Jun 1024
In my quest to try out new social networks, I signed up for FourSquare last year. I didn’t start using the service until a couple of months ago, when I get my new Palm Pre and I felt ready to dive into another social network.
FourSquare is a location-based social network. The idea is that you share your location with your friends and followers by “checking into” locations. For example, every time I go to a restaurant, I pull up the FourSquare app on my phone, let the app determine my GPS coordinates and show me possible options. I can select one of the venues select and “check-in” or add a new venue. When I check in, I can write a little message and share out my update on Facebook and/or Twitter.
Last Saturday, I checked into four locations, including three restaurants and I got hilarious comments from friends about how all I did on Saturday was eat!
Here’s what I’m enjoying about FourSquare:
- I don’t feel compelled to check in multiple times a day, every day. My check-ins are usually to restaurants, but increasingly, I’m checking into events. Tonight, I checked into the DCWW Content Strategy Workshop held at the Matrix Group office. I check in only a few times a week, if at all.
- I love the gaming aspect of FourSquare. People who have the most check-ins at a specific get a Mayor badge. So far, I’ve earned a Newbie badge and an Explorer badge. I’m hoping to become Mayor of one of my favorite restaurants sometime soon!
- It’s fun to see where my friends are and what they’re doing.
- FourSquare is not nearly as chatty as Twitter and Facebook.
- I have learned about so many great, local businesses through FourSquare!
- Some enterprising retailers are rewarding frequent customers with discount coupons and other goodies. The retailers are glad for the patronage AND the free advertising from the check-ins!
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May 1020
Remember when Facebook was a closed network, open only to college students? Then Facebook went mainstream and everyone could create a profile. But even back then, Facebook remained a closed network: you had to have a Facebook profile to see other profiles and connect with friends. Facebook was closed to Google and other search engines, which meant Facebook profiles and pages never showed up on search results.
Back in 2005, Facebook’s privacy policy clearly stated the following:
No personal information that you submit to Facebook will be available to any user of the Web Site who does not belong to at least one of the groups specified by you in your privacy settings.
The Evolution of Facebook’s Privacy Policies
But then, slowly and over time, Facebook’s privacy policies changed.
- In 2007, Facebook made your name, school name and profile photo available to the search engines unless you specifically prohibited this in your privacy settings
- In 2009, Facebook revamped its privacy settings and gave users more control over who gets to see which aspects of their profile. Trouble was, the default gave “everyone” access to information.
- In April 2010, Facebook made the decision to make specific elements of all profiles public (name, hometown, school, interests and fan pages), and eliminate the ability to limit access to these fields. If you didn’t want those elements to be public, Facebook recommended that you delete the information from your profile.
- In April 2010, Facebook also launched the Open Graph, which shares user profiles with third party sites so that visits to those third party sites can be personalized based on a person’s Facebook interests. On the flip side, Facebook opened up its API (application programming interface) so that third party sites can add a Facebook “Like” button to their pages; when clicked, the information would be saved back to a user’s profile.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has a great timeline of Facebook’s privacy policies, including links to archived versions of Facebook’s policies.
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Jan 1013
Facebook Founder Mark Zuckerberg has gotten a lot of flack lately for his pronouncement (during an interview with TechCrunch) that privacy norms have evolved over the years and privacy is essentially dead. I watched the interview myself and think the criticism is overdone. I think that Zuckerberg has correctly described the times and his company is taking advantage of our voyeuristic culture. Facebook did not create this culture. I think it started with the first reality show on MTV back in 80s. We watched the teens living together and reveled in their pranks and arguments.
Does the social Web mean the end of privacy? Are MySpace and Facebook to blame for all the personal revelations we spew out every day? Or should we blame Google and Bing, which manage to index the Web and let anyone find out gobs and gobs of information about each of us? When I Google my name (Joanna Pineda), I find lots of information that I WANT the search engines to find and index. But I also find pages that have my address, my political contributions and address, yada, yada. I’m not happy that Facebook changed its privacy settings and defaulted some of my information to be available to everyone, but I actually appreciate the more granular control that I now have over my posts, link and photos.
What do you think? Is privacy dead? How much do you reveal on social networks? Are you doing anything to keep out of the search engines?
