Two news stories divided by a common language

The Obama administration has release a white paper outlining online privacy goals. The 60page  report, Consumer Data Privacy in a Networked World, is available here  (PDF).

Here's how the New York Times Bits blog reports it:

Meanwhile, the Register, a UK tech site, brings us the story in proper English:

Republicans Target Marketing Guns on New Hampshire

Republican candidates are using a mix of old and new-media marketing tools to reach state voters for the important New Hampshire primary on Tuesday.
Read the rest of my latest blog on  The CMO Site - Republicans Target Marketing Guns on New Hampshire.

Facebook and class warfare

It's probably been years since you signed up for Facebook. You've forgotten what you had to go through. You've probably also had enough experience with online services to know what to ignore, how to switch between one website and another, and how to ignore ads.

Imagine, then, being in your retirement years and learning about Facebook as well as the web for the first time. I recently spent time a small group of people who were new to Facebook. They'd heard about it and were nervous, but willing to have a look.

We spent 10 minutes discussing why Facebook was requiring a complete birth date - day, month, and year - in order to create a new account.

I explained that the Facebook terms of service required that you created an account with your real and correct information. Part of the reason for requiring a true birth date was to enforce requirements for the minimum age (13). The group met the minimum age five-fold.

The people weren't vain about their ages. They just didn't like having to provide their birth dates. They were concerned about identity theft, even though they weren't quire sure what that meant or how it would happen.

"Can I use my son's birthday?" asked one. They didn't mind providing a date; they just didn't want it to be theirs.

One man signed up using his wife's birth date, knowing that, if he forgot that date, well, ....

Facebook has a minimalist explantion:

Facebook requires all users to provide their real date of birth to encourage authenticity and provide only age-appropriate access to content. You will be able to hide this information from your profile if you wish, and its use is governed by the Facebook Privacy Policy.

It's well known that a large number of children are using Facebook.While Facebook requires a birth date, it doesn't include any overt way of verifying it. (A father in Northern Ireland has brought suit against Facebook because his 12-year-old daughter has created an account. It's a long and somewhat complex story, as you might imagine.)

In sum, Facebook is requiring a piece of personal information, won't really explain why or what it will do with the information, and has a history of tolerating fake answers.

And that's just the beginning of the beginning. More questions.

What's this? Do I have to upload my email address book? No? OK. Skip this step.

I don't want to give this information. OK? Skip this step.

Do I have to put in a picture? Why? How do I do that? OK. Skip this step.

Then you wait for 10 or 15 minutes until the email confirmation shows up before you can confirm that the account is really yours. In the meantime, advertisements for dating services and time-wasting games are showing up on your page.
This is what 700 million people are excited about?
Meanwhile, Facebook is due to announced major new features and user interface changes at this week's developer conference. New features that include more music, news, and videos.
We know that Facebook's corporate DNA is in college or those who still think that they're in college. The unfriendly sign-up process, the nagging demands for more information, and the cacophony of features are making Facebook increasingly irrelevant to digital immigrants, those who come to web technologies later in life. I don't know if that's the plan, but it certainly is the effect.

Google and Facebook - too smart to help you

Try to find the link to the online help for Facebook. Hint: it's at the bottom of the page. Just press the Page Down key on your keyboard until you get there. Go ahead. I'll wait.
...
Found it yet? Probably not. Facebook thinks that you're much more interested in the musings of your friends to want to see what's at the bottom of the page. (By the way, here's the link to Facebook Help Center. You might want to bookmark it.)
Facebook has achieved phenomenal growth with a frequently-changing user interface, a complex process for setting privacy options, and no customer service. If you discover a problem, wander through the help pages until you're satisfied that it isn't addressed anywhere, Facebook is glad to have you report it.

via My bug is not listed above. - Facebook Help Center

Just don't expect an answer.
You won't get an email if they agree that it's a bug. At most, it might be listed on the  Known Issues on Facebook page.If your problem is fixed, what you tried to do before will just work when you try it again later.
The folks who built Facebook and Google are very smart. They're so very smart that they'd prefer to devote engineering resources toward fixing problems rather than responding to your email queries. In I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, Douglas Edwards recounts a conversation with Google co-founder, Sergey Brin. Edwards told Brin about the problems of the lone Googler responsible for customer service. The poor guy, noted Edwards, couldn't respond to all of the emails.

Sergey offered a useful perspective. "Why do we need to answer user email anyway?" he wanted to know.
To Sergey's thinking, responding to user questions was inefficient.. If they wrote us about problems, that was useful information to have. We should note the problems and and fix them. That would make the users happier than if we wasted time explaining to them that we were working on the bugs.

See? It took two people to write, review, and send a reply to your complaint. Those talents could have been better spent fixing the problem without interference from you.
Something that doesn't work as expected one time will, by the wizardry of very smart people, work properly at some time in the future. The classic pop-culture definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Facebook and Google invite and, to some extent, require this kind of insane behavior.
It's not an oversight. It's their business model. At last check, there are three Googlers and one Facebooker in the Forbes top 50 richest people in the world.

Google and Facebook - too smart to help you

Try to find the link to the online help for Facebook. Hint: it's at the bottom of the page. Just press the Page Down key on your keyboard until you get there. Go ahead. I'll wait.
...
Found it yet? Probably not. Facebook thinks that you're much more interested in the musings of your friends to want to see what's at the bottom of the page. (By the way, here's the link to Facebook Help Center. You might want to bookmark it.)
Facebook has achieved phenomenal growth with a frequently-changing user interface, a complex process for setting privacy options, and no customer service. If you discover a problem, wander through the help pages until you're satisfied that it isn't addressed anywhere, Facebook is glad to have you report it.

via My bug is not listed above. - Facebook Help Center

Just don't expect an answer.
You won't get an email if they agree that it's a bug. At most, it might be listed on the  Known Issues on Facebook page.If your problem is fixed, what you tried to do before will just work when you try it again later.
The folks who built Facebook and Google are very smart. They're so very smart that they'd prefer to devote engineering resources toward fixing problems rather than responding to your email queries. In I'm Feeling Lucky: The Confessions of Google Employee Number 59, Douglas Edwards recounts a conversation with Google co-founder, Sergey Brin. Edwards told Brin about the problems of the lone Googler responsible for customer service. The poor guy, noted Edwards, couldn't respond to all of the emails.

Sergey offered a useful perspective. "Why do we need to answer user email anyway?" he wanted to know.
To Sergey's thinking, responding to user questions was inefficient.. If they wrote us about problems, that was useful information to have. We should note the problems and and fix them. That would make the users happier than if we wasted time explaining to them that we were working on the bugs.

See? It took two people to write, review, and send a reply to your complaint. Those talents could have been better spent fixing the problem without interference from you.
Something that doesn't work as expected one time will, by the wizardry of very smart people, work properly at some time in the future. The classic pop-culture definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results. Facebook and Google invite and, to some extent, require this kind of insane behavior.
It's not an oversight. It's their business model. At last check, there are three Googlers and one Facebooker in the Forbes top 50 richest people in the world.

Testing Facebook comments

I've enabled Facebook comments on my blog posts. As a result, if you post a comment, it will show up on this post's page and also on my Facebook page. This will reduce the amount of fake comments because only people with Facebook accounts can post comments.
I realize that this may pose a problem for those who don't have Facebook accounts or who don't wish to use them. Please bear with me during this experiment. I've also seen that, in the past few months, all of the people who've commented directly on the blog posts (on the Roasterboy site) are already Facebook friends.

That third place

The stuff that shows up on the Intertubes over the weekend seems to address more social issues than technical ones. Political topics sometimes get stirred up by events in the nation and world and by the Sunday morning talk shows. Mostly, though, the articles, blog posts, and tweets tend to show how people are living their lives.
One post, Why Teens Don't And Won't Tweet, gave a view about social networking that's lost in the breathless rush to the Next New Thing. Twitter isn't useful to teens because teens, for the most part, want to hang out with their friends. Facebook gives them that. Twitter is something else. It can be a way to hang out with your friends, but that's not really what it's designed to do best. Twitter is about broadcasting to the world, giving everyone a chance to hear what you can say in 140 characters or less. Again, teens generally don't want to talk at everyone, even if it sometimes seems like that. They want to talk with their friends, hear their friends, trade inside jokes, and experiment.
Facebook becomes that important "third place" in their lives, a place that while often overlapping with home and school, is something essentially different, something close. Nearly 30 years ago, Ramon Oldenburg and Dennis Brissett authored a key analysis of American culture titled The third place. In it, Oldenburg and Brissett describe an America that is increasingly time-bound. "Most individuals, except in unusual situations, seem able to estimate the time of day within 15 or 20 minutes when they are at home or at work," they write. In the third places, time easily gets away from you.
The third places can get wild as people step out of their typical roles and often play against them. 

Often third place participation is loud and boisterous. It is reassuring to observe that the average person, given the opportunity to let off steam, rarely will be vulgar, obnoxious, or spiteful in the presence of his companions.

Yes, people can appear to behave badly, but it's relatively rare for people to cross that line into bullying. (If abusive behavior was the norm or even something frequent, Facebook wouldn't have a half billion users.)
The authors wax wistful, often idealizing the purpose and performance of these third places, but they're onto something.

Third places provide enabling, not escapist, experiences for their inhabitants.They are a forum for "play" in a society interfused with a stubborn commitment to work and purposiveness. Association in third places envelopes individuals in a temporary world within their ordinary worlds.

Seeing ourselves in another's mirror

The occasion was the passing of my mother's cousin at age 94. He was my mother's father's sister's son. For most of the gathered, including Bill's four daughters, I'd not seen these folks for five to as much as 50 years.
I might not be thinking of myself as old. If, however, I haven't seen someone for 50 years, well, if it ain't old, it'll do until some other explanation comes along.
"We went straight from being children to being old," remarked one of my second cousins. "We skipped right over that growing-up part and becoming adults."
You have to let your vision relax a bit before you start to notice the family threads run through each of the faces. Listening, you hear the slight chop of a Finnish accent, even among the American-born. We swap memories of visits to this family's house, that family's farm, to the camp and sauna.
I have a scanned copy of a newspaper clipping of one girl who'd shot a deer. It was from the front page of the Gardner News. She called it her 15 minutes of fame. That was back in the 1950s. She lived a full and a good life, but that's what got her name and picture in the paper.


We jump past the old stuff and earnestly talk for a couple of hours about what's going on in our lives now. We learn of each other's talents, hopes, troubles, and fears and theirs sound like our own.
One has recently been sort of diagnosed as having MS, although it's not certain. "I think MS means 'Maybe Something.',"  There are stories of Alzheimer's, ALS, and  other afflictions. There are celebrations of good things in our lives, children and grandchildren, work and retirement, travel, and other fun stuff. The darker, awkward stories of divorce, depression, abortion, drug use, chronic unemployment, even those quickly get into the conversation because, well, frankly, because we don't have time to do otherwise. This is who we are, who we've become, and we need to know these things.
And then, just like that, the room was emptying. We promise that we'll stay in touch by email, Facebook, a phone call, a visit. (Several of the folks live right nearby.) We might even follow through on those promises. You know, though, how life gets full. A day becomes a week becomes a month becomes, well, you know.
We squeeze a half century of news into a couple of hours. Who are these people? How can I know them so well when, just a short while ago, we were introducing ourselves as though we were strangers?

Email Rule #1 - check the date before you respond