The Hawthorne Effect

For the record, I’m typically skeptical about new services or products that launch on the internet to a flurry of hoopla and buzz. Too often the hype never lives up to the reality, and the products end up being one trick ponies or can’t scale in a way that generates revenue. 9 times out of 10 they end up dead shortly after arrival.

Enter Google+.

No sooner than it launched, the ‘in crowd’ of the internet wasted no time in calling it a Facebook killer, a blog killer, and a Twitter killer among other things. It was a game changer, a reinvention of Google, and the cure for cancer all rolled into one. The hyperbole machine was definitely in full effect.

I would consider myself a power social media user. On any given day I use Facebook, Twitter, LInkedIn, and Wordpress for various work and personal communication tasks. Given my job, I thought it prudent to get my mitts on an invite to G+ and create an account to see what all the fuss was about. I can’t say I was particularly jazzed to do so, but logged in more from a sense of occupational duty than for the promise of yet-another-social-channel-to-manage.  For G+ to be added into my daily life, it would have to offer me something seriously unique or valuable.

News flash: It does not. At all.

G+ feels like the classic engineering solution to trying to build a better Facebook. G+ focuses on creating a better Facebook-like experience rather than building upon a unique customer insight to fill a need or solve a problem. The minute you log in, you can see the resemblance to the Goliath it’s trying to slay. Some of the features are a bit more polished than their FB counterparts, but the features and tools are almost identical. G+ isn’t so much a new social network as it’s Jennifer Jason Leigh’s character in Single White Female. It shows up at Facebook’s apartment, wears Facebook’s clothes and hopes to steal its boyfriend and assume its identity.

The magic to Facebook’s growth over the past few years has come from women, baby boomers and global expansion. If you’re a forty two year old mother of three from Oregon, are you really going to change communities without a vastly better experience or value proposition?

The answer is no.

The only people Google+ seems to be helping are the people at Google, who see a huge need to keep behavioral data flowing in so that they can continue to have relevant user information to sell to advertisers. Make no mistake, Google is an ad network disguised as a search engine, and the product they sell is you.

Given that G+ is an invite only beta at the moment, I’m sure we will see a slew of new features to go along with a deluge of press releases telling us why Facebook is dead. Don’t believe it. For a company that has launched so many new tools that were supposed game changers and failed miserably (See Google’s Wave, Buzz, Latitude, Knol, Health,  Lively, Search Wiki, Audio Ads, Video, Dodgeball, Jaiku, Notebook, Catalogs, Print Ads, Answers, Sidewiki, Friend Connect, Page Creator, and Web Accelerator), I’m surprised the company gets as much benefit of the doubt as it does. My guess is that G+ will be joining that illustrious list sooner rather than later.

I believe I called this: http://laptoplogic.com/resources/how-facebook-is-becoming-the-next-myspace

A few weeks ago I had the chance to discuss the issue of Facebook and Cyber bullying on CNBC (see one post down). The tragedy of the Alexis Pilkington along with other reports of cyberbullying prompted a few interesting questions. Is Facebook responsible? Should brands in social networking sites be worried about things like this happening on their watch? Is there more that can be done?

For the sake of clarification, this isn’t a post about privacy. That horse is being flogged repeatedly and everything about the topic has probably been covered already. I use Facebook all the time and am of the belief that you can protect your privacy well enough by simply being discreet about what kind of information you choose to supply. If you don’t put highly personal information in, people can’t ever get at it, and we’ve all heard about sites like Pleaserobme.com.  A modicum of common sense goes a long, long way.

With tragedies like the one involving Ms. Pilkington it’s easy to look to blame someone. The classmates, Facebook, the parents, all in some way, shape or form can make tantalizing victims for a blood-thirsty media outlet looking for a attention-grabbing angle. I’m a big proponent of parents having tighter relationships with their kids, schools taking a more active role in monitoring student activity and everyone making more responsible decisions to make the world a safer place. In this case, several classmates used the virtual world to torment Alexis to the point of suicide. Their crimes were so egregious that they even kept taunting the poor girl even after she was dead. Could the Pilkington tragedy have been avoided? I don’t know, but I don’t think Facebook and it’s bevy of privacy issues are the problem here. Whatever the means, some people are going to act aggressively and stupidly whether the technology is there to help them out or not.

The disturbing thing about cyberbullying is that it’s most often done by someone you know. In cases like that, your privacy isn’t what has been violated, your identity is. We’re obviously not talking about identity theft here, but rather blatant attacks on your personal identity; how you feel about yourself, and what your outward persona is to others. What makes cyberbullying so damaging is that the teasing can be incessant and come from all angles, all in plain view of your circle of friends, 24-7. It used to be that when kids picked on other kids, they could at least look forward to escaping the pressure by getting on the bus and going home.

The internet has the ability to bring everyone into our personal space, whether we like it or not.

As I write this, Facebook has very quietly been asked by some parental groups to install more safety features to help protect kids. In England for instance, the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Center (CEOPC) has asked Facebook to include a “Panic Button” on all group pages. The feature would allow kids to alert someone in the event they feel threatened or unsafe. Facebook has flatly rejected including any such features its site, declining to comment as to why.

So this begs 2 relevant questions:
1. Why won’t Facebook provide more safety features on its site? And,
2. What features should they provide if they were willing to do so?

Mark Zuckerberg’s well documented abhorrence to personal privacy aside, I don’t think Facebook is deliberately obfuscating its responsibility of providing a safer community experience. I do think they worry about the precedent it sets. If you live in New York, from time to time there will be visible and formidable increases in local police and security forces in the subways. If you’re like me, the first thing you do is to feel a bit safer, but then you might begin to wonder: Why are the extra forces are needed? Is something going on? Should I be worried? It’s this very thinking that I believe Facebook is looking to avoid. If you begin to see features like panic buttons and parental alerts, I’m sure the next logical question parents will indeed ask themselves is whether Facebook is safe at all.

We all want to feel safe as long as we don’t have to think about the danger.

So what kind of tools should Facebook, or any social site for that matter, be developing? While not an exhaustive list, here are a few that I can think of.

1. A simpler privacy settings dashboard
Privacy issues for Facebook users aside, the dashboard and default settings for restricting access to personal information are a joke. Facebook should create a much simpler system for managing these features and have them all located in one place, rather than scattered throughout your profile. And, by default, they should all be off so that users would have to opt in to making information available. Their recent updates to the privacy settings system are a good start, but not remotely close to optimal.

2. An online cyber safety councilor
For anyone under the age of 18, a councilor, trained in helping people who feel they are being threatened would automatically included in the chat list of a user when they come online. Don’t want to include a panic button? This is the next best thing. A trained specialist could help guide individuals through what to do and where to go for help in the event that they feel unsafe when on Facebook. You could even take this idea one step further and have a councilor’s chat window automatically appear and offer to help should someone type a phrase like “I’m thinking of committing suicide.” Think of it as a real time 9-1-1 operator.

3. Sentiment bots to detect predatory conversations
Facebook claims that it already has tools like this in place, but if they are anything like some of the tools most social media agencies use to analyze conversations, they are most likely woefully weak. Conversation analysis tools can’t detect things like sarcasm or humor, so honing in on keywords becomes essential to determining relevancy. If these tools do exist, beef them up. Make the API open source and offer $10,000 to the person or team that could make them more accurate. Would it be perfect? No. But it would be a good start.

4. Educational programs
There already exists a page on Facebook dedicated to understanding cyberbullying, but if I hadn’t searched for the words “Facebook + cyberbullying,” I probably wouldn’t have found it. Plus, I’m not entirely sure Facebook sanctioned this. The bottom line is Facebook has the ability to drive awareness, education and support to lead the charge on this issue, and their efforts to date have been muted at best.

Privacy issues not withstanding, in my opinion, Facebook is at a crossroads. The site is already getting heat from congress about their “opt-in” privacy options, and have, to date, capitulated to a certain extent. This has made users a tad more anonymous, but not necessarily safer. Tragedies like the one that befell Ms. Pilkington are horrible, and should be met with a swift and decisive eye towards preventing a repeat occurrence. But for now, Facebook seems inert. I can only pray it doesn’t take another, higher profile incident to make them rethink a more proactive stance on the subject.

What do you think?