Posts tagged social networking
Don’t imply privacy
Jun 6th
Conversations about privacy are an increasingly vital part of any planning process for a membership-driven website. Having been engaged in such a conversation for a new project and fielding support emails for an existing one, it’s been on my mind quite a bit lately.
We’re all managing a lot of personal data, whether we’re running sites that might be described as “social networks” or simply a blog that provides a way to connect up a commenters contributions. On any new project questions inevitably come up about whether or not users should be able to hide their profiles or specific pieces of information, often influenced by the way facebook’s closed walls give a sense of privacy by not letting google index profile data. I’m given to thinking that facebook’s approach has actually hurt such discussions, by implying a level of privacy they don’t really offer.
The problem is that approaches like facebook’s are far more about an illusion of privacy than any actual protection. The artifacts of our online presence, our comments, our photos, etc. and perhaps more importantly our friends’ comments and photos, are never going to be entirely shielded just because we can hide our profiles, but hiding profiles can make us think that protection is there. Similarly attempts by some sites to hide profiles from users who aren’t logged in offers an illusion. Because there’s a hurdle to see your profile it’s tempting to think that it’s protected, but that’s simply not the case.
Our designs need to guide people to be careful about what they’re putting in their profiles rather than having those profiles hidden, and to remember that their online artifacts will last even if the attention given to them dips from its initial high. Unless we’re providing something much more secure than a “hidden” profile, we should avoid the implication that our tools (rather than their behaviour) are what will offer privacy.
[Obviously there are some cases where our architecture needs to work harder to offer privacy, but that's far from the general case]
Ecampaigning forum case study: myactionaid
Apr 11th
For the next couple of days I’m at the ecampaigning forum in Oxford and am going to attempt to live blog the main sessions as far as possible. These notes are largely unedited, so they’re likely to be a bit sketchy. For context, feel free to post a comment and I’ll catch up with them when I can.
MyActionAid Launched about a year ago. Built on plone which let them use out of the box tricks like forums, photo sharing, RSS, plus is open source so actionaid can re-invest in community.
Why bother building own online community?
More project goes on, the clearer the reasons become.
- Build closer relationship with supporters. Not UK-based service delivery org, this helps us get closer to them and add value for them
- More control of features/development
- To make money! Double the giving rate compared to presence on other sites. Wonder if that’s because of sense of closeness/more qualified relationship
- Cut out middle man, reduce fees paid to other services
What trying to achieve?
- Not competition with other social networks. Want supporters to be wherever they want to be (and link back to myactionaid!)
- People are proud of their profiles and link back to them
- Build interest groups.
- Fundraising helped them bootstrap/make case, but it pays for itself and they can diversify focus
- Going forward – empower supporters, build event-related networks
Photo sharing very popular feature. Offer unlimited public photo sharing, wonder if that will be scalable. Status updates (“twitter-esque”)
500 active supporters, meaning they are raising money. Most activities raise ~£1000 but some up to £10,000.
Cons of setting up own network/Advice
Really they are risks. Haven’t solved them all, but they are mostly opportunities too. Make sure resource well.
- Question about how deep it goes. How much content is put in? What is supporters’ journey?
- First website ever launched empty! They put very little in: event listings, news from actionaid homepage RSS feed (low maintenance). People seem to gain from the experience. Some go and visit projects. Does work a little as recruitment, but haven’t really marketed site yet. Communication strategy about to kick in.
- Cost?
- Undisclosed! Most of the investment was time getting people on board, making sure infrastructure in place, developing response mechanisms for users’ contributions. Money it’s brought in made business case for more sophisticated hosting platform, so revolutionised their IT infrastructure.
- How do staff interact with it?
- Community Fundraising Group work very closely with site. Thrilled with deepening relationship with supporters.
- How reached critical mass?
- It is vital. Site doesn’t behave like normal website. (ed: not sure this answered the question…?)
- Did it pay for itself?
- Yes. Pretty quickly.
- There’s a facebook logo on screen?
- There’s a facebook app that shows info from your myactionaid profile. it’s just launching.
- What’s the rate of growth like?
- Went up at the beginning! Grew rapidly. Levelled out for a while. Now growing steadily.
Now wondering what other ecampaigning tools they can provide to members.
Jeremiah Owyang on Facebook Strategies and Beyond
Dec 9th
A number of people have been linking to Jeremiah Owyang’s presentation at the Web Community Forum (I think I found it via Beth Kanter). It’s a good overview of the pros, cons and options for using facebook to promote a cause, campaign or brand, and well worth some time if that’s your focus.
There are two pieces from his presentation that I wanted to pull out. The first appears to be a recurring theme in his work on web strategy, centered on the acronym POST. That breaks down into:
- People
- assess you customers’ Social Technographics profile
- Objectives
- Decide what you want to accomplish
- Strategy
- Plan for how relationships with customers will change
- Technology
- Decide which social technologies to use
The third and fourth of those are particularly good to see. Not only do you need a strategy, but you need to recognise that your relationship with your customers will change when you engage them in a new medium. Too much of the focus on using Web 2.0 to promote a cause has focussed on other ways of putting across a message. It’s simply a translation of “if you’re not everywhere, you’re nowhere” from offline to online media. But part of the promise of the web lies in the fact that it’s no longer your job to get yourself everywhere. Instead you need to build stronger relationships with key stakeholders and they’ll then spread the word if they want to. You just need to look at facebook for evidence — you can put all the time in the world into building a profile, group, application or Page, but unless people want to friend you, use your app or call themselves a fan, your message won’t be seen.
Looking to the future it was also good to see the reminder “Don’t limit to Facebook,” summarised with the bullets:
- Brands should not limit strategy to Facebook Alone
- Prepare for The Distributed Web
- Understand OpenSocial
- Understand the Aggregation of Social Graph
- Tools come and go, what sustains is a strategy
Beth has some good points about building on that last one, but I was just glad to see a perspective looking beyond the current dominance of facebook. If the announcements in the web world over the past couple of months about technologies like OpenID, OAuth and OpenSocial are anything to go by, 2008 is going to bring some significant changes in the world of ’social networking sites.’ (I’ve had a draft on that topic sitting around for far too long, hopefully I’ll get it finished and posted this week!)
MyCharityPage : A Facebook for the Third Sector?
Dec 7th
Third Sector have a report today about MyCharityPage, “a new website billed as the sector’s answer to Facebook”
. The site is currently just showing a page to sign up for notifications, so any reporting or commentary is likely to be speculation, but I have to say I find the whole thing rather puzzling.
Special interest social networking sites are far from new. Whether it’s last.fm for music, flickr for photography or dopplr for travellers there are plenty of examples around the web. One of the strengths of those sites, however, is that they don’t describe themselves as or set out to be a “facebook.” They each focus on serving their niches and doing what they do very well. In the case of dopplr, it’s very clear that they see themselves living alongside other social networking sites by providing excellent tools for importing your contacts from other places, and displaying your dopplr data outside their site.
It may well be that MyCharityPage sees itself in a similar way and that the copywriters or reporters got a little carried away. It wouldn’t be the first time that reports were written about the web that tried to compress it down to variations of the site-du-jour. But the emphasis of the reporting on MyCharityPage also makes it seem like a strange proposition as there are already so many options for charities to reach out to supporters on existing sites (where they already are) that it hardly seems worth the effort of already overstretched web communications officers to set up profiles on a site that is solely focussed on the sector and so unlikely to bring in new supporters.
Just as for musicians, what would seem helpful would be a site that set out to help charities manage their profiles and activities across the burgeoning world of social networking sites. That may well have the spin-off of also hosting profiles for those charities, but it would do it by simplifying their operations rather than adding yet another point of focus to an already crowded landscape. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised by MyCharityPage, but I’m already hearing enough commentary from people who are confused about where to focus their limited resources that it will take a lot for MyCharityPage to impress.
Book Review: Practical Rails Social Networking Sites
Oct 25th
Taking readers step-by-step through the creation of the RailsCoders.net website, Practical Rails Social Networking Sites is a well paced guide to building web applications that tick many of the boxes of the moment.
The book starts with basics, giving simple instructions for installing Rails on a variety of platforms, and then steps through simple content management, adding users and groups, building a blogging engine, adding a discussion forum and photo gallery, integrating with Google Maps and Flickr, and deployment. Along the way the various aspects of rails’ testing framework are introduced as they’re used. The style isn’t test-driven, and it would have been nice to see that style introduced, but tests are written after each piece of functionality, demonstrating some of their use and importance.
Judicious use is made of plugins with a number of recommendations made throughout the book. restful_authentication is referred to, but its functionality is largely duplicated in the code. That’s probably a sensible move so early in the book as it’s important that developers understand what the code is doing even if they’re going to employ a plugin for the implementation. YM4R/GM is used to implement the Google Maps functionality and it’s good to see that getting some attention in print.
Readers who have already built a couple of rails apps may well find themselves skipping large chunks of content as a lot of the code will be familiar. As Stephen pointed out in his summary, it is a little curious that “The Apress Roadmap” suggests this as a more advanced title when it would probably work better for an engaged beginner than an experienced developer.
Of course, the great problem with publishing any rails title right now is that version 2.0 is just around the corner, and with its release we’ll see the end of built-in pagination and a few changes to the routes. As a consequence there are likely to be a number of readers who find that the examples in the book fail to run on the latest stable rails by the time they come to try them. Hopefully Apress will be able to offer a brief supplement with the book or online to help readers update the code for the new features.
Practical Rails Social Networking Sites is a solid introduction illustrating how simple it can be to build useful web applications with Ruby on Rails. I’d hesitate to recommend it to anyone with rails experience, but it will be high on my list of recommendations for beginners who are wanting to dive straight in.
Disclaimer: I was sent a copy of this book for review by the publisher. You can find it at apress, amazon US, amazon UK and all sorts of other places.