Web 2.0 Experiments, snafus and stumbles
posted in Web2.0 |I seem to have lost my head. Really. I was all curmudgeonly until last week, when I started tweeting and got into Spock. You know why I started to twitter. Ages and ages ago, when Spock was still in private beta, I got an invite, and used it. I was underwhelmed, and forgot about it. Then, last week, I got a request from Beth Kanter and Deborah Finn to join their “trust networks.” Well, I already trust them, so I joined them. I then decided, why not - let’s find out who else is on Spock. So I did the usual, gave up my gmail password.
Turns out, unlike Facebook, or Myspace and such, the “Spock Bot” makes pages for people without their knowing. So people who were in my gmail address book, and in Spock, got a request for trust from me, not knowing where it came from. So, although I can trust Beth and Deborah, it appears I can’t trust Spock.
There have been lots of blog posts about Spock, mostly negative. I’m hoping that Spock ends up in the dead pool, but who knows.
Then, for the creepy part. I joined Spokeo. Spokeo takes your gmail, aol, or yahoo address book and, looking at a wide variety of web 2.0 communities, from LinkedIn to Flickr to … Amazon.com, keeps track of your contacts content. So when someone in your addressbook posts a new photo to Picasa, or tweets, you’ll know about it. Creepy part: do I really want to know what’s on my ex-girlfriend’s MySpace page? Or that a certain nonprofit Executive Director Dugg a post about starting a video game company? (Although I do have to admit its fun to know what a very old friend is listening to on Pandora.)
What have I learned in all of this? What my colleagues and friends do has influence. I did set a pretty high bar a while back for the next social network I’d join. And what did I do with the influence of colleagues and friends? Walk right under it. This is not at all to blame them, it’s just to state a reality - what other people (those I trust and follow) do matters, and I think it matters for most people.
What else have I learned? Privacy matters. I happen to be someone who has had a relatively high online presence since before the web (remember Usenet?) I’m someone who has, since day one, tried my damnedest (and succeeded 96% of the time) to only say by email, or put up, what I would say in a room full of people. But for a long while, it took a lot to gather all of that information. No longer. The tools are getting better and better, and one of the hallmarks of Web 2.0 - the APIs, make it all the more simple to aggregate all of someone’s online content.
I think I’m going to wait at least a few weeks after getting an invite to the next web 2.0 tool to jump in. Or perhaps maybe I won’t even. What a concept. Maybe it’s time to go back to being a curmudgeon.
Tags:nptech socialnetworks spock spokeo web2.0
