As my Facebook friends and Twitter followers know, like many others I’m angry at Facebook. I haven’t written a blog post about it because so many others have been making most of my points so eloquently (forgive me for not linking to them). But I relent, and here it is anyway, in the form of responses to the criticisms of criticism that I keep hearing:

(1) Twitter’s public, where’s the rage against Twitter?

Here’s the difference, and it’s a big one: When I signed up for Twitter, like everyone else who signed up for a public Twitter account, I knew it was public. There was an easy box to click: private or public? It said right there that if I chose private my tweets wouldn’t appear in the public timeline. Now there may be some users who didn’t infer that if they picked public, their tweets would appear in that timeline, but Twitter was always above board from the start that a public twitter account meant decontextualized public display and searchability of your tweets. That has never changed. Some whom I really respect are upset with the Library of Congress archiving tweets, but I view the Library of Congress as a very different entity from the unknown agencies to whom Facebook sells our data and don’t think a tit-for-tat comparison makes sense.

When I signed up for Facebook in early 2006, it boasted of its strong privacy, of my ability to control who saw what. I used it as a place to share things I didn’t want publicly searchable. Now I’ve been teaching about the internet long enough to know not to post things anywhere that I don’t want in the newspaper, but it nonetheless felt like a safe place to target messages toward a known audience rather than the hundreds of strangers who follow me on Twitter.

And then they changed the rules. Regularly. Repeatedly. And every time they did it required more research to understand what they’d done and more unclicking to preserve the premises they’d offered when I signed up. I was President of The Association of Internet Researchers, I read articles about Facebook every day, I check my settings regularly, and I still can’t keep up and I still get confused.

Facebook has engaged in a bait and switch. They promised privacy, they encouraged us to invest our data in it and build connections on that premise, and then, when we had built networks that really mattered to us, they changed the rules. Which brings me to…

(2) If you think it’s so evil, just leave.

Don’t think I don’t think about it. Every day. I look with admiration and envy on my friends who have left. I’ve also watched sadly as several have returned. And I note above all that very few of my friends, who by nature of our professional connections are probably more attuned to these issues than most, have left. I don’t like supporting Facebook at all. But I do.

And here is why: they provide a platform through which I gain real value. I actually like the people I went to school with. I know that even if I write down all their email addresses, we are not going to stay in touch and recapture the recreated community we’ve built on Facebook. I like my colleagues who work elsewhere, and I know that we have mailing lists and Twitter, but I also know that without Facebook I won’t be in touch with their daily lives as I’ve been these last few years. I like the people I’ve met briefly or hope I’ll meet soon, and I know that Facebook remains our best way to keep in touch without the effort we would probably not take of engaging in sustained one-to-one communication.

I know that I don’t NEED these little interactions but I also know that I like them very much and that my daily life would be less fun without them. The rewards of Facebook are concrete and immediate. The costs are abstract and ideological. When I try to balance the two, the rewards win, but that is because of my friends and despite Facebook. It is not evidence that Facebook is acting appropriately. Telling people with complaints to leave ignores the very real value of the networks they have built and what should be their right to continue those networks on the grounds on which they were built.

(3) Facebook needs to make money.

I agree. Facebook should make money. But I have yet to hear a convincing case that their strategy of itemizing every bit of data we give them, repackaging it into groups of people into that thing or into profiles they can sell for advertising purposes is the best way to do this. I haven’t heard compelling arguments that it is the only way to do this. What I hear is “Facebook needs to make money. Facebook thinks they can make money this way. Ergo, this is the way Facebook can make money.” You know, I’d gladly pay a subscriber fee to opt out of being data mined, though I wouldn’t propose it as a sole solution since it would mean privacy is only for people who can afford it. It is sad that such creative minds can only think of one business model. Where’s the innovation?

(4) If you don’t want it shared, don’t share it.

Setting aside the assumptions of privilege that this claim entails (like the legitimate safety of marginalized and oppressed people who should have a right to affiliate though social networking sites without fear of being identified as dissidents, GLBT, etc), ‘if you don’t want to share it, don’t post it’ completely misses the point. The willingness to disclose all our data to marketers should not be required to socialize. Imagine if AT&T said “we’re going to track all your calls and all your networks and we’re going to store keywords you mention and personal connections in your profile we’ll sell to others so we can insert ads before and after your phone calls. And if your friend calls from another carrier, we’ll share that data with their carrier too.” People would be mortified, legislators would snap to attention, and most users would probably switch carriers. But there is no other Facebook. We can’t switch carriers. We can only give up what we have now and go back to what we had before. You might say, “but you pay for AT&T” which brings me back to #3: Paying for Facebook with money is not an option.

So for now I’ve decided I am better off fighting the system from within. I AdBlock the ads, I have removed almost all my connections. My info is nearly empty. My settings are as locked down as I can figure out how to make them. Like many of my friends, my contributions to the site are increasingly pithy. Most of my posts these days serve to inform my friends who are not obsessed with the ethics of Facebook about what bad behaviors they’re up to this week. Using Facebook with the rules I signed on for makes me a subversive user. That’s wrong.

What I want is a Facebook that is premised on a belief that first and foremost human relationships are valuable and sacred, not the ground on which money trees grow, but that if the value of relationships is genuinely nurtured, there will be ways to earn money.

I want a Facebook that really believes that people have a right to select how their information will be shared, instead of a belief that they’re too dumb to figure it out if the settings are too confusing so it’s okay to dupe them.

I want a Facebook that can find creative ways to make a profit using the rules they originally set for their own game.

I want an ethical Facebook.

That shouldn’t be too much to ask.

Update: You can hear me discuss this more on WNYC’s The Brian Lehrer Show. There’s a stream, an mp3, a discussion, and more.

Note: This is closed for comments and trackbacks on account of spam deluges. If you want to post a real comment, please email it to me.

I’ve been continuing to analyze the data I collected about friendships on Last.fm. Last week I presented a paper at Internet Research 10.0 in Milwaukee co-authored with Kiley Larson, Andrew Ledbetter, Michelle McCudden and Ryan Milner in which we combined quantitative analysis of motivations people had for friending with qualitative answers to questions about what they get out of friending. We then did a cluster analysis which led us to identify 6 types of friendships on the site. Axel Bruns did a wonderful job of live blogging the presentation and I hope he won’t mind my just quoting from his summary:

Nancy suggests that there are six types of friends: people who met on last.fm, divided into linkers, music explorers, and last.fm socialisers; people who met online, but not on last.fm (online socialisers); and local socialisers and local music socialisers.

Linkers have a static connection, very little communication, feel that it would have been rude not to friend, have the most recent friendships, and a low relational development; music explorers connect only because of the music, and have moderate last.fm and little off-site communication, they share musical tastes and histories, as well as other similarities, have the oldest friendship partners and low relational development; last.fm socialisers enjoy the site as a social space, do the most communication through it, met somewhere on the site, are interested but may not share one another’s musical taste, talk about music as well as other things, appreciate their differences, tend to be international and same-sex; online socialisers already knew one another from somewhere else online, and may also have met face-to-face, communicate a lot online but not through the site; local socialisers with high levels of face-to-face, phone, and online communication, but not through the site, observing one another’s listening and appreciate the sense of connection but don’t talk much about music, they have a moderately high relational development; and local music socialisers, who have the highest relational development, with high communication through all media,even moderately through the site, with music as a motivation for friending and an observation of each other’s listening patterns.

You can download my PowerPoints from the talk here.

I’ll also add that Axel blogged many other talks given at the conference, and point you to his complete event liveblog.

In a  post that appeared remarkably soon after my last post in which I noted that I am easier to find on Twitter than on Online Fandom these days, Rob Walker of Murketing and Buying In fame, expressed “Nostalgia for Blogs” and lamented:

I checked the Twitter feed and it was, of course, far less substantial than the blog had been. In fact I didn’t seen a single tweet of interest, whereas this person’s earlier blog posts had been, with some regularity, worth a look. If I don’t “follow” this person, I miss the possibility of some future interesting tweet — at least a link I would have missed, something.On the other hand, if I do follow, I clearly have to wade through a bunch of garbage. The signal-to-noise ratio will clearly be way worse than it had been on the now-dying blog. I’m interested in this person’s thinking — but I’m not that interested.

I wouldn’t want to presume he’s talking about me*, but either way, I’ve got some thoughts.

I agree with him that blogs are (sometimes) more substantial and I think reports of the death of blogs due to Twitter and Facebook are wrong. For me blogging has been a great way to collect and share thoughts on a particular issue, to collect ideas for future longer projects, and to create a public persona as an expert with something to say about the topics I know a lot about. I like to think the blog has been useful to people I wouldn’t otherwise get to communicate with. I’ve come into contact with many people, especially those on the ground addressing the issues I write about here, through this blog. Blogging has been and I hope it will continue to be great. It also takes a lot of time to get a post to what I want it to be before I post it.

But that said, I think Walker’s characterization misses the point on a few scores.

1) Twitter isn’t a substitute for blogging. Some people may choose to Twitter instead of blogging, but I wouldn’t assume that anyone has that kind of either/or relationship. A tweet is not meant to accomplish what a blog post is meant to accomplish. Neither’s killing the other, they aren’t in competition anymore than, oh, say writing books vs. writing a blog.

2) People like Twitterers’ minutia. In my case, though we’re not talking big numbers either way, more people follow me on Twitter than subscribe to this blog. One man’s garbage is another’s treasure, or entertainment, I guess. People — even smart thoughtful ones — actually LIKE the mix of links, random thoughts, and bits of daily life. They LIKE watching the person, not the topic. I know I do. I find Twitterers who stick to posts about their one professional interest boring. Other people love them, and more power to them. I don’t. IMHO, that’s what blogs are for. If you come to Twitter looking for ideas about a topic, you’re better off watching Twitter trends and searching keywords than following individuals; Twitter usually offers great topical coverage only in the aggregate.

3) Looking at a Twitter feed or profile isn’t the same as following someone on Twitter. People who don’t actually use Twitter think that you have to read all the tweets that are directed specifically @someoneelse.  If you follow from within a Twitter account, there’s a setting so you don’t have to watch that banter unless it’s between people you also follow. That changes the signal/noise ratio  a lot. Yes, there will still be tweets you don’t care about, but let’s be honest, can you name a single blogger who posts only posts you find interesting? I sure can’t.

4) Twitter is about banter. That banter is the best part. I’ve written this blog for a few years and I’ve talked to lots of bloggers. Getting people to post comments is hard. Getting conversation going is harder. The majority of things I write here get no response at all. On Twitter I don’t get responses to everything I say, but I sure get a lot more fast feedback than I do here. It’s also a lot easier to make a quick response to someone else — much more so than commenting on a blog post, especially if, like me, you read your blogs through an RSS reader. That back and forth makes me want to keep participating in Twitter. In comparison, blogging feels like a solitary endevour.

5) Twitter is temporal and cumulative. I made this mistake myself; it’s not until some time after you’ve decided to take Twitter seriously and made it part of the ritual of daily life that you really get it. If you check out someone’s feed, you can get a sense of whether they’re interesting to you, but it’s not until you live with someone’s tweets day in and day out that you know whether the rhythms and content of their messages are going to be rewarding or not. It’s not like a blog where you can read all the archives and get pretty much the full effect. On Twitter, it’s what happens interactively amongst the twitterers over the long haul in real time that makes it interesting.

6) Twitter is a great site for language play. The 140 character limit is a fun challenge for wordsmiths, and those who do it well are joys to read. As a genre, insamuch as it is a genre, the language of Twitter is just way more fun than the language of blogs.

7) Ugh. Can we just quit judging every new mode of communication that comes along and finding it wanting in comparison to the last one? Haven’t we been doing that for millenia? Don’t we always look back later and feel kind of silly?

Don’t like Twitter? Don’t use it! Disappointed someone’s blogging less? Encourage them to keep on blogging by letting them know how much you appreciate the volunteer work they do through blogging. But don’t be disappointed because people don’t twitter how you want them to blog. That just doesn’t make sense.

* Update 03/09/09: Rob has assured me since this was posted that he wasn’t.

Last week I attended the Association of Internet Researchers’ 9th annual conference, this time in Copenhagen Denmark. One of the things I did there was participate in a roundtable about social networking research called Life On the Move put together by Daniel Skog (Umeå University, Sweden) and Lewis Goodings (Loughborough University, UK). The other panelists included Malene Charlotte Larsen (Aalborg University, Denmark), Raquel Recuero (Catholic University of Pelotas, Brazil), Jan Schmidt (Hans Bredow Institute for Media Research, Germany) and Amanda Lenhart (Pew Project on the Internet and American Life, US).

We look at a diverse range of sites in different countries, including LunarStorm in Sweden, Brazilian use of Orkut, Danish youth on Arto.dk and more, as well as taking broad perspectives such as Amanda’s work with Pew that starts with users rather than sites. Despite this, we found ourselves agreeing on many many points, particularly the need to acknowledge that people move amongst many different sites both online and off (I was intrigued by Malene’s point that people spraypaint their Arto usernames on subway walls). The discussion with the many people in attendance was very high quality.

Thies Willem Böttcher was kind enough to record the session and an (85MB) mp3 is available here.

Many thanks to Daniel and Lewis for getting us together, and I hope those who were there found it helpful and that those who weren’t will enjoy the audio.

One of the big questions raised by social networking sites is what the heck those “friendships” really are. In this paper, written with my former Ph.D. student and now Ohio University professor Andrew Ledbetter, we examine this in the case of Last.fm. Based on a large survey of users, we pose the question of what predicts how strong or well developed Last.fm friendships are.

The short answer is that the best predictor is not shared taste in music (which has no effect on relational development), but how many different ways people communicate with one another. For each medium added, people’s relationships are a little closer. This means that sites like Last.fm can provide pairs with an additional way to maintain and strengthen their relationship that goes over and beyond what they get through email, instant messaging, phone calls and other means of interaction.

On the other hand, the “friendships” that begin via Last.fm don’t go very far, even if shared taste was important to the relationship’s initiation.

Overall, the “friendships” on Last.fm are pretty weak. The notion that shared taste makes people “musical soulmates” makes for good mythology, it seems, but not strong interpersonal connections.

You can download and read the paper here. For reasons I don’t understand, the tables did not get included in this PDF. If you really want to see them, email me.

If you’re in Copenhagen this week for Internet Research 9.0, drop on by and hear this presented live in person.