@Gregory's Motivatr

The newspaper with only good news

Newspapers cover the planes that crash, but never the planes that land safely.

Of course the crash is news and the safe landing isn’t, but what a skewed view of the world it leaves us with. Bruce Schneier gave an interesting Ted Talk on how this way of understanding the world leads to a dangerous disconnect between perceived risks and real risks — we worry about a plane crash rather taking precautions to drive more safely on the way to the airport.

I often wondered, what if there were a newspaper with only common, mostly good news. Coverage of all the babies born rather than babies kidnapped, of planes that landed safely rather than ones that crashed, and of people who died peacefully after a full life rather than in horrible accidents. It would be an awfully boring paper and go out of business, but what a statement it would make.

Now we pretty much have that in Facebook, Twitter and the like. For the most part, people only post good news about themselves: vacations, promotions, new relationships, babies, parties, and even safe landings.

Facebook is publishing that impossible newspaper of mostly good news. And they’re making a load of money doing it.

However, this rush of good news isn’t all good news.

As Caterina Fake says, it exploits our basic human anxiety of FOMO (fear of missing out). We share our news of fun parties, successes, and vacations, rather than times of boredom, self-doubt and drudgery. How can one’s real life to live up to the imagined lives of others as informed by their Facebook timeline?

In another Ted Talk, Eli Pariser warns that we’re all in “filter bubbles” that rob us of a common front page experience. Pariser quotes a prescient though depressing observation by Mark Zuckerberg, “A squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa.”

The first Facebook POTUS

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while and Sam’s Facebook Timeline feature reminded me to finally do it.

In about a decade or so, we’ll have our first Facebook President of the United States. I’m not talking about a president like Barak Obama who’s increasingly embraced social media. I’m talking about a president who’s been using Facebook since at least college, before she ever thought she’d even enter politics. 

In 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton admitted to trying marijuana. I don’t think Clinton did this out of a sense of duty to tell the truth to the American people, but rather to earn the trust of his fellow baby boomers. No baby boomer would believe someone who grew up in the 60’s didn’t do it. (Or they at least couldn’t relate to someone who didn’t.) George W. Bush, Al Gore, John Kerry and Barak Obama followed suit by admitting to smoking weed.

Facebook is my generation’s marijuana.

In college we’ve all been tagged in drunken photos, posted pompous status messages and friended slackers. We probably poked people we shouldn’t have too. Pretty soon, every presidential candidate will have all of these undignified moments in their Facebook Timeline. If they don’t, we won’t trust them.

Email: the social network of last resort?

I have two old friends who email all their friends in one BCCed mass an update of their lives about once a month on average. One works for a large consumer packaged goods company and the other is a deployed Marine. They don’t know each other well, and I doubt they’re on or even aware of each other’s list.

The emails cover updates on their work and personal lives, including stories about their coworkers and daily battles — literal and figurative. The kind of stuff you’d tell any good friend on the phone, or maybe even a friend of a friend you met at a party. But because of their jobs, they can’t take the step many of us entrepreneurs have taken in being a little more public.

And to be fair, even those of us who blog and tweet need to hold back a lot of personal stuff and work details.

I appreciate the emails. It lets me keep up with their lives even if we go a while without a phone call or one-on-one email. And when we do talk we don’t have to catch up on all the details and can jump straight into meatier topics.

Both friends are on Facebook and one had a blog in the past. But if they distributed the updates on Facebook they’d have to be very careful about locking down the privacy, which is complicated. 

One of these friends told me email works particularly well because when she feels a friend is dropping off the map, she doesn’t have to unfriend them. She just removes them from the email list. And for all dropped friend knows, the emails stopped for everyone.

These regular mass emails to friends make a lot of sense when you think about it. It’s almost surprising that more people don’t do it. Yet I don’t do it myself.

I’m wondering if anyone else knows of people doing this, and if it’s actually a widespread human activity. If you have stories let me know.

Privacy is the new programming a VCR

No matter how technically savvy you are, you probably never mastered programming the VCR. Back in the days of VCR dominance, I had friends who could build computers from scratch, program scripts and navigate DOS with ease. They were all brought to tears by the VCR. Why didn’t it record the show I set it to record? God knows.

Programming the VCR was way too complicated for the utility it delivered.

Most people just watched movies on the VCR while its clock still showed a blinking “12:00”, and gave up entirely on the hope of programming their VCR to start recording a show at a given time in the future.

Facebook’s now done a pretty good job offering every conceivable privacy option. I can even restrict viewing of just my hometown to a specific list of contacts. Here’s a screenshot I made combining every FB privacy settings page:

This isn’t a criticism of Facebook (not that they don’t have their faults). It just seems the social web is getting too complicated to offer practical privacy solutions. Do I want my photos to only go out to my Facebook friends? Who’d I friend again? I want friends of people I tag in photos to see it, but who are their friends? The questions raised by trying to partially restrict content on a social network are endless.

It’d take far more time than it’s worth to really understand how content you’re sharing is restricted. Just like leaving the blinking “12:00” on the VCR, most of us will leave privacy on the default mode for years to come.

Do it like Facebook

When I was building my first business in the late-90s, a friend who I was working with on a large project gave me some sage advice: Do it like Amazon.

He explained that for any kind of decision on functionality or user interface, the default answer should be Amazon’s answer. In our case we were asking: Should we have people make usernames or just register/login with their email addresses? Amazon just does email addresses, so do that.

If you didn’t do what Amazon does, there had better be a compelling reason why not, because Amazon had the benefit of the most experienced engineers and one of the largest bases of users to test with.

Now, the web has changed a lot and Facebook is the company that’s pioneering internet innovation. Facebook has over 200 engineers — arguably the most experienced team in social-driven web platforms — and over 300 million users. Facebook’s testing many new changes to its site daily with large sample sizes of users, so most parts of Facebook are the way they are for a good reason.

When you’re making all the little decisions necessary at the beginning of your next web project, you might want to consider the default position: Do it like Facebook.

Now of course that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t break with Facebook’s way occasionally or even all the time. But you need to know the rules (and who’s making them) before you can break them.