Entries Tagged 'Research' ↓

In today’s Reputation Management, Internet Privacy, and Social Media Quick Hits, we cover a lot of news coming out of Austin, Texas and the world-famous South by Southwest Music and Technology Conference. Check it out!

–

People Care About Privacy, But Do Little To Protect It

With Internet users clamoring for increased social media functionality, such as recent developments by Twitter and Facebook that allow for geotagging status updates, many in the Internet industry are proclaiming that nobody really cares about privacy. This is not necessarily true, however, as Cecilia Kang reports for the Washington Post.

In remarks made by Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research New England, during her opening keynote speech at this year’s South by Southwest conference, Boyd explains that users do care about privacy, they simply don’t voice their concerns until they feel that they have been violated in some way, as in the case of Google’s error-filled launch of Google Buzz.

The Post article also talks about a forthcoming Pew Research Study on Internet privacy that was taken before the launch of Google Buzz and the development of geolocation technology for Facebook and Twitter. According to early reports, the Pew research indicates that people care about privacy, but they do little to proactively protect it.

Netflix Cancels Recommendation System Improvement Contest Over Privacy Issues

Back in December, we wondered why Netflix would move forward with a proposed contest to improve its recommendation system when the company was in the middle of a lawsuit regarding the very information it was opening to the public to run the contest. Apparently, they wondered the same thing, because the New York Times is reporting that Netflix has called off the contest and is looking for alternative methods to improve its recommendation engine. The New York Times article also explains that Netflix has “reached an understanding” with the F.T.C. and settled the class-action lawsuit brought by Netflix customers.

College Assignment: Give Up Cellphone, iPod, Social Media

As part of an assignment, a professor at the University of Minnesota required her students to go five days without using any technology that didn’t exist before 1984. That meant no iPod, no cell phone, and no Facebook or Twitter. The experiment is one that is being duplicated around the country at other campuses where teachers hope to teach students something about the process of communication and the impact of new media technology in our lives. While some students enjoyed the assignment, finding freedom in the restrictions, others couldn’t help but break the rules in order to maintain their social lives.

Twitter Announcing Advertising Model Today at SXSW?

According to TechCrunch, Twitter is expected to reveal at least part of the company’s advertising model today at the South by Southwest Technology conference when Twitter CEO Evan Williams delivers his keynote speech at 2:00PM this afternoon. While Twitter claims to be profitable based on the real-time search deals the company struck with Microsoft and Google, the issue of Twitter advertising has been a hot topic in the tech industry for many months now and is certain to cause a lot of reaction from other social media services.

Digg Nation Shows How Easy it is to Start a Twitter Rumor

We knew it was easy to spread rumors on Twitter, but we didn’t know it was this easy. According to CNET’s Daniel Terdiman, this year’s South by Southwest Conference demonstrated just how easy it was to start a Twitter rumor when Digg founder Kevin Rose and Alex Albrecht asked the crowd at SXSW’s Digg Party to tweet a false story in unison. What was the story, that recently laid-off talk show host and Twitter hero Conan O’Brien would be joining the Internet television start-up Revision3.

In his article, Terdiman explains why the hoax worked, at least for a little while, saying, “If only one or two people had tweeted the hoax, no one would have believed it. These days, most people’s nonsense detectors ring out when things that seem a little too good to be true make their way across the Internet, especially on sites like Twitter where anyone can say anything…But when dozens, or even hundreds of people, all tweet the same basic news at the same time, that would seem to lend the concept legitimacy; after all, hundreds of people wouldn’t all send out the same false information.”

FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski Offers the Broadband Plan for Children and Families

In a talk Friday at the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski shared the “broadband plan for children and families.” Here is a YouTube video featuring Genachowski’s remarks.

Tweet This Post

There is a practically limitless amount of information on the social web. With over 400 million members, Facebook alone provides enough data to keep researchers busy for decades. While this makes many privacy advocates nervous (and we ourselves have expressed concern over the amount of personal data on the web), the interesting thing is, the majority of that information has been put there willingly by social media users in order to optimize and expand their personal social network.

Now maybe we didn’t plan it this way, but everything we share online, from the Fan Pages we like to the RSS feeds we subscribe to, can be used to form a snapshot of who we are. What’s more, all of that data can be used to make a snapshot not only of us, but of our friends, our families, our communities, our cities, our states, and even our countries. If a smart enough programmer dedicated enough time to analyze the information we’re sharing online, he or she would be able to draw fascinating conclusions on economics, sociology, consumer trends, media consumption, and more.

But who would be the one to step up to this monumental task? Who would have the technical chops, time, and inclination to embark on such an endeavor? According to ReadWriteWeb, there is a man, and his name is Pete Warden.

Pete Warden: The Facebook Whisperer

As detailed in the article, Pete Warden, dubbed the Facebook Whisperer by Andrew Hyde, is an ex-Apple engineer and entrepreneur who has been working for the past six months on a massive analysis of public profile pages on Facebook. Thus far, Warden has over 215 million public pages indexed.

So, why has Warden collected over 100G of Facebook data? For that most noble of causes, education. Once he has completed his analysis, Warden plans to share the information online for academic researchers to study further. Quoting from the RWW article,

“I am fascinated by how we can build tools to understand our world and connect people based on all the data we’re just littering the Internet with. Nobody thinks about how much valuable information they’re generating just by friending people and fanning pages. It’s like we’re constantly voting in a hundred different ways every day. And I’m a starry-eyed believer that we’ll be able to change the world for the better using that neglected information. It’s like an x-ray for the whole country – we can see all sorts of hidden details of who we’re friends with, where we live, what we like.”

Warden had originally planned on publishing some of his findings on Wednesday, but he has held off so that Facebook can take more time to understand the privacy implications of releasing his research. When Warden finally does release his data, however, there’s no doubt that it will prompt some very interesting findings about how and why we use Facebook. In the meantime, if you want to see some of the potential uses for the data, Warden has already put together some cool maps showing high-level analysis of how Facebook operates at a regional level.

Truthfully, a major analysis of Facebook has been a long time coming. That being said, it will be fascinating to see what this data can teach us (both positive and negative.) When Warden does decide to release his data, we’ll let you know, and we’ll be here to look through it. If you’re interested in learning more about Mr. Warden, I recommended following him on Twitter or checking out his blog.

Tweet This Post

Yesterday, Hutch Carpenter wrote an excellent blog post on the importance of online reputation management and how business and technology trends over the last 15 years are leading us to a future where we might all have reputation scores based on our digital identities. The post, which combines a lot of different studies that we have talked about here on the ReputationDefender Blog (such as the Kaiser Family Foundation study we talked about last week), is very well-researched and we recommend checking it out.

One thing that popped into my head while I was reading Hutch’s blog post was how closely tied it was to some of the things that ReputationDefender CEO Michael Fertik has been saying in interviews for the past couple of years. In fact, if you look back at Michael’s pre-New Year’s ZDNet column, you will see that one of his social media predictions for 2010 is the widespread adoption of the online reputation score as a replacement or alternative to traditional credit scores. If that sounds far-fetched, consider that we have already seen banks and creditors admit to checking social media sites as part of determining an individual’s credit-worthiness.

Again, we urge you to check out Hutch’s well-written blog post. It is a pleasure to see other intelligent commentators beginning to share their insight into the reputation management field. While you are checking out the post, begin considering how your actions online are contributing to or detracting from your personal and professional success. If you don’t have control over your reputation currently, what are you doing to gain control?

Tweet This Post

If you’re an avid Facebook user, you may have noticed an interesting development. Over the last year or so, the number of older users (older being a subjective term referring to users 35 and up) has increased dramatically on Facebook. We first wrote about this development over the summer, and it hasn’t stopped since. In fact, it this increase of older users that has helped propel Facebook to its current gargantuan size, more than 350 million users worldwide.

It’s not just Facebook that’s seen an explosion of older users either. Across the board, social media websites are seeing an increase in the number of older users. What’s more, they are not only signing up for the sites, but actively participating in conversations and creating new content. Of course, “participating” can mean a lot of things. Are you participating if you’re on Twitter, but only follow and don’t tweet? What if you leave comments on blogs, but don’t have a blog yourself?

Recently, Forrester Research created a pretty cool graphic that visualizes web users as rungs of a ladder. In analyzing this new wave of older social media users, they came up with a new category: Conversationalists. Conversationalists are social media users who use social networking websites to have, well, you know, conversations. Forrester deemed an individual a conversationalist if they posted an update to a social networking website or shared a Twitter update at least once a week. Some of the other categories on the list include Creator (that’s me), Critic, and Spectator.

Where do you fall on the Internet usage ladder?

Truthfully, my Internet behavior would place me on multiple rungs of the ladder, and, increasingly, I would say that’s the case with the majority of web users. As people become more and more aware that their actions online have consequences in the real world, we are seeing an increase the number of people who actively focus on personal branding and reputation management. If Forrester releases another version of this graphic next year, I’m willing to bet that the number of creators will rise substantially.

For more analysis of Forrester’s findings, check out this article from the Wall Street Journal as well as Liz Gannes’ excellent coverage at GigaOm.

Tweet This Post

According to a new report from McAfee Labs, Facebook and Twitter should prepare for some serious security threats in 2010. Citing each company’s considerable growth in 2009, McAfee warns that social networking sites will “face more sophisticated threats” and that “explosion of applications on Facebook and other services will be an ideal vector for cybercriminals, who will take advantage of friends trusting friends to click links they might otherwise treat cautiously.” Furthermore, the report explores how cybercriminals are becoming more selective in their attacks, picking individuals and corporations based on the information that is already accessible about them online.

Here are some of McAfee’s additional findings.

• HTML 5 will blur the line between desktop and online applications. This, along with the release of
Google Chrome OS, will create another opportunity for malware writers to prey on users.
• Email attachments have delivered malware for years, yet the increasing number of attacks targeted
at corporations, journalists, and individual users often fool them into downloading Trojans and
other malware.
• Cybercriminals have long picked on Microsoft products due to their popularity. In 2010, we anticipate
Adobe software, especially Acrobat Reader and Flash, will take the top spot.
• Banking Trojans will become more clever, sometimes interrupting a legitimate transaction to make an
unauthorized withdrawal.
• Botnets are the leading infrastructure for cybercriminals, used for actions from spamming to identity
theft. Recent successes in shutting down botnets will force their controllers to switch to alternate, less
vulnerable methods of command, including peer-to-peer setups.
• In spite of the worldwide scope of botnets, we anticipate even more successes in the fight against all
forms of cybercrime in 2010.

To download the report in PDF form, check out the following link: McAfee Labs Report: Internet Security Threats 2010.To help protect yourself from falling victim to these threats, consider adopting our approved Online Reputation Management and Internet Privacy New Year’s Resolutions.

Tweet This Post