Category: Media

Facebook isn’t free

Just a few points that I wanted to make in response to the conversation I was having with Dave Schwartz on Twitter about Facebook’s ever-changing privacy policy and the growing complaints about it that doesn’t quite fit in 140 characters:

  • Facebook isn’t “free” for users. It doesn’t cost them money (unless they’re buying gifts or game credits or whatever), but the cost of entry is data. The more data you put in, presumably the more you can get out. Tell Facebook where you went to high school and reconnect will former classmates. Tell Facebook who your family and friends are and be fed their updates and feel connected. Tell Facebook what your interests are and possibly gain new friends.
  • Facebook has the right to control its own product and set its terms of service in any way that is legal.
  • Users have every right to complain and still use the service. Just like if you wish the service on your AT&T iPhone was better.
  • Facebook isn’t one-size-fits all and offers different privacy settings for that reason. Some users will be willing to give up more information than others. I live pretty publicly online. I use my real name everywhere. My phone number isn’t hard to find. I don’t have creepy people in my past that I don’t want finding that information. The equation will be different for different people. Individuals need to make that calculation on their own.
  • Decide the tradeoffs aren’t worth it? Users have the right to leave if they feel the bargain is no longer fair. Users have the right to delete data. (Does Facebook honor this right?)

I don’t think Dave and I are far off. I think we both believe users have to be smart about what they’re feeding Facebook. But it’s also important to recognize that there are people feeding Facebook a ton of data and not really thinking about it. The (loud and growing) complaints are good for them, too, so that they have reason to think about what the cost of Facebook is to them.

Twitter, Blackbird Pie and permanence

Twitter released a small, simple app called Blackbird Pie that, when Twitter isn’t painfully slow and blogged down, should make it easy to embed a tweet in a blog post. It creates little bit of static HTML code that you can plop in a page. Like so:

This is a tweet that I will later delete to see if the Blackbird Pie version stays up or goes away.less than a minute ago via webNick Bergus
bergus

But what if I delete the tweet? I think it will stay there, since I see the tweet’s text in the code. But thought I’d check. Also, one could, I guess, make a fake tweet pretty easily. (Not that it’s hard now.) Like so:

For lunch I ate an entire cow. Except its tail.less than a minute ago via webNick Bergus
bergus

Helpful? Maybe.

Update:
Clearly this takes on too much of my own CSS styling.

Update II:
There was clearly an issue with the code that Blackbird Pie was spitting out that has since been fixed. See:

This is a tweet that I will later delete to see if the Blackbird Pie version stays up or goes away.less than a minute ago via webNick Bergus
bergus

Later Robin Sloan suggested why is wasn’t exactly working the bestest, adding

So I just want to add a stronger caveat here. First of all: I think we’ll drop the royal “we” on Twitter Media from now on—it’s confusing. To be clear, this is just @robinsloan here, pitching a little hack of mine. Please regard it as such, even though it lives on this fancy domain. Seeing people call it a “feature” is making me cringe, because I know what kind of care goes into real Twitter features! This is not one of those.

Let me underscore the point: in the course of writing this blog, I coded up a simple script that I found helpful, so I decided to share it with you. It’s a prototype. It’s really rough. It doesn’t even work in a lot of places! But that’s what we mean by “experiment,” right? And, as part of the Twitter Media team, I couldn’t credibly ask producers and developers at media companies to experiment and prototype if I wasn’t doing the same thing myself.

And yes, I know it doesn’t work on Tumblr.

Update III:
I see now that WordPress was trying to “help me out.” Stop it.

Why the old model is dying: a case study

Earlier this year, a reporter from US News & World Report got in touch with my wife. The reporter was working on a story for the magazine’s annual graduate school rankings issue, which is a Big Deal for both the magazine and the schools.

After several e-mails back and forth and a few phone calls with the reporter, the magazine’s photo editor got in touch to schedule a day when a photographer could come out and get some art for the piece. They picked a day the following week.

The magazine flew a freelance photographer from Washington, D.C., to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, on a week’s notice, and paid for his meals, rental car and a night in a hotel. He spent the day taking photos and ended up with a glorified stock photo and a cutline that doesn’t even identify it has being anywhere outside of Washington, D.C.

The story mentions and quotes my wife a single time. At the very end.

So how much did this photo cost? And what did it add?

And is it any wonder that this business model has been proven unsustainable?

Metaphors: Selling snowmen

Selling snowmen to Eskimos
Information Architects‘ “The Value of Information”

Information on the Internet is as common as snow in the arctic. You can’t expect Eskimos to buy a snowman.

Jay Rosen on Twitter

Journalist: hey, I made a snowman. Inuit: nice! Journalist: it took me all day. Inuit: what’s your point? Journalist: that’ll be five bucks.

Another spin-off, with a question

As if there weren’t already enough reality shows about cooking, Bravo announced the launching of “Top Chef Masters.” The details don’t really matter, but the judges are slated to be a guy who works for Saveur, former New York magazine restaurant critic Gael Greene, and a guy from Britain.

A question: is Greene (that’s her in the center) going to continue her tradition of only being photographed wearing hats that obscure her face? Because that’s going to look really ridiculous on television.

Tragedy both human and animal

This is, it seems, the age of the unrepentant meat eater. Of course it’s a lot easier to be unrepentant when you’re only seeing the clean, blood-drained, plastic-wrapped cuts of what was once a cow, a pig, a chicken. It’s easy, in feeding our hunger for cheap meat, to forget not only the animal tragedy but the human as well.

The New York Times (and many others before it) pointed out today, the illegal immigrants who worked for incredibly low wages at Agriprocessors in Postville, Iowa, were ill treated after Homeland Security raided the plant in May. And anyone familiar with industrial meat processing can tell you that the workers weren’t treated much better when they were employees.

It’s not just the meat industry, of course. Industrial agriculture — Big Food — has an addiction to cheap labor and that often comes in the form of illegal immigrants from Latin America. But the industry does it on our behalf; if we didn’t expect 99-cent burgers, the story would be different.

Attack of the food bloggers (and anonymous reviewers)

The Wall Street Journal ran a piece that suggests online restaurant reviewers just might not be held to the same ethical standards as, say, Frank Bruni. Gosh, really?

(And let’s not debate if there are standards for professional reviewers. The Association of Food Journalists can even list them for you.)

And while the piece tried to look at bloggers, it didn’t really. The main evidence presented was Chicago’s Dine wooing of Yelp reviewers. And I would hardly call that collection of reviews authoritative. Any nitwit knows that a online single review — whether for a book, highchair or restaurant — is as useful as asking my dog what is opinion on the death penalty is.

So perhaps this is the big, bad main-stream media taking a whack at the little guy. (It is, after all, Rupert’s Wall Street Journal.) But I don’t buy it. Smart business are realizing the power a single person can have on the Internet. And how cheaply they can be bought. (Drop me a line and we’ll talk.)

This has to be scary for restaurateurs, who are already dealing with low odds of success, to think that someone with a computer and a following could have a single bad experience as leave them on Eater’s Deathwatch. And at least one big-time chef has taken a whack at food bloggers these that exact reason.

I can hardly blame him. But it’s an imperfect world. If people are willing to sell their loyalties to the highest bidder (or for at least a free dinner), there ain’t much you can do.