I attended a class on Tuesday and Wednesday of this past week. The PRE-class homework assignment was to create an account on both Facebook and Twitter so that we class members would know what the heck the instructor was talking about.
I remembered this assignment late Monday evening. Certain that I couldn't claim that the cats had eaten my NetBook, I had at it for about an hour. I found several folks I knew already on Facebook and willing to "friend" me. I spent four minutes trying to discover HOW to turn off the "year of birth" field from my birthdate (I'll get to how I knew I should do this in a moment). I didn't get angry, but, well, four minutes seemed like a LOT. I knew this thing was bigger than I understood, complex in ways I hadn't yet guessed, and clunky to use.
I got to class on Tuesday, and I was the only one who had done the homework. So, we didn't look at the class members' Facebook pages.
But what a week to be introduced to Facebook. In the previous weekend, one of their executives had spoken with the New York Times about the "charges" that Facebook handled user data in an indelicate fashion. http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/11/facebook-executive-answers-reader-questions/ They also had launched a new partnership through which your Facebook friends' experience on several other sites would be visible to you.
[Here is new how features are generally introduced in the business world. THEY TELL YOU about the feature. THEY DO NOT TURN ON the feature. THEY TELL YOU HOW to turn on the feature. If possible, they charge you for the new feature first.]
By mid-week, there was chaos about how to turn the new links off. And the "where am I" moment was when the most straightforward, simple and fundamentally easy-to-follow set of instructions was HERE - http://franken.senate.gov/press/?page=news_single&news_item=Facebook_Privacy_Instructions
Yahoo Finance borrowed a small sidebar from the amazing and useful four-page feature Consumer Reports has in their June issue about social media tools and their privacy/security issues. Consumer Union should give an award to whatever editor came up with the title, "9 Things To STOP DOING NOW on Facebook!" (Number two - "Leaving Your Full Birth Date")
http://finance.yahoo.com/family-home/article/109538/7-things-to-stop-doing-now-on-facebook
The New York Times created a truly fabulous graph of exactly HOW MANY PLACES in Facebook there are where you NEED to set security settings. ("Joe, I've been looking at this design document you just sent me, and, well, YOU'RE FIRED.")
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/05/12/business/facebook-privacy.html
Thursday night, an all-hands meeting at Facebook Central was held to address the current "bad press."
Friday, a story surfaced with an email in which Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said unpleasant things about his college colleagues who had entrusted their private data to him and his electronic student directory. Very unplesant things. The implication being that he has not matured and gotten more sensitive in the past six years.
THIS IS UNFAIR.
But, you DO realize that Facebook started as an elaborate prank Mark concocted by which to humiliate a girlfriend who had dumped him? Do you want this man controlling access to pictures of YOUR grandchildren?
Today is Mark's birthday. In case you want to go into Facebook http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001100291957&ref=profile#!/markzuckerberg?ref=ts and send him a greeting.
Meanwhile, I'm trying to earn more blood in Vampire Wars and am suddenly immune to religious icons. So, as Carl said in "Caddyshack," "I've got that going for me."
THE COMMERCIAL IS BETTER THAN THE MOVIE - Today's edition
Google Chrome, in my rarely-humble opinion, is a dog so far. I tried seven or eight versions before I even could get it to install. It still is very difficult to configure to do things that other, more mature products (Firefox comes to mind) can do immediately. Although it does fewer things while occupying fewer hardware resources.
BUT - the Googles have done a dramatically wonderful commercial for Chrome that you will not want to miss. The commercial is available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0&feature=channel
The too-short, not-really-satisfying look behind the scenes for the commercial is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oarMXGq3gI
An older, charming Google commercial is also available at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RrDHrwLUtvk&feature=channel
AND ONE MORE THING
What do YOU have scheduled for 10/10/10? The reason I ask is in my next post.
Join up so you don't miss it.
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