Facebook's Proposed Policy Changes

Facebook is proposing a number of changes to its policies. The foremost of concern is that, due to a recent court settlement, Facebook proposes to let you opt-out of "Sponsored Stories" that include your information due to you clicking the "Like" button inside or outside of the site. Your permission would now be part of agreeing to use Facebook right from the beginning (this is why I don't "Like" anything for Facebook purposes).

An additional proposal regards third party data retention.

This is a link to the Techcrunch article discussing the changes:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/29/facebooks-new-rules-change-how-it-treats-your-data-and-who-can-access-it/

This is the original page summarizing the changes by Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-site-governance/10153167395945301

This is the link to the document with red-highlighted additions and crossouts:

Proposed Statement of Rights and Responsibilities Tracked Changes

This is the link to the document with red-highlighted additions and crossouts:

Proposed Data Use Policy Tracked Changes

Same Dreck, Different Day: or Your Recommendations Kinda Stink

Recommendations or suggestions are part and parcel of  nearly every social website that exists and yet they are the one aspect of them all that has the biggest potential to truly suck. I'm going to cover four different sites (Pinterest, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube) giving my opinions on why their recommendations are a failure or actually work and how to avoid them or at least remove or dismiss them.


Pinterest


Pinterest is my choice for pushiest recommendations for the simple fact that you cannot sign up for the site without choosing five boards to follow. You can't go to the settings or any other part until you do. I just picked five random boards and then I was allowed to proceed. You can then unfollow any or all of those "gateway" boards immediately or any time after.

The site though becomes quite benign after that annoyance. Recommendations come from when you make a re-pin by noting that it has been pinned to another board and gives you the option to go to it. Also by clicking on the menu (hidden by a small symbol of three rectangles in the upper left corner), you can see more board suggestions by various categories.

An additional way to get even more recommendations was recently introduced. A button will allow you to let Pinterest make personalized suggestions by using cookies where its buttons are infused (their word). This is a feature that I haven't turned on (I also have an extension that prevents Facebook from tracking the sites I visit. More on Facebook next.). I prefer a certain level of privacy. Feel free to try it and tell me what you think about it.


Facebook


For overall lousy recommendations, it has got to be Facebook. Here is a list of all of the ways that they try to get you to "like" or follow pages, groups and people: Find Mutual Friends; Get More Updates; Recommended Pages; People to Follow; Suggested Groups; Games You May Like; Rate to Add to Your...; Add to News Feed; Add to...; and Use Friend Finder. These show in a column on the right side of your Home page.

Rate to Add to Your... asks you to give one to five stars to add to movie, TV or book lists.

Add to... asks if you have seen or read something from the same categories.

Get More Updates, People to Follow and Add to News Feed are various ways to get you to add people to your News Feed in a one-way fashion: you get their updates but they don't get yours (rather like circling in Google+). The rest are self-explanatory.

The final ways it makes suggestions are: gifts for people having birthdays as well as a chance to send them a timely greeting; events that show in your News Feed asking if you are going or not; and page likes that occasionally appear when someone shares from them.

Now, ads seem to be the most hated part of Facebook and I won't argue with anyone about that, but that is a different conversation.

My complaint is with the fact that although Facebook gives you a way to remove these suggestions, it never remembers anything.

For example, you also get page recommendations when you click on the Like Pages choice in the left side column and can remove those from that page too, so I spent some time clicking off as many of those as I could until I ran out, only to have some of those same immediately turn up when I returned to my News Feed.

Additionally, all of the Add to... recommendations are un-removable.

I have decided to just stop trying to remove them.

That said, the choices mainly come from pages, people and groups that your Friends have liked or joined. It just so happens that my friends have bad taste (well, tastes that don't match mine). Also, Facebook tracks what sites you visit (provided that it is Facebook enabled) and makes choices based on those visits (or least that is what I understand it does in addition to the info for the ads).

So, recommendations and suggestions that repeat and repeat endlessly unless you like them are possibly the worst of them all.

Now for the good part. The Events and Like Pages that appear in the News Feed can be hidden or even removed. You even get to give a reason why. And in the case of pages, even choose to block further updates from the person who sent them (a kind way to mute someone without un-friending him).


Google+


Google+ is my preferred place to share posts but it is hardly free from unwanted and poor recommendations. These appear in various places.

People you may know on Google+ is the first page when clicking on People from the menu.

Discover communities is displayed under Your communities.

What's hot has it's own menu selection. You can also choose to show those posts in your Home stream.

Trending, You may know, Communities you might like, and Interesting people and pages appear in your Home stream and in the What's hot page feed.

Birthday reminders appear in your Home stream and on Google Search (?).

Highlighted posts (posts that someone has +1'd) are in your Home stream.

Oh, and Write reviews for recent places suggests places based on results from recent searches, especially from Search.

Got it all?

Of these myriad suggestions, only the following appearances may not be dismissed: Trending, anywhere and Birthday reminders in your stream. The rest may be dismissed wherever they appear.

People and community choices are based on who's in your circles and puts you in circles, who you interact with on posts, who belongs to your communities, the communities you belong to (for community suggestions), and, apparently, random choices.

While Google+ is supposed to learn from your dismissals (or mutes) to improve its algorithms, the only one that I found to actually work is the Discover communties suggestions but only when you are using the search to start finding and by dismissing irrelevant choices. However, this only seems to work while you are actually looking at communities. Afterward, it appears to start piling up more irrelevant selections all over again.

The people suggestions seem odd, since you can add someone from a post or comment, in or out of a community, as well as from their profiles, and if I wanted to add them, I could have done it while interacting with them. It seems best suited for use at the very beginning when trying to fill your initial circles.

What's hot can be muted or avoided by simply not showing in your stream.

Highlighted posts can be muted or you can simply not show that circle in your stream (move any person choosing to show their +1s into that circle you are not showing).

Of course, just going to your circles and communities direct feeds means that you will be skipping all of that stream clutter. You also can avoid the People page by clicking on "In this circle" for any of your circles and then clicking on "View my circles" at the bottom of the pop-up card. And since Discover communities is at the bottom of the page, just don't page down. So, most of these annoying choices are easy to dismiss or avoid all together.


YouTube


Finally, YouTube has, easily, the very worst and very best recommendations. The second worst is the Recommended Channels appearing on the right side of your page. You can click to dismiss, but it will ultimately just cycle through a pre-selected forty-odd set with out actually shrinking the list.

This leads to the worst of all: a non-dismissable spin-off called Related Channels which appears when you are viewing someone else's channel.

The channels from both are very poor choices considering that this site has the very best as well (coming up).

Popular videos from Topic - Most popular and Recommended for you (based on the videos you search for and/or view) are a variety of suggestions easily removed by clicking on the small circle that appears in the upper right corner.

The very best of all suggestions, this site or just about any site, is the list of videos that runs along the right side when viewing a video (it will be below the screen when viewing a playlist). I have found that the algorithm gives a much better selection of choices than any others that I have seen, and that goes for all of those previously mentioned and many not even mentioned here.

In fact, most of the previously mentioned seem not to run from an algorithm, but simply recycle a list repeatedly, perhaps hoping that you will add something so that it can finally show new choices.


So in conclusion, I must say that the recommendations of Pinterest, Facebook, Google+ and YouTube are a mostly sorry collection of "they liked it", "you crossed paths with them" or "it's what everyone else is looking at" choices that you really didn't want to have to see in the first place.

Improve Our G+ Experience

   G+ is pretty good, but there are some real problems that need to be addressed.

   1 - Stream Issues
   There are several problems with streams, some I have encountered, some I have gleaned from other posts. The biggest is the algorithm that places activity above time. Say I have a couple in my circles and they share the site for posts; one posts lengthy, but interesting observations about his life, the other posts cute animal photos. The cute photos generate lots of activity, but the texts from the other don't. I want to see the text posts, but they are buried below by a bunch of photos I have less interest in, even though the texts post in the evening and the photos in the morning. Don't make the posts go out of time sequence. Give us at least an option to reorder the posts in chronological order. After all, the posts are directed at us, the people, not a computer algorithm. Besides, who asked for activity on a post to determine where it is placed? Lots of stupid posts have greater activity than worthwhile posts.
   Another issue is the size of those posts. If you have an active stream, be it in your home or a community, you have to page down and down and down to see earlier posts because they are so huge and take up a lot of space. These need to be reduced in size and given an option to enlarge so that more posts can fit on a page. This would be especially helpful to mobile users because it seems some folk are just giving up swimming downstream because of this size problem.
   We need a bookmark, like one you leave in a book you are reading. Not because it is a reference point, but because that is where you left off reading. If you have to stop reading, especially on an active stream, it would be great to be able to jump back in where you left off, so you can catch up. This would also mean that you have to be able to override or opt out of the algorithm and put your posts in chronological order, but I already want that.
   Gmail has better functions to order and access and compress your info on the screen. That is where Google started. Get some of those Gmail people working with the G+ers and make this easier to work with.

   2 - Communities
   The first fix for Communities needs to be the ability to organize them. Right now, they appear, in threes, in the order of the most recently visited in the top left, the second most recent to the right of that, so that if you belonged to nine communities it might look something like this:

1   2   3
4   5   6
7   8   9

We need to be able to organize them alphabetically and chronologically as well as previously visited. Alphabetically is fairly straight forward (if "The" is the first word it would be under "T"), but chronologically should be a way to arrange them by most recent or oldest activity.
   Speaking of activity, we also need to expand on the notifications on the Communities page. Currently, we get a small red box with a number on the corner of a community that has new posts, comments or +1s. I belong to some communities that post a lot of photos and much of the activity consists of comments but mostly +1s for these photos. Some of these have the most recent post being two weeks ago, but lots of "other" activity. We need to have these broken down into three numbers on each community (or at least two), a red box for new posts only, a blue box for comments only and a green box for +1s only (or a blue box for comments and +1s combined). It is very disappointing to open a community only to discover that all of the action is comments and +1s (which are worse because those are undated). I would  prefer to first view when new posts are up and skip the comments and (especially) the +1s until I am caught up with the posts.
   Another Community addition involves the moderators. Currently, moderators can dump someone from a community without notification. I found myself kicked out of one and still can't figure out what I did wrong (not going to try to find out either, not worth it). Moderators should certainly be able to expel when they feel it is appropriate, but there needs to be a formal "form" notification that says why it happened. This would help keep moderators from being arbitrary in enforcement, but also give the banned a chance to explain and plead their case or at least understand what they were caught doing.

   3 - Find People
   A simple solution. Put the toolbar in this order: Your Circles, Added You, Find People and rename the whole section People. Maybe the empty or small amount in their circles will encourage greater involvement by newbies or the shy, but certainly would allow the more active to easily access the parts they are more likely to need. After all, there is a daily limit on how many one can add in a day and a total in circles limit as well. How useful is it to have a section that can't be used for the day or at all appearing first?

   4 - Profile
   Add blank areas for the person to fill in as they choose. After the Tagline, Introduction and Bragging rights, every category is multiple choice or fill in the specific space. Not much for someone to be creative with or allow further details that don't fit into the stated lines. Also, allow these "blanks" to have adjustable visibility just as the others do, including customization. Remember, sometimes "square" peg things that people enjoy doing or how they earn a living can't be squeezed into the usual  "round" hole definitions (no allusions to FB vs. G+ intended).

   This sums up for the areas where I see a need for improvement that could benefit users, giving them more control and freedom, reigning in possible excesses and making for a more streamlined experience when visiting.

Another G+ Blog Post: What's Good And What's Bad

   G+ has a number of sections to look at for various kinds of info. I'm going to give a rundown of what I think of each of these categories. Home and Profile are always first and second on the sidebar. The others can be arranged to how you like, so they are in alphabetical order. (I use a laptop, so if some of these behave differently within apps, I wouldn't know)

   Home: your first destination when you open G+. This is all of your streams. If you manage your circles carefully, as well as your Communities, you should always be able to see just the streams that you want. One recent oddity: I have been seeing select posts from some Communities showing up in spite of the fact that all of them are turned off.
   Profile: this is where you organize all of your personal info: posts, about, photos, videos (or YouTube) and +1's. The posts is probably the most useful of these as it reflects your opinions and interests more than what you say in your about section. Photos are the next most useful because it shows just what you want others to see about you. I recently uncircled someone because the initial reason for circling back was not re-enforced by the choice of photos to display; they contradicted it entirely. About is good as a back-up or to help tip the balance to circle or not to circle. But don't feel that you have to fill it all out even if other, more well-known names say you must. Mine is nice and vague (even vaguer since "Find People" - later on that). If you don't want to circle because of that, I don't care. Videos can be interesting, but few have them as a lot of people may not know how to, or that they can or even want to bother. +1's are the absolute least important of all because if you didn't realize, it only shows them if they are outside of G+, not within and there are still many sites that don't even acknowledge G+. There is an extension that can be added that will allow you to add a private +1 to any site so that they will show up on your page. I, however, could not care what you +1 as I think it is prone to overuse and abuse and is a very lazy way to comment or recommend.
   Communities: my favorite area. An easy to use way to find discussions on topics that interest you. I currently belong to over 30 of these, although on most, I am a silent observer. The only real downside that I see are the recommendations. I have had some really strange ones appear and have no idea as to why they were suggested to me. My interests have nothing to do with these, so some algorithm must do the job of saying "if these, then those". That said, a simple click on the x makes those go away and some of them will linger for a while if you don't do choose to join or delete, giving you time to consider. Avoid empty communities because if even the moderator has nothing to say, no one will.
   Events: a way to invite people to parties and record and store photos of it. Of no interest to me right now. I maintain a neutral position on whether it is useful or not.
   Explore: often, the most tedious of all functions. Both neither hot nor recommended, it is the well traveled ground of press releases, reposted "humorous" cartoons, captioned photos and gifs and celebrity nonsense. Sometimes real news or info can filter in, but due to the limited scrolling (it just stops after three or four "loads"), it is unlikely. I say avoid unless you are bored or tolerant of potential boredom. It is much better than before Communities where much of the dreck has drifted away to their own private (yet public) dreariness.
   Find People: this consists of  3 sections - Find People, Added You and Your Circles. Your Circles is by far the most important of these as how circles are organized affects what you see in your streams. You can rename, change the order and even eliminate your circles themselves in addition to sorting out who goes where. The first 4 circles appear in the Home control bar, the rest in the more section. Added You is three lists: Recently Added You, Not Yet In Your Circles and In Your Circles Too. These are your lists of those whose circles YOU are in. Not very important if you are getting other notifications (like the red box or email). Find People is perhaps the worst of all functions. A looong list of people whom you've already met by commenting on their posts or vice versa; then ALL of the people that your circles have circled; and finally complete strangers. This info already is on your Home page in a column to the right of your stream, just in smaller type. You can "dismiss" these "Found People" by clicking on the x, but the image only becomes transparent and shrinks a little. It does not drop off the page like your circled people (or the actual circles) nor does it vanish like a dismissed community. And it is the first section, not the last. My advice is to get your circles in order, then manage them well as you add people (you can create a new circle when you click on "add' on their profile page or their "hovercard" or just put a check next to the circle/s you already prepared). Then never return to this option again unless you are desperate to have someone, anyone in your circles. Most likely, these people will NOT circle you back.
   Games: I don't play video games. I would not know good games from bad. Another neutral function.
   Hangouts: a way to have video conference calls. Sort of like the 50s and 60s sci-fi imagined all phone calls would be like. The one real downside is that all hangouts are recorded and can only be dealt with after they are over. Plus, I am not aware as to whether each participant gets a copy or if only the moderator. A concern if you are talking about a topic you would rather not go public (just like your posts). Not seeing ANY Hangouts in my future, but sounds like a live way to discuss stuff in free form.
   Local: basically the Yellow Pages with reviews and maps. Since Google bought Zagat a time ago, this is their way of adding value to that acquisition by taking it online. You can add your own reviews and/or business to it but it is something I will never need and it is easy to ignore. Results of reviews can show up in Google Search so decide carefully if you want to contribute or choose to see your circles reviews (check out Search setting on how to block this info from entering your searches).
   Pages: mostly businesses and organizations with a few groups with themes (like nothing but cats). Most businesses do a poor job of presenting posts (just look on Explore for examples). Press releases with no engagement added or other reasons to visit. Some of the groups began before communities, so they are more like one sided conversations (posts that you can respond to but can't start yourself). I follow some pages, but do so with the same care you take when adding a person to your circles.
   Photos: a sort of redundancy of the section from your Profile page but also includes private albums. You can instant upload from there as well. When you add photos, it also creates the duplicate album in Picassa with similar functions such as editing. I already posted about Picassa's Secret Auto-Opt-In, so I won't repeat myself. Suffice to say, use the same caution as posting or commenting. It could come back and bite you in the ass.

Overall, I would say that G+ improving, but is tending to veer toward catering to the FB users. It needs to chart its own course and let them find a way to join in own their own terms. They are invited to the party, but they have to eat what is here, drink what is here and listen to the music already playing.

BTW: +Google , get "Find People" into third place after Circles and Added.

Sharing Is A Little Overrated

   I was reading a post in the Google+ community that got me thinking about social media again (is this going to become a blog where I talk about nothing but Google+? Mmm, not quite).
   I've already commented on Twitter. Gossip, rumors and verbal wars seems to be the only real news that comes out of that site. Way down the list of interests for me. It does seem to be a source for researching bigger stories (Manti T'eo and Deadspin anyone?).
   Facebook is still something very new to me. And with the new Graph Search everything that one has made public will be searchable within the site. I came in just after Timeline debuted and this hasn't rolled out yet. I'm not sure how this will affect me because I only have one friend on FB (hi, JayPBee! Got your poke, don't know what to do), so I guess I could search friends of my friend. It seems like a really good way for FB to get their advertising info even more targeted. What else can I do there? All of the old friends I have an interest in are either very private folk, the sort that just didn't have a computer to begin with or dead (really). So my YouTube likes, Hulu watches, Spotify listens and Washington Social Reader reads are the only posts I have so far. I'll figure out something to do there. Soon.
   I actually have two Yahoo accounts. What is that site, beyond email? Lots of news headlines (I mainly use Google News), a number of apps/sites connections and...? It's good for signing onto other sites! (So is FB!)
   The blog post I read was called "Why the Google+ long game is brilliant" (sic). He waxes forth about how he uses Hangouts and Chat and Voice and on and on. As a businessman. For which I am not using G+. I can see the potential for a number of the features, but not for me. For now.
   This whole "integration" thing that Google is striving for is kind of a head scratcher for me. I have a YouTube account because I want to Watch videos, not post them. I have a Gmail account because I wanted to get a job, not write letters to friends (see friends issue above). I have a Blogger account (not this one) because I want to write fiction, and if anyone reads it, hooray. Google News is nice because I like to keep up with current events. And Google search is great at finding things.
   And that's it. The rest is kind of bells and whistles to me. For example, I decided to "personalize" my Gmail page and add a background. I tried a number of different images from my files until I found one that I liked. That and the others are now a Picassa album! What's that about? It didn't offer to save a image for me, it simply saved, period. Even the rejects. Which I have to delete. Because I didn't want to save them in the first place (at least not on Picassa).  
   I am starting to enjoy discussing things and reading posts on G+ but I don't see Google as the be all and end all of internet life. As an individual. If I were a business (like Brad Feld, the poster), I, too, would see a "future is now" world coming our way. But, I'm not. I am not out to promote myself all over the web (if you read this far, Yeah!). Here, I just have stuff I want to say as I explore what I encounter with social media.
   I'll figure out what to do with FB. I'll figure out what Yahoo is good for besides allowing me to log in to sites. Twitter, not going there. Flickr, Tumblr, Pinterest, Yelp: dipping my toe, so to speak. Did you know that Sears new membership is also a social media/shopping network? That Disqus is a social media/commentary network? Yeah, gonna take a look at those, too. Maybe do some research about them on Google.
   In the meantime, I'll just keep my separate stuff separate while I can and fight for my small right to not have to share everything with everyone across every feature. Just some things. Like this.

Community Failure

   Got kicked out of a community today without explanation or notice. Not sure what I did wrong but it would've been polite if I had found out personally instead of by trying to respond to a comment I found in my email and discovering that I wasn't able to interact because I had been locked out. How very disappointing. I guess Google+ is not immune to less than grown-up behavior by some members. I have since muted the individuals who moderate the community because it is too late for reasons now. That would have been before not after behavior. I will just move on and find a better group to post about this topic.

Picassa's Secret Auto-Opt-In

   Um, just what is this site suppose to be? I most recently saw that it is trying to position itself as a photo site to replace Instagram after the recent announcement backfired and they had to backpedal and return to their original policy. So far, all I have experienced with Picassa is that it made an album out of my profile photos (including a separate one for profile photos-draft?), a scrapbook photos and one for this blog(!). These were formed automatically and I only discovered this site by looking at my Dashboard for Google. I guess it is for downloading your photos as sharable albums exclusive of being in posts on a web site now that they have added a mobile app. I was surprised that it made those albums without my opting in as I did not know about Picassa before the Dashboard gave me my surprise.
   This auto-opt-in ticked off a friend of mine who was posting photos and text separately on Google+ and found that his photo posts had been removed to albums only. He was very upset and deleted all material from his page: posts, photos, profile info, etc. I had to tell him about Picassa because his photos and album were still there. So he also deleted the info from his Picassa file and made both files private and blocked from anyone but himself. But since he has no plans to use them any more, they are basically dead pages. That was when he discovered that his Blogger page had an album created for it as well (I told him about how my empty album auto-formed; I guess it is to store photos that get posted on my blog; like that will happen). That also set him off, as his blog is something he deliberately chose to not connect to his G+ account (because it is NSFW). He said that the only reason he didn't close his whole Google account was because he uses it to sign in to a number of his other non-Google sites. He really hates this auto-opt-in stuff that Google is doing. 
   As for myself, I don't have a good camera phone, so I am not downloading photos. That kind of makes this a site for which I really have no use right now. Not in some bad way, but without good tools, it's just going to store duplicates of my very occasional photo posts on G+.
   (Sorry to get a little off topic, but I promised to air his complaint).