You have to give it to Brazilians for having a sense of humor: Since the inauguration of the South African World Cup, they have pushed the tag “Cala Boca Galvao” phrase into the top trending topic, where it’s been standing for a few days I understand. They made up a fake explanation of what this means in order to catch innocent bystanders into their game, and helping the TT float higher. The excuse is that it’s a campaign to save an endangered bird of the rain forest.

There’s also a fake Lady Gaga song preview about this, and lots of people also caught that one. What this phrase actually means is SHUT UP GALVAO, with Galvao being a popular sportscaster in Brazil that people are evidently tired of.

More info:

• Save the Galvao Bird Campaign
• Wikipedia paragraph
• Article on Global Voices
• Article on Ad Age

I think it’s a great example of how a country can game social media just for the lulz!

As someone who’s focusing his research on Online Social Networks and the Privacy/Disclosure topic, I’ve been quietly following the changes on Facebook, and especially the recent modifications that have taken things close to scandal proportions. It seems like these days everyone is discussing the FB privacy disaster (some of my favorites are Nancy Baym and Fred Stutzman), yet in practical terms, they have us hooked, there are actually very few people who will leave, and a large majority who don’t care and are not even aware of how dangerous this situation is. We’re not hooked to their clunky service but to all the people from our history that we’ve been able to reconnect with thanks to the popularity of their tool.

The more I think about this problem, what most pisses me off is how there could have been so many other simple ways to handle things differently, and how all these problems could have been avoided. But Facebook has taken every time the worst possible direction, making the most unethical decisions in favor of financial greed. I was recently attending a large conference, and by chance sat at the table with a high executive from Facebook, the scandal had just exploded and it was unavoidable that he ended up interrogated about how this could have happened, and after some pressure, he ended up confessing that it’s just Zuckeberg who single-handedly takes these kinds of decisions, pretty much without interest in other people’s opinion.

The two points that most upset me are: First, how they are giving users’ information to their business partners, when it would have been so much simpler (and ethical) to match businesses and potential customers while keeping the information protected. Second, it’s outrageous how cumbersome the privacy controls are: I’ve been a fist row spectator of the development of User Experience Design for the Web as a field and am sure that Facebook must have some good designers on board, so you don’t need to be a genius to figure out that they are making things hard for people on purpose, it should not be hard to protect your account, it should not take “only 20 minutes” as some third-party tutorials are now teaching us as a quickest solution.

And just today I find thanks to my Twitter contacts, two interesting pieces that address these exact problems. The Electronic Frontier Foundation released a proposed Bill of Rights for Social Network Users, which upon reading, seems like just plain common sense and makes you wonder how anyone would think that it’s good & sustainable business to do anything away from these lines. Yet if you’ve been following the current situation, it’s clear that their piece is clearly written in response to Facebook’s abusive attitude. The other piece is Fortune’s Hey Facebook! Here’s your privacy redesign, where a series of talented interaction designers share some ideas of how the privacy controls can be improved. And just as I was saying before, they are all giving interesting examples of how all this could have been managed better. From all those ideas the proposal I like the most is the circle by the guys from Sapient Nitro, it reminds me of the Altman & Taylor theory of Social Penetration: intimacy depth presented as concentric layers and areas as slices of a circle, very appropriate and straightforward. I’ve naturally been also thinking of how I’ve done this, some of my ideas are similar to the circle mentioned above, but disclosure is such a contextual issue that two variables are not enough and I’d also add topic to the mix. For a really good Online Social Networks we need strong controls for grouping our contacts in ways that can be easily modified and updated, and for keeping track and aim of what topic and level of information we share with these different groups.

I’m not sure how much ideas we should be giving away for free to this company that keeps on profiting until abuse on our private data, in fact their reputation is so low these days… as the great Elizabeth Buie put it recently “I think I’d put either “privacy” or “policy” in quotation marks when referring to Facebook’s. :-)” I’d say, both!

Finally, I think that any private corporation managing too much personal information is a risk, it can be very dangerous, especially if they are run so irresponsibly as we are seeing the case of Facebook. I agree with Danah Boyd that services like this should be regulated, but the two major problems for that are that A, legislators are decades behind these topics and B, these services have international coverage so defining who has legal right to regulate them is an ordeal. Nevertheless they should not be run free of laws, and I wholeheartedly agree with the EFF Bill of Privacy Rights, I just can’t imagine a good service doing otherwise.

Breaking news, as I was making the final edits, I find on the BBC that FB is declaring they are listening to the users and will simplify the privacy controls. We’ll see, at this point I don’t believe much from them, they are just trying to cleanse their image.

The news became public yesterday, Dr. Gary Marchionini has been appointed as the new Dean of the School of Information and Library Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I’m certain that he’ll be a strong driver in pushing our school to growth. One of the things he’s done that is close to the IA Community, is founding the IA Summit, and now he’s also the new president of its sponsoring organization, ASIS&T.

At my school, the semester has started, and I’m auditing a course on Usability Engineering. I’m very excited as I’d always want to study it formally. The course is taught by the head of Usability at SAP, he’s got a bunch of experience. One of the takeaways from yesterday’s class was Bob Baxley’s Model of the User Interface, very useful. Although I’d heard about Bob before, I had not seen this diagram.

On another note, I’ve received the IA Institute Progress Grant for this year that will help me complete my survey on Self-disclosure on Social Media, yay!

Today I’ve been feeling the urge to blog, which you can realize had not happened in some time. Besides the intense work at Grad School and related activities, settling in town and moving again after the first year, there’s something else that’s kept me busy, or really *someone* else.

So before posting about the other things I have on my mind right now, I should really stop for a second to let those of you who have not been following me closely on flickr, facebook or twitter: Two months ago my wife delivered our first son, a beautiful baby boy who we call Victor. He’s an amazing kid, has a really mellow temper.

Last year I started working on a project based on the question of how people see different online communication tools as affording different levels of intimacy: how they feel confident disclosing private information to their peers in different manner over different particular tools.

My first take on this question was to present a poster at the Memphis Information Architecture Summit, where I asked poster viewers to participate by marking their opinions of how they use these tools and how they see them used by the people they know. My poster includes images and captions taken from these same tools to depict the whole range of self-disclosure we can see on them, and I did not judge their disclosure level, leaving that to the eye of the beholder. These images and captions should evoke the participants to reflect on their own behavior and that of their online contacts.

There were about 30 respondents - they were variable across categories - and I later started transcribing their dots for analysis and some patterns start to emerge:

I had previously sketched a map of how the results could be displayed, and this included some of my intuitive approach of what I might find. I later composed the following chart by averaging the participants’ dots and placing them next to my predictions.

In the final chart, each platform or tool has two horizontal bars that depict their range of disclosure level, from the most intimate type of disclosure they support next to the axis, to the most open/formal/public types of discourse on their outer edge. Each blue bar represents the range covered by the averaged red dots to the averaged green dots for each category. The yellow bars show what I had initially drawn that could be found.

Looking at the results

I had expected blogs and flickr to reach the highest levels of public discourse, as these are technically public (by large percent) and easily reached via search engines, sometimes even favored by them. I had also expected to find a wide range on these, as this is what I’ve observed over the years. The range covered by blogs and flickr was not as broad in the participants’ opinion as on my previous guess.

I had anticipated Facebook to show up as a system that is rather private in nature, as studies have shown a growing number of people who block their profiles to public access, and the vast majority of people with whom I interact with on it have closed profiles and tend to share lots of family moments, so I naturally expected it to be seen a lot more private than blogs, which also in large proportion are not password protected. However, my respondents marked Facebook on a mid-range of intimate disclosure.

Twitter shows a big difference as when I drew my chart I was mostly thinking of chatter between friends, but apparently my respondents were thinking of a much more public, professional-strategic use of this tool.

Email appeared as the most flexible tool in the eye of my respondents, and I should have probably anticipated this more carefully.

A big surprise for me was to see how flexible these participants found IM to be, as I am mostly used to using it for personal matters, and my guess on these results show that these participants are accustomed to using IM in professional settings as well.

Lessons learned

My method for allowing people to mark their impressions on the poster was very informal and confusing, this ranges from the way they are asked to think about the issue to the way in which they had to mark it down on the poster with two colored pencils, one green, one red.

Besides the tactical difficulties of imagining this and plotting it on the chart, there’s a lot of variation on how people perceive their discourse to be intimate/public, in order to get proper measures, this will have to be operationalized in a much more formal and straightforward way.

What comes next

I’ll now go on to build a proper survey to measure the usage more closely. It will include some demographic screening focused on usage experience, and some measures of self disclosure as a personality trait, as I expect people’s personality to have a strong influence on their levels of disclosure. Also, I will be asking about particular behaviors, not just reflection on how they judge their own disclosure.

… So I’m working on a Literature Review of Online Social Networks last night, and writing out the salient ideas of the key articles I’m collecting. I’m going through a piece by David Beer’s 2008 article from JCMC in response to Boyd and Ellisson’s more popular article on the previous number.

One of Beer’s most interesting point is how he stresses out that, at the extent to which the Web has permeated our lives in most parts of the world, it no longer make sense to establish a difference between online and offline friends as Boyd and Ellison do in their article, and - in my opinion - although they are right in explaining that the label ‘friends’ is used in  some online social networks to describe relationships that don’t always represent what we would otherwise consider a friendship, this distinction is not a problem given by the nature of the relationships, but merely of the system’s design and its labeling.
Beer also points out another interesting thought: that OSNs could eventually transform the nature of friendship via the new dynamics these afford, this notion goes in hand with McLuhan’s famous words “We shape our tools, and then our tools shape us.”, yet more specifically Garrett’s take on this in terms of user experience design “When McLuhan said “we”, and when he said “us”, he was talking about the entire human race. But not everybody’s a shaper, right? The shapers are the people in this room, the people in this field. We shape those tools and then, the experiences that those tools create shape humanity itself. Think about the responsibility that entails.” (Garrett, 2009) And this relates to how if we label those links “friends” we can eventually lead to redefine the concept of friendship.

I just thought these were some iteresting connections to share, I’m still chewing on these ideas…