for starters) at the cost of some level of customization or fine-tuning.

Wired seems to complain that providing easier access and offering more choices are akin to lowering the standards required to put your story online, but I see this as enabling, not hindering.  Why shouldn’t somebody with a few intelligent things to say be able to get their voice out without having to spend three years learning to manage a webserver on the weekend?  Who decided that bloggers should have a diverse acronym dictionary of various web technologies like PHP, CGI, and FTP as mandatory requirements for putting their words online?

Also worth taking a look at are the uses of a blog compared to Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr (as suggested above).  Flickr is a social photography site, not a place to rant about the trivialities of life, which makes that a poor substitute for the real thing.  Also, not everybody is a photographer; while undoubtedly some people will find a level of self-expression and communication through posting and browsing through images, that leaves a huge gap for people to be left out.  Facebook is a social networking site to keep in touch with your peers.  While some people tend to use Facebook as an off-scale blogging platform, “notes” (as Facebook refers to them) are not the real thing, and people tend to ignore them once their friends start cloning the childish surveys that people abandoned MySpace to avoid.  (The ability to post a new note for everything in a given RSS feed is a little amusing, too.) And Twitter…well, let’s just say that this post wouldn’t fit in 140 characters, and that some things are best left elaborated upon rather than compressed to fit such a limit.

Of course there are going to be people aiming to make money from their blog, but that’s just about typical of anything these days.  If you want to make money from your car, you would convert it into a taxi, correct?  Now, look at the number of cabs and compare that with the overall number of automobiles.  It’s a small ratio, right?  I don’t see how blogging is any different.  And on a related note (also mentioned in the Wired article), you’re going to have to deal with people who start riots.  “Insult commenters” are a part of everything, although sometimes they go by different names.  Is the point of a blog to escape them?   No.  You hear about all the people who throw paint at people wearing fur clothes; their statement may be physically destructive, so be happy you’re just dealing with a sharp-tongued snake.

Is blogging dead?  Not by a long shot.  It’s just that times change, and people need to learn to adapt to the available mediums.  Blogging isn’t the expression catch-all it once was, but it still has its purposes.

What do you think?  As usual, comments are invited (encouraged, actually).  If you vote, perhaps explain why you voted the way you did?

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Warning:  I’m on a bit of a social/communications kick at the moment, so if you’re not in the mood, you’d best be reading something else from my blogroll.

Situation #1: You just met a roomful of people you want to stay in touch with.  You want to add them to your social circles on Facebook and LinkedIn, but there’s not enough time left for you to write everyone’s name down on the back of a napkin and, frankly, you’d be too worried about not being able to spell their name correctly or read what you wrote once you’re back at the computer.  And you’re sure that everyone else has the same problem, because they’re all social butterflies like yourself.

Situation #2: You’re at a meeting with a few prospective clients for some Internet-oriented startup.  How do you swap information quickly and easily without digging through your pocket for a business card?

What would you do in these situations?

Solution: Get yourself a Poken and use it.

It’s not often  that anyone finds themselves in a situation involving the need to mass-share information (actually, I can’t think of a single time that’s happened), and it usually takes getting to know and trust someone before most people make the jump from “acquaintance” to “friend” (which, by custom today, probably includes the indication of friendship on a social site).

A new startup called Poken (sharing the name with their product) doesn’t seem to believe in there being a such thing as an “acquaintance.”  Or, at least, they view social networking friend lists as a gigantic list of people you’ve ever been stuck in the same room with.  And to alleviate either of the situations above, they’ve designed a device that you simply touch to another to instantly trade your social networking information with each other.

As much as the company would like to say it isn’t targeting them, I find it hard to believe that anyone other than a teenager would want to possess one of these things.  However, the website backing the service (at this point, anyway) seems to suggest they’re aiming for a professional market.   Honestly, what professional wouldn’t feel at least slightly embarrassed about pulling an anime-styled panda out of their coat pocket to “high-five” their counterpart’s frog?  While the dongles are quite obviously child-friendly, I’ve yet to meet the teenager who wanted to share their had a LinkedIn profile, and the lack of MySpace support (*gulp*) probably gives even more reason for the young to avoid.

Ridiculous nature of the devices aside, there’s also the issue of acquiring them.  They’re not available individually in the United States (yet?), but you can order them in packs of twelve (and then share the humiliation with eleven of your friends) for the low cost of $180 per dozen.  For the math-challenged, that’s $15 for each adorable social electronic animal.

The website that makes everything work could also use a little help in and of itself.  As I mentioned, the only services you can link to your Poken are Facebook, LinkedIn, and what appears to be a Swiss social networking site called Usgang.  It’s plagued with URL generation problems of the same sort Facebook had early on in their interface replacement (I wonder what http://www.doyoupoken.com/[...]/logout.jsf?panel=statsdetails is going to do… ) and hands you reward points (redeemable towards discounts on more Poken if you save enough) for trivial tasks like logging in.  Yes, I’ve earned two points simply by logging into the dummy account I made.

I think the Poken solves a problem that never existed in the first place.  Consider most cell phones made within the past few years, and PDAs even older than that.  Almost every device you can name includes an infrared or Bluetooth-based way to share your information (or somebody else’s, should there be a reason to, but presumably it would be best used on your own) with someone else, the methods for accomplishing this have long been standardized, and the transfer of information can also be completed without handing anything to a third party.  Also, given the fact that everyone from teen to the technologically-enhanced power-businessman has a phone capable of contact sharing these days (also with these technologies, and dozens more besides), there’s a pathetic niche at best for which these devices actually serve a meaningful purpose.

Also, there’s benefit to getting the information on paper as opposed to letting one of these devices handle it.  If you’re the businessman handing out cards, you can write any other relevant information on the card, and it’s physical evidence that you met.  Ditto with getting the names and numbers on a napkin.  I’d love to see you do anything like that with a metaphorical handshake.

From a security standpoint, I have to raise the flag when it comes to giving everyone the ability to play “Six Degrees” with your friends list.  Sure, it’s a necessary part of social networking, but seeing as Poken isn’t a direct social networking site (and I’ve already given you a few alternatives, thank you very much), is this really necessary?  Perhaps Kevin Bacon would appreciate the idea, but beyond that, I’m hard-pressed to think of a single situation where posting your information in more places than required is a good idea.

There is one thing that I do believe is covered well, or at least deserves credit for being considered, and that’s dealing with creeps you’d rather not share your information with, but you still want theirs.  You can activate a “discrete” mode when you share your information with someone, and all they get is ghost information about you until you can investigate their profile more and then approve their ability to see your identity.  As they mention on the Poken site, it’s “better than memorizing a rejection number.”  Apparently they’re expecting guys to go crazy asking females they know to share information so then they can mark themselves as a couple on Facebook so then there can be drama when… *RESET*

However, my cynical rant seems to be in the minority; the original post that prompted me to write about this is in awe of the service and the potential it could provide.  What do you think?  Are you ready to “high five” (or rather, “high four,” as the Poken hand only has four digits) everyone you meet with what could very well amount to your contact information, or would you rather take the more conventional paper/PDA/phone route?

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.