Tag Archives: social

Google doesn’t understand the meaning of anonymity

It’s pretty well know that Google+ doesn’t allow people to use nicknames in their profiles. They claim that this will protect users from the “bad intentions” of evil hackers or spammers. This is just nonsense. This basically shows a lack of understanding of what a nick name means and how the use of a nickname can harm users.

If someone want to be anonymous with the intention to do something bad and get undiscovered, the worst thing to do is using a nickname. That romantic idea of a dangerous hacker with a cool nickname, chased by authorities, working in the night in humid and dirty abandoned apartments is unreal… This is not Hollywood! Matrix was just a movie… Hello! Google, knock knock please wake up…
In real life, far before Internet, people used and still use what is called a “fake identity” to make the task of authorities harder. I suggest to see this movie to understand what being an anonymous outlaw means. This means using a fake name, a name that looks real but it’s not a real one.

So is Google really checking if the name in the profile of some user is the real one? How are they going to check that? Are they asking the scanned copy of users passports? Are they asking to introduce your credit card number? Or, maybe, they will send someone to your home to confirm… your identity? Come on, please let’s be serious. If Google really wants to enforce and assure that users use their real names, so go ahead and implement real security measures to be 100% sure that the user is not using a fake identity. (Of course they will loose almost all their users if they do that, though) But if Google is not going to really check G+ profile identities, please stop wasting your time closing accounts and focus on many of the issues that people, for free, is asking you to improve.

Then look at this, in their privacy terms:

Google Profile.

In order to use Google+, you need to have a public Google Profile visible to the world, which at a minimum includes the name you chose for the profile. That name will be used across Google services and in some cases it may replace another name you’ve used when sharing content under your Google Account. We may display your Google Profile identity to people who have your email address or other identifying information.

Posts and other content shared by or with you – such as photos of you – may be visible on your profile to those with whom that content has been shared. You can use the profile editor to see how your profile appears to particular individuals.

“…which at a minimum includes the name you chose for the profile…”
Did you read that? The name you chose for the profile. I don’t see any indication to use my real name or “…by using a nick name your account will be suspended…”

This policy does not affect me personally, I used to write my real name everywhere, but I understand that many people have good reasons not to do so.
I just would like to see a little bit of common sense. For web illiterate people, this policy, shared among other social media platforms like Facebook, has a direct impact creating a wrong vision of how “identity” works on the web. People may do the wrong assumption like: people with nicknames = bad, people with “real” names = good. This policy is sending a wrong message, making people believe that by writing a “real name” you can trust that profile.

If somebody want to abuse the system, I can assure you, he/she doesn’t need a nick name to do so.

What Linkedin should do to be Japanese

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Linkedin is trying to enter into the Japanese market. Sources: Asiajin, TechCrunch (Japanese)

It’s not only about translating the site. It’s all about understanding cultural differences. Here some points I think they should consider to be fully accepted among Japanese.

Give the option to use a predefined avatar. Don’t force people to use their photograph. Japanese take a lot of care of privacy and specially women don’t like to show their real picture on a public site. Linkedin is more a business, professional focused social network so, nobody would feel serious uploading the picture of a cat or dog, something really common in Japanese social networking. So giving the option to use some predefined funny avatars that could be chosen from a list or even letting the user to build one himself/herself. These would be really accepted among the Japanese public.
Don’t do literal translations. Translating a social network site into Japanese means to design the site for Japanese. A translation of the interface is not enough. This means that menus have to be modified, some options dropped and some other added.
Personal data should be completely configurable. For example, options like “I don’t want to show my profile to people from the following company” should exist and many more. Some people when leave their work don’t want to keep any relationship or contact with previous companies.
Roles should be adapted, not only translated. Many roles inside the company change and are different compared to the equivalent in US or Europe.
Also what kind of company, 株式会社 (public company, corporation, KK), 合同会社 (limited company), etc. Here a list. The concept may differ, and company types differ as well. It’s very important to understand this point and provide users the option to pick up the descriptions they feel comfortable with.
Understand how Japanese use social networking. Checking other successful sites is a must. Instead of trying to change their behavior and make them use SNS as Americans or Europeans do, it’s a better approach to adapt and have an appearance Japanese like.
Do alliances with many of the popular companies dedicated for job hunting and career opportunities like Pasona, Adeco, Human Resocia and so forth.

These are just few things to take care when creating a Japanese version of a social media site. For example, let’s see how facebook struggled while twitter grew as bamboo. One of the main reasons is because twitter didn’t force people to use their real names, neither their real pictures and also it didn’t force people to share so much personal information. Privacy is a real serious issue in Japan.
Of course Linkedin is not the kind of site to upload as an avatar the picture of a cat took with the mobile phone. Linkedin is for more “serious” talking, anyway dealing with the real face of somebody is not a requirement in Japanese SNS arena.

The most important advice Likedin should follow is: “Listen, listen and listen! First see how others do in Japan, understand the culture, understand how people interact, try to understand what people need and they still don’t find in other platforms. Listen to consultants having a long experience here and don’t try to quickly to convince a mature society as the Japanese to change their habits”

If Linkedin does its homework and walks the right way, it may have a really great success in Japan offering one thing that many other Japanese social network platforms still don’t properly offer: Internationalization.

Feeds, Twitter, browsing the web and no time to produce. Let’s try to be organized!

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Following the rule “instead of email it to some friends or put some poor twits let’s write a blog post.”

How much time do I spend using twitter?
How much time do I spend reading blog posts?
How much time do I spend searching for information in the web?
How much time do I spend producing something after I assimilate all these information?

Actually the time I spent in Google finding information got drastically reduced due the huge amount of feeds and the use of twitter. I spend my time reading the updates in the blogs I follow and following the links of people I follow on twitter. I end up just jumping from one link to another reading everything I can. At the end of the day I’m tired; all my brain energies had been spent assimilating information but producing none. So I had to look for a good equilibrium between input and output.

What am I looking for? Information. Yes but what kind of information? Something related to my niche, something that I’m just interested in or something in a new field or just some news to see what’s going on in the world.

The point is that I have to read all these stuff but I also need time to assimilate it and time to be productive. Of course that information will be really useful, not only to keep me updated, but to bring me the opportunity to generate content of better quality.

So I divided it by time and no-time dependent content.
News for example are time dependent content. The end of Second World War II was the hot news in September 1945 but not today. So first let’s think about the sources and organize each of them.
I count with three mayor information sources: Feeds, Twitter and Google.

Feeds:

Separate them by topics and each of them by time and no-time dependent ones. For example in photography I want to know ASAP when a new camera model comes out, it’s price and availability. This information is time dependent. I don’t want to twit about the new Nikon D5000!! many months after it’s launched.
For me actually the time dependent approach is one of the most important ones and I try to read it in the morning and stop reading it until the next day. Usually news information is easy to assimilate in few minutes; just a superficial reading is enough to identify what is really important and what is not. But don’t keep the whole day reading news, it’s worthless.

Keep checking during the day some of the top blogs you consider the most valuable sources of information, specially the ones that not only are important for you but that generate more than one post per day. Be careful and don’t select many of them, at the end you’ll spend all your time just reading.

Twitter:

Actually lists help a lot. I created a list based on topics and one “personal” one where I added the people that I know personally and that are living in the same zone. I don’t want to loose a new tweetup or the info of an event near my zone.

Personally I’m not a channel follower. Too much information, I got overloaded and again because of that, I have no time to do other stuff.
Try to take a rest from twitter, time to time. I stopped to update the status every second to see what happened. It could become compulsive and obsessive. Just let the time pass, one hour is a reasonable time. If you are involved in a conversation of course, you have to keep checking it, but if not, just checking the time line every hour should be a good approach.

Google:

Except the specific search in a specific moment, I do periodic searches about what I cannot find in feeds, twitter and topics related to my niche of interest. In that way I found many useful blogs. I do this around three times per week.

The key is organization and self control to avoid spending too much time doing only one thing. The no-time related content can stay in the cabinet for long time. The most important thing is that you don’t loose it, so keep it apart and little by little you’ll be able to read it all. Anyway I didn’t find any platform or tool that could help me arrange and manage properly the information in the web. I would like a tool that could login to the platforms I joined and do some search on them, bookmark links, program some alerts based on some keywords, time or events, and so forth. Actually I’m using many tools to accomplish only one task: organization.

What do you use to organize yourself with the never ending stream of information?
Do you read everything you find in the web? Don’t you feel loosing productivity and sometimes feeling that after you read so much it’s like you didn’t read anything?

Living resume, footprint, byteprints

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The development of internet had changed a lot since the beginning of times.
At the beginning people were just simple spectators, reading a Web page and eating information. Little by little Internet changed the way people interacted with it, adding more multimedia, more interaction, and specially becoming a medium that changed according to its users. This is a really important point because nowadays, everybody is a content editor. Any comment, any mini-post on twitter, any picture that we upload to flickr modifies the content of the Internet corpus.

This activity leaves footprints, fingerprints or, in other words, byteprints…
All this data comes from the user, except the one produced by the technical nature of this medium, such as IP addresses, browser versions, OS versions and so forth. We create the byteprints that are cached by search engines that automatically associate them with our identity.

With identity I refer to the one that we provide when we use Internet. I’m not talking about the official one, created by our parents and supported and enforced by governments where everyone of us has a serial number, an official name and family name, a social security number, and so forth. I mean the identity that we are, still now, free to create on Internet.

For example, around 150 years ago people could call themselves as they liked. The name could be decided by parents but actually any person could call him/herself as he liked. There were no pictures, no credit cards, no biometric id systems, no databases, nothing as such. Everybody could be as anonymous as they pleased.
Fortunately Internet is still a medium like that. We can decide our own identity and define it as we want, with the name, picture or whatever we like. We are still free to talk about everything, we are free to think and we are free to be anonymous.
Unfortunately almost all governments of this planet are trying to change this and make Internet a controlled environment where everybody could be recognized, prosecuted, controlled, and monitored. The reason is simple: just to control and make people stop talking against some interests and to filter and censor what governments decide which is true or false.

The freedom to create our own identity has its pros and cons. We control what could be associated to our identity. For example I’d like to be associated with Linux, Photography, Opensource and Japan.
So in the case a company would be interested to get more information about me, not just the resume, they could check the web and see that I’m involved on those topics. Actually almost all companies that decide to hire someone, do a previous search on Google to see more about this person. So the byteprints we leave out there on the Net could be used by companies, particulars or other web services to make a digital personality of ourselves.

Just try to put your name within double quotes in Google and see the results. If you don’t like it that means that the information that you generated in Internet is not the one that you should associate to your name. The process to change this records is slow and painful, its like an Akashic records. So before taking part in any Web site where a login or just a name is needed to be left, first think about who from your multiple ego (personalities) you would like to use and associate with that information.

This is the beginning of the creation of our online personality (or personalities) and online identity (or identities). Not just an id/password but the records of our movements, our byteprints, our comments, posts, pictures, and so forth. If you are not sure about which information you would like to associate with your “identity” a good practice is to be anonymous. Remember, once the information had been cached by search engines it’s really hard to change it.