Uncategorized

Fragmented Discourse

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Thinking back to how plans were made before cell phones (the regular “dumb” kind), I’m often surprised that today’s technology actually makes the process feel more cumbersome and drawn out.  Plans used to be simple:

  1. Make plan.
  2. Call friend(s) and invite. (Remember the phone tree?)
  3. Discuss and confirm details over phone.
  4. Show up when you’re supposed to.  

One continuous stream of communication from phone to person.  No other options existed.  Occasionally email might have been used to make plans, but most likely things happened over the phone.  And more often than not, people kept plans because there was no way to reach your friend to cancel last minute.

Now it seems that making plans with people often requires multiple:

  • interactions &
  • modes of communication

Here’s one of the processes I go through to make plans:

  1. Make plan.
  2. Text or email friend(s) and invite.
  3. Wait for responses (response time varies from instant to a few days).
  4. Respond via text or email or calling.
  5. Repeat previous two steps a few times.
  6. Confirm via text or email or calling – at this point the mode might change, if it hasn’t already. Sometimes if the friend I’m texting doesn’t have a smartphone, then details may need to be emailed.  
  7. Show up when you’re supposed to.
  8. Wait for texts, emails, tweets or other form of communication from friend about how late s/he is going to be.

The chain of communication from initiation to delivery feels fragmented because it’s happened over a span of time and through multiple modes of communication.  It might seem like my issue is with step 8, but in actuality my complaints are with steps 1-6.  It’s almost like there are too many options available to communicate and that’s what ends up making things complicated.

What’s your preferred mode of communication when making plans with friends?  Cast your vote in this week’s poll.

Deletion

Deleting Accounts

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I have too many accounts.  I feel like every time I’m on my laptop or a mobile device, I’m constantly having to login to something.  Or reset a password.  I find it hard to remember:

  • all logins/passwords
  • the existence of the account, especially those infrequently accessed
  • where I’m leaving behind bits of information about myself

It seems pretty common to create an account for just about everything on the internet, mostly so that user habits can be monitored, tracked and analyzed.  Or so that a history of activities is recorded and made available at a future time.  Many of these accounts I create for a one-time use and then forget about them.

I decided I wanted to have more control over my accounts and to eliminate as many of them as possible.  The first step was listing all the accounts I could remember.  To date I have compiled a list of 50 accounts, which seems to keep growing.  And this doesn’t include all the one-off accounts that I’ve created and promptly forgotten about.  Accounts are for things like:

  • Financial services (banking, savings)
  • Buying/selling things (Craigslist, Amazon, iTunes)
  • Collecting points (airlines)
  • Email (gmail)
  • Social Media and networking (Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook)
  • Administrative purposes (backend of this blog)

Phase II of my Account Cleanup Project will require me to identify what the accounts are for and assess whether I actually need them or not.  If they are not needed I want to delete them.  This coincides nicely with the release of a new website called justdelete.me.

justdelete.me lists popular sites and ranks how difficult it is for a user to delete an account, keeping in mind the difference between an account deactivation and a deletion.  justdelete.meeven has a chrome plugin that will rate a site with a colored dot that signifies how easy or difficult it is to delete an account.

Rating system used with Chrome to determine how easy it is to delete an account.

Rating system used with Chrome to determine how easy it is to delete an account.

Naturally I love anything that has to do with deleting stuff.  I appreciate what justdelete.me is trying to accomplish, but I’m curious about how deletions are handled from the service providers end.  Is it just the account connection that’s being deleted or does all my information go along with it?

How many accounts do you have?  How do you remember logins/passwords?  Will you be trying to delete any of your accounts?

 

 

Facebook, Social Media

Facebook Friends: A True Story

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Some of you may recall from an earlier post, Facebook Friends, that I keep my friend count under 50. Recently, I ran into a former FB friend who didn’t make the cut and had been deleted months ago.  We exchanged pleasantries and then he said something like, “I’ll be sure to send you out a notice for my next show on FB. We’re friends, right?”

um…er…an uncomfortable pause followed while my brain worked feverishly to find a tactful way to explain my “under-50 rule” without sounding like a nut.  When deleting phone or email contacts it’s easy to explain that your new phone didn’t transfer everything properly. Or your email got hacked and it affected the contacts list.  FB is synchronous, meaning if you friend somebody they friend you back automatically, so lost devices or hacking don’t really work as explanations.

Considering my options, I went with partial honesty.  I explained that if I don’t hear from somebody in a year I remove him/her as a friend.  He didn’t appear to take it personally and honestly I don’t see why he would care.  The only communication we ever had on FB was the initial friend request.  What kind of a “friend” is that?

I know that some of my readers are squeamish about deleting FB “friends” because they’re afraid of hurting the other person’s feelings.  Consequently, many of them don’t enjoy using FB, or they’ve stopped using it, because they’re not connecting with quality people.  Someone told me that he accepted his boss’s friend request and then didn’t enjoy using FB because he felt uncomfortable. What’s the point of that?

Your FB account is for you and you should cultivate FB friends the same way as in-person friends: if they don’t bring you value, get rid of them.  Unfriending is easy, way easier than in real life.  I find most “unfriended” people either don’t notice, or don’t care, because there probably wasn’t much of a connection to begin with, unless they have the Unfriend Finder.  Admittedly, the run-in was a tad awkward, but we got over it and had a pleasant conversation which was more contact than we ever had during our year of FB “friendship”.

Today’s challenge: Unfriend one FB “friend” that prevents you from enjoying your account.

 

Uncategorized

The Fault in Default

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According to Merriam Webster’s dictionary, the word default comes from de, meaning “of” or “from”, and the French verb faillir meaning “to fail”. The top definitions for default, as both a noun and a verb, all have to do with failing to do something.  The other definition refers to a selection made automatically, often in reference to a computer program.

I suppose that default settings are supposed to make life easier by assuming what the majority will prefer.  For example, Google recently released a new version of Gmail that automatically separates your email into 5 categories: Primary, Social (meaning notifications from social media sites), Promotions, Updates, and Forums.

New default categories from Google to presort your email.

New default categories from Google to presort your email.

I’m not sure if this is useful to people or not, but the point is Google gave it to me assuming that was what I wanted.  Now I have to make an effort to turn the feature off.  While I may end up liking the new system, I would have preferred to turn it on myself, or define my own categories for presorting my inbox.

I’ve noticed that a lot of devices, social media accounts, applications, etc. all start with a few basic defaults:

  1. Save everything
  2. Start with the lowest security/privacy settings – because sharing EVERYTHING is what connecting (and mining data) is about
  3. Stay logged in at ALL TIMES

This is not to say that there is no validity to the defaults, just that they’re not the ones that I prefer.  I’ve often noticed that Facebook updates often require me to adjust the privacy and security settings to ensure that I still have some!

As I log into my various accounts (social media, email, financial, etc.) throughout the day, options to:

  • remain logged in; and
  • save the password

are almost always selected automatically.  This means I need to make an additional keystroke to deselect the option.  Why can’t the option be offered without being automatically selected?  I’m certainly capable of deciding these two options for myself.

Some defaults can be changed through system settings, but others appear each time I login, regardless of settings.  I’m not qualifying default settings, I just don’t want the ones compromising my privacy and security preselected.

How do you feel about default settings?  Do you like to stay logged in and have your browser remember passwords?

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Social Media

The Social Aspect of Sharing

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Ironically enough, it seems to me that social media has turned sharing into an insular activity.  Never before can I know more about my friends, or share more with them, all by not having any direct contact.

When I was growing up, I didn’t need to search on Facebook for “music my friends liked” because I was hanging out with them and we would listen to albums together.  We shared the music, and the experience, by listening to it at the same time.

We’re all connected, all the time through social media, emails, chat, phone, our devices, the internet, etc. But are we really sharing with each other in a meaningful way?  I often see people “socializing” by standing around in a group, each one on his/her own private device.  Is talking becoming taboo because we more readily use other methods of communication?

Teenagers Reading Sms

 

It reminds me of these dance parties I used to hear about in NYC called Mobile Clubbing.  People would show up at a designated place and time to dance together, each one to the beat of his/her own tunes via personal headphones.  Is this what “e-socializing” is all about, connecting without actually having contact?

How do you share things with your loved ones?

Facebook, Social Media

Graph Search: Facebook’s Third Pillar

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I am a passive Facebook (FB) user.  I’m on it, but I don’t really have a presence.  In seven years I have:

  • posted exactly one picture to my wall
  • changed my profile picture three times
  • commented on or liked something < 30 times

Everything else on my FB page is because somebody tagged me or made a comment.  I often want to leave FB, but I participate in activities that only connect with participants through FB.

Enter FB’s latest development, Graph Search, which offers users a way to search for common interests among friends and strangers.  People are interconnected by their likes, friends, pages, and comments.  Graph Search allows users to search for these interconnected bits of information through the use of an interface designed to combine elements.

FB's Search

 

For example you can search for Friends who like:

  • a certain type of cuisine
  • a genre of music
  • a sport or hobby

So what does this mean for FB users?  For an active FB user, perhaps this could be a useful way to discover new interests or likes.  After all, we are often influenced by the opinion of our friends and peers.  FB can be a “go-to” resource to find out all kinds of useful things like peer-approved restaurants and music albums.

For users like me, who don’t really post anything, not much. Except that I need to revisit my privacy and account settings and figure out the implications of the new feature.  In general, I find FB’s settings confusing and inconsistent.  I recently checked my settings on what the public could see.  Here’s the screenshot:

FB Visibility Options

Huh?  So I can hide things on my timeline, but then they’ll appear in every other place on FB?  What’s the point?  And is this the kind of stuff that will be harvested and used by Graph Search?

 

 

On another note, users will need to be conscious of how Graph Search is working.  One user, Tom Scott, created a tumblr page entitled: Actual Facebook Graph Searches, where he mix and matches search elements such as “Married people who like Prostitutes” or “Current Employers of People who Like Racism.”

As of this moment, there is no way to opt out of the Graph Search.  Or at least I couldn’t find anything in the settings that disabled the Graph Search.  If you find something, let me know.  As a passive user, I don’t want my few “likes” being interconnected and search for in contexts that I can’t control.   Of course the easy answer is Get Off Facebook, but then how do I stay connected with my few groups that are only on FB?