Metamedia

Twitter New Retweets Are Terrible Because

I tried to send this via the Twitter Feedback box, but got a 405 error. Hopefully, it is because so many people are complaining :) So here's my feedback:

New Retweets Are Terrible Because

1) They violate the fundamental rule of the timeline that I only see who I follow. Instead I now see strangers I do not follow, and I see them whether I want to or not. It does this by inverting the relationship to promote the originator of the tweet over the relationship I have with the person I actually follow.

2) They violate the fundamental rule of every tweet being something I compose, since it is impossible to edit them or add comments.

3) They violate the fundamental rule of following that I see every tweet from a person I follow, since the only way to turn off this new retweet from a particular person is to squelch all their retweets.

4) It breaks - and provides no alternative for -the accepted and useful practice of a chain of retweets so we can learn and see intermediate retweeters who may be of interest to us. The fact that someone retweets something can be just as socially useful as knowing who originated it.

Philosophy

Hence, the new retweet privileges the originator and the link itself over the social knowledge gained from the network of relationships.

This is a basic transformation in the structure of Twitter designed to make it easier to identify influencers (of one type) so as to monetize more efficiently, as it is cheaper to influence the influencers than attempt to influence everyone.

And it is a continuation of the old style of centralized knowledge authority which social media are supposed to be moving away from. Hence, I consider it a retrograde step by Twitter. It will privilege the role of key influencers across Twitter, regardless of and without respect for the social networks already build by follower/followee relationship.

Moreover, it goes a long way to erode the neutral stance that Twitter takes towards content types. Before, all tweets were equal, but now the system is designed to privilege a certain kind of tweet and a certain kind of behavior in tweeting.

Let it not be forgotten that the RT was a user community invention and until now, entirely in the hands of users.

Perhaps the best thing for users would be simply to that again: agree on a new convention for rewteeting instead of RT, perhaps IT (interesting tweet) or PT (passing along a tweet) or TT (True Tweet). Or, for that matter, just keep putting in RT the way we always have.

How To Fix This

1) Keep retweets from someone I follow in their timeline, but put a small link below it to original tweeter (viz reverse the way it is now).

2) Add back the ability to edit. Since there will be a link to the original (since you implemented my first suggestion there, didn't you?) the retweet of my direct follower can always be compared to the first tweet of the originator.

3) Where are timeline filters we've been waiting for??? Helloooo?? Anybody home? Development 101 == solve the more general instance instead of the specific one. If you solve the (lack of) filters, then you solve this.

4) Doing 1 and 2 will fix this already with no extra work, but it would be very nice to have representation of the chain somewhere.

Scott Leslie's 'Open Educator As DJ' Presentation

Here are some resources from Scott Leslie's wonderful keynote presentation this morning at the 2009 Teaching w/ Technology Idea Exchange.

Some Primary Resources

• His deli.cio.us network
• SOL*R Shareable Online Learning Resources
• and the Wiki Append WordPress plugin that powers it
• The Edtechpost wiki page with extended discussion and links to all the various tools he mentioned during the presentation

Presentation Links

• Prezi presentation 'slides'
• Ustream of presentation

Brian Lamb's "The Urgency of Open Education"

Here is this morning's opening keynote by Brian Lamb from the 2009 Teaching with Technology Idea Exchange (TTIX) conference.

The Battle of Agincourt Redux: Academy vs. Technology

Purdue Tlt 09 Robbins

View more presentations from Sarah Robbins.

The Future of Social Networking

From Woody Allen's film Sleeper (1973). A prediction about social networking in the year 2173. Might be sooner than that, the way things are going.

D: "Do you believe in God?"

W: "Do I believe in God? I'm what you would call a teleological existential atheist. I believe that there's an intelligence to the universe, with the exception of certain parts of New Jersey."

D: "Why is it I never understand what you're saying?"

W; "Why? Do you believe in God?"

D: "Well, I believe that there's somebody out there who watches over us."

W: "Unfortunately, it's the government."

I'm sure there's a joke in here somewhere about Our Leader's nose and Facebook, but I will, as usual, refrain.

Eight Out of Ten Online Child Predators Prefer MySpace over Facebook

That's a fake statistic I just made up as a fake headline to get your attention.

But it sounds perfectly plausible, doesn't it?

Below are two pictures I just snapped from live television on a show called "Washington's Most Wanted."

Tonight's show featured an interview with a police officer from a local community giving basic, sensible advice. He mentioned Facebook and Myspace by name only once, as examples of online sites were you put personal information.

But the questions asked by the interviewer and the garish visuals overlaid on the interview by the producers of the show left no doubt about what online site is the dangerous one. The examples splashed across the home viewers' screens are both from myspace.com.

Why does Facebook get a pass from the online fear mongering industry?

Is this a manifestation of the class distinctions in online social networks studied by danah boyd?

That would certainly be consonant with the usual fear-mongering stereotype of child molesters, predators, and pornographers as crusty, slovenly, unshaved, shiftless, transient losers - in short, of lower class lineage.

Partly, Facebook was once - but is no longer - a true walled garden of college connected users.

In this MSNBC article from February 2006 MySpace is mentioned by name 8 times, Facebook only twice, and the aired video segment is predominantly about MySpace; in fact, Facebook presents itself as safer because it required verifiable college email addresses.

But Facebook went public several months after that report, and has aggressively marketed itself to the general public ever since.

Wait - that's eight out of ten!

Not so implausible, was it?

Links:

• The tips discussed on the show and original video
• Washington state links on mostwanted.org
• Another local TV station videos on this topic

Eric Schmidt and Transparency in the Social Panopticon

From Charlie Rose's interview with Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google -

Eric Schmidt: Well, the most interesting thing to me is that transparency is how you keep societies honest.

And we’ve now because of the internet and because of the digital revolution given people — we’ve essentially given them the ability to see everything. So you can now take photographs, take videos of everything you see in your world and people discover it. And there are whole communities of people who are interested in these kinds of aspects.

And they serve as a form of check and balance on the powerful, the rich, the people who might exploit others. It doesn’t necessarily mean for a different outcome, but it means that everybody can’t hide. They have to actually tell the truth. To me, that’s a great step forward.

[From Eric Schmidt Tells Charlie Rose Google Is “Unlikely” To Buy Twitter And Wants To Turn Phones Into TVs]

[Emphasis mine.]

Precisely. Those platitudes sure sound nice when you first hear them - until you realize that one of the great exceptions to this new transparency are corporations, who use control of the law to protect their own inner workings from any type of transparency, scrutiny, and oversight, while extracting exactly that kind of information from their "information suppliers" (more usually but misleadingly called "users".)

There are a lot of strategies available to legal persons like corporations that are not available to actual persons like you and me. They may not be able to hide some things as much as they used to, but as Schmidt notes, the outcomes don't change much - indeed this whole phenomenon would not even be happening if that were so, if companies had more to lose in the battle for social control than they can make in selling goods and services.

Why doesn't this transparency that keeps things honest apply to corporations? In this very interview, Schmidt wasn't exactly transparent about certain of Google's business plans.

Until the day I know as much about Google as they know about me, Schmidt's words will just remain platitudes, deeply ironic ones.

Indeed there is really nothing that new about this type of transparency, for it is just another view of The Panopticon.

In Bentham's Panopticon, the guards watch the inmates. In the Social Panopticon, the guards let the prisoners watch each other, too, for both entertainment and profit. But in neither do the prisoners watch the guards except for exactly when, where, and how the guards want them to.

On The Way to Info Slavery

From academhack » Blog Archive » Academic Branding and Portfolio Control

But on the other hand I think it is better to develop your own profile, your own set of pages and develop the digital literacy to control your own data. Why? Because of Facebook. If Facebook has taught us one thing it is that the services that provide us with places to store and share information about ourselves, develop an uncomfortable amount of power, and that when these sites decide to change TOS or use your data in ways in which you are uncomfortable with, there is often little you can do.

[Emphases mine]

In ancient Greece, the classical definition of a slave was one who did not have control of their body.

In the digital world, the definition of an info slave is one who does not have control of their digital person.

Control over one's representation of the self to the world is a fundamental component of freedom.

Control over one's digital representation is not just the ability to own ones own content, but also to control "the facts about" one. The fact that I like Beethoven and Jane Austin and play the guitar - those "facts about" are as much a part of my digital persona as the videos I make, the music I record, the posts I write.

And control means to be able to control who can and can not see it, who can and can not profit from it, and who can and can not reuse it. And this right pertains to real humans, not the legal fiction persons of non-human corporations.

There is no "Nation of Facebook." Or any other corporation. It has no citizens. It confers no rights. It's only relationship is monetary and contractual. And when it has power, it can and will arbitrarily change that contract to its own advantage without due process; the only recourse to which is resignation, if possible. It is the master.

The only difference between a walled garden and an info prison is how happy the inmates are. So Facebook just has to keep them entertained by throwing them trinkets and baubles.

And no faux rebellion by its "users" will fundamentally change that.

Facebook is a company which has explicitly designed a tool to make money by collecting personal information about people under the guise of a service, and then selling it.

And no marketing campaign appropriating the language of rights and democracy will change that.

The Facebook TOS Rebellion

[UPDATE: One week later I have heard nothing from FB customer support on my name change request, which normally "takes 24 hours"]

I removed all the data from my Facebook account today - it took about an hour to delete the items one by one by one, as there is no way to remove them otherwise.

Whatever the results of this latest rebellion, and whatever cosmetic changes (if any) in the Facebook Terms of Service, it does not matter to me: Facebook is a company that is inherently (and by that I mean in the character and attitudes of its founder and principal board members) disrespectful of its users and has shown itself to consistently be so.

Rather than deactivate my account, I am leaving it active so I can post items of interest there about Facebook's essentially duplicitous business model and the fundamental attitude of information sharecropping which it embodies.

As a protest, I changed my photo to the default blank with an 'X' through it, borrowing this idea from those whose names were given by their masters when enslaved. And I have formally requested - as is required by the TOS - that Facebook customer service change my last name to X.

[UPDATE:  Some Useful Aftermath Links 

• http://amandafrench.net/2009/02/16/facebook-terms-of-service-compared/
• http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#/group.php?gid=77069107432
• http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/02/facebook-battle-ends-major-victory-users

]

Farewell Mixwit, we hardly knew ye...

We regret to inform... 

Mixwit is closing down on Dec 27, 2008 - follow the news at their blog http://blog.mixwit.com.  That's yet another blow for, or rather against, mashup culture, beginning earlier this year with the assassination of Muxtape.

An interesting alternative is OpenTape a "free, open-source package that lets you make and host your own mixtapes on the web." 

Just so we remember Mixtwit, here is a picture of a widget I made with it, which does nothing but remind.