Last year, I wrote about a new startup emerging from relative obscurity to take the stage at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now, just last week, it seems that they have decided to evolve themselves to become more social. Just who am I talking about? Why, it’s LazyFeed, a real-time aggregator of content to provide you with info you want at your beck and call.
In its past form, LazyFeed was a service site designed not to show others about what you were searching for nor was it designed to do anything viral. It was entirely a one person viewing party, which makes a lot of sense because why would others care what you’re searching for in real-time? But in an age of social media where every startup simply needs to have a some form of shareability with their service, it seemed that LazyFeed was getting it half-right…they had the real-time search part down, but with no virality? That’s ludicrous! Well starting last week, LazyFeed has changed the way real-time search is being done by making it easier for you to share your searches.
With a redesigned website, LazyFeed is set out to change the perception that search is only a “read-only” function – now it’s also a “write”. What this means is that you can still conduct your searches in real-time to find out the latest trends and mentions as it relates to your topic/search query – whether that’s “Small business” or “online marketing” or whatever else you desire, but then you can easily take those results and pass them along in your very own channel. That’s right…LazyFeed will now let you create your own search channel that can be publicized to the world. Moreover, in the first release, we were only allowed one “lazyfeed”, but this time around, the team at LazyFeed has allowed us the chance to create multiple feeds to search. What this means is that you won’t have to re-type your search queries and will be able to search across multiple feed topics at once. Unlike their old iteration, users were forced to click and view feed topics one by one to see the new mentions and posts, but this time, you’re greeted with a dashboard that users can keep open and watch a dynamic display of updates come across the screen.
So where’s the virality? Well here’s where it happens…LazyFeed has followed the bandwagon like most social networks to allow you to follow other LazyFeed users. Just like in Facebook, MySpace or even Twitter, you’re now able to simply go to a friend’s LazyFeed profile and/or URL and instantly follow what they’re posting. Or, you can also periodically come back to their site, click on one of their channels, highlight one of the stories in that channel and post it to your very own LazyFeed account. The site now makes the web like a Chinese menu – you can simply pick and choose your own things of interest. It truly has become lazy.
What does this mean for your business? Well if you’re a blogger or are interested in creating your very own form of a social media monitoring tool, then the service that LazyFeed offers you might be worth taking a look at. The real-time social search dashboard approach is a pretty good way to find out what people are saying about your competitors. If you’re an airline interested in seeing what people are saying about you and your competitors, then you can do a Lazy search on your brand followed by additional channels focused on your competitors. From those posts, you can get a non-scientific way of measuring how well you’re doing in the industry. Also, if you’re trying to figure out how to do a marketing campaign on Facebook or even do some email marketing, then create a channel focused on those broad topics and see what news or posts appear in real-time. You might find one that you like. But the better thing is to see if an influencer has a profile on LazyFeed, then you can follow them on the site and see what content they find interesting so you could reach out to them on their level.
LazyFeed’s new service is out and available for use on their site by clicking here. You can read more about their update on their blog here.
In my last post, I talked about how privacy issues were affecting the way people view their social networks. In this post, I’d like to talk about the growing movement that is happening that is affecting one specific social network: Facebook.
Why Facebook? It’s one of the largest social networks in the United States now and in light of its recent movement towards becoming more “open” to sharing the data and enhancing the user’s social graph, one thing that it has seemed to have forgotten is asking the users for permission to do so. You can read a live blog account of Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder, on ReadWriteWeb here, but suffice it to say, the intent here was for the social graph to allow the web to make more semantic connections with users so that we find more it more relevant to us. It’s a nice gesture…until people realized that the services utilizing Facebook’s new features were sharing their personal data across to services like Pandora and Microsoft Docs, often without understanding how to opt-out of posting that data easily. It seemed that Facebook’s efforts to maintain control was by making it extremely difficult to simply opt-out or properly manage your privacy settings.
Explore the maze just to update your privacy
Now we’ve heard horror stories about people shocked to hear that their settings have been changed unexpectedly to make more information public when, originally, it was set as private. It remains unknown whether those cases could properly be attributed to Facebook’s tweaking of the system so I won’t speculate on the blame, but my point here is that the experience just to update your settings can be rather convoluted. Just look at this infographic created by The New York Times showing you the complex maze in order to adjust the slightest thing.
So by now you’ve looked at the infographic, right? Did you try and figure out how to adjust your privacy setting? Are you lost? Yeah, so are most people. In an analysis of this chart, Dan Nosowitz from Fast Company made this comment:
Exceedingly complex controls like those Facebook offers for privacy always struggle with balance. Keep things too simple, and everyone can understand them but advanced users won’t have enough control to tweak the settings the way they want to. That leads to Facebook making decisions for people–a dangerous system. But if you provide every conceivable permutation of privacy setting, you’ll confuse the hell out of the people who just want to make one tiny bit of information invisible. That leads to users thinking, “screw it.” And that comes to the same result: Facebook makes decisions for people.
In my last post, I wrote about Tim O’Reilly’s blog post where he cites that he supports Mark Zuckerberg’s effort to make the web more “open” and data public, but that he thinks that this is a learning challenge for him. By that, he means that entrepreneurs and startups need to take these risks and go forward and sometimes reverse course in order to find the right balance needed to satisfy the company’s mission and appease its users. However, in the above infographics case, Nosowitz thinks that Facebook hasn’t done this yet, until probably recently. While Nosowitz’s article about Facebook’s privacy wasn’t published until May 13, 2010, some simpler settings have emerged from Facebook. But if these new options haven’t condensed the above infographic into something more streamlined, people are still going to get increasingly frustrated about the service and still be confused – leading more to believe Nosowitz’s assumption: that Facebook is making decisions for people.
The protest grows
Typically when Facebook has made changes to the site, whether it was a redesigned homepage or some new features that millions of their users disagree with – including updates to the Terms of Service, people took to cyberspace and protested by “demanding” changes be made. Sometimes there were no changes and other times, Facebook acquiesced and reverted back to their old ways. These demonstrations usually occurred on blogs and on Facebook through the use of the group feature. It was quite entertaining and you didn’t hear a lot of commentary about deleting your Facebook account. But now, somehow this time was entirely different. After this year’s F8 developers conference, there was more uproar concerning the privacy of user data and how Facebook had a laissez-faire view about keeping our content hidden without our consent. Allegedly, even Mark Zuckerberg believed content published on the web in a social network was completely open – privacy be damned.
As a result, technology influencers and those upset over the recent direction taken by Facebook have orchestrated campaigns designed to accomplish one: deletion of Facebook accounts to send a message to the social network. One such campaign took place on May 31 and was called We’re Quitting Facebook. As of this writing, over 30,000 individuals have “committed” themselves to deleting their accounts on Memorial Day. Whether or not this number actually is true remains a point of speculation, but suffice it to say, people are genuinely upset and have resigned themselves to cutting themselves free from the addictive social network. Their argument is that Facebook is misleading on its good intentions and there aren’t any fair choices – by which the organizers cite a Wired.com article that highlights that it seems Facebook holds a monopoly (or with MySpace it’s a duopoly) in the United States when it comes to great social networks.
Another protest is also set to take place on June 6 around the world (virtually, of course) called Facebook Protestthat some are also calling “D Day”. While striving to achieve the same goal as the We’re Quitting Facebook campaign, this protest’s methods include simply boycotting Facebook to show the social network the power of the crowd. This means logging out of Facebook completely and making sure that you’re not clicking on any “like” button on a site or sharing content through any Facebook-infused application or service. While not as extreme as the We’re Quitting Facebook protest, this one does have a considerable following of more than 4,000 fans on Facebook (ironic, yes) and close to 2,000 followers on Twitter. It has also been picked up by some local news affiliates and other publications.
Whether Facebook will notice thousands of protesters out of millions of its total users boycotting or deleting their accounts will be interesting. How will the service handle the fact that thousands will stop using their service for a whole day? Granted, Facebook is quite addictive, but will 24 hours of non-activity be a detriment to their business or revenue?
If you’re charging up that hill, you better know what’s on the other side
It’s one thing to say that a lot of people will be deleting their accounts, but one must also look on the other side to see how effective that reach would be:
Facebook has over 400 million active users
50% log into Facebook on any given day
People spend over 500 billion minutes/month on Facebook
About 70% of Facebook users are outside the United States
Two-thirds of comScore’s U.S. Top 100 websites and half of comScore’s Global Top 100 websites have integrated with Facebook
More than 550,000 active applications currently on Facebook Platform
More than 250,000 websites have integrated with Facebook Platform
More than 100 million Facebook users engage with Facebook on external websites every month
Those statistics are quite daunting so for most of the protesters to avoid anything Facebook-related across the Internet is probably a near-impossibility. Just by reading this blog post, you might be tempted to click on the “like” button or maybe even share this article on Facebook. You just can’t get away from it!
In gathering information about this post, I came across this article on Compete that had an interesting graphic focused on how big was this hype surrounding Facebook privacy. What it graphed out was the amount of site traffic towards Facebook’s privacy page during each of the major issues that had people complaining about the openness of their data. As you can see, more people began visiting the privacy page since Facebook announced their profiles were going to be subject of searches by sites like Google and Yahoo, but subsequently, the traffic has since dropped to an average of 400-500,000 weekly unique visits. There wasn’t even a spike when a new ad platform was launched or even when Facebook announced a universal opt-out from their Beacon program. Granted this chart does not show recent issues surrounding privacy concerns once again plaguing Facebook, but could we expect another rise in traffic to the privacy settings page in light of a more simpler approach? Most likely.
But how are we motivated towards going off the deep end and deleting our account? I don’t think that it’s entirely possible to do. In fact, in another Compete.com post, they doubt whether it’s even feasible for us to really “quit” Facebook. In the above graph, you can see that the average visits to Facebook have only gone up with the exception of February – March 2010 which displayed the most obvious drop in site traffic. But even looking at the different incidents that occurred with Facebook regarding privacy, more people overall are still visiting the site and using their service. So what effect will this really have against the Facebook protests? Probably not much.
Go ahead and quit, but we’ll find someone to take your place
One of the things that is probably highly anticipated is the opportunity to see how many people actually followed through with the We’re Quitting Facebook campaign. With over 30,000 people “committing” to follow through, the true test would be to see if everyone did, in fact, take part and remove themselves from the social network. Chances are that with one person quitting, there’s many more to take his or her place. VentureBeat reporter Paul Boutin wrote an article today where he noted:
If Facebook signups were to run at their usual pace today — probably not, based on today’s slow holiday traffic on the Internet — for every user who threatened to quit, there would be four or five new signups. Facebook averages 150,000 new members per day, the company has claimed. Quit Facebook Day signed up only 32,522 pledges, and it’s not likely that all of them actually quit.
This is definitely evident that with a large user base, in order for Facebook to truly notice a movement of significant caliber, the action would have to be extraordinary and substantial – meaning that more than a few thousand users would need to sacrifice themselves in order to really make a difference.
Regardless of the actions taking place now with the two protests and an updated privacy setting, one thing remains certain, the debate will remain the same. In addition, the hype may have been over-promoted about how people view the damage caused by Facebook’s lack of privacy and the uproar that accompanied it.
I’ll leave you with this video featuring Mashable’s co-editor Ben Parr and his debate with an intellectual property attorney and a government official from Canada on a Russian TV program where they discuss the privacy aspect – the video is in English:
So will you be abandoning Facebook or will you be sticking around waiting for the next issue to arise?
We’ve seen a lot of news recently surrounding Facebook and their changes they’ve made since their annual F8 developers conference where founder Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed that Facebook would now be sharing your data across a wider social graph so that your friends could get to know you better.
Well, that didn’t have the reaction that Facebook intended and what actually resulted was a backlash against the giant social network that has since resigned them to pull back from some of their work and rethink the one thing people are having issues with: their privacy.
It’s understood that within a social network, we’re free to share our data with our friends – hence what makes the service “social”. And we’re also able to control what information other people see – perhaps we don’t want our employers to see our wall posts or photos, or maybe let our friends see our information. Regardless of the types of privacy settings internally, we’re probably fine with having that control. But what users are not so inclined to allow is the additional sharing of their data without their consent – that being a violation of their privacy. Facebook’s work with the social graph is great, but what they seemed to have forgotten is that while users have consented to sharing their data on their social network, that agreement does not also constitute sending it to other social services like Pandora or news sites like CNN. Yes, it’s not feasible to poll everyone to have that option, but to help assuage the feelings of anger, Facebook and other social networks who intend on going through this course should simply set additional privacy settings and allow the user to choose where they would like to share their data.
To me, this is what this whole scenario sounds like:
You sign up for an email newsletter from a company to learn more about their products that you’re interested in and during the course of registration, you note specific things you’d like to know about: upcoming releases, product features, testimonials, etc. Over the next few months, the company does a good job reaching out to you via email newsletters targeted towards your request. But then, the company decides to take your data and share it with third-party companies without your consent and, as a result, you start getting their newsletters as well.
Does everyone have a point where they’ll give up their privacy?
Is this what you want? To not have any voice in determining where your information is sent? It’s great to have more connected social network so that we have the ability to find out more from our friends, but only with their consent and without destroying any sense of privacy that still remains on social networks. In fact, in a recent study published on eMarketer and done by public relations firm, Edelman, 13% of Internet users in the United States are comfortable with giving up their personal data for content. Edelman claims that since there’s no such thing as a free lunch (or in this case free content), US Internet users are willing to “make some sacrifices to get entertainment without paying”. Could this be a sign that money is more important than privacy?
We all know that using social networks like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter are free, so why should we complain? But do we still allow that laissez-faire approach affect how we view our data? Well 13% seem to think so. But what else would we willing to give up our privacy for? According to the Edelman study, if we give up our personal data, 47% of US Internet users would be fine with getting entertainment without any advertisements, 43% would give it up for the ability to share it with their friends, and 40% would want the ability to access it across multiple devices. Not quite 50%, but these numbers seem to indicate that there are a lot of people who just want the functionality and the entertainment value without understanding any long-term consequences of giving up data that they would not potentially want others to see.
A bigger question would be “What are social networks doing to help protect people from making these foolish decisions?”
Playing devil’s advocate for a moment
I’m not suggesting that social networks are the ones who should be criticized – in fact, it’s both the user and the social networks. After all, the users are the ones supplying the information and for what? Added superficial features that would only help them online? Some users who participate freely without regard for their data need to understand that their privacy is something very important to them. If there are unintended consequences from the result of them posting data online, then the one person they have to blame is themselves for posting it, not just that the social networks failed to enforce their privacy. The data would not have been there had the user not added it in themselves.
When Disa Powell’s husband and brother were badly burned in an electrical explosion while conducting maintenance at a Wal-Mart store and the family sued, the defense went after something she never expected: her online life. Through a subpoena seeking information about the men’s injuries, Wal-Mart was able to gain full access to her Facebook and MySpace social-networking accounts — every public and private message, contact and photo for the previous 2 1/2 years…
And while online services like Facebook and MySpace are building dossiers on practically all their users, one thing to keep in mind is that you should not be putting information out on social networks that you wouldn’t share with the general public normally. There are different rules that people employ to help them figure out what data is private and what isn’t, but I’ll let you choose your own rule – just make sure you use common sense.
In a recent article by Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media and one of the most influential technologists in the country (maybe in the world) today, he defends Facebook’s recent privacy “crisis”. Why? Because it is a sign that entrepreneurs are learning and that they need to make these big mistakes in order to understand where the boundaries are. O’Reilly even goes as far as to support the social graph that Zuckerberg is trying to create. He goes on to say:
The world is changing. We give up more and more of our privacy online in exchange for undoubted benefits. We give up our location in order to get turn by turn directions on our phone; we give up our payment history in return for discounts or reward points; we give up our images to security cameras equipped with increasingly sophisticated machine learning technology. As medical records go online, we’ll increase both the potential and the risks of having private information used and misused.
It’s apparent that O’Reilly feels that while users are prone to giving up data to help make it more “entertaining” or to accomplish a certain purpose – whether it’s to view medical records, security or any other function, entrepreneurs like Zuckerberg or even Steve Jobs will need to understand how far they can push the limits on exposing user data without being a blatant violation of their privacy. Is the information being used in a helpful way to the user (not to the entrepreneur or any third-party)? In closing his post, O’Reilly acknowledges that there will be trade-offs, which makes perfect sense, because you’re not going to be able to have the luxury of using social network services for entertainment without possibly giving up your privacy. It seems that these two are at the opposite ends of the spectrum and to that end, we’ll need to find some happy medium.
Respect my privacy
Even so, just because Facebook has seemed to brush off the crowd’s anger towards its lack of care towards our privacy, the majority of people online still care about what is being said. Privacy doesn’t have to span just the data you input into social networks, but also how these services target you as well. Whether it’s reaching out to you through advertisements on the site or any other targeted marketing that only could be found through your personal data, that might not be acceptable. I suppose a failed example of this would be Facebook’s Beacon platform? Regardless, in the eMarketer article cited earlier, one of the suggestions given includes having marketers be conscious that while “users make certain information about themselves available, MOST still want their privacy respected“. Don’t make the mistake that you can do whatever you want without understanding the consequences – after all, chances are that the people building the social network are on social networks themselves…what would they think if someone did this to their data?
Closing thoughts
I, for one, am someone who likes to post a lot of data online, including photos and other content, but I also subscribe to the web 1.0 policy when it came to interacting with strangers in a chat room: be careful who you’re talking to because you never know who someone is online. With that being said, I think that privacy is a big issue and people should take it seriously when deciding what information should be put online. The fact that we’re not paying to use social networks (yet) is something we are always needing to be cautious about because these networks are probably going to look at the data as a metric to understand what new features are needed and whether or not they’re accomplishing their mission. But even still, social networks must be aware that privacy cannot be sacrificed entirely just to make their product a reality and success. Ensuring that the proper opt-out and security barriers are in place, plus educating their users on how to adjust these settings, is imperative for a service to show it cares.
So how are you viewing social networks? Do you think that most or any are respecting your privacy?
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