Category Archive for ‘Facebook’ at Blog P.I.

Archive for the 'Facebook' Category

Twitter Already Has a Spam Problem

Published by William Beutler on March 25, 2008 in Facebook, Spam, Tech Blogosphere, Twitter, Web 2.0 and William Beutler. 3 Comments

Yesterday, Adam Ostrow at Mashable asked, “Is Twitter About to Have a Big Spam Problem?” Well, I wouldn’t yet call it “big,” but the problem is already here. Ostrow wrote:

[L]ately, I’ve been getting an influx of new followers that resemble this character to the right – someone who is following thousands of people, with only a couple hundred following back. In this case, the new follower seems to be a web design studio in Beverly Hills. While I can’t prove it, I have a feeling that this person used a bot to automatically follow me (and a lot of other people) in an effort to take advantage of the fact that a lot of people will simply return the follow – in turn giving this person a new platform to pump their marketing message.

I knew the account he spoke of; I am one of those also being followed by the “Tripix Designs” Twitter account he mentioned. Like Ostrow, I’ve been followed by a handful of these accounts. Aside from inflating my follower count, I didn’t consider it a problem. But this morning I’m convinced.

At right is the sidebar for “Flyaxe” — a Twitter account that added me sometime last night. That’s what it looked like at about 6:30 this morning, Eastern time. Just a couple hours later, Flyaxe is following more than twice as many. Unlike Tripix, it hasn’t even updated once, so it isn’t clearly promotional. Flyaxe appears to be a “19 year-old dude from norway,” as the matching, recent and similarly empty Digg account shows. At least Tripix was honest about its intentions; Flyaxe could be a Trojan horse for just about anything.

The only solution is for Obvious (the under-funded Twitter-makers) to impose restrictions on Twitter accounts. Facebook imposes all kinds of restrictions on its users, and the result is a better experience — at least for those of us who prefer it to MySpace. So let’s say, you cannot follow more than 75% of those following you. Add more followers, and you can follow more people. But we know already that Twitter doesn’t scale well, so anybody following 6,000 people is doing something other than keeping tabs on that many friends. If you want a macro view of Twitter, Twitter tracking exists and so does Tweetscan. The Twitter API and the myriad tools built using it obviate the need to create one account following thousands of other accounts.

Unless, of course, you’re trying to promote something. However, as I’ve written before, Twitter is not especially useful for broad marketing. Thanks to tracking, one could hand-build a targeted list that could be worthwhile for the marketer and the marketed-to. Flyaxe, on the other hand, is wasting my time and his.

A LinkedIn to the Past

Published by William Beutler on January 6, 2008 in Amazon.com, Facebook, Social Networking and Tech Blogosphere. 3 Comments

Despite much chatter in the tech blogosphere over the past year about whether business-oriented social network LinkedIn would fade in the face of competition with an increasingly professionalized Facebook, the site appears to be holding on, if not exactly thriving. Anecdotally, I get a new request on the order of once per week, a little less often than Facebook (and way less often than attractive young women with “cams” on MySpace…) but more often than I gain followers on Twitter.

Far from throwing in the towel, the site continues to improve. However, there are some annoying tics. For example, a colleague of mine joined recently, and has been having a small problem. Like many social websites, including Amazon, LinkedIn makes recommendations. For Amazon, items you might want to buy. LinkedIn, people you may want to add as contacts:

Or, in this case, not…

Here’s what he got back, about 24 hours later:

Hi [REDACTED],

Thank you for your email. If you choose to join LinkedIn, uploading your contact list is entirely optional. By uploading, you can discover which of your existing contacts are already LinkedIn members and also invite those who aren’t.

Dashboard scans the uploaded list of contacts, and based on sent/received emails it recommends members you should invite to join your network, based on who you are in contact with most frequently. The LinkedIn People you may know feature uses your email correspondence score, counting the number of emails sent to a particular person to determine whom you may want to invite.

LinkedIn does not gather the “notes” or other fields from your address book. The only fields collected are those required to identify your contact: name, email address, title, and company of your contact. If your contact is already a member of LinkedIn their name will not appear, as that contact already has a LinkedIn profile.

Please feel free to contact us with any additional questions you may have.

Thanks for using LinkedIn!

Brian F. Customer Support Specialist

“If you choose to join LinkedIn… Thanks for using LinkedIn!” What? Did Brian F. even read his complaint? Shouldn’t the customer support specialist know that my colleague is already a LinkedIn user? He didn’t ask for a lengthy explanation of the LinkedIn algorithm, however interesting it may be. He asked to stop seeing his ex’s name every time he logs in to his LinkedIn profile.

Certainly this doesn’t rise to the level of Facebook’s ongoing Beacon fiasco, but LinkedIn should certainly offer users more control over automatic notifications. A check box is all it takes.

Inside the Ron Paul Machine II: On the Assembly Line

Published by William Beutler on May 25, 2007 in Facebook, Howard Dean, Mitt Romney, Online Polling, Ron Paul and Social Networking. 41 Comments

In yesterday’s installment, I demonstrated how it took Ron Paul’s supporters a few hours to start making an impact on the May GOP Bloggers straw poll — fair evidence, I think, that his supporters are not quite as legion, or representative, as they’d have everyone (not least themselves) believe.

So where are they meeting to plan their onslaught? A few days back, one frustrated Digg user identified ten such sites, noting that Paul’s Diggers were organizing in such a way that violates Digg’s Terms of Service (thereby qualifying Paul’s support as “manufactured,” not that I expect it to forestall complaints in the comment section).

One site he didn’t count was the Congressman Ron Paul for President 2008 group at Facebook, but it too qualifies as the planning site for yet another [potenti] TOS violation. Specifically, the Wall — a constantly updated comment stream — for this group is a veritable assembly line of votes for online polls testing the Republican field.

And of course their latest obsession is the aforementioned GOP Bloggers poll. I would say don’t miss this comment, but alas, it’s since been deleted:

Ron Paul Facebook user requests script to game GOP Bloggers poll

To be fair, two subsequent Facebookers recoiled in horror, (correctly) concerned that someone such as yours truly would find it, and the commenter agreed to remove it (note: this is from the archive, hence the wideness):

Telling that this Paul supporter’s first instinct was to suspect that the poll was rigged, isn’t it?

In any case, I’m sure this won’t result in too much bad press. Not this instance, at any rate. But this is just one Ron Paul forum, and one that merely requires Facebook membership to view. And even here, Paul’s supporters are well aware that poll hosts will view their organized effort as illegitimate:

Ron Paul Facebook user warns against being identified by referring IP

What’s sad about this is a) Paul’s supporters are not going out and trying to convert more supporters through reason and debate, and b) they have no sense of humor. First they try to overwhelm others’ communities, and retaliate with subsequent e-mail swarms when their man gets knocked.

So far at least, it’s a hollow movement. The Paul Machine certainly compares unfavorably with, say, the Deaniacs of 2003. They got organized to blog and MeetUp and demonstrate, rather than merely agitate. Ron Paul does have honest supporters at Reason’s Hit and Run and a few other libertarian blogs, but his movement fares badly in comparison with Mitt Romney’s online volunteers as well. Sure, the so-called Romneybots can be annoying at times, but at least they’re reaching out to other conservative constituencies and trying to engage the uncommitted. Not to mention, I’m sure their ranks are filled out by, you know, actual Republicans.

Meanwhile, the assembly line rolls on, only slightly less amusing than Lucy and Ethel’s:

Ron Paul Facebook users keep up the swarm

A lot has changed, indeed. For instance, he has now sailed past Romney and is within 900 votes of Fred Thompson. Truly, it will be a stunning victory. But history will probably mark this as the biggest contest Ron Paul won in the 2008 race.

P.S. This poll, however, will likely go down as Paul’s most unanimous victory.

Tragedy 2.0

Published by William Beutler on April 17, 2007 in 9/11 Attacks, Asymmetrical Media, Blogs vs. MSM, Cable News, Don Imus, Facebook, MSM vs. Blogs, MSNBC and Tech Blogosphere. 0 Comments

Post-Columbine, post-9/11, post-Iraq, are we desensitized to mass murders these days?

Doesn’t seem to be: The tragedy at Virginia Tech has at least captivated the mainstream media, pulling it out of its embarrassing, Anna Nicole/Imus-obsessing doldrums to a hypertensive level not seen since the aforementioned debacles plus Katrina.

Each major media disaster story since at least the dot-com bubble reveals new voices and resources from the online mediasphere, and to the extent that we know to follow them — that we can devise filters to locate them — it helps us understand these things better than we did back when most of the media we consumed was on glossy paper.

And since Drudge and MSNBC and others have already reported the name and online profile of Emily Hilscher, the first victim of yesterday’s horrible awfulness* — and as an antidote to Wayne Chiang, the Asian-American Hokie gun fetishist with girl troubles and a Livejournal account — I might as well share this screen shot from Facebook:

Her page is not public, and I suppose it will probably remain as much in the hands of her friends and family. But there are also 27 groups with her name in their main content and with hundreds of members, which grew literally overnight.

Part of me thinks there’s something invasive in writing about this, but ultimately it’s all part of the record. Here there are no candles and no songs — but it’s a digital vigil. It doesn’t convey how it actually feels, but it does show that people feel.

P.S. Via Techmeme, I see Dan Gillmor, Doc Searls and Xeni Jardin have been thinking along the same lines. And somehow, Slate’s Michael Agger managed to write an entire article about the massacre and social networking without a single mention of Facebook. Plus, according to Hotline On Call, producers from ABC and NBC have been posting interview requests to Facebook:

Our thoughts are with everyone affected by the horrific tragedy at Virginia Tech. In our ongoing coverage, we want to speak with people that knew Cho Seung-Hui. We have anchors and producers on campus that would love to meet with you.

Okay, I feel a bit less of a ghoul now.

*I don’t know what else to call it, I’m never very good writing about these things, and I’ve already blown the chance to suspend blogging, which I might as well have because I didn’t have a Benchmark Poll ready to go today.

The Facebook of Virginia Tech

Published by William Beutler on April 16, 2007 in Cable News, Facebook, Social Networking and Virginia Politics. 2 Comments

What happened today in Blacksburg, Virginia, surely has many thinking back to the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School. But I am also reminded, in part because I have Hokie co-workers, of the 1998 killings at Thurston High School. Thurston is in Springfield, Oregon, just next door to Eugene, where I was in my freshman year at the University of Oregon.

What was first reported as loud noises soon horrifically became 24 down and three killed, counting the killer’s parents, murdered the night before. Despite my relative proximity to the crime scene, but perhaps not surprisingly, I remember it mostly through the media: The initial radio report whence I’d first heard that “gunshots rang out” at Thurston, then a friend of a friend who was there calling in to CNN’s now-defunct Talkback Live and, much later, Rolling Stone’s in-depth coverage and the Frontline documentary.

One thing we didn’t have was Facebook. Today, students with accounts who couldn’t get through to their family and friends have been using it to let people know they’re all right:

In fact, a new group was started today called I’m ok at VT, already with 1,983 members. Remember Virginia Tech (4/16/07) has 1,885. An event concurrent with this very post, Student Gathering at the Drill Field, has 99 confirmed guests. And I’m sure that I’m only scratching the surface.

ABC News has taken notice of the activity, plastering an image (below left) of Facebook on their front page and quoting one registered user (whom I couldn’t locate) taking strong exception to the administration’s handling of the initial murders:

They could have prevented most of this…shooting at 730 in WAJ, classes don’t start til 8, why couldn’t they cancel classes for the day … SOMEONE WAS SHOT AND IT TURNS OUT THEY DIED … I THINK THATS GROUNDS TO CANCEL CLASS RATHER THAN SENDING OUT AN EMAIL THAT SAYS USE CAUTION AND REPORT ANYTHING TO POLICE. They could have save almost 20 lives and 20 injuries if they just decided to cancel class right away.

Facebook is a fairly closed system, so I would normally say it wouldn’t become part of the permanent record of this event. But this event is also a criminal investigation, and it’s entirely possible the killer will have an account of his own. Or maybe a MySpace page — he wouldn’t be the first mass killer to have one.

If the rumor is true — originating on the TechSideline.com Hokie fan board (via Hot Air via Dan Riehl) that “this all started with an ex-boyfriend finding his girlfriend in bed with another guy,” would you really be surprised if he’d blogged about it first?

Hey, This Rudy Giuliani Site Isn’t Half Bad

Published by William Beutler on March 27, 2007 in Facebook, Online Campaigns, Online Fundraising, Republicans, Rudy Giuliani, Web video, Website Design and White House '08. 3 Comments

The new website for Rudy Giuliani went live last week, and what was an attractive if perfunctory placeholder has now become an attractive and functional website. This shouldn’t be too surprising — when Bush-Cheney ‘04 blogmeister Patrick Ruffini announced in January that he was joining the Giuliani ‘08 team, that was a good sign the campaign would have a pretty decent website. And it is more than that — but it’s also not without flaws. So let’s take a look:

Is The Buzz is just a round-up of favorable coverage? Sure, but unlike the news feed from every other top-tier candidate, here the MSM and blogs coexist as equals. Romney’s page does link to favorable blog posts, but segregates them from the proper journalists; the others don’t link to bloggers at all. The Buzz also includes a quasi-Digg counter keeping track of how many times a story has been clicked. I assume this is imported from Ruffini’s 2008 Wire. Neither feature prevents a single user from clicking on a story multiple times to artificially inflate its relative significance. That’s a flaw on Ruffini’s own site, but not so much here.

A fundraising widget? Now we’re talking. Other candidates will let you sign up to become a fundraiser, but only the Giuliani campaign makes it as easy as cut-and-paste. In contrast, the Romney campaign makes you join TEAM MITT before they’ll let you at their fundraising tool, the cumbersomely-titled QuickComMITT. Hillary wants you to sign up before you can send your friends e-mail pitches, and while I haven’t completed the Obama sign-up page, I get the impression it’s an updating thermometer akin to the old Howard Dean “fundraising bat.” All of these campaigns want to keep tabs on their individual fundraisers, but the Giuliani team can do that through this Flash-based widget, too. But most importantly, if you can put a YouTube video on your page, you can raise money for Rudy Giuliani.

Ruffini is no great fan of the social bookmarking buttons that litter the bottom of many a blog post, but if the Giuliani campaign is using these ones, he must have decided these are the ones that work. That, or he was overruled. Regardless, Giuliani’s is the only campaign to make these tools standard across the website.

Considering how important talk radio is to the Republican base — and to the Giuliani campaign — this is a good idea. And nobody else has one. Yet the execution and experience leaves something to be desired — the boxes are small, the “Select City” box is unused, and the final readout doesn’t tell you what time the radio programs are on or on what station. Perhaps a prospective caller should already know this, but if so, why bother with this feature? Bottom line: If you want people to volunteer on your behalf, it helps to connect the dots for them.

And now, onto the less-good:

So it’s not perfect. I keep getting this dotted outline whenever I click on links from this panel. Not a big deal, but it does disrupt the browsing experience.

Now, this is a bigger deal. I got this message at home last night and again at work today. Both connections qualify as “broadband,” I’m on a MacBook Pro and using the latest version of Firefox. What’s a guy gotta do to watch some video around here? Actually, once I finally got the error message to go away (I was starting to wonder if Amazon’s one-click patent was written into McCain-Feingold…) the video worked just fine. On the other hand, it took too long to load. On the other other hand, the now-you-see-them-now-you-don’t controls worked like a charm.

And the best-laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley, but this is still kind of embarrassing:

Republican presidential front-runner Rudy Giuliani’s campaign hurriedly fixed its official Web site late Monday to remove a dangerous design flaw that could have allowed hackers to expose personal information submitted by volunteers. The vulnerability affecting Giuliani’s site, http://www.JoinRudy2008.com, could have exposed confidential information stored in the campaign’s databases. The Web site failed to block commands that can instruct it to improperly display sensitive information, a popular hacking technique known as “structured query language injection.” … “Anybody who knows anything about security could have found these problems in two seconds,” said Marc Maiffret of eEye Digital Security Inc., a researcher who examined Giuliani’s Web site at AP’s request.

Aren’t you glad they didn’t make you sign up to fundraise now? I kid, I kid. So again, it’s a work in progress.

It’s also worth noting what isn’t included. Notably absent are any of the front-page social networking icons that most of the other candidates include. Before My.BarackObama.com and McCainSpace I wouldn’t have thought to mention that there is no social network, but there isn’t one. And there is no blog. A Facebook button wouldn’t kill them, but the one place they really need one is in their social bookmark toolbar — and it is. Meanwhile, a campaign probably doesn’t need to bother with their own blog unless they have a compelling reason to do so. And while I do think a Giuliani-based social network could succeed (call me crazy) it certainly is no requirement.

All in all, not bad. And I bet as the campaign goes forward, it’ll get even better.

Mayor Beutler… I Like The Sound of That!

Published by William Beutler on March 17, 2007 in Elections, Facebook, Metapost and Seriously. 2 Comments

I belong to a Facebook group called The Beutlers, dedicated to a family name common in Germany but not so much here in the states. Yet there are obviously enough of us to warrant a Facebook group facilitating the discussion of what it means to be a Beutler. One member, who happens to be a relative of mine and is something of an expert on the subject, explains:

Most of the Beutlers in this country come from the German part of Switzerland, from the little village of Trubschachen, Bern canton. There are a lot of them in Utah and Idaho, and they are Mormon in background, and came to the U.S. in the late 1860’s. I am part of this group, who uniformly pronounce our name Byootler, which is not correct German Swiss, but that’s how we say it. There is another Beutler family who are Polish jews who emigrated in the 1930’s. They all pronounce the name “correctly” as “Boytler”.

In fact, soon piped up another group of Beutlers — the “Bite-lers.” It’s that Beutler clan which has contributed the most notable Beutler that I know of, former Nebraska sate Sen. Chris Beutler (D-Lincoln).

I don’t know much about these Beutlers, although they can’t be all bad: the prospective mayor of Lincoln has a (perfunctory) campaign blog (and a MySpace page); his nephew belongs to The Beutlers on Facebook.

No, I don’t know much about Chris Beutler or the election under way, but I do know one thing: I desperately need some campaign swag. Buttons, yard signs, T-shirts, tote bags. You name it, I want it. The election for Lincoln mayor is May 1, just 46 days away. How do I know this isn’t the last time a candidate bearing my surname runs for an office important enough to generate coffee mugs and bumper stickers?

Listen up, campaign staffers: If I do get some Beutler campaign swag, I promise to blog about that. You can’t buy this kind of online buzz! No, you can only barter for it, and I’m willing to haggle. If you’re in a position to negotiate, send me an e-mail.

P.S. About all I know about the campaign comes from his opponents’ press releases, diligently forwarded to me by a friend covering the race. I’ve included one example below the fold. If I get at least a yard sign, I promise I won’t run any more.

Continue reading ‘Mayor Beutler… I Like The Sound of That!’

This One Goes Out to the One They’ll Vote For

Published by William Beutler on March 4, 2007 in Barack Obama, Facebook, Hillary Clinton, James Webb, John McCain, Mitt Romney, Seriously and Social Networking. 2 Comments

This year for Valentine’s Day, Facebook introduced “gifts” — a series of icons designed by early Macintosh icon generator Susan Kare which, for one dollar, users could buy and send along with a short message to another user — a social networking Valentine’s Day card. Big deal, maybe.

But starting last cycle Facebook has sought to cooperate with political candidates, and plenty have accepted (Virginia senator Jim Webb, most amusingly). So now some of the 2008 candidates have official pages, none more popular than — drumroll please — Illinois senator Barack Obama.

Not coincidentally, he’s got the fattest “gift box” of all:

At first glance, you’d think it stuffed with saccharine sweet time-wasters. And so it was, when you clicked through, but in more of a… MySpace kind of way:

Other gifts were just plain goofy:

The following gift exemplifies a concept utilized several times, but here most concisely:

And at least one took a small dig at the current DNC chair:

Still, more than a few were on the racy side:

If it does require one, click here.

How about the other candidates on Facebook? John McCain and Mitt Romney either got none or weren’t accepting them, which if so would be just as well — Webb got just two. Hillary got a whole 13, but because it looks as if she’s letting Facebook handle the admin duties on her page, message control… isn’t quite what it could be:

Triumphalism in Excelsis

Published by William Beutler on February 13, 2007 in Barack Obama, Facebook, Netroots and Technorati. 4 Comments

Collected on the Internets, about Sen. Barack Obama, today:

“[C]learly the Facebook organizing is working.” Who said this? No peeking at Technorati!

Consider, the news articles linked above were to the Des Moines Register and Manchester Union Leader, neither of which mentioned Facebook. Neither did the rest of the post. And not to belabor the point, but none of the above mentioned any specific turnout by college students.

Here’s Not Paul Begala and yours truly, just a little while ago:

Not Paul Begala and William Beutler on IM

So, who is actually responsible for this incredibly sloppy bit of blogosphere triumphalism? The answer is embedded somewhere in this post. If nobody guesses (or Technoratis) correctly by Friday, Blog P.I. will provide the answer in this space.

Update: Congratulations to JeffL for correctly guessing (or Googling) the answer. Congratulations are also due to Timothy for finding the embedded answer. You should all feel… like you read blogs too much.

The World Wide Webb

Published by William Beutler on January 22, 2007 in Facebook, James Webb, Seriously, Social Networking and Virginia Politics. 2 Comments

Win or lose, most candidates retire their campaign blogs and related online efforts soon after (and, surprisingly often, before) election day. But Sen. James Webb appears to be pushing on. To wit, the Facebook entry I commented on in late October is still being updated.

And while not so eyebrow-raising as before, it’s still more than a little amusing:

Well, I suppose it is nice to know he doesn’t regret becoming a member of the U.S. Senate. But has anyone broken the bad news to Wes Clark?

However, I do wonder what is the point of a politician (not seeking national office) devoting staff time to a gimmick like Facebook. It won’t raise money, it won’t get his message out, and even if it does, almost certainly not to his constituents (and certainly not those who actually vote). Perhaps this is his last update until 2012, or at least until the next recess. Meantime, he’d be much better advised to take his official blog off hiatus.

And while I again caution against reading too much of anything into anything that happens with a politician’s social networking page, this (not currently on Webb’s page, but visible on your own, if you’re one of his Facebook friends) still makes you wonder:

Sen. Jim Webb removes "Faith" from his Favorite Activities

That doesn’t make him the first born-again atheist senator, does it?

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Twitter Already Has a Spam Problem

Tragedy 2.0

Hey, This Rudy Giuliani Site Isn’t Half Bad

Mayor Beutler… I Like The Sound of That!

Triumphalism in Excelsis

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