Connected Conversations

A new back-to-school ritual for students these days is to create and manage a profile on facebook.com. At the beginning of this summer, my friend Nathaniel convinced me to sign up and I have looked back. It is amazing, for the reasons I described in this past post. But why does it work so well?

Facebook taps two powerful human desires:

1. Exhibitionism: filling out a facebook profile gives pleasure in defining who you are, sharing your music, book and movie preferences, etc. And as you get more involved in facebook, you may develop a sense of obligation (e..g, oh! I haven’t added a review of the movie I saw last weekend).
2. Voyeurism: facebook allows you to peek into the lives of others. It offers a low commitment “on ramp” perhaps towards deeper friendship with new acquaintances. Over time, it is a lower barrier way to keep in touch. And what I hear is that facebook is the best way to find the cool parties. :)

In addition, facebook has developed a trust culture. In the beginning, only students with “.edu” email addresses could participate. No “creeps” could participate so facebook was safe. There is also a strong commitment to use real names and real profile pictures. Now, facebook is open but you can’t make much headway in the system if you violate the culture of trust. So, this culture is self-perpetuating.

Finally, facebook has “lightweight connectivity.” What is lightweight connectivity and why is it so cool? Consider how my mom uses netflix. She watches lots of movies and actively manages her movie list. She has also had great lists of books, movies, events and restaurants that she kept in a private diary. With netflix, she can now share at least her movie list with a half dozen or so of her friends. And just by sharing that list, she is strongly influences what movies her friends watch. What netflix does for movies, facebook does for everything social in your life. And if you are in college or recently graduated, you can be certain all your friends are on board.

Well, I apologize for dumping so much jargon in this post. Facebook is something really cool. Join now! I’ll be your guide if you want. And then you’ll understand what I am talking about, because I plan to write a lot more about facebook.

1. technology facebook, follow up, reviews

Yahoo has launched a neat site that allows you to compare video responses of the Democratic candidates. Check it out here:

http://debates.news.yahoo.com/

Unlike the one I wrote about yesterday, this one is highly produced. Charlie Rose asks the traditional questions and Bill Maher challenges the candidates with nontraditional ones. You can make video playlists by selecting the issues and candidates you want to see.

I find it ironic that they called a “mashup.” It’s really nothing of the sort. It’s professionally produced programming, not an amateur hodgepodge put together from different sources. I like it, but I still like ExpertVoter.org better.

2. politics democracy, Election 08, follow up, interactive, videos

Google has just launched an Australian election project, and I think it demonstrates some of the power that I mentioned in my post last week on political video mashups and open politics. It exposes both the strengths and weaknesses of google’s generic approach to information discovery. Here is a screenshot of a portion of the page:

The strength is that they integrate many of the services housed within google: search, news, blogs, satellite images, youtube and more. Within a few clicks, you can search your MPs web site for policy positions, see videos about them and examine interactive electoral maps.

The weakness is that they’ve implemented this site with the minimum amount of political knowledge necessary. The main content is just searches of politician’s names within local newspapers; for anyone living in Australia you probably won’t get anything that you wouldn’t normally get from your local paper. You have to pick your political jurisdiction from a list because it doesn’t have a look up by address feature. And it doesn’t have much customization in the way that it presents the information (e.g., comparing candidates side-by-side.)

The biggest weakeness is that there is very little actual unique content at the local level, like videos about candidates. But the very existence of google’s portal may help promote interest in creating that very content. Whenever google tries something, you’ve got to think it has a chance to work!

Well, I think there’s still a good chance that this will not transform Australian politics. However, I do believe that it is a nice way to experiment before the ‘08 elections here in the US with less downside exposure.

I plan to follow these developments closely, and I’ll keep abreast of anything interesting that I find or think of!

1. technology, 2. politics follow up

Yesterday, I started a conversation on e-thepeople.org about Obama’s new plan for Iraq. I wanted to summarize the interesting feedback that I’ve gotten from these discussions.

First, I raised the question: how does Obama plan to fix the oil sharing problem? No one responded, but I think Chris Dodd has the best proposal on this subject yet, whereby the oil revenue would be split among the federal government of Iraq, regional governments and directly to Iraqis.

Second, bocamp22 asked whether partitioning proposed by Biden should be part of the solution. CatsAngel responded by questioned how Shiites and Sunnies could really be separated and Kent Wicker worried that partitioning could lead to ethnic cleansing. Personally, I am not a fan of partitioning and I think it can’t possibly solve anything if the oil issue isn’t resolved first.

Third, several members asserted their belief that military withdrawal would threaten our security. My personal belief is that the state of Iraq poses no threat, but that the terrorist activity within Iraq may pose a threat. I think the innovation of Obama’s plan is that he offers an alternative to a military presence — namely, humanitarian aid and diplomacy — to mitigate this risk.

Fourth, several members questioned whether humanitarian aid and diplomacy would work. Chickmd called diplomacy with Iraqi’s neighbors an “error in judgment” because these neighbors are our enemies. I agree that this is a risk, so I’d like to how Obama wants to go about this delicate task. As for humanitarian aid, Chickmd believes that Obama like “all other democrats he does not care how he wasts other peoples tax dollars.” He wants out now and to cut our losses completely, but when I pressed him, he preferred Bush’s plan to Obama’s if he were forced between those two unsavory choices.

But the highest rated comment by d_jinx says that Obama’s strategy is risky and uncertain, but better than not trying anything different: “Gotta get started because what we what we’re doing now ain’t encouraging.”

Amen to that, brother!

2. politics Election 08, follow up, foreign policy, Iraq, Obama

In a post last week (Chutzpah!), I wrote about the travails of Chris Knight. Chris ran for a seat on his local school board and lost. More notably, he made a funny campaign ad that was appropriate by VH1 for one of its shows. When Chris uploaded the ad on youtube, Viacom threatened him for copyright infringement despite having aired his entire creative work without permission! And youtube threatened to ban him from the site, as is its policy for any alleged infringing work.

So, he fought back with the help of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. And as this blog post reports, he won the battle and youtube sent him a very apologic note, wouldn’t you say?

Dear Kwerky,

In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, we’ve completed
processing your counter-notification dated x/xx/xx regarding your video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddyVQwpByug

This content has been restored and your account will not be penalized.

Sincerely,

Harry
The YouTube Team

Yeah! at least he won this ridiculous case.

1. technology, 2. politics copyright, follow up, law