Matt Bigelow - Digital Media

I recently helped a friend (whose name I shall not mention) sign up for Facebook, and walked said friend through the process of setting up an account.

It occurred to me (through observations among friends and colleagues) that the most recent wave of Facebookers in the U.S. are by definition those who are late to the game, and therefore are least comfortable with the idea of ceding some of their privacy for the benefit of increased connectedness with friends and family.

Here’s a great tutorial that walks through recommended privacy settings on Facebook, although it’s a little outdated. My tips are below:

Privacy settings, privacy settings, privacy settings

Walk through these as soon as you sign up, and make sure you’re comfortable with the amount of information you’ll be sharing with your friends. Here’s an article (with a cool graph) that indicates how few Facebook users visit the privacy settings.

If possible, sit down with a friend who is already on Facebook and have them walk you through it first before you even sign up.

“I just want to be friends…”

You’ll have the option to share a lot of your information on Facebook with your friends, their friends, your entire network (school, city, etc.) or anyone on Facebook. When in doubt, choose “only my friends.”

Better to pick that one by default, because the immense growth of Facebook means that the other options offer ultimately no control over who sees your stuff.

Crawl before you walk…

In general, pick the most limiting privacy settings first. If you’re uncomfortable with an option, opt out. If you’re not sure you want to share something, don’t.

You can always add more later, adjust your privacy settings or upload more information. Better to start prudent and open up more down the road.

Got any more tips to add…?

Feel free.

And while in the U.S., Friendster can’t touch Facebook, the opposite is true in Malaysia. Although Facebook numbers are steadily rising there, Guan says this is mainly among more westernized Malaysians and American expats. Friendster’s dominance in Malaysia is due to its early market entry and more importantly, offers the Bahasa Malayu language which is the primary language used in Malaysia.

Audience.

(I’m targeting this query primarily at my friends involved in the space of social networking, attempting to glean insights ahead of a speech I’m giving on the topic.)

Is it a Facebook group? Is it Twitter? Is it a more targeted approach, like listing something on ThePoint.com? Is it good old fashioned e-mail?

There’s no one size fits all

I realize this. That’s why I’d like to learn what specific ways you’ve tried to organize people online, and how that affected what tool you chose to do so.

Thanks in advance.

Do not give your login information to Fanebook.com.

I received two e-mails from ‘wallmaster+f_444za6@facebookmail.com,’ which, through the glory of gMail, just showed up as “Facebook” in my inbox, informing me that a friend had left a message on my wall.

The messages looked downright phishy (”lol this vid is so crazy and funny! check it out http://facebook.com.vids.myspacevds.com”) and here’s a screen shot of the Fanebook clone below:

As you can see Fanebook looks identical to Facebook, but you can see the slightly different URL in your browser. I didn’t have time to look at the source code this morning, but apparently it’s all in JavaScript, according to a few folks who dug through it over the weekend: Weblog.com.np, hem.com and Pi’s blog.

If you’ve given your password and account information to Fanebook, you might want to see if you can still log in to your account. If you can’t, make sure that other sites you use (for online banking, etc.) don’t use the same password.

A friend of mine sent me the following story of a Canadian union organizer banned from Facebook for making too many friends:

He then asked me, “Does this thwart the potential for organizing through Facebook?”

No, I said. And here’s why:

Obviously, if you want to get a message out to organize a protest, a prayer service or anything else , you’ll get that message out most QUICKLY by having a lot of friends, say, more than the 5,000 limit. Note I said most QUICKLY. (This is the equivalent of broadcasting a message through a traditional one-to-many medium).

But not necessarily most EFFECTIVELY, nor most SUCCESSFULLY, if the barometer for success is how many people take the desired action you’re hoping for.

Here’s the key

Successfully organizing on Facebook doesn’t necessarily mean one person broadcasting a message to 5,000 people. If anything, that message is going to be watered down for broad appeal, less relevant to each specific person, and prompt the least (percentage wise) action.

The KEY is getting 50 people to each tell 50 people to teach tell 50 people, etc., etc., etc. (Or, really, 5 people to tell 5 people, etc., etc., etc.) Each message then becomes a relevant, targeted message, and a message that the recipient of which is most likely to pass on.

And that’s what gives social networking sites, such as Facebook, such a great potential for organization.

So you sort of have two issues: 1) crafting the right message and 2) getting that message to the right people.

Obviously what I’m describing here is simply viral marketing in theory (the practitioners of which will tell you in reality is anything but simple).

One thing that amazed on my recent trip to Peru was the pervasiveness of Skype and Facebook in hostels and internet cafes, even in some of the most remote destinations. A year ago when I backpacked in Argentina, a quick glance around a “locutorio” would reveal computers dominated by travelers on gMail, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail and the like. E-mail allowed those on the road the ability to stay in touch with friends and family with incredible ease.

Within a year and a half, however, not only did I find it incredibly easy to drop my parents a quick note, I could even call them. In Aguas Calientes, the tiny village outside Machu Picchu in the remote Andes, every internet cafe I went to offered Skype with headphones.

Incredible…

A lot has been said regarding Facebook’s controversial advertising scheme dubbed Social Ads. Here’s my problem with it: it uses its users instead of empowering them.

No way to opt out

One thing I’ve read thus far is that there is no opt out option for the Social Ads program. This fact overlooks another interesting one: there’s no opt in. Why not build the program and ask users if they even want to participate, and then share the revenue with its users.

Now, I’m sure there are a ton of issues with this route as well. But, I think it’s better than what Facebook is doing. What do you think?

Read about an interesting study on Facebook conducted at MSU (thanks to Alec Saunders).

The group attempted to establish a correlation between different forms of social capital and heavy Facebook usage. To put it simply, social capital is the benefits we gain from being connected. (For an exhaustive study of social capital, read “Bowling Alone” by Putnam). In it Putnam establishes bridging social capital and bonding social capital. Bridging social capital represents the our relationships with acquaintances, whereas bonding social capital describes the close relationships we have with friends and family. The study, however, introduced a new form of social capital: “maintained social capital.”

Maintained Social Capital

Maintained social capital refers to those relationships, and the benefits we derive from them, that we maintain despite having shifted geography, interests or workplaces. In the case of Facebook, they may be the relationships we forged in high school with people who went off to different colleges. The authors of the study write:

Social networks change over time as relationships are formed or abandoned. Particularly significant changes in social networks may affect one’s social capital, as when a person moves from the geographic location in which their network was formed and thus loses access to those social resources.

What makes Facebook, other social networking sites, and the Internet in general so interesting when it comes to social capital, to put it plainly, is its uncanny ability to help people keep in touch. The authors of the study quantified those relationships using survey questions such as, “If I needed to, I could ask a high school acquaintance to do a small favor for me,” or “I’d be able to stay with a high school acquaintance if traveling to a different city.”

Social networking sites solidify our past relationships, and have huge benefits for personal and professional gain. Taken the above example, if you’re traveling to a city where you don’t know anyone, how easy it is to peruse your network of friends on Facebook or MySpace to see if an old friend or acquaintance got a new job there? Perhaps you wouldn’t feel comfortable crashing on their couch, but you might drop them a line to see if they are free for dinner one night.

On the one hand, the Internet is exciting because it’s fast; dynamic. On the other hand, however, it’s also much more stable; permanent.

Interesting stuff…

I’ve been meaning to post on this for a while, but here’s my argument why Facebook’s marketplace feature has the potential to unseat Craigslist as the home for online classifieds, and is at the very least a much bigger deal than it’s been touted.

As I was perusing Facebook some months back looking for an apartment in Chicago, I found one in the Uptown neighborhood where the price was right. I read the description, looked at some pictures and saw the contact information to e-mail the person who posted the ad.

Thus far, nothing too different from Craigslist.

Then, at the very bottom of the post, I saw a little message that read “Send Brandon a message? You are not friends with Brandon, but you are both friends with Jessica.” (See more recent example involving an iPod Nano).

It hit me. Leveraging its enormous database of social networks, Facebook effectively eliminated the anonymity behind a classified ad AND established reputability between buyer and seller.

This is huge

Now, whether Facebook’s marketplace will become the home for online classifieds may be a bit of a stretch. But, as anyone who has used Craigslist can testify, there’s nothing more frustrating then not knowing (1) the identity of the person with whom you’re dealing and (2) whether or not they are reputable.

Identity and reputation.

Now, other sites (notably Amazon and eBay) have done with these two issues using reputation ratings systems. But for peer-to-peer transactions, sitting on an enormous database of connections (or friends) could easily be another, perhaps easier way, because it’s automated and requires no effort on the part of the user.

Something for newspaper sites to chew as they look further into hyperlocal sites and offer classified solutions that attempt to rival Craigslist.