Rainblog

How have you set up your Circles?

Going back over my post about Google Social Search, which I wrote in haste last night after the new feature was pointed out to me by a somewhat agitated friend, it looks to me as if I may have been wrong about some of the pitfalls of the new system.

The potential privacy killer is the exposure of private second-order contacts. But re-reading Google’s documentation more closely today, it turns out that Google already has a notion of ‘public’ and ‘private’ contacts. ‘Private’ contacts include your Google chat list and Google contacts, and according to the documentation, these are not shared, and will not be used to “expand your social circle”. So it looks as if the sky may not be falling after all.

I apologize for misleading you all, and for maligning Google. It seems that they have learned something since Buzz.

But systems such as Social Search are not risk-free. Google’s position is that they don’t make anything public that wasn’t already public. That’s as it should be, but it’s worth bearing in mind that what Google is doing is to make obvious what’s already public. Yes, all the individual links that make up your implicit social graph may be ‘out there’, but most people won’t necessarily connect all the dots. Tools like Social Search take the complete picture and dump it in your lap.

It’s easy enough to dream up scenarios in which that can still turn around and bite you. Your strait-laced Aunt Hettie may enjoy visiting your personal website full of kitten pictures, unaware that you’re also an active member of a flourishing bondage’n’spanking online community. The day that you inadvertently create a graph link that spans your separate personae, Google Social Search is going to make all the connections and give Aunt Hettie something to think about over her breakfast coffee.

You did it to yourself, says Google. All the information was there. We just put it all together. They’re right, but that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a problem. In general, people aren’t good at thinking about what you might call the calculus of privacy: what connects to what, who has permission to see what, and how they interact. Part of it is that we just don’t think that way yet. But part of it is that the rules keep changing. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, Google (or whoever) will add a new way of inferring connections and suddenly the whole shape of the graph has changed in ways you never imagined.

There’s another problem. Tools for managing this new ball of wax are either non-existent or ill-adapted. Google says proudly “You control who is part of your circle”, and goes on to list ways that you can do that. But the suggestions seem to amount to changing the social graph itself by removing a person (or a network). If you detect a potential exposure, the recommended fix is to take a machete to your social network.

This seems unsatisfactory. Tools designed for one purpose - such as managing your social network - are usually inadequate for another - such as protecting your privacy or controlling your online persona. If your connection to your friend Joe reveals something about you that you don’t like, Google’s answer is that you should break that connection. But when you do that, you lose whatever functionality comes from the connection.

Let’s make that more concrete with an example (not a privacy example this time, but analogous problems exist in that space as well). Suppose Joe tends to write embarrassing drunken rants on every subject under the sun. Each time you do a search, Google’s Social Search feature brings up a couple of Joe’s inebriated screeds, which may not be what you want even when the boss isn’t looking over your shoulder. But Joe’s in your social graph, and the only way to get him out of there is to remove him from your chat contact list and your Gmail address book. To manage one feature - Social Search - you’re forced to reduce the utility of two others - chat and email. Surely that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

Connections in the social graph are overloaded. Applications built on social networking such as Google Social Search assign a ‘meaning’ to those connections that may be quite different from the ‘meaning’ intended by the user. The connections that the user creates end up being used in ways that he or she did not anticipate or intend, yet there are no tools available to let the user correct or control the way that the graph is used or interpreted. The only tools provided are tools for editing the graph itself.

It’s unrealistic to think that we can stop Google or Facebook or anyone else from adding new whizzbang features that stitch together what people reveal about themselves online and use it in ways that we never anticipated. It’s also unrealistic to think that we can ever predict the ramifications of putting any single piece of information out there (or, equally often, having it put out there by someone else). But there ought to be a middle-ground between withdrawing from online life entirely or accepting that our online persona - the sum total of information that can be learned about us online - is completely out of our control.

If someone like Google wants to think about how to build tools to give users real, flexible control over their personal information, that will impress me a great deal more than their questionably-useful Social Search.

If you’re selling anything - or even if you’re not - you’ve probably been subjected to dozens of offers from people who want to help you “harness the power of social networking” to market your product. The phrase is particularly common, of course, in the sleazy world of get-rich-quick schemes and spam, but the more reputable sectors of the economy are also asking themselves the same basic question: how can I use all this Twitter and Facebook and YouTube stuff that the kids seem to be into these days to sell more of my shit?

The answer - one answer - showed up recently in the form of a viral ad campaign by the makers of Old Spice deodorant, which featured their shirtless spokesman responding to messages from Twitter users from the comfort of his own bathroom (or someone’s bathroom, anyway). The witty and surreal videos were produced in close-to-real-time and showed a deft touch and a good understanding of their medium and their audience. They may not have sold many actual cans of Old Spice, but it’s a safe bet that large numbers of people who would never otherwise have thought about Old Spice have suddenly had it dragged into the forefront of their consciousness, in a positive way. (For the record, I haven’t thought about Old Spice in years, not since a friend unwisely used it to try to mask the odor of some rotten eggs. This traumatic incident created an association in my mind that has led me to try to suppress all thoughts of the brand ever since. But I digress).

The most striking thing about that campaign, however, was the amount of effort that went into it. The advertisers made eighty-seven videos in an eleven-hour period (that’s seven and a half minutes per video, for those of you keeping score at home). To make it work, they had to be able to plan and realize their improvised responses at high speed and they had to hit exactly the right note to appeal to their audience. If they hadn’t thoroughly understood the medium they were working with and hit on a novel formula for using it, the whole project would have fizzled and died. It may have looked like a bravura piece of high-speed improvisation, but it wouldn’t have worked at all without some solid planning and preparation. It must have been, in short, a hell of a lot of work.

But the people who want to help you “harness the power of social networking” are coming from a different direction. The implicit promise that they seem to be making is that social networking is some magical new force multiplier: that you can just sprinkle some Twitter and some Facebook on your product under their guidance and your sales will magically skyrocket. What they’re selling is a hands-off, no-involvement-required magic bullet. Just put your product ads on YouTube, goes the pitch, and the kids will beat a path to your door.

Ain’t gonna happen. At best, blindly leaping onto the social networking bandwagon will yield little or nothing. At worst, listening to the advice of the snake-oil salesmen will lead you into the brand-killing swamp of spam. The Web 2.0 generation is fickle and hard to please and they have vanishingly-low irritation and attention thresholds and an almost supernatural sensitivity to anything that smells even faintly of spam. Get it wrong and it won’t be your message that goes viral overnight.

If you want to use online social services like Twitter and Facebook to sell whatever you’re selling, take a look at the Old Spice campaign and think about what made it work. It wasn’t just a charismatic actor and self-deprecating humor that made the viewers feel they were in on the joke. Equally important was the swift response time and the fact that the advertisers engaged the audience directly, even personally. You can’t get that with a hands-off approach. You only get it by hard work. Despite what the self-styled ‘social networking marketing experts’ may tell you, there’s no substitute. There are no shortcuts.