Column: Social Networking At War
When I was about 13 years old, a rumour – one of those rumours whose origin is never really known – started to spread around our family. The rumour was that my grandpa was keeping all his money hidden somewhere in the bowels of his house rather than entrusting it to a bank.
I remember my cousins and I laughing sagely at such an anachronistic and quaint idea. Surely it was only people in children’s stories who did such a thing. I mean, come on – why would anyone be suspicious of banks? Why would anybody rather stuff their money into a mattress than entrust it to one of England’s many respected financial institutions? Err…
The tale of my grandpa’s natural distrust of major corporations has always stayed with me, and it struck me as a pertinent opener for this column, given the current war that’s being waged for your online identity. The reason for this is because that war – ultimately – centres on trust.
A few years ago, if someone asked you for your online home, the chances are that the more tech-savvy among us would have replied with a personalised URL. (If you were lucky enough to secure your name, it might have been something like www.danoliver.co.uk.) You had complete control over your own site, and that felt good. But these domains were simply silos of personal information, and a real effort was required from visitors to find it – they had to first remember that they wanted to visit your site, then recall the URL and TLD and then – God forbid – actually type it in!
When the social web got into full swing, there was a new way to connect online that enabled people to include you in their social circle. Rather than having to actively visit your site, people could integrate your stream into their social service of choice. Hallelujah!
Many sites and apps have come and gone, and the likes of Google and Microsoft are constantly trying – and mostly failing – to make headway in the social space. The current war for users is being waged between two relatively new adversaries: Twitter and Facebook. The times when you’d tell people to find you online via a personal site have been replaced for millions of net users by Twitter’s ‘@’ identifier, or a Facebook account. Both Twitter and Facebook want you to use them as the default way for other people to find and interact with you online, but they’re going about it in very different ways.
Twitter’s API is already widely used by developers wanting to build the service into sites and apps, and with the recent announcement of its new @anywhere offering, you will soon be able to integrate Twitter into any website with just a few lines of JavaScript (the likes of YouTube, Bing, Digg and Ebay are already signed up to use @anywhere). Twitter’s founder Evan Williams has repeatedly referred to the company’s mantra of ‘keeping things open’, and recent announcements certainly back this up.
Facebook is another story. The company is trying to create a walled garden, but it’s a transparent wall. By changing its privacy policy to recommend that users make their status updates and other information public – as it did at the end of 2009 – Zuckerberg et al are trying to ensure that the major search engines can pick up as much of what you’re up to as possible. There are many people who simply approved these privacy changes without thinking, and who are still unaware that any ‘privacy transition’ actually took place. This has led to accusations against Facebook of ‘nudging’ its members into more open privacy settings – in many cases without their knowledge (we’ve all approved pop-ups without actually reading their content beforehand, especially when they come from a trusted site). For many of Facebook’s users, who signed up on the proviso that Facebook was about building private networks, the goalposts have been significantly moved in recent months – in some cases onto another pitch altogether!
Now, there’s nothing to stop you following my grandpa’s lead, and eschewing the social behemoths that are Facebook and Twitter – more power to your elbow if that’s the way you choose to go. But, if like millions of others, you choose to promote yourself via one of these two platforms – and take advantage of the huge audience, reach, and ease-of-use they offer – then I have just one question for you: out of the two, who would you trust with your cash-filled mattress?
