juanaguilar's posterous

Facebook parents: Don't waste the opportunity

Fbstuff

Today I read an article that suggested that most teens on Facebook want their parents to get off the site and let them have their privacy. I found the article via a Facebook friend, and I was interested to see the response it got from one of his friends (in the screenshot). 

I couldn't help but think that for many parents who use the site, it is a wasted opportunity for insight into their children's lives. Unlike (some) adults, kids have no sense of what they should or should not post. They have little conception or regard for the openness of the site, and fail to realize that does not take much for a casual observer to learn intimate details of their comings and going. 
While it is much better for kids to be careful about what they post, it is one frontier on which parents - with a little planning - have the advantage. Searching a child's room, for example, can rightly be viewed as an invasion of privacy. On Facebook, the rules are different. There they readily volunteer information, and a vigilant parent can simply lie in wait as the confessions roll in. 
The parent in the screenshot probably does that to some extent, but I think she's wasting a golden opportunity. The point is not to catch your children before they do bad things, but to gather information that can be used in a dialog with the child. I'm not suggesting that you electronically stalk your children; there are a number things wrong with that picture that I would hesitate to explain if you are unable to sense that for yourself. I think it's valid to openly send a friend request to your children and sit back. Watch their dialogs with their friends, but don't comment. Let them be. Don't allow it to appear as though your electronic vigilance is a weapon you wield against them.
When potentially troubling information surfaces, it may be tricky to broach the topic without seeming as though you were using Facebook as a tool of parental espionage, but this is where real parenting skills come in. Be straightforward about where you gained the information and sensitive about what you have learned. You may find that the channels of communication between you and your child will open, and the trust you inspire will extend beyond the internet into real life. 

TechMeme features it, so it must be true: Web 2.0 is dead. I'm not sure what the hell we're talking about, but it's DEAD!

Don't think this is going to be a long screed about TechMeme; it's actually more about the tech blogosphere echo-chamber and it's far-reaching proclamations. Let's examine this:


Uh... not what I meant. Just so you know (as if you didn't) this is a chart of all the "original" Web 2.0 companies with pink x's over the ones now in the deadpool. Hey, a picture is worth a thousand words, so who needs thoughtful analysis? Case closed right? So seems the consensus.  

Just so this doesn't run long, I'll get to the meat of my argument:

1) Do you even know what Web 2.0 is? Does anyone? Yes, it is something real in the tech sector, but it's also something of a branding strategy, and people will continue to use it that strategy ("it's fast, it's easy, it's fun! Improve your life with one click! Be hip! Freemium!")  even if they shy away from that particular term or start throwing around the oh-so-creative Web 3.0. 

2) If what we're talking about is specific companies, then yes, many of them have failed. Many will fail this year, and others will fail next year, and the year after that. Hm... that doesn't sound dead to me; that sounds like people are still founding these companies and investors are still funding them. 

3) Not all of the companies on the chart have x's. I'd be willing to bet that you used one of the still-alive companies/services on the chart in the last 24 hours. Vimeo? Yelp? Blogger? StumbleUpon? Gmail? Wikipedia? Alive and kicking, and every day they are inspiring new entrepreneurs to roll the dice on their vision (or at least try to copy someone's ideas). 

What we have here is a case of a hack writer looking for a juicy headline and an easy article to write, and the echo chamber nodding mechanically like good little robots. The reality of the situation is more complex, but I guess that's not gonna get me many Digg votes. 

I'm thinking about Twitter (again) and coming to the conclusion that it provides no genuine utility to me.

I don't want to get into a whole thing here, but the recent Ashton and Oprah story has helped to crystalize some of my impressions on Twitter. Let's start at the begining: before these celebrities made Twitter fashionable for those who are slightly less tech-savvy and/or bored housewives in the Oprah demo, I already knew that Twitter's four major purposes were the following (lists are easy, and I'm a hack):

1) Promotion. This something of a large umbrella; everything from the most basic advertisements ("Our band is playing at the Knitting Factory on Friday, don't miss it!") to more complex functions like SEO and traffic generation for other sites fall under this category. 

2) Non-promotional announcements. These are the ostensible purpose of the service; The ever-present question, "what are you doing?" is the stated reason for the existence of Twitter, and generally every user who isn't a bot answers it on an occasional basis. Though unglamorous, tweeting about your lunch is a very common thing to do. 

3) Gathering small, up-to-date snippets of information from your contacts. From a user's standpoint, Twitter allows you to see very current, very digestible chunks of information from the list of contacts you have chosen. Ideally, the information gathered will hold a mix of promotional announcements from indivduals and organization you are interested in an non-promotional announcements from your friends and family. What time does the anti-government tea party start? Twitter should cover that. What time does your buddy's birthday party start? That should also be covered. 

I've attempted to use Twitter according to this model. I follow 55 people as of right now, and 88 are following me (modest numbers to say the least, but I'm not pretending to be an internet celebrity, and I don't think my eating habits are more interesting than they are). I generally posted work-related tweets when I had internet-related work, and I still post links to my blog. I often bluster about minor irritations. I stop short of lamenting how fat I am, and how I must get to the gym. As far as gathering information, I get to see what people I haven't otherwise heard from in awhile are doing, and I get updates from news organizations I'm interested in about developing stories. 

Having said that, as I tick down the list, I see no real necessity for Twitter. I have nothing to promote that will make a substantial difference in my life. Whether you read my blog or not will not put money in my pocket. Likewise, I have no need to announce my broken Xbox, my new apartment, my refrigerator magnets, or any of the other banalities I have broadcast to on the internet for all to see. I can actually think of a lot of ways in which it would be better if I didn't. Finally, the information I gather from Twitter is usually available elsewhere. The news portion of it can be acquired from news sources. The non-promotional stuff, (say, your assertions of being too fat and subsquent resolutions to visit the gym) can often be gained from other long-form social networks or blogs or phone calls or face-to-face conversations. An argument can be made that the brevity of a tweet saves me time by getting to the point fast. I think the only things is really serves are my short attention span and my anti-social tendencies. 

Aside from all that, and extremely hypocritically, I have always chafed at three things about Twitter:

1) Self-importance: No one ever called all their friends to announce "the ham sandwich I'm having for lunch is amazing," yet this is the foundation of the service. There is no message too personal or prosiac to merit a tweet. 

2) Static: When I am searching for news, perhaps from TechCrunch, I have to wade through the various musings and mutterings of my friends and former colleagues. I have stopped following dozens of people because they just wouldn't shut up about every little thing that happened to them over the course of the day. Dude, seriously, I don't need to know about your headaches. Please just take an aspirin like everyone else. 

3) Status Symbol Numbers: There is a highy degree of stigma about the numbers you're pulling on Twitter, which Ashton Kutcher and Oprah have shown us. For regular people, it's a rather pathetic spectacle. There's a really douchy guy in the L.A. tech scene who actually had the balls to give me his Twitter name (so that I would follow him) and stated that he would not follow me back. In effect, he has just upwards of 1,000 followers and follows a paltry 62. While I admire the honesty of this pitchman, his supercillious attitude and oily persona left a very bad taste in my mouth. I know that for him, the numbers are not about vanity: they are a marketing tool to appear successful, much in the way lawyers and doctors drive luxury cars to let potential clients know they are the best at what they do. While I'm not particularly fond of Twitter's mission to broadcast every errant, half-cooked thought the human mind is capable of generating, the conent is virtually irrelevant for people like L.A. tech guy, and that is entirely too cynical, even for me. 

This brings me back to Oprah and Ashton. Unofficially the ambassadors of Twitter to the public, my suspicion is that a great deal of their legions of followers are new sign-ups. They have been hearing people bandy the name Twitter for months, feeling out of the loop for not knowing what it is, and now they've had their chance to jump on the bandwagon. Is this a good thing? Almost certainly no. Having little to no concern for the genuine utility of the sevice, these new users are likely to abandon their accounts soon or launch a fresh salvo of Delicious-Ham-Sandwich tweets. Having no followers, this will all be nothing but static and vanity, shouting loud nothings into the wind. Furthermore, Their introduction to it came with a great deal of trumpeting about the amount of followers their celebrities have; if a well-followed account was not woven into the fabric of Twitter before, it certainly is now.

My beef with all of this is that it undermines the simple genius of Twitter. The great thing about the internet is it's ability to distribute information quickly, oftentimes while it is still developing. Twitter's short form gets to the heart of the matter, allow the person broadcasting the information to publish it all the more quickly, and the person receiving it to absorb and process it almost instantly. While there is something deeply poetic about millions of people shouting "Me!" in unison, it isn't particularly useful. 

I admit it: I tweet because I like running my mouth while having nothing of consequence to say. What's your excuse?

One thing I've come to learn about my web 2.0 contemporaries: not having something important to say has never- never once- stopped them from giving vent to their most vapid, ill-concieved excuses for ideas. The difference between us and normal people is that we have the shamelessness to attempt to profit from our utterly useless chatter. Yeah, I'm probably thinking specifically about you. Sorry.

I'm not saying I exclude myself from this category. Far from it. Recognizing that there is nothing of genuine substance to be found within the various tweets, posteri (?), blog posts, and endless stream of facebook chatter is neither an earthshattering revelation nor a complete thought unto itself. 

I realize that while affectations of boredom are quite the popular meme in online social networking spheres, it seems those tinged with genuine ennui are not so well recieved. Not especially suprising, though: courtesy and white lies are the glue in this experiment, and expressions of mutual affirmation are built into the infrastructure. And that's kind of pathetic, if you think about it. My boredom, though, is genuine. I really don't care to read more about the gears of web 2.0 as they spin. I don't care to learn about every headache, every attempt to lose weight, every excruciatingly mundane detail of your shockingly ordinary journey through life 140 characters at a time. I really don't care.