Microsoft’s Danah Boyd on social networking
May 8, 2010 by raj
Filed under IT News, Social Media Marketing Strategy
Earlier this month, Facebook sought to increase its reach by connecting with other sites across the Web. The Open Graph Protocol, announced at Facebook’s f8 Developers Conference, makes it easier for outside sites to share information with Facebook when visitors want to recommend a page. But Facebook has come under increasing scrutiny for making users’ data more public and available to search engines and for making changes to the terms of its privacy policy, which some users have been unaware of.
 |
| Credit: Technology Review |
Few have been as vocal about Facebook’s actions as Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England. More generally, she has called for Web companies to take more responsibility for how they handle users’ personal information. Technology Review‘s assistant editor, Erica Naone, recently talked with Boyd about how to think about Facebook’s latest moves.
Technology Review: Why is it so hard to keep up with the way Facebook works?
Danah Boyd: People started out with a sense that this is just for you and people in your college. Since then, it’s become just for you and all your friends. It slowly opened up and in the process people lost a lot of awareness of what was happening with their data. This is one of the things that frightens me. I started asking all of these nontechnological people about their Facebook privacy settings, and consistently found that their mental model of their privacy settings and what they saw in their data did not match.
TR: What’s been driving these changes for Facebook?
DB: When you think about Facebook, the market has very specific incentives: Encourage people to be public, increase ad revenue. All sorts of other things will happen from there. The technology makes it very easy to make people be as visible and searchable as possible. Technology is very, very aligned with the market.
TR: Some people dismiss concerns about this sort of situation by saying that privacy is dead.
DB: Facebook is saying, “Ah, the social norms have changed. We don’t have to pay attention to people’s privacy concerns, that’s just old fuddy-duddies.” Part of that is strategic. Law follows social norms.
TR: What do you think is actually happening to the social norms?
DB: I think the social norms have not changed. I think they’re being battered by the way the market forces are operating at this point. I think the market is pushing people in a direction that has huge consequences, especially for those who are marginalized.
TR: A lot of people wonder why it matters if companies share personal data. How are people affected by privacy violations?
DB: The easiest one to explain is the case of teachers. They have a role to play during the school day and there are times and places where they have lives that are not student-appropriate. Online, it becomes a different story. Facebook has now made it so that you can go and see everybody’s friends regardless of how private your profile is. And the teachers are constantly struggling with the fact that, no matter how obsessively they’ve tried to make their profiles as private as possible, one of their friends can post a photo from when they were 16 and drinking or doing something else stupid, and all of a sudden, kids bring it into school. We want teachers to be able to have a teacher relationship to our kids that is different from what the teacher has to their intimates. Yet the technology puts the teacher constantly at risk.
TR: What can users do about this kind of thing?
DB: I think that the voices need to start speaking up. They have with Facebook historically, and I think that’s the really interesting thing. Users have taken issue when the rules changed and the company gave no warning.
TR: But does it matter if users speak up?
DB: It’s different for different cases. [Facebook's failed advertising platform] Beacon didn’t have the outcome you might have expected. Users said, “Oh my God, what is this? This is horrible.” And a class action suit ensued. That did not result in the service eventually being accepted.
TR: What sort of regulation would be helpful?
DB: If you’re going to change the privacy settings, the default should always be what the users originally chose, and you have to opt into changes. Period. End of story.
TR: What could Facebook do that would convince you they’d changed their ways?
DB: They need a set of actions that show that they’re paying attention. If they actually care about making certain that people have a real model of understanding about their privacy, the best thing they could do is have every post that they put up there show all the people who can actually see it or show how many people can see it. If you see something that is visible to 10 million people, you might think twice about what the heck you did with your privacy settings.
Popularity: 4% [?]
Share on Facebook Microsoft’s Danah Boyd on social networkingWill Twitter’s Ad Strategy Work?
April 25, 2010 by raj
Filed under IT News, Social Media Marketing Strategy
This week Twitter launched Promoted Tweets, an advertising platform that sheds light on its much-discussed business model. The platform takes a page out of Google’s advertising playbook by letting advertisers sponsor posts that will appear at the top of Twitter search results.
Twitter hopes to take Promoted Tweets further in the long run by dropping advertising messages into the multithreaded conversation that goes on between its users. But it may find it difficult to ensure that these advertisements are relevant and useful, and it will need to tread carefully so as not to alienate its vocal, opinionated community of users.
Cofounder Biz Stone said in a blog post that Twitter plans to display “relevant Promoted Tweets in your timelines in a way that is useful to you.” If the company can do this successfully, it will have solved one of the biggest issues for social networks–turning explosive popularity into explosive revenue.
But even the most popular social network, Facebook, has not yet become a goldmine for its backers. The hope that it would be possible to serve perfectly tailored ads based on users’ profiles and activity has faltered because of poor click-through rates. Even so, companies are still searching for the formula that will make social advertising work.
Michael Bernstein, a researcher at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT, has been developing algorithms for automatically identifying the subject of tweets in conjunction with researchers from the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), including senior research scientist Ed Chi. . The good news, Bernstein says, is that a lot of the interaction on Twitter happens around trending topics (the most popular subjects of conversation at a given moment). Bernstein thinks Twitter could easily insert ads into these conversation streams, much as advertisers already target the audience of a particular show on television.
However, Bernstein points out that this is not how online advertising brings in big amounts of money. A huge percentage of Google’s ad revenue comes from ads that only interest a few users a day. So to get a truly successful ad platform going, Twitter will need to identify and target much smaller groups of users who are involved in less popular topics of conversation.
This turns out to be a hard problem. The algorithms designed to extract meaning from a piece of text were intended for longer documents that usually provide plenty of cues to suggest the focus, Bernstein says. For example, a blog post about Apple’s iPad will repeat the name of the product several times. In the cramped 140 characters of a tweet, users tend to avoid repetition, making it harder for an algorithm to identify the writer’s focus. However, Bernstein says analyzing users’ previous messages, as well as those of their networks of contacts, could make the process easier.
Several companies are already trying to find ways to identify Twitter users who wield the most influence around particular brands and topics. Raj Kadam, cofounder and CEO of Viralheat, a San Jose, CA-based analytics startup that measures real-time conversations on social media sites, says that companies can reach out to these users through direct messages or other personal interactions. Promoted Tweets might serve the same purpose while requiring less expense and effort, he suggests.
But Twitter will also have to figure out how to measure the success of individual Promoted Tweets. Vishal Sankhla, Viralheat’s cofounder and CTO, says it could be difficult to figure out who’s actually seeing which Promoted Tweets, because the most engaged users access the service in a number of ways: via the Web, via text message, or through third-party applications. Twitter will have to make changes to its application programming interface in order to make Promoted Tweets work properly with third-party applications.
Depending on how Twitter decides to implement Promoted Tweets, computing power could become another challenge, says Michael Rubenstein, president of AppNexus, a real-time advertising company. Tweaking ads based on user behavior and other factors requires a great deal of computation and platform stability, he says. It is unclear how much Twitter will try to adjust the behavior of Promoted Tweets on the fly, but Stone’s post suggests that ones that don’t perform well will be removed.
Promoted Tweets won’t appear in user timelines for a while yet. By the time they start appearing, Twitter hopes to have fine-tuned its algorithms so that users don’t mind–or even like–the ads.
http://www.technologyreview.com/web/25096/page2/
Popularity: 1% [?]
Share on Facebook Will Twitter’s Ad Strategy Work?
