Facebook told to tighten up privacy rules

Facebook, let´s face it no stranger to controversial changes to terms and conditions around data privacy, is to tighten up its privacy rules after complaints from Canada´s privacy commissioner.

The move will see users given much more control over what and how much information is shared with the site and its third parties. This is obviously bad news for their appeal to advertisers who obviously want as much customer data available as possible.

The changes will be introduced over the coming year and will affect every single one of their 250 million members. The site has agreed to change its default privacy settings and to share with its users how their information is being used for advertising.

This might appear bad news for Facebook in the short-term but it was quite clear that it coud not continue in the vein it has been. Users are now more picky than ever (and rightly so) about how their data is being used and instead of hiding from the notion of privacy social networks should be embracing it. It´s something that we and one of our clients, sixpartswater, has certainly embraced in building a network for people to share sensitive updates on their health with distinct and controlled groups. It´s the control element over the information that´s the USP.

You can read more here.

Police use Twitter for Climate Camp

The Climate Camp is something I am quite close to... literally. It is about 300m from my front door.

All seems peaceful and under control and I am happy to see our constabulary are using social media to keep track of what is going on. Catherine Mayer of Time magazine covers the story.

Fingers-crossed it works, for me and my house´s sake.

http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1918997,00.html.

Social networks - now the domain of the elder?

A recent Ofcom report about how we all use the Internet has shown that use of social networks amongst 16-24 year olds is down for the first time. And that use amongst the older demographic (25-54 year olds) is up.

Alarmists are saying this represents the death of social networks amongst the younger age range. Piffle we say. We know that any new phenomenon will have its innovators and sloths. And we know innovators (mostly from the younger age group in this instance) will jettison a technology when it becomes old hat. That doesn´t mean it´s going away within the younger age group any time soon.

You can read more here.

Data from social networks - Sysomos gets into Twitter´s numbers

People often come to us asking if you can get good data from social networks. At the moment everyone is talking about Twitter... so here is lots of data about twitter and its users.

http://www.sysomos.com/insidetwitter/

Privacy - why social networks don´t want (you) to know

A lot of social networks are faced with a quandry when setting out their approach to privacy. On the one hand there have been studies that have shown that reassuring people about privacy actually makes them more, not less, concerned (it´s called "privacy salience" and has been demonstrated in a number of experiments). And therefore social networking sites don´t really want to broach the topic openly as they want their users to be comfortable about pouring a lot of personal data into the networks.

But on the other hand, there has recently been a public outcry surrounding privacy. Facebook has had a few high-profile run-ins. So what to do? Well, according to Bruce Schneier, BT´s chief security technology officer, privacy is something that is a competitive feature and something that can be a USP in, what is fast becoming, a very competitive and homogenous market. Whether they do this depends on the need of the individual network to get as much data as possible whilst being open as possible about their privacy controls.

Unlike a lot of businesses involved in social networks, we actually embrace privacy. It´s something we´re always looking to get better at and it´s something that actually underpins the proposition of one of the sites we´ve built recently, most notably for sixpartswater, a site which allows people to send messages (often containing sensitive and personal health information) to different groups of people (each with different privacy settings) in a safe and secure environment. Check it out at https://communities.sixpartswater.org

You can read more about the privacy conondrum here.

Study shows Twitter hype is misplaced

Given all the recent media coverage, and the fact that Twitter is the fastest growing social network, you´d be forgiven for thinking that almost everyone tweets. In fact this is not the case in the slightest as, according to a Harvard study of 300,000 users, just 10% of Twitter users generate more than 90% of the content.

Furthermore, the research team found that more than half of all people using Twitter updated their page less than once every 74 days and most people only ever tweet once during their lifetime.

So what does this show? Well, it would appear that people register, tweet for a while and then drop-off. Indeed, Bill Heil, a grad from Harvard who carrie dout the work said, "Based on the numbers, Twitter is certainly not a service where everyone who has seen it has instantly loved it."

Rather more revealingly, the following assertion was made by the research team in a blog:

"This implies that Twitter´s resembles more of a one-way, one-to-many publishing service more than a two-way, peer-to-peer communication network."

You can read more about this here.