The Giddy Social Whirl: 25th March 2011

Spring has sprung! In celebration, we have gathered some fresh and juicy news-shoots for you to nibble on, on your way to the Great Outdoors (it’s that green bit; there may be birdsong - you remember.)

Yesterday was Thursday/ Today it is Friday

First up, the tower of online inches devoted to Rebecca Black, the 13-year-old whose pretty-grim-but-definitely-not-the-worst-we’ve-heard jinglet ‘Friday’ has racked up about a gazillion YouTube hits, and taken pride of place in the Haterz Top Ten. There is plenty to be said about this peculiarly ‘11 phenomenon, so naturally, plenty has.

Yes, there is something a leetle unsavoury about Ark, the company set up by two grown men (one of whom performs a questionable rap-turn in the song) to take $2K from the over-proud parents of over-indulged tweens (though frankly, a couple of thou’ seems – how do I put this – a not unrealistic sum for their efforts. And her parents seem like pretty nice people all in all - they’re vets, you know).

But yes, the whole episode amply illustrates the fact that the internet can be a cruel, Christians-and-lions sort of a place, and that to negotiate it safely teens and tweens require a better-informed adult guide than the poor girl seems to have had access to. And for sure, it’s all way axiomatic of the fact that there’s no good or bad out there in internet land – just big, or not-big. But enough, now.

Frankly, when I was thirteen there was nothing, literally nothing, I would have rather done than star in my own pop video, in a convertible, my braces-wearing backing-singers swaying in unison as a giant blue-screen facsimile of the LA freeway jerked unconvincingly in the background. Alas, my stardust dreams went no further than lip-synching to Pepsi and Shirley in my bedroom, with a hairbrush for a mike. Everyone did it. It was normal.

And that, in essence, is the crux of Rebecca’s misfortune: not, in fact, the web 2.0 truism that a bedroom/hairbrush/mirror routine can become, in a matter of moments, a global viral phenomenon – but that we’ve yet, either as individuals or as a culture, to learn the core competence of ‘keeping-things-in-perspective’. We’re still so startled by our own cleverness that we have developed only two responses - gurning spite, or doom-laden commentary. But soon, I firmly believe, we will catch up with ourselves: either teens will stop offering up their foolhardy experiments to a global audience, or we’ll stop noticing them, or both.

As for the song: it’s a harmless little madeleine of a thing, a Proustian souvenir of a time when every teeny thought which popped into our brains pinged right out into the world - untroubled by logic, unfiltered by self-consciousness, uninflected by irony. It provides welcome evidence that some 13-year-olds face no more onerous a decision than where, in a car chock-full of seating options, to sit; that the more pornified aspects of pop-culture are not yet all-pervasive; that adolescence needn’t be a drag if you have sparkly lip-gloss and some respectful dudes to hang with. Any person over the age of 25 who isn’t cheered by that fact is a jaded curmudgeon, in my book.

OED Gets New Words

The latest edition of the Oxford English Dictionary includes the not-actually-all-that-neo-logisms OMG, LOL and <3. According to the OED site, “the intention is usually to signal an informal, gossipy mode of expression, and perhaps parody the level of unreflective enthusiasm or overstatement that can sometimes appear in online discourse, while at the same time marking oneself as an ‘insider’ au fait with the forms of expression associated with the latest technology.” Right-o. If the mere presence of these words in the OED weren’t sufficient indication that their time is well and truly up, we can kill them clean to death with our Frasier-laser.


Royal Wedding 2.0

Prince William and Kate Middleton have announced they will be releasing their wedding vows on iTunes.

A spokesperson for Decca, the label charged with cracking the downloads charts despite being more readily-associated in the public mind with EPs and mop-tops, was sweetly enthusiastic: "If enough people start to download their favourite parts of the service then the royal couple could find themselves at the top of the singles charts as well as reaching number one in the album charts. That would be unprecedented, but it's worth watching out for." The GSW gently suggests that the word to focus on in that sentence is ‘unprecedented’. But bless.

In related news, Alcatel have launched a version of their One Touch mobile phone which discreetly celebrates the happy couple’s troth-plighting. The front of the handset features the Union flag and Will-and-Kate wallpaper; on the back, the couple’s initials are scribed in that curly gold writing which invariably indicates a truly class product. So what if it costs £14.94 more than the standard 1p-with-contract One Touch handset – you can’t put a price on quality.

“Gay Cure” iPhone App Yanked From the App Store


Apple has seen sense and blocked a ‘gay cure’ app, after more than 146,000 people signed an online petition demanding its removal from the App Store. The app was produced by the pretty-obnoxious Exodus International and purported to “provide support for individuals who want to recover from homosexuality.” Two things to note in this story: firstly, that the power of tech is just as easily harnessed by those with unpleasant agendas as by the rest of us. Secondly, that this same broadly-democratic quality means that, by and large, the right outcome is generally reached.

Camera Does Makeovers

Psst. Want to look like your own waxwork dummy? Then you SO need to invest in the new Panasonic Lumix DMC-FP7 camera, whose built-in Beauty-O-Lator applies a tasteful layer of maquillage to all your pics. Now I’ll acknowledge that there may be a small percentage of women concerned not to disrupt their online brand with a photo revealing a less-than-flawless complexion; but the rest of us have got something really good for that, and it’s called ‘make-up’. On which note, is it now not allowed to be anything less than ‘the best we can be’?

Finally, some linkage to those bits and bobs you may have missed, while you were doing all that stuff you do:

Sex websites to get .xxx web addresses
Google accuses China of blocking Gmail
Majority of FTSE 100 'fail' at social media
Facebook policy chief admits site needs to improve deletion tools for a minority of users
U.S. Military Developing False Online Personalities to Counter “Enemy Propaganda”
Amazingly, MySpace's Decline Is Accelerating
Apple cuts UK iPad 2 prices to £399 and up
LinkedIn Hits 100 Million Users
Coca-Cola Cuts Ad Spend by 6.6% and Invests More in Social Media
iCorrect: the website where celebrities are righting the wrongs
Apple cuts UK iPad 2 prices to £399 and up
Why AT&T Bought T-Mobile

A bientôt, mes amis!

For more social media snippets, follow @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams.

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Color me stupid - has photo sharing just gone too far?

Mashable today brings us the news of Color, a new mobile photo-sharing application billed as a 'local discovery tool'.

Color is a photo and video sharing network, just released to iPhone and soon to come for Android users.  What makes it stand out from Facebook, Twitter Path or Instagram is the way in which your sharing network is formed and maintained.  It's all about proximity and frequency of contact.

Based on the highly spurious supposition that a) someone you stand close to who also has the app is your friend, and that b) you actually want to see their images and have them see yours, and that c) you want to see the images from anyone standing close to them, the app delivers a stream of content from anybody within 100 feet of your location, as well as anybody within your “elastic network.”  Let's get this straight.  You don't choose your own network.  The app decides for you by using algorithms to determine the relationship between two app users regularly close to each other.  You can boost friendships by interacting with friends' content - but if you don't meet up for a while or like/comment on their content, then their pictures start to fade away, until they disappear from your network altogether. So long-distance, gosh-it's-been-ages, thought-I'd-look-you-up Facebook-type friendships are definitely out.

From Mashable: "The result is that whenever you fire up the app, you can see what pictures are being taken around you, as well as the pictures friends in your elastic network are taking. Not only that, but the app will show you the pictures being taken by others within 100 feet of your friends. The app even has the ability to pull pictures that your friends took in the past, so long as you’re standing in the same location in which the pictures were taken. Imagine visiting the Statue of Liberty and then being able to magically see your best friend’s pictures from a different trip three year ago."

Right.  And just imagine the unflattering and potentially compromising shots you took at the party last night being broadcast to your boss (you spend a lot of time standing near him, right?  You must be friends).  And you can look forward to getting those sexting shots that 19 year old bloke standing next to you on the train took when he was 17.  Oh it wasn't him?  It was his friend's collection, the one he's just left on the platform?  Oh, that's alright then.

Well, a lot of people believe this will be the Next Big Photo-Sharing Thing - Color already has a whopping $41 million in the bank, including $25 million from Sequoia Capital, $9 million from Bain Capital and $7 million from Silicon Valley Bank.  But I'm going to retain the last tiny shred of privacy I have, thanks very much.  There's such a thing as over-sharing.

Update 27 March: Just seen this interview  in Business Insider with Color's founder - very interesting technology and intended usage ...and also this support for my position from the wonderful NetFamilyNews.org

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Japan, and Social Media

It seems inconceivable not to mention the dreadful suffering and as-yet-unquantifiable physical devastation wreaked on Japan by the recent earthquake and subsequent tsunami. Our newsfeeds have been filled with it. We gathered round Twitter as the scale of the disaster emerged; later, video footage exposed the depth of destruction on the ground, and surveyed the unimaginable scale of it all from the air.

Remarkably, Japan’s online infrastructure seems to have survived the onslaught. As fixed and mobile phone lines failed under a torrent of desperate calls, the internet became a lifeline. Skype came into its own, and Facebook, as dominant in Japan as it is elsewhere, became the simplest and most effective means for survivors to let the world know they were safe.

Facebook itself collated data on the developing crisis by tracking keywords in user updates. Google launched a Japan Person Finder, viewed 30 million times in its first 36 hours. It now holds records on around 250,000 people, some of which come via digitized shelter lists, captured on mobile phone cameras.

The International Atomic Energy Agency is using YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to upload official briefings on the state of play at Fukushima. And a crowd-sourced radiation tracking project is allowing anyone with access to a Geiger counter to share their findings via this Google Map.

In contrast to previous moments of global upheaval, there’s been a respectful silence on the part of most social media gurus, marketeers, activists and evangelists. All, for better or worse, have a tendency in moments of international crisis to claim that social media is a universal panacea, a cure-all for everything from disasters to despots.

Often with justification; while realists might balk at some of the more astral claims made for the power of social media, who would seriously deny the role that it has played, for example, in disseminating and encouraging the Arab Spring? Clay Shirky pointed out at SXSW that this can cut both ways, recalling that the Sudanese authorities used Facebook to entrap potential agitators - but there’s no doubting the part that social networks have played in fostering change.

Evangelists are generally keen on the idea of social media as a social good in and of itself: intrinsically libertarian, generally egalitarian, wholly beneficial. It’s still too early to determine whether they are right or wrong, but their jubilation can at times seem solipsistic and self-congratulatory. In the face of the unthinkable destruction and despair faced by those in Japan, and experienced only remotely by us, their restraint has been heartening.

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Giddy Social Whirl: March 18, 2011

Well, hello! Welcome to this week's round up of the all the bits and bobs you may have missed, while you were doing all that stuff you do.

Birds Of A Feather Tweet Together

The Science has discovered that as with real life, so with Twitter: those of a cheery disposition attract others of their kidney, while the consistently glum are left with those who share their gloomy temperament.

Regular readers will have noted that I am quite the most Pollyanna-ish of gladhearts: I therefore attract to my circle a similarly joy-dispensing crew of agreeables, so this is all win to me. Miserablists, however, may be further downcast by the news.

And in truth, it’s a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it is cheering to discover that there is a limit to the efficacy of ‘personal branding’: despite the ladlefuls of energy devoted to it (you know who you are), if you are by nature one of the Morrisseys of this world, you are fooling no-one with your w00ts and your high-fives.

On the other hand, the symphony of life loses some of its sweetness if it is played out in a monotone. We need light and shade to thrive, both online and off - and it is somehow disheartening to know that our constitutional dispositions are impossible to outrun, even online.

Britain Clasps Social Media To Its Bosom

The British, it seems, would rather do social media than anything else. First thought: Pshaw! More than transfats, kvetching, or uninformed opinion? But a closer reading of the text reveals that this refers only to our online activities - Brits have finally caught up with The World, and now spend more time on social media sites than entertainment, news, or those other bits and bobs that slop around the internets.

Even I, with my scattergun antipathies, groundless aversions and arbitrary snobberies – qualities which usually bar me from embracing novelty in any form - have been so fully assimilated into the 2.0 landscape that I struggle to imagine another way of being.

And I am far from unique: Twitter, my enabler of choice, has hit the one billion tweets a week bar. Users are generating 140 million tweets per day, and 460,000 new accounts are being created every 24 hours.

In celebration, @kenarmstrong1 has devised a neat inventory of The Five Stages of Twitter, with which you may identify. Viz: Completely Lost; Hashtag Games; Infatuation; Resentment; Acceptance. Yikes. Tomorrow, we will barely notice it’s there.

Now, I’m not in the habit of over-egging the pudding (I am) but it feels, as @oliverburkeman suggest in his excellent upsum of #sxsw, that we have reached some kind of tipping point; social media is no longer something we ‘interact with’ - it’s now fully embedded in our identities. The sixth stage of Twitter is fusion.


IPad 2 'Not Perfect' Shock

If you are one who, like me, will not be upgrading to iPad2 any time soon, due to that exasperating ‘feeding and clothing the family’ imperative, you will have been watching this week’s plethora of iPad-related headlines with something approaching inchoate rage. Cheerful tales of demand massively outstripping supply, mobbed #sxsw pop-up stores, - yes, even that smart girl who sold her spot at the front of the line to an arguably crazed and certainly overpaid neophile for $900 - will have engendered in your bosom nothing but a bitter gall. Or perhaps you are a better person than I am. I don’t know – it’s hard to tell from here, even with my monacle in.

Either way, you may be cheered by the news that the iPad 2 isn’t quite God’s gift. Mashable cites glitches which mean that apps must be manually transferred, a casing that feels kinda plasticky, and that disarming toasty sensation in your nethers, so familiar to laptop owners everywhere, but thrillingly absent in the first-gen device.

What’s more, it seems as though the over-heating, at least, is a function of the iPad 2’s new slimline look, much hyped by Steve Jobs and gang, in the run-up to the launch. So - thinner is not always better, my friends. It is meagre comfort, yes, but something to cling to in these difficult times.

Psst. If you’re still weighing up that Hobsonion iPad2/destitution binary, it might be worth perusing this: How Much Can You Get For Your Old iPad?

A bientôt, mes amis!

For more social media snippets, follow @emodkate - or for general twittery, @KateVWilliams

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Five social network steps to counter cyberbullying

In case it passed you by, it was bullying prevention week last week in the US, with the not-inconsiderable combined political mass of Barack and Michelle Obama thrown behind the campaign as they hosted a live conference on the subject on March 10th. The conference included sessions and discussions on cyber-bullying, campus bullying and pioneering new programs to combat harassment of young people, and announced a new website: stopbullying.gov. To give a sense of the scale of the problem, almost a third of young people or 13 million students are bullied each year, with victims more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol and have mental health issues; themes unfortunately all too familiar with young people in the UK.

Opening the conference, Obama said:
"If there is one goal of this conference, it is to dispel the myth that bullying is just a harmless rite of passage or an inevitable part of growing up, it's not. Bullying can have destructive consequences for our young people."

The conference announced a number of intelligent measures being taken by the US federal government: for a round of them, take a look at Anne Collier's excellent post on NetFamilyNews.org. Focussing here on cyberbullying, social networks were stepping up to the mark:

1. Formspring intelligent filter. First up, Q&A site Formspring - that hotbed of anonymous hatespeech - finally owned up to some kind of responsibility for the hurt its platform can cause. Partnering with MIT's media lab, it is has developed a filter for finding “problematic content” and putting a stop to online bullying. The site has limited the number of questions that can be asked on a formspring to prevent harassment. Users also have the option to require anyone having a question to have formspring.me account.

The filter reportedly detects questionable content on the site by using natural language recognition to determine the meaning behind words better. (I'd be interested to know how this filter may differ from our friend Crisp Thinking's moderation tool which perhaps Formspring could have installed from the start? But that's by the by ...)

Facebook 

Never one to let a week go by without a major change or two, this week the platform announced two changes to its reporting mechanisms.

2. Suicide reporting

Firstly, in response to several cases where users announced their intention to commit suicide on the platform, it has launched a system which allows users to report friends they think may be contemplating suicide. (eModeration sees and responds to *a lot* of these threats on many sites we monitor, especially those aimed at young people.) The reporting page asks for the address (URL) of the Facebook page where the messages are posted, the full name of the user and details of any networks they are members of. Suicide-related alerts will be escalated to the highest level, for attention by Facebook's user operations team, which will triage the reports, deciding whether to call police or forward the report to the appropriate suicide prevention organisation, such as The Samaritans in the UK.

This is a welcome recognition of a growing problem. However, the system will always be open to abuse by users, who may overwhelm the site with bogus reports: and in any case, since there is no certainty of the speed of Facebook's response, we would always take a belt and braces approach and follow Facebook's own advice to also report any threat which appeared imminent directly to local police.

3. Additional reporting links
You’ll now be able to report content on profiles, groups, pages and events.

4. Social reporting

Another change to reporting will allow users to report cyberbullying directly to a trusted adult, in addition to Facebook itself. Clicking “report” on a photo, for example, will allow you to clarify whether or not you actually appear in the image and whether it’s a form of harassment. Selecting the latter option will allow you to forward the picture to a trusted friend like a parent or teacher, in or out of the Facebook network, who can take appropriate action in the real world.

“Social reporting’’ aims to involve adults who know the students involved and can intervene before cyberbullying spirals out of control. This is a really important step in recognising that online bullying is usually a reflection of what is happening offline, and it will take real life intervention to control it.

Facebook's director of European policy, Richard Allan, said: "Often the best way of sorting offensive content is for friends to flag those things to each other." For more serious concerns, Facebook can put users in touch with police or charities that can help them, said Mr Allan: "In the real world you have a sense of when you need to escalate something to the right organisation. If someone is calling you names, it might not be appropriate to go directly to the police."

This may also help address CEOP's concern that Facebook's response centres may not have enough staff to cope with reports from its 500 million global users.

In a statement from Facebook:

"In the next few weeks, we will incorporate new educational videos, external resources from renowned experts, downloadable materials for people to share and discuss, and more…We’re also looking to teens to get their perspective and advice on using technology wisely."

Not everyone has greeted the changes with open arms. Some still fee that Facebook isn't going far enough. This, from Boston.com:

"The link to report abuse is not prominent enough. Despite what Facebook claims is its “real-name’’ culture, bullies can easily set up fake accounts. And Facebook still does a poor job keeping children under 13 from joining in the first place; as many parents can attest, the age restriction is easily circumvented. And however firm its policies, Facebook still relies on users to enforce them. This is a reasonable philosophical stance, but it also spares Facebook the trouble and expense of more closely monitoring the vast social environment it has created."

5. Going after the bullies. This one went largely under-reported, but was picked up by the indomitable Mary Kay Hoal on her Yoursphere blog. In a trial by Thames Valley police (UK), police will be working with teen volunteers to investigate reports of cyberbullying and harassment on Facebook made by parents and schools.

The whole point behind the program is to “nip the problem in the bud and prevent it [cyberbullying] from becoming something more serious” says Dave Thomas, the mastermind behind the plan.

If cyberbullying is found to have taken place, the culprit will be sent a message on Facebook warning them they are breaking the law and could be prosecuted for their actions. Their parents will also be alerted to their activities.

This trial could be rolled out across the Uk is successful, and I look forward to hearing more about it.  It sems like a good combination of real-life intervention and teen education.  What do you think of the measures taken against cyberbullying?  Know any more good examples?

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A social month in media

It’s been a busy month for anyone involved in social media. Facebook Pages underwent a major redesign (which always keeps us on our toes), which lets company admins post under their company name, rather than using their personal profiles. Facebook also made major changes to its moderation practices, introducing three levels of auto-moderation that should help to filter out the most obvious profanities and blacklisted words. We’ve started testing the filter, and you can read our initial impressions of it, here.

We’ve also seen a number of changes that affect anyone involved with child safety, whether online or offline. There were changes to the Vetting and Barring (V&B) scheme in the Protection of Freedoms Bill, which affects the way CRB checks are made on people working with children. The UK Council for Child Internet Safety (UKCCIS) announced the launch of its guidelines for the moderation of online environments used by children (which we, along with other industry organisations, charities and child safety experts were involved with drafting).

This week, the ASA extended its Code of Practice (CAP) to cover social media, which got a few people in a spin...

You can read the views of industry experts, including our own Tia Fisher, over on Econsultancy, or a summary of what the changes mean for agencies on our blog, here.

And finally, we launched our own guide for brands on how to manage a customer review site (including how to deal with negative reviews) which seems to have been pretty well received.

And in case we stop to rest on our laurels after that lot, we’ve been challenged on Twitter by our friends in the Fresh Networks agency to take part in the Great Ormond Street 5km ‘fun run’ (not two words I normally put together). But it’s for a good cause… so anyone who’s feeling generous and would like to sponsor us (even if it’s just for the chance to laugh at the photos from the finish line), or who’s feeling fit and would like to take part, please visit Team eMod's fundraising page. We’re really grateful for any support you can show for Great Ormond Street, whatever form it takes.

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Testing Facebook Pages: the new profanity filter - how it works.

When it comes to Facebook, there's only one to check out their changes: test, test and test. For which you will need access to at least three profiles:

1. Page admin
2. User posting comments
3. Other user.

My tips?  Use three different browsers for each log in, and keep notes as you go.  Oh, and screenshots.  Then you can fill in any other members of your team who need to manage Facebook pages (and check they have the same results, following the steps you took).  Anal doesn't even begin to describe it.  It's even slightly dull.  But that's how it has to be.

Following my recent post on Facebook's new built-in profanity filter, our community management team at eModeration  had some questions.  Do you have to put any words in the customisable list? How strong is the filter on the two available settings?  Does it work on character strings?  How quickly does it work?  Does a user know their comments has been deleted? Posts as well as comments?  etc etc.

I've just done a little testing, and here is how it went:

The test

Posts

1. I set the Page to 'strong', with no words in the custom list.
2. I posted the F word.  It appeared.
3. After a little while (2 mins or less?) it vanished from the front - but not when I was viewing the page as the profile who had posted the message.  It looked to me as though it was still on the wall.  However, the admin profile and 'another user' profile couldn't see it on the wall at all.  The admin could see it in the only in the 'hidden posts' tab).
4.  'Damn' in a post got picked up, same as with the F word.
5.  I set the filter to 'medium' and posted "Damn and blast"  It stayed on the wall.

Comments

1.  Posted a comment with the F word in it. It was not treated in the same way as a post - it stayed in the admin wall view, and in the view of the account which had posted it - but disappeared from any other user's view.  It did NOT appear in the hidden posts tab.

My conclusions?

1. Words entered into the blacklist are in addition to the preset filters that Facebook has set up
2. The profanity filter is more stringent when set to 'strong' than 'medium'
3. Whilst taking both from the view of other users, only flagged posts go to the 'hidden' tab in the admin view.  Comments stay (greyed) on the wall. Neither can be seen by other users after flagging.
4. Hidden posts can be reinstated (via a dropdown feature - see image below)
5. Unlike deleted content, users whose posts or comments are hidden by the profanity filter can still see them on the wall, whereas other users can't.  This is a good anti-spam measure.
6. The fillter is set to recognise strings of characters within words, such a 'Scunthorpe'.  Therefore it is likely to hide a number of false positives, which - in the case of comments, cannot be reinstated.

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