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Facebook Changes Privacy Policy

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that the privacy policies of Facebook would be changing in the next few weeks. He explains in his blog:

Facebook’s current privacy model revolves around “networks” — communities for your school, your company or your region. This worked well when Facebook was mostly used by students, since it made sense that a student might want to share content with their fellow students.

In it’s infancy, Facebook revolved around college campuses. You didn’t need to “friend” someone in order to see their full profile. You simply had to be a part of the same campus “network” and you had full access to their profile.

Eventually Facebook brought this same functionality to cities, meaning if you lived in Anytown, USA, all the people who claimed Anytown as their home could see your full profile. You could change this setting, but not without wading through the Facebook settings.

Zuckerberg and his team saw a need to change this–for various reasons–and are planning to do so very soon. Again, from the Facebook CEO’s blog:

The plan we’ve come up with is to remove regional networks completely and create a simpler model for privacy control where you can set content to be available to only your friends, friends of your friends, or everyone.

We’re adding something that many of you have asked for — the ability to control who sees each individual piece of content you create or upload. In addition, we’ll also be fulfilling a request made by many of you to make the privacy settings page simpler by combining some settings. If you want to read more about this, we began discussing this plan back in July.

What does this mean? Networks, as we know it, go bye-bye. The only people who can see your profile are the ones you give access to.

This is a good move. As online privacy and identity control becomes more of an issue, Facebook is smart to tighten up access points.

Tags: Facebook, identity, Online, security
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What Everybody Ought to Know About the Web

Tuesday, November 17th, 2009

The Harvard Business blog had an article the other day that was, aptly titled, “Five Mind-Blowing Web Stats.” They were, in fact, mind-blowing. The stats boiled down look like this:

There has been a 40,000-fold increase in websites from 15 years ago. We’ve gone from 5,000 to 200+ million.
The blogosphere is doubling between once and twice a year, and there are nearly 1 million blog posts per day.
There have been over 5 billion tweets.
Google receives nearly 2 billion queries per day. Facebook is adding 700,000 new users per day.
Half of the top-ten websites are between 5-6 years old. Start-ups have more potential than ever to explode and take someone’s spot.

In light of this and a recent article from ReadWriteWeb that states blog posts have a longer shelf life, a few thoughts pop into my mind:

We are well on our way to becoming a web-synergistic culture. For instance, in the last week I have found myself on more than one occasion responding to a tweet by sending that person a text. Or vice versa. Someone might email me and I respond with a direct message. Or a quick text. Or I might just do it the old fashioned way and go see them. Point being, the media we use to communicate are beginning to overlap with one another.
After taking a look at my Google Dashboard, I became slightly alarmed at just how much information Google knows about me. What do they know about you? What will we do if Google ever decides to start charging for their services? At what point does technology become “too big to fail”?
Twitter is here to stay. Words like “tweet,” “DM,” “hashtag,” will become a part of the cultural fabric and the “at sign” will become the most famous punctuation mark ever.
The growth of Facebook is staggering. I hesitate only a little in saying this, but it’s not going anywhere either. Facebook, in my opinion, is not the next MySpace.

One of the primary reasons I believe the Internet has flourished in the way that it has is because people want to be connected–to information and to each other. Community is a meta-theme of the Internet. Keep that in mind.

Do these stats surprise you? Confuse you? Scare you? What do you think are some implications of Harvard Business’s findings?

HT: Jeremy Anderberg for the research

Tags: blog, Blogging, internet, readwriteweb, web, web culture
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How One Blogger Changed the World

Tuesday, November 10th, 2009

Jon Acuff just changed the world. And he did it with little more than an idea and a blog.

18. Keep that number in the forefront of your mind. Why? Not only does it signify the amount of hours it took Jon and the Stuff Christians Like (SCL) community to raise $30,000 for a kindergarten in Vietnam, it’s also the new number for change.

“18″ means that you, yes you, can change the world around you.
“18″ means that you no longer have to wait for a church or business or ministry to effect change–all you need is a blog.
“18″ means that people want to give their lives to something bigger than themselves.

$30,000 in 18 hours. That is astounding. Can you imagine how long that would have taken in the “real world”?

Committees would need to sign off on the idea.
Campaigns would need to be planned.
Brochures would need to be printed.
Announcements would need to be made.
Staff would need to be assigned to the project.

I’m not suggesting that giving campaigns like this are a bad thing, but what if Jon Acuff has found a better thing? What if he’s discovered a way to better utilize the time, talents and offerings of faithful Jesus followers in order to better effect change? To better build God’s Kingdom here on earth as it is in heaven? You can clearly sense his heartfelt conviction, joy, and amazement as this project progressed. Track the journey of this epic idea from start, to middle, to finish.

And people wonder if online community is “real”. You’d be hard-pressed to find another community that could raise this amount of money in such a short time–online, offline or anywhere in between. The question now becomes, “online community is real so what are we going to do with it?”

Congratulations, Jon. Congrats for acting on your convictions and utilizing technology to shepherd the flock that God has given you. Congrats for being faithful and opening an avenue for bloggers everywhere. You’ve changed the game. All this from goofy blog that pokes a little fun at stuff Christians like. Amazing.

Tags: blog, blogger, Blogging, change, jon acuff, scl, stuff christians like
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Are Preachers Ready to Sit on the Hotseat?

Friday, November 6th, 2009

My jaw dropped after I read this. From Mashable:

Students at Purdue University are experimenting with a new application developed at the school called Hotseat that integrates Facebook, Twitter, and text messaging to help students “backchannel” during class … Hotseat is used to allow students to comment on the class as it proceeds, with everyone in the class including the professor able to see the messaging as it happens.

Right now it’s only being pilot tested in two courses, but has already become a fast favorite for both teachers and students. Professor Sugato Chakravarty, whose personal finance course is one of the pilot tests, said, “I’m seeing students interact more with the course and ask relevant questions.”

This is brilliant. And inevitable. The leadership at Purdue is onto something. They see that these social media channels are the preferred methods of communication for college students. Instead of trying to block Facebook or Twitter, they’ve embraced that this is as much a part of a student’s life as homework and pizza. “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” as the saying goes. It’s educational judo.

If commerce, communication and education–basic building blocks of our society–are being shaped and influenced by the web, what makes us think our faith lives should be exempt from this? They won’t (and shouldn’t) be, unless you’re Amish. In that case, you won’t even be reading this.

If we’re smart, we’ll learn from what Purdue is up to and find ways to bring this dialogical approach to our teaching and preaching. The Hotseat (or something like it) would allow congregations to break down the “fourth wall” and provide an avenue for real-time discussion on what is being preached. Questions, concerns, clarifications–all could be addressed in real-time amongst people who are having a shared experience. Brilliant.

What do you think? Could your pastor sit on the hotseat?

Tags: digital, Digital Pastor, hotseat, mashable
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