Why I hate facebook or what social media shall we use today?

By Peter Fleck at MN Extension Service

Beth Kanter is attending this session...

My note: My blogging is a bit handicapped as I just gave myself the mother of all paper cuts on a fairly thick manilla folder. Ouch!

Social Network (Dana Boyd) (I've heard of her... great article about MySpace/Facebook dichotomy):

• Construct a public or semi-public within a bounded system.
• Atriculate a list of other users with whom you share a connection.
• View and traverse your list of connections and those made by others within the system.

Cool, but specifically, what can you do?

• Find long-lost high school friends.
• Make new friends.
• Find work.
• Collaborate.
• Market. Have to be careful, though... if you're blatantly marketing, ppl would chew you out.
  
• Connect by sharing. Sharing a part of yourself in the network. Might be what you're interested in.

Some work cultures are not social media friendly. (How can you tell, though? --e)

Can find support from folks doing the same kind of work.

How private and sensitive is your data?
Issues in small towns: people know alot about you!

Facebook
60,000,000 "active users" (what is an active user?)

Peter's problems with FB:
* Invites: so many aps ask you to spam your friends.
* FB interface is kind of clunky and nonintuitive; not a web interface. (My note: I think it's much better than MySpace.)
* FB "feels slow" (I wonder how so?)
* Irritating applications (e.g. "vampires", "zombies" aps) (My note: I agree! That stupid FunWall spam--telling me messages sent to other friends--so annoying!)
* Spam: friends using aps can be used in ads, as if they are recommending that program (also annoying)

FB doesn't share well--it's a silo.

Ning.
Create your own social community.
Fundraising.com

Google
Share maps
Share docs
Map out buildings of campus for other folks to use
Google Streetview (very cool--get 360 view of a point on the street)

Google OpenSocial -- work at MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.
* Apache 2.0 license. Owned by Open Social.org, open source.
* NYT, Nike, PayPal, others that use this standard.
* FB considering it.

Twitter
* Officially about 1 1/2 years old. Answer question: what are you doing? Or answer question: what are you paying attention to at the moment?
* What's really amazing: can access it through multiple systems (e.g. IM, widgets, Twirl, texting from cell phone, etc.)
* Can follow like-minded people.
* Can direct message folks without others reading it. However, replies don't in themselves give context... context is timeframe in which you tweet, or you give context of reply.
* Status reports. Doesn't have to be open to the world.
* Aggregate and publish links from many posts.
* Announce blog posts and podcasts.