What I Learned In Social Media This Week

This week I have a couple of things.

1. Facebook Launches Places

The big news of the week was that Facebook announced a new feature called Places. This allows you to check in places through Facebook much like Foursquare of Gowalla. The feature that Facebook touts as different is the ability to tag your friends at certain locations. Here is the video that Facebook published explaining the new feature.

They are supposedly partnering with Foursquare and Gowalla but Foursquare has said that they are not sure how they will work with it yet. @Dens - Foursquare CEO - said that they are not that concerned with Places. But then again what else are they going to say. Here is a video from Mashable with the Foursquare VP of Mobile and Partnerships Holger Luedorf.

I am talking about Foursquare instead of Facebook because time will tell what people think of the new feature but location has been one of the hottest spaces in technology and Foursquare has been the golden child of that space. The most interesting thing to me is if this will change the landscape of this space considerably or if they will coexist. One note is that Foursquare had its largest signup day ever after this announcement.

2. Rowfeeder Has a Major Update

I talked about Rowfeeder two weeks ago. Right after that they released a major new release that really stepped up the sexiness of the product. They now generate 'native Excel files with pre-populated charts, visualizations and pivot tables'. The original beauty of this was that I could get the data in the raw format so that I could create whatever I wanted on top of that. I lived in Excel for 10 years so that is very comfortable for me. Now they just lowered the barrier for use even more by pre-populating some of the first use cases they are hearing. I have talked to these guys a few times and I can tell you they are pushing to continually improve this product and are gaining great traction. Nice work guys.

3. The Word Influence is Being Bastardized.

I will talk about this more as this is my real area of passion but the word influence and influencer is a term that is really getting abused. SO many people are talking about this and they are defining it in whatever way is convenient for their purposes but not necessarily in ways that will provide true value. There are a few companies that are trying to so metrics around influence but they are very 1.0 in their thinking. I have discussed this with a friend of mine about what the true roles in a network are and how you really measure them. There is a better way and over time I will be talking about the more and more here. This is a problem that there is real business value in discussing and solving, and this is an issue that were are working through at my day job currently. As companies start into social media this is a space that they are trying to get their arms around and the misuse of these terms are going to cause confusion and false starts for many companies.

What Information Do You Share About Your Kids Online?

I have always been concerned about how much information I share about my kids on the Internet. The reality is that there are some people in the world that have bad intentions. This is not the majority, but it is enough to make parents need to be aware of how much they expose about their kids. In the past, my filter for who I would friend on Facebook is who I wanted to let see pictures of my kids. Over time, I have posted more information about my kids on my blog, Twitter and Flickr. Even my walls around my Facebook network have come down as I have become more liberal about who I friend and as I try and keep up with the ever changing privacy settings on Facebook.

Not long ago I started the site My Weekly Adventure. The objective of the site was to increase the amount of quality time parents spend with their kids and for them to share it with the community of parents. My first blogger was a friend of mine, Tristan, who created a great post with video of his bike ride to school with his son. Right after he posted that I had lunch with him and his wife. They loved the site but they had some concerns about the amount of information they were sharing about their son.  The greatly reduced the amount of information they shared from the original post. This goes back to those people in the world that don't have the best of intentions  The new world that we live in of the Internet and social media this is going to be an ongoing conversation. There are some things that you should consider when it comes to sharing information about your kids online. 

What are you comfortable with?

Everyone has a different view of what they think they should share or not.  Part of this is generational, part of this is paranoia, and part of this is reality.  Times are changing, and people are getting more and more comfortable about how much they share online.  I recently went to a session from the Social Media Club of Portland on privacy and one of the main topics was Facebook privacy.  I have to admit that there were some people there that were much, much more paranoid than I am, but they might be right.

Your kids are probably sharing way more online than you would feel comfortable with.  Kids that are growing up with the internet as part of who they are and they are much more transparent than most of their parents. You need to do what you feel comfortable with and that will probably continually change over the coming years.

Don't enable dumb people

I am a believer that if someone is smart and wants to find out information about you or your kids, they will find it.  Your information is on the internet if you know where to look.  People that truly think they don't have a record of their kids or themselves on the internet is more than likely wrong.  Accept that smart bad people can find what they want if they want.  

The objective is to not let the dumb people get access to that same information very easily.  When you write a post, do you really need to put your address or neighborhood?  Do you need to put your kids names?  Does the post need where they go to school?  Don't enable the dumb criminal.

The Result

Everyone is going to look at both of these sections differently, and there is no perfect answer.  Don't hide in a cave and be scared of the world.  There is no contesting that there are some scary things out there, but there are lots more amazing things out there.  Before you post take a look at what you are revealing and ask yourself if you were to remove some of the details would really lessen the impact of the post?  Try and find that balance of a great post that is full of information without compromising your personal privacy limits.   

I would love to know what you think.  Are there other things that people need to consider? Where is your personal limit?

 Picture via Flickr: Picture Perfect Pose

Peoplebrowsr is Listening and You May Not Know What They Do - I Didn't

A few times now I have written about about my issues with Peoplebrowsr and their user experience. (Dear Peoplebrowsr - I want to love you. Really I do, but... & User Experience is King - Please Tell Peoplebrowsr) I have wanted to love Peoplebrowsr for a long time but they make it so hard yet you can quite shut them out. If you take a look at them you can tell that there is something there but it is hard to identify what. After my last post and Twitter stream the people at Peoplebrowsr responded. They contacted me on Twitter, Facebook and they commented on my blog post. I was pleased to know they are listening and working to improve, although as of the time of this post they had not fixed the simple login issue I noted in my last post.

I was poking around on the site and decided to click on the data mine image at the top. It takes you to a list of options. It is somewhat of a random list but I selected Get Special Report option which allowed me to send an email. Later that day I was contacted by 2 people from Peoplebrowsr and I had a call with Becky Wang and we chatted about what was possible. What I found out was interesting. Peoplebrowsr has 18 months of all Twitter data saved in storage. They claim the only other people to have such data is Twitter. They have quite a head start on any competitors but at some point that advantage runs out because people are only going to care about that data looking back for so long.

They have a nice platform to respond and monitor the Twitter stream but they card they should play is being the experts in data and reporting. I can tell you from my experience at Tripwire that this is something we are struggling getting in the way we want. There are so many little tools out there this is an area of real opportunity. They should kill all the other stuff they do and focus. Be really good at one thing and not confusing at a bunch.

One of my favorite Facebook features is one of the simplest

You know when you have a contact photo in Outlook or on your phone that is about 5 years old. Facebook has fixed that - at least for your facebook contacts. In one of the latest releases they have a feature that allows your contact list to be synced with their current photo on Facebook. I have not really seen anyone talk about this feature but it is one of my favorites. This is the type of feature that starts to merge some of these great social platforms with my more traditional life of outlook email and contacts. This is great because it adds current life to your facebook contacts. Now when my wife calls I get her most recent Facebook photo on my phone. Simple but a a very effective way to be current while building relationships.

I used my wife as an example. If she updates the photo my phone and outlook change.

  

Facebook, Facebook

What is a Social Media Map and How Do I Use It?

Being a very curious person I love to try new technologies.  This can make things a little messy at times for me on the web.  Over the past couple of years I have explored all the different communication / social media platforms that have come out.  There are a few of those that I have established as my main forms of communication - Twitter, Facebook and my blog.  This is not to say that I don't use Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Delicious, Google Reader, Posterous, etc.  I use all of these and a few others.  They all have legitimate uses and a place in life but I don't want to have to build a separate community on each platform.  My problem was that in order to share most of the items that I collected in different places I needed a more streamlined process.  So I started hooking things together and automating.  Friendfeed has been a great platform for me to do this because it connects to so many different things.  I would really love to have one master platform that everything connects to and I can manage what gets published where but we are not there...yet.  As I started exploring and automating more and more, I started to publish things to places I didn't want them to go or post things multiple times.

Finally one day I sat down and started to draw out all the places I lived on the web and how they related, thus creating my first social media map.  The picture resembled spaghetti with parts that made no sense.  By doing this, I started to question what places did I have an objective of being there and what places was I just there because I was curious.  I started to weed things out - yes believe it or not this is the cleaned up map.  

I have revised this map a few times and did this again last week.  The objective in this last revision was to make the use of this system simple.  After using these platforms for some time I know what I will use on a regular basis and what works well in each area.  

• For pictures and video I use Posterous.  By posting these things there they automatically go to Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook.  
• Blog posts go to Twitter, Facebook and Friendfeed.  But I don't use Friendfeed to post to Twitter because there can tend to be a delay of posting them.  I use Twitterfeed for posting to Twitter and Facebook. 
• Most of the other random places I live I have hooked up to Friendfeed to go to Twitter.  The most important place for me is Google Reader.  I subscribe to about 150 blogs and as I find things of interest I share them and out they go.   
• Finally I post things directly to Twitter and Facebook.  

I try not to act like a robot but use these services to send information I find interesting out to Twitter.  If social media is hard people won't use it very long or expand outside of Facebook.  

What does your world look like and how are you using these services?