New Year's Resolution: Replace FOMO with CWID

FOMO. Fear of Missing Out. You know it all too well. The fear that somewhere, someone that you know, is having a better time than you, doing something. It's the dark side of social media that keeps you glued to your email, your twitter stream, and dare we say it, your Facebook feeds. Portlandia does this awesome bit on it.

I've had enough with FOMO, so for 2012 I am making the following resolution: No Mo' FOMO. Instead of FOMO let's try CWID: Content w/ What I'm Doing.

Legal Ruling Analogizes Twitter to a Colonial-Era Bulletin Board

In United States of America vs William Lawrence Cassidy, in which Cassidy was accused of harassing a Buddhist religious leader via Twitter, the judge drew a fascinating distinction b/w public speech on Twitter and blogs on the one hand, and speech "specifically addressed to and directed at another person" such as email (and Twitter DM's one presumes?). The distinction was based on an analogy to the communications media available at the time that the Bill of Rights was written.

The judge said that a blog, or a micro-blog, was like a bulletin board that a colonist might have planted in their front yard: “If one colonist wants to see what is on another’s bulletin board, he would need to walk over to his neighbor’s yard and look at what is posted, or hire someone else to do so.”

Twitter, according to the analogy, would be like having news from one colonist’s bulletin board automatically show up on another’s. The key is that the second colonist could choose to “[turn] on or off" such a feature on his bulletin board. “This is in sharp contrast to a telephone call, letter or e-mail specifically addressed to and directed at another person,” he concluded.

I love these kinds of historical analogies to existing technology. Basic human needs hardly change over time, so every new technology should have a functional analog from an end-consumer perspective.

In this case however I think the judge's analogy is flawed. Twitter is designed for @ replies to indeed be addressed and directed at another person, despite also being public. The analogy would be something like writing an open letter in the newspaper harassing the victim, shouting at her in the town square in a voice loud enough for all to hear, or perhaps writing her a letter and distributing it to the public on a leaflet in addition to giving her a copy. I'm not a legal scholar, so have no idea what the legality of this would be.

The story was reported by the New York Times here.

Why Facebook May Really Be Worth $100Bn

I wrote my last post about how Facebook was a bubble, so now I am going to eat my words and explain why I think Facebook might be worth its price after all.  

I have long been a FB-apostate when it came to seeing the platform’s monetization potential: big, yes, but $100Bn big?  Now however I’m starting to see the light.  And it's not because of advertising.

I believe that Facebook has won the online identity war, and the spoils will be enormous.

Companies like MSFT and GOOG have forever been trying to create a single identity for users to use across the web, from MSN Passport cum Windows Live, to the simply titled Google Account (or is it Google Profile?) cum Google+.  Other, parallel efforts have focused on being a one-stop destination for all things online, from the Yahoo! Portal to iGoogle. But FB has actually done it, and not as a bolt-on afterthought but as their core competency (granted the portal was Yahoo's core competency, they just weren't very competent at it).  Because identity is a natural monopoly, this makes FB’s dominance of this space difficult to challenge.  

Twitter and the Danger of Listening Out of Context

You know that guy that overhears a line of your conversation and jumps in, with the completely wrong context?  With Twitter we are all That Guy - or least the barrier to being That Guy is dropped waaaay lower.

I was just reviewing @christinacaci's tweetstream to decide whether to follow her (I did), when I read this one:

@arainert I also saw a few parks trending on Foursquare this afternoon, which seems a solid indication of springtime.

1 Mar via web Favorite Retweet Reply

from Union Square, New York

I was about to give her shit a la "you know you're in a social media bubble when you use Foursquare to tell the weather"- b/c seriously, who uses Foursquare to tell the weather? b/c I was feeling snarky after finding a time to catch up with her had involved more reschedules than a NY airport in a Xmas blizzard, although in her defense I've been guilty for a couple of the reschedules and she's been incredibly gracious about it - until I saw the context of the conversation and noted that the person she was talking to was a) the head of product at Foursquare, and b) had just made a comment ending in "Screw you Winter!"  Suddenly her tweet made so much more sense, was so much more nuanced than originally perceived to be, and wiped away all snarkiness to the point I felt bad about even the mildly-ribbing tweet I'd made about 4Sq having a new use case - telling the weather.

11:26PM, March 2, 2010.  Note to self: you're already pretty good at being That Guy; be double careful on Twitter!

Facebook Messaging: Do You Really Want to Use a Messaging System Based on a Focus Group of Teenagers?

Seems everybody is predicting that Facebook Messaging is going to revolutionize communication (http://nyti.ms/dz3qtF, http://tcrn.ch/9STaBp, http://wapo.st/cwD3OJ, etc.). So I figured I'd throw my predicting hat into the ring and say, "Meh." There are three reasons for this: Facebook's choice of focus group for developing the new product; Facebook's prior design failures in building messaging systems; and the inherent conflict b/w Facebook's "social," sharing communication model and email's private, recipient-only model. And finally, for anyone who would underestimate the difficulties of making grand change to people's methods of communication, I have two words for you: Google Wave.

The product may be revolutionary if you are a modern teenager, Zuckerberg's apparent focus group for the project (if I read another article quoting Zuckerberg as saying that the idea for Messaging "came out of talking to current teenagers" ...). But for the rest of us? Do folks in the real world really want to use a product designed with the communication styles of high schoolers in mind? (and I'm not going to try to mock those communication styles since I'll probably just get it wrong, but we all went to high school once and how many of us want that experience rehashed in our inboxes every day? The occasional Breakfast Club or Ferris Bueller screening should be enough to remind us that *those are not days we want to go back to*)

At the same time, every one of Facebook's attempts at a communications fool so far has been to my taste unbelievably kludgy (think about the existing Facebook Messaging and IM systems compared to their competitors, or Michael Arrington's comment that the previous iteration of Facebook Messaging was "completely unusable as a personal or business productivity tool"). Even the demos of the new Messaging demos I've seen continue much of this kludgy-ness, and my predictions of adoption by the post-high school crowd are extremely low. Do I really want all of my communication to be sorted exclusively by who it's with? And subject lines may be an unnecessary formality in rare cases, but generally they serve to let me know what the rest of the message - and the entire conversation thread - is about, and to separate conversations accordingly.

Finally, there is an inherent conflict of interest b/w the use of private messaging systems like email, in which conversations are designed to be seen only by their recipients, and the kind of public conversations that Twitter and Facebook (through wall posts) encourage. Facebook wants all your conversations to be out there in the open, wants as much public sharing as possible, and email fundamentally represents the opposite of that. Therefore it's hard to see a company like Facebook seriously committing to the development of a private messaging system of any kind, over the long term.

But then again maybe at 31 I'm just an old fogey who doesn't "get it" when it comes to "modern messaging" (as Zuckerberg puts it). I just requested my Messaging invite and may end up eating my words if it promises to be the biggest revolution in modern communication since Twitter. But somehow I doubt it. Communication paradigm shifts happen organically, not by declaration from on high. Just think back to last year when to buzz was all about Wave, another promised revolution in social communication. We all know how that went ...

TwitterFeed, the bit.ly API, and the Perils of Poor Documentation

I have been trying to use TwitterFeed to post to my Facebook and Twitter statuses, setting my URL shortener to bit.ly, which I like because of the analytics it provides.  However due to my own short attention span, I didn't bother to read how the bit.ly third-party API works and fed it my password instead of the API key (below), thinking all the while how weird it was that TwitterFeed would store my bit.ly password and display it in cleartext on the screen (at least they gave me a "hide this" option).

When I saw that my posts continued using TinyURL, I disabled the TwitterFeed service and did some research, where I found out that your API Key is not the same as your password.  As one of the more technically- and detailed-oriented people I know, I should have realized this, so shame on me for that.  However shame on TwitterFeed for not taking the two hours to create an inline explanation of what an API key is (or the two days to create robust inline linking to all of the URL shortener services API key pages so that the user could get their key without ever leaving the TwitterFeed site).  If I was this close to dropping their service with my top Computer Science program degree and career spent in IT, imagine how many ordinary users who encounter this puzzle must simply decide the service is not worth the effort.  Even worse, a simple search on their support forum shows that many others have complained about the same problem and even gotten replies from TwitterFeed employees, so what are they waiting for to fix the problem?

(the TwitterFeed URL shortener settings)