Small Fish, Big Pond

Sorry to be so vulgar but I can’t think of anything else to say.

DARPA put up 10 red balloons moored across the US, the challenge was for an organization to use social networking to accurately find the 10 locations. The point was to see if social networking could be used as a credible source of information.

10 balloons across the entire US. Locate and provide their exact coordinates. Game started this weekend.

I was thinking that in maybe a couple weeks we’d hear that some organization found them all. MIT already found them all…
9 hours after the competition began.

It was over before it even started. If you put this article in the newspaper, the papers would still be printing when news came that the game was already over.

I guess the DARPA has their answer, with some good data mining social networking and crowd sourcing can provide accurate information. And in less than half a day.

Too bad we can’t find a way to use this technology to find Bin Laden (remember him?).

Every time I see this story I remember this short film from when I was a kid:

Sorry not hacked. According to Facebook’s official response, it’s not a hack, not a problem, and what you see happening doesn’t really exist.

What am I talking about? 300+ Facebook groups have been hijacked (unlike hacked this description is 100% accurate no matter what Facebook says). But the people hijacking them aren’t doing it maliciously, only to raise awareness for how easily social data can be manipulated. In the hijackers own words:

Our main goal is to draw attention to questions concerning online privacy awareness.

We have seen too many examples where friends and relatives of ours have suffered from their lack of in-depth knowledge concerning their online presence. After some research we discovered this is a wide spread problem. People have even lost their jobs over Facebook content. So we wanted to do something about this.

Our method of choice only serves the purpose to prove our point and put emphasis on how easy it is to lose track of a part of your online presence. If we wouldn’t have communicated this way, our message would probably have fallen into oblivion the moment it got out.

I have to say, I am 100% behind these guys. They share the same viewpoint on social networking that I do, it’s great to keep in touch with friends but people’s social lives are now dictated and controlled by their Facebook interaction. Just this weekend my friend was relating a tale of how his falling out with one friend has now started having repercussions with others because the one friend “removed him from their friend list”!

What a sad state of affairs, I may not be able to quantify my number of friends through Facebook associations but I don’t have to worry about online drama affecting my offline relationships either (or vice versa). People say I’m either paranoid or anti social; paranoid maybe, but I don’t consider interaction through the internet to be on par with social interaction face to face.

Back to the point at hand, Facebook has responded to the hijackings thusly:

There has been no hacking and there is no confidential information at risk. The groups in question have been abandoned by their previous owners, which means any group member has the option to make themselves an administrator in order to continue communication to the group. Group administrators have no access to confidential information and group members can leave a group at any time. For small groups, administrators can simply edit a group name or info, moderate discussion, and message group members. The names of large groups cannot be changed nor can anyone message all members. In the rare instances when we find that a group has been changed inappropriately, we will disable the group, which is the action we plan for these groups.

So apparently this hijacking group isn’t helping Facebook to do anything about improving their system. The group claims that they’re not going to do anything malicious with the groups, only point out their vulnerability. But this is a problem they should take more seriously, groups that can be renamed to anything can cause huge issues. With the drama that came of being “de-friended” imagine the drama that would come if your friends (or potential employers) visited your site to see that the groups you belong to are “NAMBLA” “BNP” “Al-Qaida” “KKK” and “George Michael Fanclub”.

And to the FBI agents who just visited because of all the flags in that last line, please read the whole article.

ViaLoose Wire Blog.

I have to say I totally agree with Devin Coldewey’s post at TechCrunch about why he’s a Tweetotaller and as I’ve said here in the past I’m one too (I think my first post reviving this blog was why I’d rather blog than tweet).

I don’t like bad mouthing things, I feel like I do it too much, but as with most social networking I think Twitter has more to do with the vain action of drawing attention to yourself by shouting at the top of your lungs and less with actually getting information out.

Although I’ve seen a few examples where twitter works or has some marginal benefit, for the most part it’s a cacophony of useless input from people I don’t care to listen to. There just isn’t enough benefit for the waste of my time to sift through the chaff for the marginal nuggets of info.

How to use twitter for marketing and PR

And I’m sorry to be so pompous but I barely have time to run down my RSS feed and email in a day to bother keeping up in real time with somebody who has way more time than me and can spend their day posting their every action. I don’t even watch TV or play video games anymore and I still go to bed at night feeling like there was 4 hours too little time to get things done during the day.

For an interesting experiment take how many hours you spend reading or using twitter, multiply it by your hourly wage, and decide if you’re getting a good return on investment for losing your free time (remember time=money).

Personally I think everybody else will tire of it too; I feel the same way about twitter as I did about Myspace shouts. Eventually the next big social networking thing will come along and people will migrate over to it. Think about it, the sub-20 year old crowd can’t even get excited with twitter, how long before the novelty wears off for the rest of us?

Then again never underestimate the appeal of people thinking that having 50 followers (or 1000 “friends”, or 560 unique page views…) makes it feel like people are actually listening to you.