2011 Predictions -- Hits and Misses

Originally published 12/12/2011

Last December I made some predictions about what was likely to happen in the social networking scene this year.  There were a few hits and a few misses. This week, I’ll review what I got (sort of) right and what I got (really, really) wrong.

First the hits and missed from last year:

Hit: I wrote “The largest social network on the planet, Facebook, will continue to be the 800-pound gorilla in social networking next year. The biggest challenge they Face (sorry, couldn’t help myself) will be to not shoot themselves in the foot over privacy concerns.”  And lthough there were a few minor kerfuffles with Facebook privacy in 2011, they certainly didn’t make any fatal mistakes.

Miss: I wrote “Facebook is poised to kill location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla. Facebook will take over as the 800-pound gorilla in the “check in for rewards” category of applications.”  Hmm, not so much.  Facebook places didn’t overtake Foursquare; in fact Foursquare integrated their check-ins with Facebook.  Gowalla was actually acquired by Facebook late in the year, apparently for the people working on it and not the application: Facebook promptly killed it.

Hit (Kind of): I wrote “The aspiring gorilla in social media—Google—will release Google Me sometime in the first half of 2011 to much fanfare and pundit praise.  The public, however, will once again scratch their collective heads trying to figure out what it’s good for.” Google did indeed release a social networking platform in 2011: Google+.  It shot out of the gate with millions of people jumping on board in the first few weeks, making it the fastest growing social network on record.  The jury is still out on whether or not it will ever threaten Facebook for dominance in the space.

Hit: I wrote: “Twitter, left to its own devices, will continue to be a rising star in 2011 as more and more people figure out what it’s good for: news and entertainment. Twitter will be the “go to” site whenever there is breaking news anywhere on the planet or whenever they are in the need for a bit of quick humor.”  Twitter obviously continues to thrive, even releasing a new interface late in the year.  Unlike other revamps, the New Twitter doesn’t seem to have offended users in droves.

Hit: I wrote: “Like Google Wave before it, Apple’s musical entry into social networking—Ping—will languish in obscurity until Apple finally gives up on it late next year (seriously, does anyone really care what music Steve likes to listen to?).” I don’t think Ping is in any danger of becoming massively popular anytime soon (and RIP, Steve Jobs).

Swing and a complete miss: I wrote: “The biggest social change (but not really in the area of social networking) will come in June when Apple releases the iPhone 5 with NFC (Near-Field Communication) capabilities.  NFC will let people program their phones to behave as wireless credit cards, enabling people to leave their wallets at home.  Other phone manufactures will follow with similar functions some months later.”  Turns out Apple will be late to the game with NFC, as it did not appear in the iPhone 4S released this year.  My suspicion is that although the technology appears to be ready for prime time, Apple won’t jump in with NFC until it has an entire payment ecosystem (that they control) in place.

Next week: My predictions for 2012.

The Other Facebook Facial Recognition Problem

Originally posted 6/9/2011

As I’m sure you are aware, your friends at Facebook rolled out a new “feature” in the last few days that has privacy experts more than a little concerned.  Supposedly the new facial recognition software they have deployed will recognize your face when friends post pictures of you (and vice versa) so that all your other friends can see who you’ve been hanging out with.

Privacy experts were surprised (I don’t know why…Facebook has a history of being oblivious to privacy concerns) when the new software was automatically implemented as a “default on” option.  In other words, if you didn’t want Facebook to do this for you (or to you), you have to go into your profile settings to turn it off.  Apparently, the new feature has European regulators so annoyed that they are investigating (seriously, do these people ever get around to taking action other than “investigating?).

Today I noticed an article published by PCWorld, where the authors actually investigated the facial recognition feature to see how good it is.  And, guess what: the facial recognition software doesn’t work so well.  The author’s conclusion: stop worrying about your privacy…the feature doesn’t work well enough to warrant concern.  In their words: “As it turns out, the tool isn't exactly advanced to a worrying degree (or anywhere close).”

Hmm.  The feature doesn’t work.  Facebook really doesn’t do a good job of identifying my face on a friends picture.  Excuse me if I don’t breathe a sigh of relief.  Let me explain why: Apparently it works sometimes…and that’s what concerns me.  What if it identifies me as a face in a photo and that face doesn’t belong to me? I’m far less concerned that the feature identifies me in things I’m involved with; I’m much more concerned with the potential for false positives!  If you and one of your Facebook friends look somewhat alike, the feature can identify you as being involved in lots of things you didn’t do.  No, really, that isn’t me dressed in a bedsheet helping those people load a cow in the back of a van (though it sounds like an interesting evening).  No, that wasn’t me drinking beer at the racetrack on the day I called in sick to work.  No, that wasn’t me at that party making out with that woman who isn’t my wife.  And so on. Even if the facial recognition software worked perfectly so that there were never any false positives, what’s to keep a vindictive acquaintance from pasting my face onto an incriminating photo and posting it?  (This is why, just to be on the safe side, I always buy treats for the Creative Services team at work: they know how to use Photoshop.)

Facebook seems to have some interesting ideas about how “privacy” should work.  It remains to be seen if this will be the wake-up call they seem to so desperately need to be more privacy conscious, or if it turns out to be just one more kerfuffle over an ill-timed and badly implemented feature. 

And seriously people: if you work with creative professionals that use Photoshop for a living…buy them cookies or candy once in a while.

Social Media in 2011

Originally posted 12/2/2010

Over the last year corporate America largely embraced social media (even if a lot of them haven’t quite yet figured out what it’s *good* for). On the other hand, eGov/Gov 2.0 (whichever you prefer) is still behind the curve in social networking. What adoption there is in this area seems to be mostly one way: Government to Constituent (the channel back up to government seems to be turned off at the moment). Since 2010 will be wrapping up in a few short weeks, I thought I would get a head start on all the other prognosticators out there and make a few predictions about what I think we’re likely to see in social media/social networking in the coming year.

The largest social network on the planet, Facebook, will continue to be the 800-pound gorilla in social networking next year. The biggest challenge they Face (sorry, couldn’t help myself) will be to not shoot themselves in the foot over privacy concerns.  Trust is a big component in social networking (in real life as well as online), and Facebook is already on thin ice with many people over their ever-shifting privacy policies.  If those concerns spread or become more profound (or perhaps worse, attract the attention of government privacy regulators) they risk losing growth momentum. Aside from potential privacy issues, Facebook is poised to kill location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla. Facebook will take over as the 800-pound gorilla in the “check in for rewards” category of applications.  Indeed, anyone with a business plan based around mobile devices and locations will have to be looking over their shoulder at Facebook.

The aspiring gorilla in social media—Google—will release Google Me sometime in the first half of 2011 to much fanfare and pundit praise.  The public, however, will once again scratch their collective heads trying to figure out what it’s good for. Google will continue to snap up other companies in the coming year, perhaps even going after a social networking fish like Twitter. 

Twitter, left to its own devices, will continue to be a rising star in 2011 as more and more people figure out what it’s good for: news and entertainment. Twitter will be the “go to” site whenever there is breaking news anywhere on the planet or whenever they are in the need for a bit of quick humor. At some point in the coming year, the folks at Twitter might even figure out how to successfully monetize the site.

Like Google Wave before it, Apple’s musical entry into social networking—Ping—will languish in obscurity until Apple finally gives up on it late next year (seriously, does anyone really care what music Steve likes to listen to?). The biggest social change (but not really in the area of social networking) will come in June when Apple releases the iPhone 5 with NFC (Near-Field Communication) capabilities.  NFC will let people program their phones to behave as wireless credit cards, enabling people to leave their wallets at home.  Other phone manufactures will follow with similar functions some months later.

The biggest change in social networking in 2011 will be the emergence of social commerce as an engine of growth. Facing stagnant economies and low growth rates, more and more businesses (and maybe even governments) will recognize that the wisdom of the crowds is a great way to drive growth and revenue.

Life Events and Social Networking

Originally published 8/18/2010

Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt has some interesting ideas on privacy and social networking.  Noting that people (especially young people) have a habit of posting private or potentially embarrassing information on public social networking sites, he predicted that “coming of age” in the future might have to include the creation of a new online persona to distance oneself from youthful online indiscretions. If that’s true, I wonder why would we limit reinventions of one’s online self to just a single coming of age life event.  What about getting married: should the bride and the groom be able to change their names to disavow social networking posts made when they were single?  Should divorcing couples be allowed to change their names to distance their online personas from when they were married?  Should parents be allowed to change their names after they have children? What about switching political parties? Moving to a new city? And so on and so on.

How would such a trend apply to our professional personas?  Increasingly, employees are asked to join social networks as online representatives for their company. If I post positive reviews of my current employer’s products and services, for instance, won’t I need a new persona if I change careers and go to work for a former competitor?  Or if I post a competitive analysis casting another company’s product offerings in a negative light, won’t I need a new name if my company and that company merge?  As it stands today, you certainly don’t have to look far to find lots of examples of statements made by corporate executives that they’ve come to regret after their business environment changes.

I doubt seriously if creating new online personas for each different life event becomes formalized anytime soon (informally, of course, people do it all the time with email and user name aliases).  Instead, I expect governments to get involved soon (some already have) to legislate that when a person leaves a social network, the owner of the network must irrevocably delete all content that person created while a member.  It remains to be seen how those privacy laws will effect 3^rd party content aggregators and search engines.

As online privacy laws stand now, it should give people pause when participating in social networks. It should also be a big consideration for organizations thinking about getting into social networking. How much involvement can you expect of members on public social networking sites when it finally sinks in that anything they say “can and will be used against them” in the future? 

Forget Me Not/Forget Me Now

I've written about internet privacy concerns several times before on my blog, and I recently ran across another privacy issue that I hadn't seen pop up before: the right to be "forgotten." It poses some interesting questions for organizations, especially those that own and operate social networking communities.

It turns out that the European Union has some rather interesting views on a person’s data privacy rights; the EU long ago laid down directives pertaining to what conditions under which personal data may be collected, how it must be secured, and how citizens have the right to correct erroneous data. (Although codified, the directives are non-binding, and privacy laws in Europe still do vary from country to country.)

Spain, for instance, has established a Data Protection Agency to monitor and enforce their data privacy laws.  Recently, it ordered Google to remove links to material about 90 or so people (Google gets asked to remove links all the time and generally ignores them).  This "right to be forgotten" has just surfaced in the last few years as search engines have become more effective at collecting and indexing information on the web.  Information (both old information and erroneous information) is now much more easy to find, so people in Spain at least are starting to bring lawsuits to have search engines remove links to the information that they find objectionable.

This poses some interesting issues for organizations that run social networking sites.  If people register as members, participate for a while, and then decide to leave a community, do they have the right to tell the community to delete all their information?  This would include not only their username and other personal information they shared, but also all of the content they had ever generated (forum posts, blog posts, comments, funny cat pictures, links to YouTube videos, etc.) while they were a member of the community? 

I'm pretty sure that people in Spain (and probably most of Europe) would unequivocally say "yes," while people in the United States would most likely say "no."  After all, there are disclaimers on most social media sites (Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, Quora, etc.) that basically state that any content you choose to share with the community is owned by the community, and by posting the content you are implicitly giving the community the right to collect it and use it as they see fit. (Privacy policies are continually evolving, but pretty much all the social media sites I've seen take the position that if you post it, they own it.)

It also poses some interesting challenges for operators of commercial social networking sites domiciled in the United States.  What if someone from Europe joins your community? After all, most sites don't go to the trouble—yet—of figuring out where someone is accessing their community from so they can apply different privacy rules (plus, even if you try there are lots of tools that let people “spoof” or hide which country they are from).  Big sites like Google and Facebook who do a massive amount of business internationally may be willing to bend over backwards to appease local laws (assuming they wish to continue to do business in those countries (cough, cough, Google, cough China).  But I doubt commercial owners of social sites (intended for customers in the United States, for instance) that don't do business in Europe will be overly concerned if they receive a notice that someone in Spain is suing them.

Just for fun the next time you log into your social networking site, see if you can figure out if they’ll let you delete all your content when you leave.  If they don’t already, social networking sites might someday have to transition from their current “forget me not” attitude to “forget me now.”

Social Networking Bill of Rights

As you probably know, the last year or so has been challenging for organizations like Facebook and Google (with their Buzz feature) with respect to keeping member’s data private.  At the Computers, Freedom and Privacy Conference  held last year in San Jose, CA, a draft “Social Network Users Bill of Rights” was created. (I found it curious that the bill is posted on Facebook, and you vote by “liking” the page…when the pervasive and public use of “liking” is one of the things privacy experts complain about.)  The bill is as follows:

We the users expect social network sites to provide us the following rights in their Terms of Service, Privacy Policies, and implementations of their system:
1. Honesty: Honor your privacy policy and terms of service.
2. Clarity: Make sure that policies, terms of service, and settings are easy to find and understand.
3. Freedom of speech: Do not delete or modify my data without a clear policy and justification.
4. Empowerment: Support assistive technologies and universal accessibility
5. Self-protection: Support privacy-enhancing technologies.
6. Data minimization: Minimize the information I am required to provide and share with others.
7. Control: Let me control my data, and don’t facilitate sharing it unless I agree first.
8. Predictability: Obtain my prior consent before significantly changing who can see my data.
9. Data portability: Make it easy for me to obtain a copy of my data.
10. Protection: Treat my data as securely as your own confidential data unless I choose to share it, and notify me if it is compromised.
11. Right to know: Show me how you are using my data and allow me to see who and what has access to it.
12. Right to self-define: Let me create more than one identity and use pseudonyms. Do not link them without my permission.
13. Right to appeal: Allow me to appeal punitive actions.
14. Right to withdraw: Allow me to delete my account, and remove my data.

While I think the idea of a social networking users “bill of rights” is an interesting one, I also think the chances of any social networking platform adopting it at this time are realistically zero.  I’ve written on data privacy several times before. And as I’ve previously explained the problem isn’t so much that social web sites are collecting too much data or that they are making too much data available outside the network: the problem is that--without government protections--the data is going to be used in inappropriate ways. 

An example: Let’s say you have a friend who is trying to quit smoking.  You might visit a web site on how to stop smoking, to get some tips on how to help them or at least be supportive.  How would you feel if your insurance company cancelled your non-smoker discount the next day, assuming that your visit to the stop smoking site was an indication that you secretly smoked (and hid this fact from the insurance company) and that you were looking for ways to stop.

Far fetched?  Not at all.  There are lots of examples of insurance companies abusing private data, and those companies aren’t alone.  While there have been numerous protections put in place regarding the dissemination and permitted uses of data (particularly health data), organizations with a financial incentive will continue to push the data privacy envelope as long as they are permitted to.  Tools that use sophisticated data mining techniques to discover correlations between otherwise innocuous data are readily available to large organizations, and they’ve repeatedly shown a willingness to use public data in “creative” ways.

The most effective social networking bill of rights I can think of can be expressed in one line:

I have the right to prohibit organizations (including government) from using my public data in ways for which it was not intended.

That’s a petition I would sign. (Not that I think that petition has any better chances than the other one.)