SXSW 2011: Vote for MashED Up!

The presentation I co-authored with Doug, MashED Up!: Mashups and Higher Education, is up for vote in the South by Southwest PanelPicker! So, if you enjoyed the talk we gave at eduWeb and are thirsty for more or you’re attending SX and want to see how mashups intersect with education, click over to the voting booth and give us a thumbs-up.

Do you have a presentation currently up for vote? Let us know in the comments!

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MashED Up: Mashups and Higher Education

Hey, remember the spork? The bizarre utensil combining the properties of a spoon and fork? The spork is an analog mashup: a combination of two existing things into a third thing that has some of the positive attributes of its parents, but also has its own structure, pattern, and level of fragility.

The spork is a great example of a mashup because it’s simple—easy to understand, easy to parse, with a catchy name. Most mashups are more complex, and the internet has given rise to a multitude of digital mashups, combinations of APIs and content designed to leverage assets and code already written.

It’s estimated that in 2007 YouTube’s bandwidth exceeded the bandwidth of the enitre internet in 2000. The ever-growing well of content that the internet represents, in conjunction with huge media repositories like YouTube and open source APIs, isn’t just changing how we think; it’s changing how we build. And how we build is important because the structures we build end up dictating the spaces we occupy physically, mentally and socially … in the analog world, and on the internet.

In the first quarter of this year, my coworker Laurel Hechanova and I noticed that a growing number of the interesting projects we were working on, like the new branding page for Trinity College (part of larger relaunch that is not yet live) or design of a social media aggregator NMHbook were mashups.

So we spent the last few months taking a deeper dive into mashups, and the result was this presentation (download as PDF) for Eduweb 2010. We’ve taken care to curate by the mashups we felt were most compelling in higher education and beyond. While NMHbook is an mStoner project, the other examples are simply really nice projects we’ve selected so you can get an idea of what’s out there.

For easy reference, here are the examples shown in the presentation by category.

Education examples:
Savannah College of Art and Design: Connect
Northfield Mount Hermon: NMHbook
University of Maryland, Baltimore County: Be.UMBC
Towson University: Campus map

Non-education examples:
Newsmap
SeeClickFix
WeFeelFine
HandmadeSpark

We also felt it was only appropriate to create our own mashup based on the live presentation. The second half of this blog post is a combination of Expression Engine and the Twitter API. Stuff you tweet with the #mashed_up tag goes into the second half of this post automatically. You’ve got an opportunity to say something insightful–or incendiary–that becomes a part of this post and the back channel simultaneously. The blog post also gives you a chance to drive traffic to your twitter channel. We look forward to seeing how your comments become a part of the mashup.

Posted by Doug Gapinski
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On the Move

The mStoner Chicago office is moving! We are pleased to announce that as of August 9, 2010 our address will be:

mStoner, Inc.
4311 N. Ravenswood Ave.
Suite 304
Chicago, IL 60613

We love our neighborhood, though, so we’re not going very far. Seriously:

And our new office will really be a new office. The building is freshly rehabbed (ahem, it’s not done quite yet but we’re assured the necessities will be done by the time we move). For those of you who enjoy home improvement, we thought we’d share some photos.

The building is three stories and we’ll be occupying about half of the top floor. If you look closely, the sign out front reads “Bobby Moore’s Performing Elephants”. We love the sign and the landlord has agreed to move it inside to the lobby. We’ve been assured that elephants weren’t really kept in the building.

Look at all those windows! As you can see, we really were working with a blank canvas. With the help of a wonderful space planner, we’ve come up with a plan that suits our needs and keeps true to the mStoner atmosphere.

The natural woods are another great feature. When we first saw the space the wood was covered in peeling paint but now it’s back to it’s natural color and quite beautiful. Our landlord (we may be moving but we’re not changing landlords, we’ve been with Hayes Properties for about 10 years now) has done a wonderful job in keeping the vintage wood structure intact.

Overall, the new office allows for a better use of space and, most importantly, moves us far enough from the El train that it will no longer be drowning out our conference calls. We’re all pretty excited about the move:

• Voltaire is excited about the move because it puts us within walking distance of Spacca Napoli, one of the best pizza places in Chicago
  
• Jeremiah is excited about the move because he (and lots of other people) will be getting his own office
  
• Kevin & Laurel are excited because their section of the office is filled with natural light
  
• Sarah is excited because her commute will be only 7 minutes
  
• The entire group is excited because the nearby lunch options are have improved tremendously (though we’ve promised to make the .5 mile walk back to one of our favorites, Cafe 28)

We’ll keep you posted!

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Topline Results from CASE/mStoner/Slover Linett Social Media Survey

On Monday, 19 July, Cheryl Slover-Linett, managing partner of our research partner, Slover Linett Strategies, and I presented findings from research we conducted with CASE on how CASE member institutions use and manage social media. Our panel at the CASE Summit included Andrew Gossen from Cornell and Charlie Melichar, who just left Colgate University and will be joining the staff at Vanderbilt University in September.

Scott Jaschik from Inside Higher Ed attended the panel and reported on the discussion on 20 July. Cheryl and I will present a webinar about our findings for Inside Higher Ed in August and we’re working on a white paper that we’ll release in September. Stay tuned for details on both….

The research is the first survey to look at how institutions use and manage social media across the campus and within units. We emailed links to the survey to 18,000 CASE members and received 968 responses. Interestingly, the respondents reflected CASE membership demographically.

The survey represents a partnership between mStoner, Slover Linett Strategies, and CASE. We worked closely with CASE’s social media task force, which is composed of members of the organization’s three comissions (Alumni Relations, Communications and Marketing and Philanthropy).

There’s a lot of data here and some of it is surprising. But it’s a start and provides a benchmark that we’ll revisit next year. As I work with the data and review the open-ended responses, I expect to share a more nuanced perspective.

Slover Linett’s work on the study was led by senior associate Bill Hayward, a veteran institutional researcher who directs the firm’s higher education practice. “This really stemmed from many higher ed professionals asking, ‘What are my peers doing? What are the best practices out there, and how can we improve the way we run our social media?’” Hayward recalls.

“We knew that nearly all organizations use social media to some degree, but this study suggests that it’s still in a growth phase: most organizations expect to expand their social media activities. The tough news is that few plan to hire more staff to do it. So at least in the short run, administrations will be doing more with less.”

Here’s a PDF download of the topline findings from the survey.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Timing is Everything

Some folks, like my colleague Patrick DiMichele, were mystified by the reaction to the news that Facebook had suddenly revised its privacy controls, making public information that many people thought they shared with only a few people. If you post something online, don’t be surprised if it is shared, Patrick believes.

I, on the other hand, was among those who were really angry. I’ve been online since the 1990s and learned a long time ago to be circumspect with what I shared since it is so easy for anything posted online to be distributed widely. I wasn’t too concerned about personal details in my profile or wall posts being shared with others. But I was angry about the way in which Facebook breached my trust, cavalierly altering an agreement it had made with me about what I could hold back from public view.

Whatever your attitude, I believe this widely publicized incident may make many people more motivated to exercise some control over how info about them is shared. Pew research indicates that already the Facebook generation—those who adopted Facebook in college and are now among its most avid users—are more likely than older adults to “take steps to limit the amount of personal information available about them online” (44% vs. 33% of internet users between ages 30-49) and that 71% of them have changed privacy settings or deleted unwanted comments that others have made on their profiles (47%).

In short, the canard that this generation doesn’t care about privacy isn’t true: they might be more comfortable than older people in sharing information about themselves online, but they’re also more active in managing their reputations.

Takeaways—and taking action

If you maintain a proprietary network of some kind—an alumni community or another kind of social network—this is the time for you to demonstrate that you’re helping your members to protect their privacy or manage their reputations.

First, review the tools in place for allowing members to restrict or share information. Are they clear and easy to use? If not, how can you make them clearer, simpler, more straightforward? Make sure that you have a clear FAQ in place and that people can find it.

It’s also time to review your privacy policy. Make sure it’s up-to-date and outlines what you do—and don’t do—with information that people share with you. And if you don’t have a privacy policy, write one. Now.

Once you’ve reviewed and updated your policy, it’s time to remind users in your community about it. You might want to clarify their rights and responsibilities and remind them to be respectful of what other community members share. And invite them to review what they’ve shared already and to adjust their sharing settings.

At minimum, this approach shows that you’re paying attention to what’s going on in the world of the Internet. And it can reinforce the fact that your own community, unlike Facebook, takes privacy seriously and wants to allow its members to control their own privacy—and reputations. While many people many not pay attention to online privacy issues, some people care about it. Showing everyone that you take it seriously helps to reinforce your cred as a community host and manager.

It’s too early to tell about how this news will affect how people interact with Facebook and what they share (or don’t share) with each other and with you. Only time will tell. But you need to keep up on these developments and pay attention to how they affect your community.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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mStoner changes—and stays the same

Have you ever had the experience of something being simultaneously extraordinary and routine? That’s how I feel about mStoner’s recent big news. Last month we completed the acquisition of our long-time technical partner, Global Image.

This acquisition is extraordinary for us because it’s a big change in terms of mStoner’s corporate structure. In essence, our company just doubled in size. OTOH, it doesn’t seem as if anything has changed. To understand why I’m feeling so bipolar at the moment, some history might help.

I first met Rob Cima, Global Image’s (now-former!) CEO, in 1997 when GI acquired ArachNet, the company that had provided technical support on some of my first web projects. Shortly after that acquisition, ArachNet’s principals moved on to other things, leaving Rob and me to figure things out. We have worked together ever since, with his team providing software development and a variety of technical services for every web project I’ve done, either in my former practice or at mStoner.

For me, one of the interesting aspects of our partnership was that Global worked in businesses outside of education, giving me exposure to new horizons. For instance, they launched an inventory system for a startup that used PalmPilots and the web to sync orders for small retail stores: at the time, a very innovative project.

Also, GI’s work with banks, health care institutions, and other kinds of businesses brought them into contact with tools that hadn’t yet come on the radar of our .edu clients. Excited about what we were learning in these other venues, we attempted to bring some of those advancements to our clients in education. Some of these attempts didn’t stick, but, happily, our early experiments introducing content management systems hit the mark. Even though today most education websites use a content management system of some kind, a decade ago—when we built the first .edu websites using CMSs—that was unheard of.

In 2001, Rob joined Voltaire and me in founding mStoner, signing on as a partner but running Global Image as a separate business. He even financed our launch until we could bring in enough work to support ourselves (for a little while, Voltaire and I were actually Global Image employees).

As mStoner grew, our ties with Global Image became broader and deeper. More and more of Global’s work became focused on education as the needs of our clients expanded. Our companies worked together so well that some clients didn’t know we were actually two companies. Yet, over time, we realized that we could improve client service through even better coordination of processes across the two companies and even stronger collaboration between our teams. Finally, at some point, it became apparent to all of us that it just made sense to integrate mStoner and Global Image in fact, as well as operationally.

To be clear, this change isn’t really about corporate structure. Incorporating technology and software development as a core function within mStoner allows us to be more strategic and responsive in serving client needs. As a company, we’ve always emphasized that sound strategy precedes technology (or, for that matter, design or implementation of any kind). But today, great websites need sophisticated technology. We believe that our new configuration can provide that kind of integration for our clients—whether we’re building a website, an iPhone app, a marketing campaign, or something we haven’t yet dreamed up.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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NMHbook: the Award, the Trends, and the Takeaways

Congratulations!
I’m writing this post to publicly congratulate our client, Northfield Mount Hermon, for winning a Circle of Excellence Silver Award in the Best Uses of Social Media in Student Recruitment and Marketing Category from CASE this year for NMHbook. Michael Stoner wrote a longer post on judging criteria you should read if you’re interested in more information on how social media was evaluated by CASE this year.

I’m also writing this post to give a little additional context on this project: what it is, thoughts on trends, and some takeaways to keep in mind if you are considering an aggregation project.

What is NMHbook?
It’s a social media aggregator that collects feeds from multiple social media channels and displays them on a single page. At the time this page was conceived of (around March 2009), to my knowledge, no one in higher education was doing aggregation pages. I remember coming across some of the early aggregation pages (sites such as popurls.com and the previous version of netvibes.com) that collected feeds from news sites and talking to the partners about how we might apply this idea in higher education.

Aggregation was a good fit for NMH because they were already maintaining good social media content on a number of channels including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and their own Wordpress blogs. We pitched the NMHbook idea, then designed and developed it with Northfield Mount Hermon. We customized Drupal to collect decentralized social media content being maintained by NMH around the web in a single destination. The goal was to provide people interested in NMH a consolidated dashboard for quickly viewing all of the content with the option to jump off and participate in a single channel if they wanted to.

Some thoughts on aggregation trends
NMHbook was conceived of in early 2009, but in the last year and a half the idea of aggregation pages has become much more common. We partnered with Christopher Newport University to relaunch their site and a new aggregation page. We’ve have a couple of alumni-focused versions of this idea in development for a couple of clients.

Other great examples of this are popping up elsewhere. SCAD launched an absolutely killer aggregation page. Our friendly competitors at White Whale launched an aggregation page for USF.

The list is much longer, but my point is: you don’t have to look very hard to find this idea is a rapidly growing trend on the web and specifically in higher education. But the aggregator is the second part of the trend. The first part is individuals or institutions maintaining decentralized content around the web instead of only on a single institutional site. Maintaining content on multiple sites helps search engine results, allows people to find you on the platform of their choice, and (usually) allows readers to post on or respond to your content. Aggregation (the second part) is what follows: collecting these channels in as a dashboard view so that people have a consolidated source they can check on regularly.

My opinion on why NMHbook is successful:
• They keep a primary audience in mind: prospective students. Other people aren’t excluded in any way, but they keep primary audience in mind with the content.
• The aggregation page doesn’t post every comment made in these channels, only the institutional comments. This strategy corresponds to their comfort level about user contributions. This is one of the keystones of a successful social media project: understanding your own comfort level for sharing user contributions first.
• There’s new content almost every day in most of their channels except YouTube. The information is fresh and relevant, giving audiences incentive to check back regularly.
• There isn’t much overlap between channels unless it’s for events / calls to action. By handling it this way, audiences have an incentive to visit NMH on multiple channels.
• They post content to inspire discussion. The kind of post that inspires multiple responses is a complex topic, but I encourage you to check out their facebook page and see where the action is.
• The design of NMHbook follows conventions of social media: it’s simple and to the point.

Posted by Doug Gapinski
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CASE Awards of Excellence 2010: Report for Category 12, Best in Social Media

This year, CASE created a new category, Best in Social Media, in its Awards of Excellence Program. I led the judging for social media, which was held in conjunction with the judging for websites at George School in Newtown, PA, in early April. [Here’s a blog post containing results, comments, and a downloadable version of the Judges’ Report for Category 11, Websites.]

Eight of us judged the social media category. Judges represented American colleges, schools, and universities, both public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, student recruitment, social media, web technology, and marketing. Some members of the panel have considerable exposure on social media, including significant number of Twitter followers.

According to CASE,

Gold, Silver, and Bronze awards may be given in each subcategory to recognize best practices using social media within new and established programming. One overall category Grand Gold award may also be awarded for superior work. Eligible programs may come from any area of institutional advancement. Programs may be on-going or new in 2009 but must have been in place long enough to have produced well-documented results. You may also enter best uses of social media in the following categories: Alumni Relations Programs: Creative Use of Technology and New Media and Fundraising Programs: Technology Applications and Creative Use of New Media.

So there may be awards for social media coming from entries in these other categories: stay tuned.

Results

Here are the number of entries in each subcategory and the awards given:

12a. Best Uses of Social Media in Alumni Programming: 12 entries, no awards

12b. Best Uses of Social Media in Fundraising: 5 entries, one award
Silver: Children’s Hospital Trust Boston Social Media Portfolio: Facebook (English); Facebook (Spanish)]; YouTube (English); YouTube (Spanish); Twitter: @helpkids

12c. Best Uses of Social Media in Student Recruitment and Marketing: 19 entries, 2 awards
Silver: Northfield Mount Hermon School NMHBook
Bronze: Brock University Both Sides of the Brain [url=http://apps.facebook.com/
bothsidesofthebrain]Facebook Application[/url]

12d. Other Uses of Social Media: 25 entries, 3 awards
Gold: College of William and Mary Mascot Search
Gold: Oregon State University, Powered by Orange: Facebook page; Twitter: @poweredbyorange; YouTube; LinkedIn; Flickr.
Bronze: Tufts University, The Beelzebubs on NBC’s The Sing Off: news package and chat.

Comments and Trends

Social media is new enough that there aren’t a whole lot of precedents for great uses of social media. But there are some. Last year, for example, several initiatives that used social media won in various categories, including Flight of the Flyers from Nazareth College and Emory University’s Blue Pig campaign, both of which won awards. [I wrote blog posts about Flight of the Flyers and the Blue Pig.]

So before we began viewing the entries, we agreed that just having a Facebook page or a Twitter account—or even both of them along with a LinkedIn presence—wasn’t enough for an entry to qualify for an award. We wanted to see strategic goals set—and accomplished through the use of social media along with, perhaps, other channels. We wanted to see some evidence of engagement on the part of a target audience—blog comments, retweets, wall posts. And we wanted to see something that was new or different, not something that every other college or university was doing.

Honestly, we didn’t know what to expect and in general, we were relatively disappointed in the submissions. We did see a number of institutions that thought having a Facebook page or a Twitter presence was significant. It isn’t, not today.

From the award-winners, we gain an emerging sense that “best practices” in social media do involve multiple channels. Sometimes these are multiple social media or online channels. Northfield Mount Hermon’s NMHBook mashup is an example of this approach: it aggregates social media feeds into the school’s website. Powered By Orange, OSU’s impressive awareness campaign, mashes up social media with many other channels, including banners, signage, and face-to-face events. [Powered By Orange is an awesome campaign; here’s a blog post I wrote about it last year.] The College of William & Mary used multiple online channels in its search for a new mascot and did it brilliantly.

These are great examples of the kinds of social media-focused programs that institutions should emulate.

In judging social media, as in judging websites, written submissions are essential. Comments in the submissions help us to put what we’re seeing on-screen in context. A well-articulated strategy, supported by results, helps us to understand that social media can achieve institutional objectives. We’re keenly aware that these award winners will serve as models for other institutions and can help to convince reluctant administrators that social media is a safe channel to advance institutional goals. In this context, results are essential.

Here’s a copy of the complete judge’s report for this category, with comments about each of the award winners.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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CASE Awards of Excellence 2010: Winners, Comments, Judges’ Report for Category 11, Websites

The best professional development event I attend every year is the judging for the CASE Circle of Excellence Awards for websites, which I’ve led since the 1990s. At this year’s judging, held in early April at George School, we judged Category 11: Websites and Category 12: Best Use of Social Media. [There are comments and a downloadable Judge’s Report from the social media category here.]

What this means is locking oneself in a room for two days with more than a dozen smart, informed, opinionated people; looking at more than two hundred websites and social media sites; and arguing about which sites are good enough to get a award. It’s incredibly stimulating—and sometimes frustrating—to have strongly held opinions strongly challenged. No one knows where we’ll end up when we compile the final list of award winners.

For the record, as you scan the lists below, there are several sites that would never appear on my own list. And it’s safe to say that each of the other judges this year, as in years past, would say the same thing. But we all stand by the final list of award winners.

This year, the judges represented American and Canadian schools, colleges, and universities, both public and private. The panel included people with experience in design, web strategy, web content development, admissions, fundraising, student recruitment, social media, web technology, and marketing. Several of the judges work for institutions that have won national CASE Awards of Excellence for their websites. Two representatives from CASE attended the judging.

Results: Category 11

There were 54 complete institutional sites entered in Category 11A [Complete Institutional Websites] and 106 sites entered in Category 11B [Individual Sub-Websites]. Here are the winners:

Category 11a: Complete Institutional Websites
Gold: Fashion Institute of Technology
Silver: Northfield Mount Hermon School
Bronze:: Duke University; University of Puget Sound

Category 11b: Individual Sub-websites
Gold:: King’s College London, Online Prospectus; University of Michigan, University Housing
Silver: University of Toronto, U of T Magazine
Bronze:: Boston University, 2009 Annual Report; Columbia College Chicago, This is Columbia’s Moment Media Production Center; Hobart and William Smith Colleges, 3-D Web site; University of Iowa, Annual Report
Honorable Mention: University of Missouri-Columbia, Illumination

Observations and Trends

Each year, we begin this judging with a discussion of what makes an award-winning institutional website. Here were some of the important elements we identified this year:

• a sound strategy;


• sound information architecture, navigability, usability and search;


• valid, accurate, timely, and relevant content, effectively deployed across the site, including both text and images;


• the quality of resources-content assets, staff, and budgets-and how they were used on the site;


• a clear identity that is appropriate to the organization;


• an appropriate level of innovation—in other words, we want designers to push the envelope but we still expect information to be findable, content to be readable (or viewable), and the site to be well-designed. Cutting edge for the sake of being cutting edge didn’t persuade the judges to award anything.


• standardization of interface across the site;


• accessibility of the code; appropriate use of technology and adherence to standards (We awarded extra points for sites that had considered how they would display on a mobile device.);


• metrics; evaluation plans; results;


• and, new this year, a connection to the ecosystem of the web, which is particularly significant as the social web assumes a greater importance.

We asked ourselves repeatedly what each site does that’s unusual or innovative. Though we are tasked with judging the sites that are entered in this category and, to some extent, we must compare them with each other, we can’t ignore other sites we’ve seen. For example, we considered it legitimate to reject a site that was a collection of student blogs designed to recruit students. While it was well-designed, there was nothing about it that distinguished it from many similar sites nor did it do anything different than Ball State University’s student blog site has been doing for five years.

We were underwhelmed at what we saw this year. Sites entered for an award were missing basic elements like a sense of where an institution was located. And there were a lot of bland sites.

Some trends we noticed this year:

• People are trying to break out of the mold of what a traditional site looks like and are trying some radically different things that don’t seem to work or are very hard to understand from a user’s point of view. If they’ve tested these innovations and found that they are working, they haven’t shared any usability testing results or data that backs up the success of their risk taking.


• Perhaps because of a desire to be “different,” many sites had identity issues and did not provide us with a strong sense of what the institution was, what it stood for, or how it was truly differentiated from its competitors—and, therefore, why anyone would want to go there. The winners all did this well.


• It’s still hard to find calls to action on many websites. One judge recounted the difficulty of finding information about how to apply, much less an “apply now” button on a website he viewed.


• We saw many attempts to connect a website to the larger web through Facebook and Twitter badges and other devices, but often saw “share this” buttons in unexpected places where they appear to have been added as a afterthought, not baked into the design of the site.


• While .edu websites are much better organized and easier to navigate than they used to be, we still saw sites with “layers and layers of navigation all over the place,” which made them very confusing to navigate. This is particularly challenging on sites that don’t have a clear design hierarchy for pages or where choices are clearly dictated by internal politics rather than a sense of what a visitor to the site might want to do.


• On many sites, the space is just not well used. For example, pages about curriculum choices carried a big header and large images. What value does that have to a visitor to these pages? And related to this, while a big, splashy something may be suitable for a first-time visitor, what happens when repeated visitors tire of it and just want to reach the information they’re seeking?


• While we did see good content on some sites, some of it was buried on the site and hard to find. And some was good, but overused—like a site that featured profiles of six people that showed up everywhere. Another point that is often overlooked is that images, too, need to be refreshed and updated, especially when they depict events that happened some time ago.


• Some of the special-purpose sites, especially annual reports and some of the magazines, were totally devoid of interactivity and even links. I can’t stress too much how important the written submission for this category is—and how crucial it is to provide data about how effective the site is.

A last word about how important the written submissions for this category are. Comments in the submissions that outlined how much testing had been done or how successful the sites were convinced us to give awards to several sites that we might otherwise have passed over.

Likewise, some sites might have fared better if they had demonstrated that the unorthodox choices made by their designers were supported by usability testing rather than whim. One of the judges remarked: “It’s not just about the numbers, even if you have them. It’s about providing context for your content and trying to serve your customers. Posting content is no longer enough—you have to think about providing a service and include a task-based perspective; that’s where analytics shine.”

In terms of context, we paid a lot of attention to the organizational work and cross-campus cooperation that went into building the backbone of some of these sites.

Finally, knowing that sites were created in-house or with in-house solutions was also a plus.

Here’s a copy of the complete judge’s report for this category, with more details about the judging and comments about each of the award winners.

Posted by Michael Stoner
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Why is everyone so upset about Facebook?

There’s been a lot of thoughtful stuff written and said over the last few weeks as Facebook’s privacy policy has continued to erode (including a post by Michael Stoner written on this blog with some great insights about the big-picture implications about Facebook’s new announcements). You can also get a great set of insights here, here and here. But I’m more interested in why any of us are shocked and/or surprised by what Facebook is doing.

First a bit of background: I’m a privacy advocate, a member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and an optimist. So it’s not like I don’t care about the changes in FB’s policy, how personal information is handled online or have a gloomy outlook on everyday life. Just the opposite actually.

But as far as I understand them, these are the facts:

> Facebook is run by a guy with a history of unethical behavior
> We freely chose to join Facebook (a for-profit entity)
> We individually decided how much personal stuff to post on their servers
> Some of us decided to profile ourselves to a shocking degree of detail
> Some of what we posted we’d prefer not to share with the world
> Facebook realized/knew that co-opting this info is worth a TON of money
> Facebook slowly changed their policies to make it ok to exploit this info

What did we think was going to happen? We shared really personal information with a corporation who’d never really promised to take our privacy seriously. We watched as they incrementally shifted their stance on privacy (and on who actually owns the content we post). Basically, they made a really nifty platform that encouraged sharing and they decided to cash-in on that platform. Can we be collectively outraged at the fact that it’s happening? Yep. Should we honestly be surprised that it’s happening? Nope.

The admittedly flawed analogy that’s been bouncing around my head is to the cigarette industry:

Big tobacco behaved dishonorably and dishonestly in attempting to lead the public to believe that there were no health risks associated with smoking. But regardless of the health disinformation being circulated, smokers had to know on some level that there’s something inherently unhealthy about lighting an object on fire, sticking it in your mouth and sucking on it.

Facebook has behaved dishonorably and dishonestly in their communications about privacy and in the way they’ve repeatedly changed their policies. But on some level we all knew (or should have known) there were real risks associated with sharing our private information with a company that doesn’t seem to give a damn about privacy.

What it comes down to for me is this:
There are known risks associated with smoking. Smoke or don’t.
There are known risks associated with Facebook: Stay or leave.

Ultimately, just like there isn’t a safe cigarette, there isn’t a safe Facebook. If you’re worried about risk you can smoke less and you can share less. Or you can quit.

Posted by Patrick DiMichele
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