Facebook Trusted Contacts & Mother's Day Notification

A couple of weeks ago, Facebook rolled out a feature called Facebook 'Trusted Contacts'.  Instead of relying on security questions and two factor authentication, Facebook is saying that they can solve the problem by using social graph.  Facebook is thinking that our identities can be verified easier by sharing the secret codes with our Facebook friends.  They can forward the codes to us, and we can enter them to regain access to our Facebook account.

A neat idea on the paper.  I like the idea of password-less login.  But asking them to send me a secret code that they received just so that I didn't choose to pick my security question or enter mobile phone number?  For me, the pain of bothering someone to solve my forgotten password problem is greater than regaining access to my Facebook account.

What about this push notification that I received from Facebook Pages yesterday?

Push notification that I got from Facebook Pages yesterday.
Sorry, Facebook.  My mom got a phone call from me instead.

Thoughts on social network and its API

I have been thinking about what API meant for social networks.  Social in nutshell is about identities, sharing content and engaging with readers in two way conversation.  It made existing blogging concept easier to adopt and more accessible to millions of users.  While popularizing publishing and subscription model with social relationships, social found new exciting applications like user-reported breaking news network, 1-1 messaging networks, and photo and video sharing services.

Blogging platforms were available well before social networks.  But it took Facebook and Twitter for content publishing and subscription model to really take off.  People saw what they can do by easily sharing updates with friends and families.  Technology (publishing and subscription) disappeared in the background and the user benefit (staying connected with friends and families) emerged.

Social API on the other hand is all about allowing developers to integrate social network identities and social graphs stored in each social networking service.  Social API is there to allow other applications to incorporate what social network has done to blogging platform.  Social API made it for social applications easy to use identities, share information and get engagements from people around us.

It allowed many applications to introduce social component by plugging into social network APIs.  What could have been a run-of-the-mill word puzzle turned into real-time family room board game that could be played across cyberspace.  Flower shop applications knew before I did that my mother's birthday is coming up and reminded me to send her bouquet.  Social API instantly allowed developers to run their applications in context of user's own social graph.  These applications in turn provided richer environment for the social network and its users.

Facebook Home and privacy concerns

Facebook announced Facebook Home application yesterday, and there have been discussions around what this means to Facebook users.  Om Malik wrote about how Facebook Home will be used to track user information without their consent.  Robert Scoble responded with how benefits will outweigh the loss of privacy, asking privacy-concerned users to get used to being constantly tracked.  After reading these articles, it made me think about what it all means to me the user.

Privacy concern is real.  We are all being tracked, and it is only going to increase.  At least both Malik and Scoble agree with that trend.  With proliferation of connected mobile devices with camera, GPS and dozen other sensors, we are generating more data than ever before.  And the trend is accelerating.

I don't think anyone fully realizes what it means.  That's because we never lived in a world where most of everything that we do are tracked, aggregated and analyzed.

Transitioning from email to collaboration platform

Transitioning from email to collaboration platform is a difficult problem.  Technology of deploying collaboration platform is easy.  What is difficult is getting people off from email and have them start using collaboration platform to start realizing the benefits of shared virtual group page.

As I wrote earlier in my blog post, I have been thinking about this problem for a while.  This week, I've decided to look into a simple module that would make this transition easier.

Minimal Viable Product is a simple one.  As an email user and collaboration early adopter, I want to start posting emails with long To and CC list to an internal collaboration system.  The system will keep track of single master copy of the email thread and recreate the thread by timestamp.  That's it.

Support "Right to Know" Act

California law makers introduced a legislation that would allow consumers to get their personal data from companies and whom they shared the personal data with.  Right to Know Act (AB 1291) will require Googles and Facebooks in the world to disclose their Californian's personal data that they store, and notify their users before or after the data is shared with third parties.

If you've paid attention to all the privacy disclosure forms that you get from credit card companies, you know that privacy disclosure is already mandated for financial industries.  What EFF and ACLU of Northern California are trying to do is to expand this to cover digital personal data stored by online software giants like Google and Facebook.  You can read more about the Right to Know Act on EFF blog or take a look at the Assembly Bill 1291 in PDF format.

Twitter Cards with link to mobile app

Twitter had a developer meetup and announced upcoming Twitter Cards.  The concept of Twitter Cards have not changed much.  It allowed third party developers to embed their rich content, such as summary of content, photo or video clip as part of the expanded tweet.  But what's new was the link to mobile app where viewers can download the mobile app.

new @twitter card types: #Summary #Image #Player twitter.com/davemcclure/st…
— Dave McClure (@davemcclure) April 3, 2013

This means as tweets get passed around, so does the link to the original app through which the content was shared.  Just like Facebook users clicked on click to play FarmVille link, Twitter third party developers can use Twitter to spread their adoption and maintain active user base.

Twitter has all grown up.  It has come full circle and realized that it now has to compete with Facebook to compete for mobile user's eyeball time.  As its final act to demonstrate that it's now fully claiming itself as its own social network, Twitter wants to be a social network that is friendly to app developers again.

Facebook becoming more like Twitter in a bad way

WSJ had an article today discussing how Facebook is revoking its API access to applications that compete with Facebook's core functionality.  Facebook is making lot of ifs-and-buts about what third party apps are getting blacklisted.  Twitter's Vine, MessageMe and several others have been officially banned from using Facebook social graph.

It's not so surprising that Facebook is doing this.  After all, Facebook has a long history of not letting its competitors access their users' social graph.  It started with Google's potable data policy.  While Facebook accepted import of Google contacts, Facebook did not allow its content to be shared with any other network in an easy way.

Now that Facebook is staking out its ground against Twitter and many mobile applications, it makes sense for Facebook not to share its treasure trove of 1 billion users' social graph for their short-term gain.  In that way, Facebook is becoming more like Twitter.  Becoming more and more unpredictable and unwelcoming platform for third party developers to invest their time to build useful applications.

What does "social" mean to you?

Recently I was asked to think about a question.  What does "social" mean to you?

This gave me a pause.  I have been talking about what it means to enterprises and companies.  But I don't think I sat down to think about social media means to individual users.  Especially what it means to me.

After thinking about it for a while, here's what it means to me:

What happens to social media data after you die?

I was listening to NPR, and they were talking about data stored in social media accounts: What happens to your data in your social media accounts once you die?  It sounds like a morbid question to be asking until we remind ourselves that Facebook has +1 billion users.

"It's estimated that three Facebook users die every minute. Those accounts used to be deleted, but now the company offers the option to memorialize those pages..."
- 3/11 NPR News Hours

It pauses an interesting question.  Who is the rightful owner of the data?  Can friends and relative get access to the data once you're gone?  What should you be doing to keep track of online digital records?

Facebook announced updated news feed

Facebook unveiled updated news feed design.  Bigger photos, more white spaces and streamlined navigation icons on the left were main points of news feed redesign.  When looking at the newly redesigned Facebook news feed, I couldn't help but think of Google+.  Already users are making comments about Facebook taking design cues from Google+ news feed.

Google+ on the left; Facebook on the right.
Hi-res photographers wanted.
Source: http://mashable.com/2013/03/07/facebook-google-plus/

Clearly Facebook wants to become a more multimedia friendly social network.  Larger hi-res photos and videos provide more emotionally engaging experience to the users.  I have to think that they have picked up some design cues from the photo-first social network, Google+.

Twitter is retiring TweetDeck mobile

TweetDeck iPhone and Android app are going away.  If you have been following Twitter, they have been making series of changes.  They are replacing Twitter API 1.0 with API 1.1 to put tighter control on API rate limit.  They stopped their support for posting tweets to Facebook.  Speaking of end of Facebook support, TweetDeck will no longer be supporting posting to Facebook either.  (Facebook still continues to support posting from Facebook status update to Twitter.)

Au revoir, TweetDeck.
Interesting that the last update was support of Instagram,
the network that could have been Twitter's.

What do all these mean to Twitter users?

Location-based social network

Two weeks in a row I have been on a plane heading out to customer site.  Whenever I get on a plane, I check for wifi connectivity from my iPad.  More airlines are starting to offer wifi connections, yet I have not seen any one offering for free.

I have grown so used to having internet connection wherever I go.  When I open my iPad, I assume there will be some connection available somehow.  It has become a habit of mine.

Same happened today.  I opened my iPad, tapped on Settings and went to check what wifi connections were available.  It was showing SouthwestWiFi.  Neat.  When I tried connecting, browser redirected me to the Southwest landing page.  Not a surprise.  Reading the fine prints, I found out that internet connection was sold for $8 per flight, and only available for free to A-list passengers (Southwest frequent flyer club).

Andrew Mason's farewell to Groupon

Andrew Mason has been fired.  He posted a very candid farewell letter publicly anticipating that the letter will be leaked to public anyway.  You can read the letter here.

I have only watched the his interview on Charlie Rose, and seen his talks, so I don't know how he has been in the office.  But the farewell letter really spoke to me as his genuine message.  The way he shared his disappointment was well handled and I think it offers a few lessons that we can all learn from.

Benefits of face-to-face communication

I practically live on the phone.  I get on the phone to talk to development team in India.  I get on the phone to speak to sales engineering team all over the world.  I get on the phone to talk to customers and support team.  Thanks to desktop sharing apps like WebEx and Microsoft OCS, I get to share documents, do awkward whiteboard drawing using my trackball, and get to see the feature requests or bugs directly as it happens on customer environment.

I cannot imagine working without a phone line and desktop sharing application.

But whenever I get to visit a customer, a sales person, a support engineer or anyone in person, I realize how much signal I am missing from just muffled VoIP audios.  It's like one of those moments when you don't realize what you are missing until you actually try it.  All of sudden you are noticing details that you did not notice from voice calls.  The information bandwidth is qualitatively different with a in-person meeting.

Google+ Sign-In

Google announced its single-sign-on service support, Google+ Sign-In.  It's a simple idea.  Just like OpenID and Facebook Connect, Google wants to be the identity platform where many applications can manage their user accounts.  This means the following:

• Application developers don't have to worry about creating a registration page or losing passwords.
• Google gets to learn about all user's online identities, and can learn more about where we have accounts and when user signs on.
• Users don't have to go through sign-up process with new service, and remember just a Google password to access all applications.

Each party gets something in return.  But are they of equivalent value?

It depends on how much you as the user value your online profile and privacy.  

App.net is going freemium

It's happening.  Pay-to-play App.net is going freemium.  In case you haven't been following, App.net is the  crowd-funded subscription based social network that started last year.  Having been inspired by the ideal of creating a social network where it actually caters for the users, I joined the network.

I must admit that I haven't been active on the network since joining.  I have test drove the UI and downloaded an app on my phone, but I failed to incorporate the new network into my daily social networking routine.

For a casual user like me, it's all about automating the posting to a point where I don't have to think about posting.  When I write a blog entry, it gets automatically posted to Facebook and Twitter.  When Twitter allowed posting to LinkedIn, LinkedIn was also another network where I would post blog updates, but we all know what happened with the LinkedIn-Twitter relationship.

Social media security

In the past week, Burger King and Jeep had their Twitter accounts hacked.  It looked pretty silly to lose control over their official Twitter handle.  Seeing some prankster's tweets on their timeline gave us something to talk about.  But in the end, it's something that could have happened to anyone.

We all know the right thing to do to avoid getting our accounts hacked.  Randomize our password, change our password a few times a year, and don't use the same password for multiple sites.  These are all well known best practices.  But who proactively changes the passwords without being prompted by the site?  Even when we are forced to change our password, we often have trouble coming up with a difficult-to-guess password because we all have too many passwords to remember already.

Posterous to Posthaven

Posterous is shutting down.  After a year of acquisition by Twitter, it announced that it will be shutting its door on April 30th.  For those of you who haven't been using Posterous, it's a free blog site that competes with Tumblr for ease of setup and use.  I should now say, it used to compete.  It's clear now that Tumblr has won the battle.

Posterous is shutting down.
That's my excuse for posting this notice on Tumblr...
Source: http://itsbrokenfixit.tumblr.com

Someone else's opinion about Quora

Since I wrote about Quora pivoting to blogging platform, my good friend forwarded me a link to a long opinion piece on Quora.  It was quite long, and since most of you, I figured don't care enough to read the entire article, I thought I would share a quick outline.

Basically the writer is making three points against Quora for the following reasons:


1. Quora moderators are not doing the right job to promote greater participation from wide range of contributors because they are often more interested in being politically correct than allowing open discussion to take place.

2. Anonymous contribution is perceived as less valuable than ones with author info.

3. Q&As are not available for everyone to view without logging in to Quora.

4. Quora caters to a handful of user categories and alienates the rest of users, hence suffers from lack of diverse viewpoints.

Time spent on Facebook is on its way down

Pew Research released its survey results of 316 Facebook users asking whether they have taken a break from using the site.  About 61% of all Facebook users took several weeks off from actively using Facebook in the past, indicating that their Facebook activities are on the way down.

There were many reasons.  Most frequently cited reasons were not finding time to be on Facebook (21%), not interested in using the site (10%) and irrelevant content (10%).

Source: http://pewinternet.org

Pew also reported the usage slowing down the most significantly among younger users (18-29 of age) than older populations.

Source: http://pewinternet.org

Pew Research's survey results match Garry Tan's quick poll showing wide range of social network adoption among younger users and Josh Miller's personal observation of tenth graders picking up new social networks as early adopters.  Younger users have been moving away from Facebook and looking for easier more mobile-friendly social networks like Tumblr, Instagram and Snapchat.