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Archive for the ‘social networking’ Category

In-flight iPhone snaps Space Shuttle launch

17 May

The picture at right isn't something you see every day, and it's something there'll only be one more chance to capture: a Space Shuttle launch photographed from an in-flight passenger jet. Stefanie Gordon shot this image of the Space Shuttle Endeavour's launch with her iPhone as her plane descended for a landing.

The shot itself is a rare enough event, but what happened next was an eye-opener for the photographer. According to Mashable, within a few hours of uploading the launch pics to Twitter from her iPhone, Stephanie was getting phone calls from ABC, CNBC and the BBC. Her follower count on Twitter went up by over 1000, and she was getting so many @mentions as a result of the pic that she had to shut them off so her iPhone's battery didn't get drained.

Other people on the plane took pics, but apparently none of them uploaded them to Twitter. The real draw of this story isn't that the photo was taken with an iPhone -- people use the device to take extraordinary pics all the time -- but the colossal and immediate response the photographer got after sharing it. This scenario shows just how interconnected everything has become today thanks to devices like the iPhone, and it's a trend that's only going to become more powerful as more people start sharing information this way.

In-flight iPhone snaps Space Shuttle launch originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 17 May 2011 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Why 3 Startups Are Betting That You’ll Want to Stream Your Browser History

18 Feb


At one point, e-mail was the best option for sharing something interesting online. Blog posts made it a bit easier, and 140-character Twitter messages have brought us into the age of near-effortless sharing.

Several startups are betting that there’s another (rather large) step to go before sharing content is as easy as it can be. Voyurl, Sitesimon, and Dscover.me have all launched platforms for automatically sharing your clickstream data, or browsing history, with friends.

The concept of automatic sharing feels counter-intuitive at a time when the U.S. Congress just introduced its first “Do Not Track” bill, but these startups are betting that shared clickstream data has an important role to play in the future of web browsing. We talked to each of them to get their perspective on how clickstream data could become the next sharing trend.


Dscover.Me: Put Recommendations in Context


Friends Paul Jones and Josh Payne started Dscover.Me while trying to stay in touch after college. Instead of sending each other interesting articles, they could just see what the other person was looking at and start their discussion there (Jones notes that this is also useful for long-distance relationships).

The site’s approach is different than that of Sitesimon and Voyurl in that it revolves around a white list of sites that a user shares, rather than a black list of sites that he does not want to share. A suggested white list that includes Wikipedia, YouTube, popular publications, retailers, and travel sites is provided. Users can see a stream of what their friends are looking at on white-listed friends and also see what the entire community is doing.

But that’s not entirely the point: “People enjoy seeing what are the popular articles in their community, but they don’t really care about seeing a stream of random people and what they’re checking out,” Jones says.

Eventually, Dscovr.Me will partner with web publishers to provide recommendations for users as they browse. For instance, if a user were on the New York Times website, he would be able to see which articles his friends looked at on that site with the highest priority given to the articles that the highest number of their friends looked at. The end goal is to help publishers keep people on their sites longer.

The next version will also take into account links being shared over the user’s Facebook and Twitter feeds, and it will filter out any sites that the user has already visited.

“I think as long as there’s a limitation and the company that asks to track your information can demonstrate value back to you and say ‘OK, we tracked all of this information, but now you have a much better experience.’ Then clickstream sharing can catch on,” Jones says.


Sitesimon: Prove You Saw it First


Sitesimon, founded by three recent NYU grads, attempts to generate recommendations not only from friends, but from people who share your browsing habits. In the process, the site adds a competitive component to web browsing.

The original version of Sitesimon allows users to either select a list of sites that they were willing to share (white list) or to instead share everything by default but select the sites they aren’t comfortable sharing (black list). The next version will scratch the white list.

“As you’re browsing, we don’t want to have people create a white list because a lot of what is fun about clickstream sharing is discovery through your friends,” co-founder Steven Gutentag says. “And if your friends end up on a random fun site and it’s not white listed it’s not going to show up and it’s a hassle to do it.”

Right now, the site operates on a friending system. You see what your friends are browsing and vice versa. Other user data comes in to play when assigning each user a “site score” that measures influence. Your score improves when you see a webpage earlier than other Sitesimon users and when other people on Sitesimon view pages through your clickstream. Much as there is a cachet associated with being the first to submit an interesting webpage on Digg, Sitesimon’s founders are betting that giving people credit for discovering cool stuff on the web will attract users.

But they also want to leverage non-friend data in order to give users personalized recommendations based on others with similar browsing patterns. Gutentag compares it to the way that StumbleUpon learns what users like and don’t like as they spend more time using the service.

“Our dream is that we can offer up better recommendations for what you should be looking at than you’ve ever had before without you having to do any work, such as [StumbleUpon's] thumbs up and thumbs down — without changing how you browse normally,” Gutentag says.


Voyurl: Use Natural Behavior to Power Recommendations


Working in the ad industry, Voyurl founder Adam Leibsohn occasionally hears stories about clickstream data collection methods that repulse him. Voyurl is a play on data collection that he feels good about.

“I wanted a place that was driven by data, but uses that data to provide value back to the consumer,” he says.

Voyurl’s current private beta site (which Mashable readers can check out any time in the next 36 hours by clicking here) gives users access to a feed of the community’s browsing data. They can follow other users to create a personalized feed or filter sites by categories that they’re interested in (Culture or Music, for instance). Any user can submit their data anonymously, and a “discover” feature gives recommendations based on their browsing habits and the browsing habits of their friends. People who are looking for great new sites can also browse top users, top URLs, top domains, and top categories.

Leibsohn considers sharing content this way to be more conducive to conversation. “When someone engages you about the content, they’ve already consumed it,” he says. “So the conversation skips ahead of ‘Look at this thing, consume this thing,’ and instead goes into discussing the merits of it one way or another and a substantial dialog actually comes out.”

Platforms like Twitter, Foursquare, and Facebook all take pains to collect data. The problem, Leibsohn says, is that these platforms only have access to their own users. Clickstream data paints a fuller picture of online activity.

Voyurl is planning to somehow use this data in its business model (they won’t be selling it), but the startup is being a bit stealthy for now. “We intend to use data to make other services that people use way better,” Leibsohn says.


More Startup Resources from Mashable:


- How an Online Game Plans to Reward Kids for Playing Outside
- What We Need to Win the Entrepreneurial Race [OP-ED]
- 5 Startup Tips From the Father of Gmail and FriendFeed
- 6 Ways to Recruit Talent for Startups
- HOW TO: Land a Job at 9 Hot Startups

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, inkastudio

More About: browsing history, clickstream, dscover.me, privacy, sharing, sitesimon, startup, voyurl

For more Startups coverage:

 

The Social Media World Before Twitter And Facebook [Infographic]

10 Feb

A world without Twitter or Facebook seems distant and almost non existent. Yet still there was a time, long ago (hrmm..), when they didn’t exist. As a matter of fact, Facebook didn’t even exist 8 years ago and Twitter even less. So, if you feel like you’ve been using Twitter or Facebook for ages, well then you’re wrong. Some say Social Media was invented at the same time as the Internet was. The reason why is because at that point we all got a forum where we could interact with people all around the world. However, the real term Social Media really started way later. There are literally hundreds of social networking services on the Internet today, and many that you have never heard of.

You might not know it, but there were actually a few successful social networking services before Twitter and Facebook even though when reading their names you might not recognize them at all. Some of us used the Internet purely to look up information and send files back and forth. Some even used chat rooms and message services like ICQ or AOL Instant Messanger.

But mostly, we never touched the social networking world or even came close to it before Facebook and Twitter. You will be surprised to know that there were actually quite a few services that you would file under the category of Social Networking Services. The whole thing started with an email, and it is on that road that we will soon come to Facebook and Twitter. Watch the whole pre-Facebook and pre-Twitter world unfold in front of your eyes with this awesome infographic designed and created by Online Schools. Interesting indeed!

The History Before Facebook TwitterThe History Before Facebook TwitterThe History Before Facebook TwitterThe History Before Facebook Twitter

 

Facebook Pages Getting New Design and Checkins [SCREENSHOTS]

05 Dec


Facebook appears to be on the verge of launching a new design of its Fan Pages.

This change seems to include the site’s location-based Places checkin functionality, enabling “likers” of the page to check in to it.

Although Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is said to be giving a sneak peak at the new Profile Pages design on 60 Minutes tonight, it seems that more change is in store; you can already see the new Pages design in action on select pages, such as Ellen DeGeneres’s Fan Page. On Ellen’s page, you will notice a count for the number of checkins the Page has. According to Facebook spokesperson Meredith Chin, the Ellen Page is a merged page that includes the functionality for checkins available shortly after the feature launched a few months ago. Basically, your brand page will then take on the Places page designs, which appears to be the inspiration for the new profile pages that are to be released as well.

“As long as the address of the official page and the place page match, it should show you a prompt and ask you if you want to merge them,” Chin said.

You can see screenshots of the new design below.


Current Pages Design



The current Pages design, similar to Profile Pages, has the Page navigation tabs (Wall, Questions, Photos) at the top.


The New Pages With Checkins



The new Pages design includes checkins, profile information (which includes some basic information about the page and the Wall postings below it), a narrower left column and more.


New Tabs



The new Pages also feature the navigation tabs on the left-hand side.


Reviews: Facebook, pages

More About: facebook, facebook pages, Facebook Places, mark zuckerberg, social networking

For more Social Media coverage:


 

Facebook, Twitter and The Two Branches of Social Media [OP-ED]

11 Oct

Two Directions Sign

The Social Analyst is a column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.

There’s no disputing that Facebook is the poster child for social networking. It is the platform for building social connections online and keeping up to date with what’s happening in your social circle. It is one of the two most important platforms in social media.

The other one is Twitter. However, if you try to describe Twitter as a “social network” to anyone who works at the company, they’ll quickly correct you. Internally and externally, Twitter describes itself as an “information network.”

What exactly is the difference? And is there one?

People have used the terms “social media” and “social network” almost interchangeably over the years. It’s inaccurate to say that they’re the same thing, though. In fact, I argue that social networking is a branch of social media, and can itself be further broken down into two distinct branches — the social network and the information network.

It’s with this distinction that I attempt to explain the relationship between Facebook and Twitter, and why I believe they are not destined for a clash of the titans. Instead, they represent two different sides of the same coin.


The Difference Between Facebook and Twitter


It’s easy to see why most people think Facebook and Twitter are essentially the same. The core of their experiences focuses around profiles, relationships and a newsfeed. But if you dig a bit deeper, you realize that people use each platform for different purposes.

On Facebook, you’re supposed to connect with close friends. Becoming friends with someone means he or she gets to see your content, but you also get to see his or her content in return. On Twitter, that’s not the case: you choose what information you want to receive, and you have no obligation to follow anybody. Facebook emphasizes profiles and people, while Twitter emphasizes the actual content (in its case, tweets).

The result is that the stream of information is simply different on both services. You’re more likely to talk about personal issues, happy birthday wishes, gossip about a changed Facebook relationship status, and postings about parties on your Facebook News Feed. On Twitter, you’re more likely to find links and news, and you’re more likely to follow brands, news sources and other entities outside of your social graph. In fact, Twitter tells me that one out of every four tweets includes a link to some form of content.

There’s also interesting data from a team of Korean researchers suggesting that information sharing is fundamentally different on Twitter when compared to social networks. Their conclusion was that Twitter has “characteristics of news media” rather than characteristics of a social network.

In other words, Facebook and Twitter are different once you look past their social media roots. Now it’s time to define the difference between a social network and an information network.


Social Networks vs. Information Networks


This may seem obvious, but social networks are about your social networks. Specifically, the focus is on your friends, colleagues and personal connections. They are about sharing personal or professional experiences together. They are about keeping in touch with friends rather than discovering news or content. Facebook, LinkedIn, Bebo, MySpace, hi5 and Orkut clearly fall under the “social networking” branch of social media.

The concept of an information network is a more recent phenomenon. Information networks are about leveraging different networks to distribute and consume information. While they may utilize an array social media tools in order to find, curate or deliver content, they focus less on what’s happening in your social graph and more on information you want. Twitter may be the best example of an information network, but YouTube (video), Flickr (photos) and Digg (news) are information networks as well.

Pretty much every social media platform has aspects of both types of networks, but they tend to fall into one category or the other. I contend that Foursquare is a social network because it utilizes Facebook’s friend model instead of Twitter’s follow model, but you might have a different opinion.

In fact, that may be the biggest differentiating point between social networks and information networks. For the most part, content on Flickr, YouTube or Twitter is public, while content on MySpace, Facebook or Bebo is private. A big reason for that is that the former services utilize the follow or subscription model, while the latter ones utilize the friend model.


Conclusion


I consider this article to be the start, not the end, of an exploration of how we define social media and the services that comprise it. We tend to group Facebook, Twitter and an array of other web tools into one giant pile, when in fact they’re vastly different tools with vastly different applications and uses.

Facebook, with its mutual friend connections and college-exclusive beginnings, is better suited for keeping in touch with friends. For most people, it is indeed a network of your social graph, all in one place. Twitter, on the other hand, is all about the stream of information coming from people and organizations all across the world. That’s why there’s room for both: they simply provide different functions.

If we are to take social media further and further change the world with social technologies, we need to better understand how we use these technologies. The first step is understanding how we as a society currently utilize social networks and information networks in our daily lives. There are many intricacies that underlie social and information networks, most of which we don’t yet understand.


More Social Media Resources from Mashable:


- 5 Fun and Safe Social Networks for Children
- New Facebook Groups Designed to Change the Way You Use Facebook [VIDEO]
- “SNL” Spoofs Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg [VIDEO]
- HOW TO: Customize Your Background for the New Twitter
- Top 10 Twitter Tips for Bands, By Bands

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ryasick


Reviews: Bebo, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Foursquare, Hi5, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Twitter, YouTube, iStockphoto

More About: Column, facebook, Information Network, Information Networking, social media, social network, social networking, The Social Analyst, twitter

For more Social Media coverage:


 

What Identities Are We Using to Sign in Around the Web? [INFOGRAPHIC]

07 Jul

The days of having a separate login and password for each online service we use are behind us. Now, you can log into most sites and services using your social network’s ID.

The most popular social identities are Facebook, Google, Yahoo, and Twitter, but are they always being used in the same way? The infographic below, courtesy of social optimization platform Gigya, shows that users trust different identities on different services. For example, users are most likely to log on to entertainment sites via Facebook, but when it comes to news sites, the login of choice is Twitter. Furthermore, the infographic shows what profile data is available to services after users log in using various online identities.

Check out a bigger version of the infographic here.



Reviews: Facebook, Google, Twitter

More About: facebook, gigya, Google, online identity, social networking, twitter, Yahoo

For more Social Media coverage:


 

Amazon Patents Social Networking System, Winks at Facebook

17 Jun

social networks clutter imageThe United States Patent and Trademark Office awarded Amazon a patent for a “Social Networking System.” Amazingly enough, the description of the patent sounds, well, pretty much like any social network we’ve seen over the years, including Facebook.

The description of the patent is as follows:

“A networked computer system provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users. For example, in one embodiment, users can identify other users based on their affiliations with particular schools or other organizations. The system also provides a mechanism for a user to selectively establish contact relationships or connections with other users, and to grant permissions for such other users to view personal information of the user. The system may also include features for enabling users to identify contacts of their respective contacts. In addition, the system may automatically notify users of personal information updates made by their respective contacts.”

Replacing the word “system” in the paragraph above with “Facebook” reveals, once again, how flawed the U.S. patent system is. This patent was invented by Brian Robertson and Warren Adams — the same two guys who founded social networking service PlanetAll, which Amazon acquired in 1998. Alas, not seeing potential in the service, Amazon shut it down in 2000, but decided to revive it by filing a patent application in May 2008.

Now, let’s look at some of the other social networking-related patents. Four years ago, Friendster patented — you guessed it — “social networking.” It was described as a “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.”

Friendster was awarded several more patents for certain aspects of social networking over the years, Facebook patented the newsfeed three months ago, and we’ve seen many other patents that supposedly cover the fundamentals of social networking over the years.

So, after all this, who owns the patent for the social network? You tell us, cause we have no idea.

[via TechFlash]

image courtesy of iStockphoto, drflet



For more technology coverage, follow Mashable Tech on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook




Reviews: Facebook, Friendster, Twitter, iStockphoto

Tags: amazon, facebook, patent, social networking

 

Amazon Patents Social Networking System, Winks at Facebook

17 Jun

social networks clutter imageThe United States Patent and Trademark Office awarded Amazon a patent for a “Social Networking System.” Amazingly enough, the description of the patent sounds, well, pretty much like any social network we’ve seen over the years, including Facebook.

The description of the patent is as follows:

“A networked computer system provides various services for assisting users in locating, and establishing contact relationships with, other users. For example, in one embodiment, users can identify other users based on their affiliations with particular schools or other organizations. The system also provides a mechanism for a user to selectively establish contact relationships or connections with other users, and to grant permissions for such other users to view personal information of the user. The system may also include features for enabling users to identify contacts of their respective contacts. In addition, the system may automatically notify users of personal information updates made by their respective contacts.”

Replacing the word “system” in the paragraph above with “Facebook” reveals, once again, how flawed the U.S. patent system is. This patent was invented by Brian Robertson and Warren Adams — the same two guys who founded social networking service PlanetAll, which Amazon acquired in 1998. Alas, not seeing potential in the service, Amazon shut it down in 2000, but decided to revive it by filing a patent application in May 2008.

Now, let’s look at some of the other social networking-related patents. Four years ago, Friendster patented — you guessed it — “social networking.” It was described as a “system, method, and apparatus for connecting users in an online computer system based on their relationships within social networks.”

Friendster was awarded several more patents for certain aspects of social networking over the years, Facebook patented the newsfeed three months ago, and we’ve seen many other patents that supposedly cover the fundamentals of social networking over the years.

So, after all this, who owns the patent for the social network? You tell us, cause we have no idea.

[via TechFlash]

image courtesy of iStockphoto, drflet



For more technology coverage, follow Mashable Tech on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook




Reviews: Facebook, Friendster, Twitter, iStockphoto

Tags: amazon, facebook, patent, social networking


 

How Facebook Became Twice as Fast (But Still Not Fast Enough)

19 Feb

There’s an interesting post today at Facebook’s engineering blog, detailing how Facebook’s engineers managed to make the site two times faster in a six-month period — from June of 2009 till the beginning of 2010.

It’s an interesting (albeit somewhat technical) read. In short, Facebook’s primary concerns were shortening network time (the time it takes for data to be transmitted between the user’s computer and Facebook) and render time (the time it takes the user’s web browser to process a response from Facebook and display the page). They managed to speed up the site primarily by reducing the number of cookies and cutting back on JavaScript.

Finally, they divided a typical Facebook page into parts (which they call pagelets), which can be loaded one after another (instead of waiting for the entire page to load. From the post:

“Over the last few months we’ve implemented exactly this ability for Facebook pages. We call the whole system BigPipe and it allows us to break our web pages up in to logical blocks of content, called Pagelets, and pipeline the generation and render of these Pagelets. Looking at the home page, for example, think of the newsfeed as one Pagelet, the Suggestions box another, and the advertisement yet another. BigPipe not only reduces the TTI of our pages but also makes them seem even faster to users since seeing partial content earlier feels faster than seeing complete content a little bit later.”

While this is nice to know, it’s hard not to notice the recent user complaints that Facebook is slower than ever (it’s been that way for me, too). Of course, the Facebook experience is different for users in different countries, so it’s hard to say whether it’s a global problem, but one thing is certain: With Facebook’s userbase growing the way it does, keeping the site fast enough will always be a challenge.


Reviews: Facebook

Tags: facebook, social media, social networking, trending, Web Development

 

Privacy: Managing the New Currency of the Social Web

29 Jan

privacy imageMollie Vandor is the Product Manager for Ranker.com and Media Director for Girls in Tech LA. You can find her on Twitter and on her blog, where she writes about the web, the world and what it’s like to be a geek chic chick.

The privacy policy might seem like just another box you have to check when signing up for a site. But in today’s web world, privacy is much more than just another barrier to registration, and it will only become more important as we move into the social, semantic world of web 3.0.

Privacy is the core currency of the social web, and like any other type of currency system there’s an exchange rate. In this case, the equation boils down to how much privacy the user is willing to give up in exchange for the features and functionality a site provides. It’s a tricky equation, and the answer varies for every user and for every site. But, with targeted advertising, connected social networks and constant lifestreaming becoming more mainstream by the day, privacy is poised to become one of the core issues that defines the relationship between users and websites. Understanding how and why that relationship works — or doesn’t work — is going to become a hallmark of both smart sites and smart users.


The Common Ground

Like most transactions, privacy on the web is generally governed by a contract, often known as the “privacy policy.” There is some boilerplate language you can expect to see in pretty much every privacy policy on the web. Most sites will save your cookies, track your IP address, and store your login, registration and contact info. Despite the “Big Brother is watching” fears sometimes associated with words like “tracking” and “cookies,” you can rest assured that most publishers respect the fact that with great tracking power comes great responsibility. So, they’re using this information to serve up more appropriate ads, help you log back in if you forget your password, and make sure that they’re legally covered in case you turn out to be a 12-year-old kid in a place you’re not supposed to be surfing.

Publishers are generally pretty cautious in how they use this information, and sites are certainly learning from the very public battles web giants like Facebook have fought when their users feel uncomfortable with their privacy policies. Of course, there are different comfort levels for different users on different types of sites, particularly in the social media sphere. Although many privacy policies start with the boilerplate blah-blah-blah, the modern social network seems to fall into one of three categories when it comes to crafting their particular balance of privacy and functionality.


The Social Network: Share & Share a Lot

Since the Friendster days, social networks have walked a fine line between protecting a person’s personal information and helping their members meet each other. Recently, with the rise of real-time social search and the development of entire app-based ecosystems, that line has become even blurrier as social networks struggle to stay both open and private at the same time.

It’s in the best interests of sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn to make their users feel safe and secure in sharing their information. The more they can convince you to feel comfortable sharing within their walled-off networks, the more incentive there is for other people to use their particular platform to stay up to date on what you’re up to. However, it’s also in these sites’ best interests to keep connections flowing between members, developers, and the major search engines.

Social networks have always had a vested interest in helping members find each other, often by making certain types of information publicly searchable by default on their sites. There’s also a relatively new and growing demand for social network statuses to show up in third-party search engines, and that demand will only continue to grow as more and more customers come to expect everything on the web to arrive in real-time.

These sites have a good reason for wanting to open their data up to search engines now, and they are expecting that consumers will be more receptive to these real-time deals. After all, if you want to see Facebook updates in your Google results, you’re going to have to accept that, at some point, Google had to index those updates. And Facebook — amongst other sites — seems to be banking on the idea that you might be willing to let that wall down a bit in order to gain those Google results.

As a result, many major social networking sites have recently started splitting the information you give them into different categories, some of which is considered public by default, and some of which isn’t. This distinction appears in privacy policies from MySpace to Meebo, where categories of information tend to be broken up into personal, profile information, and publicly posted content and activity. Users can then control who sees these different categories by defining different groups of connections with different levels of access.

Regardless of the site, these groups all start at public and end at totally private, which is nothing new. However, the definition of “public” has changed. Whereas “public” was once considered to mean “open to all users of a social networking site,” it has now become synonymous with “the entire Internet.” This adds a whole new layer of people with access to the privacy pyramid.

A similar shift in privacy expectations is also occurring as social networks become more open to third-party developers who seek to link their applications to the rich networks of data that large social networks have to offer. With 14.3 million users allowing the Mobsters app to access their MySpace data, and 69 million users playing Farmville, it’s clear that people are willing to open up their profiles and forgo some of their privacy in exchange for the services a third-party app developer has to offer. That’s why many sites are now adding clauses allowing them to connect third-party developers to your personal profile information — provided you approve that connection.

LinkedIn’s privacy policy is a perfect example of the balance many sites are trying to strike between encouraging third-party development and protecting your privacy. It explains that the site will “enable you to share your information and communicate with other Users, or provide (usually at your option) your personal details to third parties offering combined services with LinkedIn.” By putting the onus on the user, LinkedIn and sites like it allow the millions of users who want to exchange their information with developers to do so, while keeping the default settings at a more conservative level of privacy.


The Communication Platform: For Everyone’s Eyes Only

everyone imageTumblr, Yelp, and Twitter are all social sites with distinct characteristics and uses. But when it comes to privacy policies, they all share similar struggles and similar solutions, making them more alike than you’d think. At their core, all three types of sites share the same purpose — to help the user broadcast information to a network of (presumably) interested people, many of whom the user may not know, or may not know very well.

Unlike the social networks discussed above, these sites don’t have to worry so much about creating different categories of connections, since they’re already assuming that you’re likely using them to broadcast on a one-to-many basis. So, these sites tend to protect only the most private of your personal information by default. For example, on Twitter, the standard privacy settings make a user’s name, bio and tweets publicly available, and the privacy policy clearly states that “Most of the information you provide to us is information you are asking us to make public.” However, geotagging is one of the few features that is disabled by default for all Twitter users, meaning that you must actively give the company permission to annotate your content with your location. Clearly, Twitter has decided that most users will accept their content being made public by default, but that location is something their users are not willing to exchange so easily.

Yelp does something similar in that their privacy policy posits that all content you create on Yelp is public, but they do promise to protect your most personally-identifying information when sharing that public content across the web. Yelp’s privacy policy says, “When we distribute your submissions to third parties, we typically include your account name (but not your personal information unless you include your personal information in your submissions).”

Tubmlr takes a similar approach, promising to protect your personally-identifying information while also warning the user that “if you submit information to ‘chat rooms,’ ‘forums’ or ‘message boards’ such information becomes public information, meaning that you lose any privacy rights you might have with regards to that information.” By refraining from specifically defining what a “forum” or “message board” means in the Tumblr universe, the company puts the burden on the user to figure out where their information will be public and where they can expect it to remain private. With monthly unique visits in the millions, it seems that Tumblr’s users don’t mind that very much. Clearly, the users creating content on these communication platforms are expecting an exchange rate that favors finding friends, followers, readers and reviewers to maintaining personal privacy.

Ultimately, these communication platforms do rely on that particular attitude towards privacy being a core attribute of their main user base, and so they provide policies that allow for a lot of information sharing, streaming and searching by default. Of course, users can always restrict the flow of that information by setting their profiles to private or protecting their status updates, but the reality is that for sites like these, it’s often as much in the user’s interest to broadcast to many as it is for the site itself.


The Location-Based App: Where You At?

Like communication platforms, location-based apps have a bit of a luxury when it comes to putting their privacy policies together. They know their users are already open to the idea of giving up a certain amount of privacy in exchange for a certain level of connectivity. After all, why else would you use Foursquare, Loopt, Gowalla, or any other service that exists for the sole purpose of sharing your location with friends? The tricky thing for location-based services is figuring out how to make users feel safe sharing something as private as location with an entire network of people, while also allowing those users to do the things they signed up for in the first place.

That’s why these apps tend to be the most conservative when it comes to the privacy exchange rate — their very functionality hinges on users exchanging information. Loopt explains it well when they write “Loopt uses your personally identifiable, registration, profile, and location information to operate, maintain, and provide to you and other Users all of the features and functionality of the Loopt Services.” Users give information to get access to the service. If a user chooses to disclose less information, they receive fewer benefits of the service.

For example, in Gowalla’s case, the site automatically adds you to the feeds of a particular location when you check in there. Should you choose to turn that feature off, Gowalla says, “your check-ins will not be credited in the spot feed nor will you appear in Top 10 lists amongst other things.” Similarly, you can’t become the mayor of a place on Foursquare unless you upload a profile picture.

Users looking to make the most of a particular location-based app are also increasingly turning to third-party services like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace to share their statuses with their entire social networks. This presents another privacy policy challenge to these sites, as they must address the way user information is shared outside the relatively close confines of their protected, proprietary networks.

Foursquare recently revised its privacy settings to allow users to specify very specific kinds of information to be sent to each site they connect their account to. A user can specify different levels of privacy for their friends on Facebook and their followers on Twitter. They also built a caveat into their privacy policy that allows them to share certain pieces of profile information in search results — both within the network and outside of it. They couched this caveat in the promise that sharing the really personal stuff would still be up to the user, since that information would only be viewable by the user’s friends. Loopt also puts the onus on the user to dictate their own privacy policy by specifying that Loopt will only share personally identifiable information with third parties based on the user’s personal settings.

The location-based apps expect their users — or at least their power users — to be willing to give up a certain level of privacy in exchange for features and functionality. The amount of people doing so tends to be much higher on these sites than it does on the traditional social network. However, these location-based sites also put users in control of the exchange rate, allowing them to easily manage the publicity of their updates and information.


Conclusion

Ultimately, it is up to users to take that kind of control on all social sites. The only truly effective privacy policy is the one a user sets for himself by being conscious of the value of privacy as currency and making informed decisions about these exchange rates. And while that consciousness starts by understanding why different sites treat privacy the way they do, it ends with the user making educated choices about what to share and where to share it. The best privacy policies are not written by coders, copywriters or corporate lawyers. They’re the ones observed by people who know what they want from the web, and what they’re willing to give up to get it. That makes privacy a much more important issue than that innocuous little checkbox seems to imply.


More social media resources from Mashable:

- Why Facebook’s Privacy Changes are Detrimental to Users
- HOW TO: Use Facebook Privacy Controls on Your Fan Page
- How Social Media Creates Offline Social Good
- Zen and the Art of Twitter: 4 Tips for Productive Tweeting
- 3 Ways Educators Are Embracing Social Technology
- 5 Ways Foursquare is Changing the World

Images courtesy of iStockphoto, gulfix, exdez


Reviews: Facebook, Foursquare, Friendster, Google, Gowalla, LinkedIn, Meebo, MySpace, Tumblr, Twitter, Yelp, iStockphoto

Tags: facebook, foursquare, gowalla, linkedin, loopt, myspace, online privacy, privacy, privacy policy, social media, social media privacy, social networks, tumblr, twitter