Tag: social networking

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ShareThis is rolling out a tool for “frictionless sharing.” That’s the term for those apps or widgets that “let” you broadcast everything you do on a site to your social network. I suppose it sounds great for publishers, because your content gets shared more, but…

As someone who reads stuff online, “Frictionless sharing” is a privacy disaster waiting to happen. Undo is nice, but in a world where updates are pushed instantly, you can’t count on it.

As someone who follows social networks, it’s just more noise. I don’t want to know every article you read in your latest wiki walk. I’ll tune it out, or I’ll tune you out. What I want to know is which articles, photos and videos you think are worth sharing.

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Fury after Facebook messes up smartphone users’ address books:

Remember how Facebook sneakily changed your default email address to @facebook.com? … Some smartphone users…are reporting that their on-phone address books have been silently updated to make @facebook.com email addresses the default way to send a message to their contacts.Graham Cluley at Sophos

The lesson: Whenever you change something, always consider the impact on things that depend on it.

This reminds me of the ill-fated Network Solutions attempt to replace failed DNS lookups with responses directing web browsers to search pages, not considering that web browsers aren’t the only software that uses DNS, or that some of that software might depend on accurate “this domain does not exist” info.

Originally posted on Google+

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Community participation pyramid: the 90-9-1 Rule (Jakob Nielsen)Sometimes it seems like more people are talking about Google+ than using it, but it really depends on the community you’re looking at. Comics fans? Not well represented. (But they’re even harder to find on Pinterest.) But “Bad Astronomer” Phil Plait has a thriving following.

It seems like Speed Force’s Google+ Page is starting to attract a bit more participation, and I think that might be in part due to it passing the 100-follower mark. I vaguely recalled something about a 90-9-1 Rule for community involvement, which turned out to be pretty easy to find once I searched for it.

Basically, the rule states that:

  • 90% of community members are “lurkers” who read or observe, but don’t contribute.
  • 9% contribute occasionally (i.e. comment, “Like,” +1, share)
  • 1% contribute frequently, and account for most contributions

Continue reading →

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Klout’s methodology confuses me. When I first signed on with two profiles — one personal, the other for Speed Force — they classified my personal profile as an “explorer,” and Speed Force as a “specialist.” This makes sense to me. Speed Force also had a higher score for quite a while (it certainly has a bigger audience on any given network).

Sure, there were oddities like their conviction that I was influential about Washington DC rather than DC comics, or Reading Pennsylvania rather than, well, reading, and so on. But at least the overall classifications made sense.

Recently, that’s flipped. My personal profile is scored as having more influence, which I guess makes sense because it’s associated with more social networks (Flickr, Google+, etc.) and I actually do interact more through my personal profiles, especially on FB.

But the weird thing: Now my personal profile is a “specialist,” while Speed Force, which I use exclusively to discuss comics and plug blog posts about comics, is a “socializer.” Huh? Did I post too much about SOPA or something?

Notes: 1. Originally posted on Google+. 2. Klout was a service that tracked your social media influence across multiple networks. You could link Twitter, Facebook, Google+, etc. to one Klout account and it would try to analyze how you interact with other people on all those networks.

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Some interesting links I’ve seen over the last few weeks.

  • Twitter Click Research: What types of tweets get the most clicks? (via @danilolee)
  • The half-life of a shared link is 3 hours on Twitter, Facebook, email or instant messaging…but twice that on Youtube.(via Mashable)
  • YouTube Founders Aim to Revamp Delicious (NY Times) – I’ve used Delicious for years mainly as a cross-platform bookmarking service, not so much as a social link sharing service, but these days I mainly use XMarks. (via Techcitement)
  • OAuth Needs Partial Authorization – as Alex King points out , many sites that let you log in using your Twitter, Facebook, or other accounts ask for too much access to your account. If I’m not going to use the service to post status updates, it shouldn’t require permission to post updates in my name.

On a related note, I’ve set up on Klout and PeerIndex, mainly out of curiosity. Their topic analysis needs a bit of work, though. Klout was convinced that my Speed Force accounts were influential about Washington, DC (rather than DC Comics) and, inexplicably, ducks. PeerIndex seems to think I post a lot about breakfast cereal.