What the new Facebook features mean to us users

Remember how the word "friends" took on new meaning with the advent of social networking? Well, the same thing might be happening to the word "like." You always liked stuff, but now you "Like" it, as in broadcast that you like it, to the world via Facebook – or just to your Facebook friends, depending on how you've set your privacy settings. FB users, right after logging in today, click on "Learn More" in the box FB has at the top of your page explaining all this (its headline is "Connect with your friends on your favorite websites"). I'm talking about the just-announced latest changes at Facebook, the Like button you'll be seeing in more and more sites and blogs around the Web and "instant personalization," which personalizes your experience of Web services like Yelp, based on the info you've shared about yourself in FB.

Some pundits have actually called these developments "Web 3.0" (though we can't forget the mobile part of Web 3.0, I think). The BBC's headline was "Facebook's bid to rule the web as it goes social" – or, if not to rule, at least make it much more social than ever, or make the whole Web a more socially informed experience. And then maybe, as the BBC put it, "unseat Google" (and all FB's other competitors) to boot. For more on what it means to us mere mortals, check out GigaOm's "Your Mom’s Guide to Those Facebook Changes, and How to Block Them," then talk with your kids about checking those privacy settings again – make sure the settings are just the way everybody wants them under these new conditions. ReadWriteWeb.com goes into great detail about how Facebook's latest moves, announced at the F8 developers conference last week , affects its competitors and Web publishers as well as users. Remember that word "Like" I mentioned above? Well, ReadWriteWeb already replaced "click" with "like," where it says that Facebook's intent is "to get users to Like on the site and post a link to Facebook." [See also the Oregon Daily Emerald (at the University of Oregon) on how Facebook "surpassed Google in hits in the U.S. in one week during March of this year, the first time Google has been out of the top spot since it surpassed MySpace in 2007," and the New York Times on new apps and services illustrating the trend that sharing personal details is the whole point.]

This just in!: The Electronic Frontier Foundation has just posted a video and instructions on how FB users can opt out of "instant personalization" in the Web services with which Facebook has struck deals so far: Microsoft Docs, Yelp, and Pandora.

The 'weak ties' that bind

Of course, young social networkers at your house already know all about "weak ties" - they just call them something else: their social-network "friends." Some of them are friends in real life, some just friends of friends, kind of second-tier friends, or somebody they met at the last away game. It's just helpful to have a fellow adult explain what friends in social-network sites are like from a sociologist's perspective. That's what Julia Angwin at the Wall Street Journal does. These weak ties can really come in handy in these crazy economic times, as well as when one's looking for a summer job or a prom date for her visiting cousin. "Weak ties are particularly good for job searching," Angwin reports, citing the view of a Stanford sociology professor, "because acquaintances can expose a job candidate to a much wider range of possibilities than his or her close friends can." Check out the article for more on the value of weak ties. But remember this is a very adult discussion, wherein the "friends" in social sites are viewed in a different, more casual and detached, way than among young social networkers. For a sense of that greater intensity, see "The pain of 'unfriending'" in the Digital Natives project's blog at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Be sure they're real friends!

Tell your kids not to feel bad if they fall for fake friend requests in a social-networking site. After all, some of the smartest computer-security professionals have fallen for them. What's important is that they know to be alert. Accepting new friends indiscriminately is really becoming bad news, SecurityManagement.com reports. The article says two top network security executives conducted an experiment, creating "fake profiles of prominent computer security professionals" on several social-network sites, and then sending out "plenty of friend requests to other security experts. They were so astounded by the results they presented to the Black Hat hacking conference" in Las Vegas this week. "Each time they lured in more than 50 new friends within 24 hours. Some of those people were chief security officers for major corporations and defense industry workers."

'Friending' against school policy

It's against school policy in Mississippi's Lamar County Public School District for teachers and students to text each other or to be "friends" in social-networking sites. "Both texting and social networking have too many gray areas that could lead to misunderstanding and downright trouble," the Hattiesburg American reports. The policy's being considered in other Mississippi school districts as well. This reminds me of a case of teacher-to-student sexual exploitation involving texting in the news this past year (sorry I can't find the link at the moment). I'd like to hear your thoughts on the validity of this school policy - in comments here or, ideally, in the ConnectSafely.org forum.

Online 'friending': Nothing that new

A commentator who used to be a "pre-Facebook teen" makes an excellent point about today's social networking: Things haven't changed much since pre-social-Web days. "Categorizing and ranking friends existed long before these social-networking sites came around," writes L.A.-based writer and editor Sara Libby in the Christian Science Monitor. "Adults baffled by the proliferation of MySpace and Facebook are confusing themselves by viewing the use of these sites as a completely new and foreign phenomenon. Kids who network with friends online aren't affecting their ability to create real, face-to-face friendships any more than typing a term paper affects their ability to address a postcard by hand. Kids are still kids. Online networking is just an updated version of collecting choice yearbook signatures or, in my case, wearing a friend's picture on a T-shirt," Sara says, referring to the "buddy shirts" of her high school years. "It became a status symbol to invite the most popular people from the team to take a buddy pic with you, then to wear that shirt around school. The cooler the people in your picture, the more impressive the shirt was." Now it's online "friending" that allows public display of teens' social status.

More than 150 friends?!

The Wall Street Journal's "numbers guy," Carl Bialik, zoomed in on that number - 150 - which many reporters have cited as the limit to the number of personal contacts any human being could possibly sustain. This is when they're writing stories about the lengthy friends lists some teens have amassed in social sites. The 150 comes from the research of Robin Dunbar at Oxford University, "extrapolating from social groups in nonhuman primates and then crediting people with greater capacity because of our larger neocortex, the part of the brain used for conscious thought and language." Ah, got it. So we definitely can sustain more friendships than primates. But, actually, Dunbar himself, Bialik reports, believes that social sites "could 'in principle' allow users to push past the limit." To the professor, the real question is "whether those who keep ties to hundreds of people do so to the detriment of their closest relationships - defined by Prof. Dunbar as those formed with people you turn to when in severe distress." Bialik cites another recent UK survey that found - no huge surprise - friendships really start offline, but "less-close friendships and acquaintanceships, however, also die offline, while the Web can help sustain them" [read the article for examples]. I suspect this is one of the things youth who move far away, go off to college, or graduate and leave behind college friends so appreciate about social networking. There's much more that's thought-provoking in the Journal column - do check it out.

Adding strangers as 'friends'

A new study found that Facebook users may need to take their personal privacy more seriously - also that there seems to be some confusion about who is and isn't a friend there. It doesn't appear to have been that scientific a study, but the methodology is interesting: IT security firm Sophos "created a fake Facebook profile, under the name 'Freddi Staur' ('ID Fraudster' with the letters rearranged), and randomly requested 200 members to be friends with 'Freddi'," CNET reports. "Out of those 200, 87 accepted the friend request and 82 of those gave 'Freddi' access to 'personal information' such as e-mail addresses, dates of birth, addresses and phone numbers, and school or work data. Presumably, the other five had restricted 'Freddi' to limited profile access, which many users select for bosses, parents, or people they don't know in real life." Sophos says that, although it's unlikely this behavior will result in theft, this is the kind of fuel phishers seek for their social engineering (manipulation). BTW, I admit to a bit of that friending confusion - I have a Facebook profile and get friend requests all the time from people I don't know personally, and I confess to feeling kind of mean and unfriendly if I ignore them. If an online-safety advocate feels that way….

Professional & personal lives online

It's all getting kind of muddy online for grownups. For the pioneers of social networking - teenagers and 20-something just starting out their careers - it wasn't such a big deal. They didn't make the distinctions we make between "lives." They, especially teens, experimented with different persona, but that's just it. The persona were experimental, not established. Now that we adults are getting into social networking, and social sites are proliferating and specializing (or settling into niches), fortunately we have some choices: We can have our professional social networking, our extended-family social networking, our music social-networking, but we are also having social networking dilemmas. Take Washington Post tech reporter Rob Pegoraro's experience with Facebook, for example. For him, Facebook started out to be "purely recreational" and kind of solidified in his head as such. Then co-workers started friending him. Okaaaaay, he could maybe get used to that. But then p.r. people in his business circles but not personally known to him wanted to be "friends." Hmmm. The problem is, Facebook has become what you might call the hip LinkedIn.com (a "social-networking" site that has always been about professional networking), so plenty of people 30+ are now doing professional networking on it. Facebook does have "at least 135" privacy options. "Yet not one of these options allows you to categorize Facebook contacts as close or distant friends." It' getting a little tricky. See p. 2 of Rob's article for his conclusion.