Facebook has announced official support for the just-released 3.0 version of Microsoft’s Facebook SDK (also known as the Facebook Developer Toolkit). The kit was written with one goal in mind: to make it easier for .NET developers to write applications that integrate with Facebook.

I’ll leave it to the Facebook SDK Overview to do the talking:

The main entry point is the API (Facebook.Rest.Api) class in the Facebook.dll assembly. This class wraps the Facebook REST API and provides an easy to use interface for calling the different methods currently available in the Facebook API. We’ve also provided samples and tools for helping develop Facebook applications in the various .NET platforms including: ASP.NET, Silverlight, WPF and WinForms. Additionally, we’ve provided all the source code for the API, components, controls, and samples for you to explore.

The toolkit is comprised of the following core assemblies:

• Facebook.dll: This is the main assembly that will be used by all applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications (Silverlight and WPF) to enhance the Facebook platform to make databinding and data caching easier.
• Facebook.Silverlight.dll: This is the Silverlight version of the main assembly that will be used by all Silverlight applications. This has all the logic to handle communication with the Facebook application. This assembly also has specific support of XAML applications to enhance the Facebook platform to make databinding and data caching easier. The REST API in this assembly is Asynchronous only.
• Facebook.Web.dll: This assembly should be used by Canvas applications. The main functionality supported in this assembly is to encapsulate the handshake between the Facebook application and a canvas application (both FBML and IFrame)
• Facebook.Web.Mvc.dll: Provide a support building canvas applications using ASP.NET MVC. Separated from Facebook.Web.dll to avoid all developers from needing to install the MVC bits.
• Facebook.Winforms.dll: This assembly provides support for writing Facebook applications using Winform technology. This provides a Component that wraps the API to make it easier to use from Winforms. This also contains some user controls to help display Facebook data easily.

To get started, download the SDK, then consult these docs:

• Anatomy of a Facebook App
• Platform Core Components
• How-to Guides
• Creating a Platform Application

If you create any Facebook apps using the SDK, let me know by dropping me a line. I’d love to feature it here!

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

Yeah, that’s about right:

And better yet, it’s available as a T-shirt!

[Found via Kevin Kelly.]

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

The Incident

I live in Toronto’s High Park neighbourhood, which puts me at that magical distance where biking downtown takes a half-hour, about as long as public transit. If weather isn’t downright terrible and I don’t have too much to carry – say, laptop, change of clothes and even an accordion — I tend to take my bike.

Cycling is much easier with a pair of properly-inflated tires, so I often make use of the air pump at the gas station near my house:

Gas stations used to give you air for free, but these days, you have to pay to use an air pump – presumably to cover the cost of their upkeep. At the gas station near my house, a dollar gets you enough time to inflate all the tires on a car, which is plenty of time for a bike’s tires. You can use either a loonie (that’s “dollar coin” to you readers outside Canada) or four quarters.

Take a look at  the coin slots for the air pump at the gas station near my house:

Although the left and right coin slots are identical in size and appearance, they are for different types of coins:

• The left slot is marked “dollar coin” and is for loonies (that’s “dollar coins” to you non-Canadian readers) only.
• The right slot is marked “4 quarters” and is for quarters only.

It’s the worst combination of usability factors: identical slots that serve different purposes.

I reached into my pocket and pulled out some quarters. Without thinking, I put quarter in the dollar coin slot, realizing my mistake a little too late. The machine accepted the coin and didn’t route it to the “coin return” compartment. In fact, the machine didn’t even have a coin return compartment.

I wondered what would happen if I put three more quarters in the dollar coin slot. After all, the sticker might be wrong.. It wasn’t – I put in the remaining quarters and the air pump remained off. Luckily, I had four more quarters. I put those in the quarter slot and the machine came to life, providing compressed air for my tires.

Out of principle, I went to the gas station attendant and asked for the dollar I’d lost to the air pump back. He was resistant at first, but as soon as I said “Geez, you guys are a rip-off. I should post that on Twitter,” he quickly capitulated and reimbursed me.

The Lessons

Because I am in the business of talking about software development and design, I was inspired to turn the experience into a blog article (eight years of blogging will do that). I took photos of the air pump and derived two lessons.

Lesson One: Interface Matters!

If two things expect different input, they should appear different. The coin slots on the air pump are the same size. Although the sticker on the machine has markings that say that the left slot is for loonies and the right slot is for quarters, those markings are almost identical. Possible solutions include:

• Differently-sized coin slots: a larger slot for loonies, a smaller slot for quarters. Older coin-operated machines made use of these:

• A new sticker, perhaps with some colour coding to make it very clear that each coin slot expects very different kinds of coins. 

  

Be forgiving of user mistakes:

• Both slots should accept either loonies or quarters. This solution is even better than differently-size coin slots or a new sticker. The constraint that one slot is for loonies and the other for quarters is a convenience for the manufacturer, not the user. Go the extra mile – after all, coin recognition technology isn’t anything new or hard to get.

  Most coin-operated machines that provide more than one coin slot, such as videogames and pinball machines at arcades, don’t “care” which one you use. Either coin slot will do, as long as you provide enough coins:
  

  

• There should be a coin return slot. The current design simply takes your money and doesn’t let you cancel the transaction.

Simplify! Once you put in a coin slot that accepts loonies and quarters, there’s no need for a second coin slot – a single one will do.

The lesson of “interface matters” doesn’t just apply to user interface; they’re just as applicable to application interfaces, from method signatures to whole APIs. It pays to be clear and comprehensible.

Lesson Two: Social Software Matters (at least to some people)

The second lesson? Never underestimate the power of social networking software. The gas station attendant wouldn’t budge, but I saw him constantly checking his smartphone and guessed that he might be into Twitter.

Click the photo to see its source.

If you were born in the 1990s, you fall into the “youth” demographic and are considered to be part of the “Generation Y” or “Millennial” generation (a classification applied to people born in the 80s and 90s). Chances are that you don’t remember a world without commonplace desktop computers, the world wide web and mobile phones – lucky you!

You’re also the generation that Microsoft Research’s danah boyd has been observing for the past couple of years. She’s been studying how youth use social networks, or “networked publics”, as she likes to refer to them. She completed her Ph.D. last year and in fulfillment of her promise, she posted her dissertation on her blog this past weekend. It’s titled Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality in Networked Publics.

Teens use social media and social networking software to do these things:

• To present themselves to the world
• To interact with their peers
• To understand and navigate through adult society

If you want to understand how and why teens’ use of technology to do these things, danah’s dissertation is your must-read document.

Be warned that a dissertation isn’t a blog entry or magazine article; Taken Out of Context spans a whopping 406 pages. Although it’s quite comprehensible to someone not versed in sociology or ethnography, it’s still a lot to read. You might find my notes from her My Friends, MySpace presentation that I took back in the summer of 2007 a reasonable overview – perhaps even a “cheat sheet” — for her dissertation.

A ThirdAge/JWT Boom study has data that suggests that “people over age 40 participate heavily in word-of-mouth and value personal recommendations and expert opinions, but they have not embraced social networking or blogs despite being heavy users of other online services.”

For the second time in a week, a group of Canadian Facebook users may have broken the law by publishing the names of youths charged under Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act. This law puts limitations on the publication of the identity of people charged under it; the basis for this is that revealing their names would be detrimental to rehabilitation and to public safety. The publication ban also applies to the identities of victims and witnesses in cases where people are charged under the act. There are exceptions to this gag order, such as in cases where the crime is transferred to adult court or if the youth court has found the accused guilty and imposed an adult sentence.

It happened with the first homicide of the year here in Toronto, in the case of a 14-year-old girl who was murdered on New Year’s Day. While newspapers, TV and radio stations and their associated websites complied with a 24-hour ban forbidding the publication of the victim’s name, some Toronto Facebook users created a memorial group in which both the victim and her two accused killers — a 17-year-old boy and 15-year-old — were named. The group was created by a 16-year-old who said “felt entitled to ‘pay attention’ to someone who was special to him and who had no idea he might have been violating the Youth Criminal Justice Act.

It happened again, this time in Alberta, where the names of four teenage boys accused of microwaving a cat to death were published in a Facebook group. Reactions were (understandably) harsh, with posted comments like “I think people like that should be shot”, “They will all get their faces smashed in by January 6th” and ” would say these monsters should be tortured, let society at them”.

These appear to be cases where technology has entered a grey area with the law. Referring to the case of the 14-year-old murdered in Toronto, a Toronto area constable said that “It’s a very good question if the people who post things on Facebook are actually breaking the YCJA. I guess it all boils down to whether Facebook is eventually determined by somebody that it is a publication.” In the story on the Alberta boys who accused of killing the cat, a British Columbia lawyer is of the opinion that the YCJA was broken and — as even someone at their first day of law school will tell you — ignorance of the law is no excuse.

My own opinion is that posting things online, whether in a blog, social network site, wiki or any other public online forum, is publication, even if you’re not doing it professionally. If online publishing gives you at least the same potential audience and reach as a city newspaper, then as an online publisher, you also have the same legal and ethical responsibilities that a city newspaper has.

Luckily for me, I worked at Crazy Go Nuts University’s main student newspaper, where we got brief on Canadian law and journalism and benefited from having one of the Globe and Mail’s lawyers do a regular Q&A session with us. I may not be able to quote chapter and verse of Canadian journo law, but I think I’ve can do a decent job at “sniff testing” to see if a posting will get me in legal hot water. I think that a number of bloggers — people who post articles on a regular basis — have made themselves familiar with the legal aspects of blogging, although I’m sure a number haven’t. Things can get hairy on online forums like Facebook, which is made for people who don’t publish regularly but do want some kind of online presence. On these places, users probably don’t think of themselves as publishers and might be unaware that they’re opening themselves up to charges of libel, defamation or violating the YCJA.

Paging Canadian lawyers who specialize in the internet — fellow neighbourhoodie Rob Hyndman, and friend-by-correspondence Michael Geist, I’m lookin’ at you! Do you know of any places where a Canadian blogger or Facebook user can find out more about the law and online publsihing?

If you’re going to become a fan of a business on Facebook, you’d better make sure that your profile photo is a good one — you might end up as that company’s unwitting spokesmodel!

I’ve filed it in my “to read” list and forwarded it to a number of other people at TSOT (we make social software): a ZDNet article titled Can Social Networking Co-Exist with the Workplace?.

Today marks the start of my fourth week at TSOT, a Toronto-based startup that develops custom social networking software in Ruby on Rails. The company’s first two products are FraternityLive and SororityLive, which as you might imagine are targeted at fraternities and sororities, with future plans for creating similar apps for other fields.

I was hired primarily for my tech evangelism cred and broad development experience (Visual Basic, Python, PHP, Director and Java from the rough-and-tumble Java 1.2 days) rather than for experience with Rails, on which I’d done only a little spare-time noodling. This means that a good chunk of my time during this first month on the job has been split between getting familiar with Rails as well as TSOT’s apps.

Just before my first day at TSOT, I went down to Boston to join my in-laws for American Thanksgiving. While there, I decided to take advantage of the strong Canadian dollar and Thanksgiving weekend sales to do a little job-related book shopping. Although I had the PDF edition of Apress’ Practical Rails Social Networking Sites, I was pleased to stumble across another book on building social networking apps in Rails: Addison Wesley’s RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Site with Ruby on Rails. I figured that if I find a book that covers the sort of development work that I’m about to start, I should buy it on the spot (after a quick skim of the book while in the store, of course).

Of all the books I’ve read on Rails development, this one’s my current favourite. Yes, there’ll always be a special place for Agile Web Development with Rails, but I have to say that I like the pacing, ordering of topics and the presentation of material in RailsSpace a little bit better. I like the way that authors Michael Hartl and Aurelius Prochazka take a slightly different approach to teaching Rails, from going with a social networking app rather than a “store” app to their clever visualization of Rails’ directories as a pie chart, shown below:

Graph adapted from RailsSpace
and borrowed from Weblog of Fernando Reig Matthies.

So take it from a guy who’s paying his rent by working on Rails social networking apps: if you have some development experience under your belt and are looking to pick up Rails in a hurry (or if you’re looking for a gift for someone who needs to learn Rails in a hurry) I recommend:

• Picking up a book on Ruby (because you need solid Ruby fundamentals to really write good Rails code — I’ll talk about my favourite Ruby books later)
• Picking up RailsSpace: Building a Social Networking Site with Ruby on Rails

Here’s what other folks have to say about the book:

• Review at Amazon.com by Charles Harvey: My favorite of the Ten Ruby and Rails Books on my desk — “The authors’ programming style(s) are easy to read while following and teaching the Ruby/Rails community practices. The book uses output examples after each snippet of code so you can follow along not wondering if what you just did worked.

  The example app you produce while working through RailsSpace is not YASNS (Yet Another Social Networking Site) rather a (LBERBPS) Learn by Example Rails Best Practices Site. It was fun for me as I was tired of shopping cart, and book/music store examples.

  I don’t know how to put it into to the right words, but this books code flows.

  I always enjoy the rare book that sets a standard of excellence, and that is what puts this book at the top of my Ruby on Rails Library.”

• myCATs: An excellent Rails tutorial for the intermediate Rails Programmer — “This book is just plain fun. As the title implies, the focus is on building a social networking site using Ruby on Rails. The depth of knowledge of the authors, Michael Hartl and Aure Prochazka, is evident right from the first chapter. The examples are relevant and well explained, with clean, consice, well-tested and correct code.”
• Nate Klaiber: RailsSpace review — “I may seem cynical about social networks, but this truly book pays attention to the small details. Building a social network is a great tutorial that covers many aspects of Rails and building your own application – no matter what it is. It has several callout boxes that give more explanation where it is needed. It discusses the importance of testing. It shows the importance of refactoring. All of this comes together to make a great reading experience and knowledge gained. If you are a Rails professional, there might not be a whole lot new for you, but if you are just beginning Rails this is an excellent full-blown tutorial. Even if you don’t want to create a social networking site, the foundation and principles set in this book will give you the knowledge needed to start building your own application.”
• ComputerWorld: RailsSpace hits the Ruby on Rails learning sweet spot — “…if you’re already a proficient OOP developer — or a beginner who prefers learning by example — RailsSpace offers useful insight into what the Ruby on Rails hoopla is all about.”
• A.P. Lawrence: RailsSpace — “I liked also that the project paid attention to both looks and ease of use without clouding up with too much detail. The design is simple, but with enough attention paid to presentation to understand how to accomplish that in ROR, and the same is true for niceties like data validation: they do enough to show the concepts without burying us in it.

  The authors also included deliberate mistakes – that is, design deficiencies which you might notice before they get around to pointing out the problem. That’s good too, because often the best way to understand why you need to do something this way is to see what happens when you don’t.”

• WebChicanery: RailsSpace – The Book — I’m somewhat skeptical of these “build a project and learn” type of book, but this book may be one the the handiest book on Ruby that I’d had a chance to read. The authors approach it was a very pragmatic and structured standpoint, all while explaining some neat steps and additions they’ve thrown in along the way.”

Here’s the most recent XKCD comic:

Click the comic to see it at full size on its original page.

It reminded me of an idea I had for a simple Facebook app. It would go through your entire list of friends, and send a “please explain” message to anyone who had their relationship listed as “it’s complicated”.

Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose, two of the people behind Pownce.
Photo taken from the New York Times.

“JUST now, the hottest startup in Silicon Valley — minutely examined by bloggers, panted after by investors — is Pownce,” says the New York Times article A Social-Networking Service with a Velvet Rope, “but only a chosen few can try out its Web site.”

If after reading the article, you have that empty feeling inside — a feeling that can be filled only by a Pownce membership — I may have just what you need. I’ve got 10 invitations to Pownce! Be one of the first ten people to email me at joey [at-sign] globalnerdy [period] com with a request for a Pownce invite and I’ll send one to you after I come back from dinner tonight.

Would You Like to Confirm Your Boss as Your Friend?

Transgender Jakob Nielsen isn’t my boss, but he thinks he is.

If it’s not one boss, it’s another. If you’re not freaking out because your mom “friended” you on Facebook, there’s still the chance that your boss might, meaning that he or she may be privy to your extracurricular indiscretions. The Wall Street Journal looks at this dilemma in OMG — My Boss Wants to ‘Friend’ Me On My Online Profile.

What you may want to keep in mind if faced with the decision of whether or not to “friend” your boss is that the openness works both ways:

Paul Dyer was always able to hold off his boss’s invitations to party by employing that arms-length response: “We’ll have to do that sometime,” he’d say.

But when his boss, in his 30s, invited Mr. Dyer, 24 years old, to be friends on the social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook, dodging wasn’t so easy. On the one hand, accepting a person’s request to be friends online grants them access to the kind of intimacy never meant for office consumption, such as recent photos of keggers and jibes from friends. (”Still wearing that lampshade?”)

But declining a “friend” request from a colleague or a boss is a slight. So, Mr. Dyer accepted the invitation, then removed any inappropriate or incriminating photos of himself — “I’d rather speak vaguely about them,” he says — and accepted the boss’s invitation.

Mr. Dyer, it turns out, wasn’t the one who had to be embarrassed. His boss had photos of himself attempting to imbibe two drinks at once, ostensibly, Mr. Dyer ventures, to send the message: “I’m a crazy, young party guy.” The boss also wore a denim suit (”I’d never seen anything like it,” Mr. Dyer says) and posed in a photo flashing a hip-hop backhand peace sign.

It was painful to watch. “I hurt for him,” says Mr. Dyer.

My Own Situation

My boss, Leona Hobbs, is my friend on a number of social networks, as is my old boss Ross Rader. The powers that be at Tucows are aware of my blog and read it every now and again; in fact, a lot of the credit to my getting hired has to go to a number of personal blog entries of mine at The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century. Everyone here is aware of my blogs and the goofy stuff I sometimes put in them.

I’m reminded of what someone at the DefCon conference back in 2000 told me. He was a guy who worked at a U.S. military site but whose major was in Marxist Studies. I asked if having how he managed to get a job like his with a degree like his, and he replied by saying that they hired him because he was open about it. Had he tried to keep it a secret, someone could use that secret to blackmail him. I suppose the moral of the story is that if you’ve got a reasonably open-minded boss (and proclivities that aren’t too far out there), openness might be the best policy.

Last Tuesday, I had the good fortune of being able to attend a Tuesday luncheon session at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard. Doubling my good fortune was the speaker, who was none other than danah boyd, who talked about her research into MySpace and other social networking sites and their use by youth. It was during this presentation that I first heard her thesis about the class divide between MySpace and Facebook, which has since become a popular topic thanks to her recent posting on the topic.

I took notes and photos during her presentation and present them below…

danah boyd making her “MyFriends, MySpace” presentation at the Berkman Center at Harvard, Tuesday, June 19th, 2007.

To Begin, Some Quotes from Teenagers…

• “If you’re not on MySpace, you don’t exist” — Skyler Sierra
• “My mom doesn’t let me out of the house…” — desperate desire to be social, even in the face of increasing strictness

Who is danah boyd and What Does She Do?

• What danah does: ethonography, which means “writing culture”
• Her field of study: youth in America
• In her studies, she’s been moving between online and offline worlds
• Since 2004, she’s been “hanging out in and being present among youth culture”, doing things like:
  • Fast food places and malls
  • Riding buses when school’s out
  • Interviewing not only youth, but parents, pastors, teachers, etc.
  • Looking over something int he area of 10,000 MySpace profiles

Networked Publics

• 55% of online American teens 12 – 17 claim to have a profile on some social software system.
• Note that these are teens who will admit this sort of thing in front of their parents; the actual number is porbably higher
• A social software system can be called a networked public
• What is a networked public?
  • A space or collection of people that exist within and through tools that network people
  • Sometimes it’s a civic space, sometimes it’s not
  • Usenet was an early form of networked public
  • As time passed, people migrated to mailing lists, which are also a networked public
  • Then, with the web explosion, people moved to forums, which are also networked publics
  • And now, in the Web 2.0 age, we’ve got social software, which are also networked publics
• Early networked publics — newsgroups, mailing lists and forums — were organized by topic
• Web 2.0 changes rules of organization — now they’re arranged by friends and communities

Friendster

• One of the earliest social software sites
• Not mainstream — its populace fell could be divided into three categories:
  • Self-defined geeks. It was popular among geeks in San Francisco, who in 2003 — the afternath of the dot-com bubble bursting — had lots of spare time.
  • “Freaks” (as in counter-culture). A large number of the freaks were Burning Man regulars who used Friendster communicate with fellow “Burners”.
  • Queers (mostly gay men in New York). Gay men in New York City were using Friendster to arrange “hook-ups”
• In June 2003, Friendster hit the mainstream news, with 300,000 users, most of whom were active
• A distinction arose between real friends and Frienster friends — “She’s not my friend, she’s my Friendster”
• Friendster was originally designed to be a place to find and arrnaged dates
• As such, its creators tried to enforce rules that fit its intended purpose:
  • No fake images: you were supposed to use only a real photo of yourself in a profile, not an icon or avatar a la LiveJournal
  • Profiles were formal
  • No “Fakesters” — that is, no fake personas or pseudonyms. Each Friendster profile had to correspond to a real person
• Trying to make people follow these rules was like playing “Whack-a-mole”:
  • Rather than treating it like a dating site, as its creators intended, people treated it as a fun online space and a place to experiment with self-expression
  • People created fake profiles, a.k.a. “Fakesters” for all sorts of reasons
  • Some people created fake profiles — usually with a very attractive photo — simply to build a collection of friends
  • Friendster didn’t have groups like Facebook’s, so some people created Fakesters for this purpose. Harvard had a fakester so that Harvard people could find each other.
• While these transgressions of the rules served Friendster’s users well, they did not align with the creators’ wishes
• The creators responded not by listening to their users base, but by killing off the goofy things, which in turn killed off some of Friendster’s useful populations

MySpace

• Right from the very beginning, MySpace was meant to be a complete rip-off of Friendster
• MySpace’s creators reached out to people kicked off from Friendster for various transgressions
• One crowd the MySpace creators actively courted from the beginning were independent rock musicians:
  • Many indie rockers were kicked off Friendster for using Fakesters to network with their fans
  • They listened to their indie rock band users and added features they requested
  • L.A. music promoters started using MySpace as a means of tracking and communicating with music and DJ event fans
  • Bands started using MySpace to convince clubs to book them — “Check out our MySpace page! See all the fans we have!”
• The first group of music fans to make use of MySpace were the 21+ crowd
• The younger people began to join
• Kids want to read about youth slightly older than them — consider that the readers of Seventeen magazine are on average 13 years old
• MySpace began extending it “downward reach”, age wise: they dropped the minimum age to join from 16 to 14. 14 is as low as they can go without requiring parental consent or getting into dangerous legal territory
• The first kids to join MySpace were the “arts scene” kids in high school
• They liked being able to collect friends
• A teen found that the MySpace people weren’t too tech savvy, and that they didn’t filter a lot of their input. He found that he could include HTML tags in all sort of MySpace input and started using them
• Rather than try to stop this, the MySpace people allowed it and observed how people took advantage of the oversight
• This led to what danah called “Copy/paste literacy” — people knew enough to figure out what HTML and JavaScript code to copy from other people’s MySpace sites, but not enough to know how it worked
• One side effect of this was the rise of phishing on MySpace

danah boyd’s presentation at the Berkman Center, June 19th, 2007.

Properties of Social Networking Sites

• Most social networking sites provide these three things:
  • A Profile, where you can provide a picture and other information about yourself
  • A mechanism that allows you to declare other members as “Friends”. Note that “Friends” in the system is a different concept from real-life friends:
  • Friends in the system aren’t all people whom you trust or are close to. Sometimes, you declare people as friends when:
    • You want to look cool (especially if these people are popular)
    • You want to get to know them
    • They’re a band you like
    • “Why not?”
    • It seems impolite to say “no”
  • Ability to write public comments. This got started in Friendster as “testimonials” and lives on in MySpace as comments and Facebook as “The Wall”.
  • In Friendster, there were two highly followed Fakesters, “Table Salt” and “Pepper”, who would write glowing, gushing testimonials of each other
  • Strangely enough, people don’t seem to mind communicating to each other in public. In Facebook, over 66% of the messaging is done by writing on people’s walls, as opposed to using private messages
• Unlike “real-world” publics like the park or the mall, networked publics have these qailities:
  • Persistence: What you “say” in a networked public can last at least as long as the service does
  • Searchability: And in a matter of seconds, too.
  • Replicability: What you “say” in a networked public can easily be copied
  • Invisible audience: You don’t know how many “witnesses” are around to “hear” what you “say” — nobody? A few people? Tens? Hundreds? Thousands? Even more?
• Given these properties, young people have found ways to make sense of it all
• Online spaces, like real life spaces, have rules…
  • There are social norms and roles for online spaces and contexts for gatherings
  • In many online spaces, the topic of the forum sets the tones and rules
  • It’s jarring when the rules get broken — consider the clash between the rec.pets.cats newsgroup and alt.tasteless
• The “like-minds effect” of the early internet disappeared after the boom
• You might have many audiences, for which a different “voice” is best. Which voice do you use?
• Celebrities and their effects on these new publics:
  • This generation is growing up with celebrity-style publics
  • They’re getting their cues from Paris Hilton, and the lesson is that it’s better to be public and be seen than private and invisible
• Kids are turning to networked publics to get access to publics that would otherwise be denied to them

The Creation of the Teenager and the Rise of Age Segregation

• During the Great Depression, moral reformers teamed up with the government to instill the high school regime
• This led to the rise of age segregation
• They created sports and other extra-curricular activites to keep people off the street and away from labour organizers
• Having adolescents occupied with high school was protection for the labour force, so they wouldn’t be displaced by these younger, more able-bodied people
• High school’s system of age segregation led to the rise of bullying, which was a largely unknown phenomenon before 1950
• The term “teenager” was created in 1941 by marketers
• Another effect of age segregation: adults don’t understand young people
• Fear of things like the Catholic church scandals is reinforcing age segregation
• Another effect: teenagers are kept out of public life
• Teen mobility is becoming increasingly limited:
  • Urban and suburban design is such that cars are necessary, limiting access to many places
  • Even in cities with good public transit systems, many kids aren’t let out of sight. In the UK, people are practically terrified to let the kids out of the house
• These days, kid time is high structured. Think of the rise of things like “play dates”, the increase is extra-curricular activities and so on — all upper-middle class phenomena

Messaging in Public

• Why are people on social networking sites like Facebook communicating by writing comments on the publicly-viewable wall as opposed to sending private messages?
• One reason: It makes for better “cred” for social interactions
• It provides control of the situation:
  • Many kids break up not in person, but in mediated fashion: through phone, IM or MySpace
  • Breaking up this way allows for control of the conversation
  • It provides witnesses. People “hear” what you said, rather than “what she said you said”
• Database rules as a reflection of real life: in MySpace, deleting a friend deletes their comments. It effectively “wipes them out”, at least in your world
• Friend deletion is rare, which makes deletion a very strong statement
• “You write your community into being”

An Interesting Tidbit About MySpace Profiles

• 2/3 of MySpace profiles are private

danah boyd and Berkman Center fellow Ethan Zuckerman.

“The Most Dramatic Part of MySpace

• MySpace’s “Top 8″ feature — where you can rank friends as your “top 8″ — is the most dramatic part of MySpace
• Many fights ensue as a result of people being added to or removed from a friend’s Top 8
• To quote one teenager, MySpace’s Top 8 is “the new dangling carrot for gaining superficial acceptance”

Dodging audiences

• Which audiences do kids want to dodge? It’s people with direct power over them, such as their parents
• “Chi-mos” or child molesters are not as big a problem as spammers and scammers
• How do you evade people in a networked public?
  • You can build walls — things that keep unwanted audiences out — through lies
  • You can make demands to the people who run the sites, asking for features that allow you to evade people
  • You can “play ostrich”, which is the number one way adults deal with panic of publics
• The assumption that what you plut online is public only to people like you is based on an assumption we make based on physical space

Public Life is Changing

• We don’t have the techniques to educate people about how to interact within networked publics
• The new generation is one that wants to socialize, but is constrained by time and structure
• Email is dead to young people. It’s used as a means of communicating with people who have power over them
• In social software, you click on a person’s pic and you know it’s them
• Social software message systems have less spam
• The rates are getting better — better than 10 cents per SMS
• Outside the US, social network sites are profile-centric as opposed to message-centric
• Meanwhile, it’s rude to SMS cause we have to pay to get the message.

Question-and-Answer/Discussion Session

These network publics are for-profit, which means that business decisions shape them. Are the users cognizant of that? Does it affect their decisions?

• My activist self wantsd to believe that the users are aware of that, but sadly, that’s not the case
• To them, seeing ads means that the service is free
• Kids are so used to being blasted with ads that they don’t notice them
• There is a sharp divide between the MySpace and Facebook cultures: Facebook is working class and subculture, which Facebook is upper-middle-class and college-bound
• This divide is playing out at all sorts of levels
• Note that the U.S. military is banning the use of MySpace, but not Facebook. They’re banning what the soldiers are using, not what the officers are using.
• In Facebook culture, it’s better to be less commercial and more tasteful. Ads in Facebook are more like Google ads
• In MySpace culture, it’s all about bling, so loud ads are acceptable and commercialization is cool
• “They don’t know a world that’s not commercial. They don’t know a public life that’s not commercial”
• But there’s no way to support a system like MySpace without commercials
• Advertisers and social netowrking site creators are iterating based on youth desires — it’s not that kids don’t want ads, they don’t want ads that aren’t relevant to them.

What do you think the next step for social networking sites will be?

• That kind of stuff is always hard to predict
• I don’t think that that immersion — a la Second Life or World of Warcraft — will be the next big thing
• Rather, I think that mobile — access via phones or phone-like devices — will be the next big thing
• There are two possible mobile futures:
  • Genuine wireless, where there’s no “carrier barrier”
  • Something like Blyk, where you get a free mobile phone in exchange for viewing ads
• Growth will affect what becomes the next big thing. If you’re dealing with people on Wall Street, you need to demonstrate that your social networking site will grow.
• But growth means dealing with multiple audiences, which leads to fragmentation
• Consider Facebook: it’s gaining an older audience at the cost of its younger audience
• Successful social software needs cluster effects
• If only 80% of your friends can participate, you won’t
• An interesting aside: many MySpace users have their profiles managed by other people — friends, girlfriends and so on. People know each other’s login credentials
• On successful social software sites, everyone participates at different levels

Can social networking sites be used to counteract some of the effects of age segregation, the way things like Hakim Bey’s “Temporary Autonomous Zones” or World of Warcraft, where people of different ages and other classifications seem to?

• It’s tricky
• The vast majority of teens are talking to ony to people within their groups
• They’re told that all adult strangers are bad
• “My mom says it’s okay to talk to you”
• Recounted a story about a lost boy scout troop that took longer to find because they were hiding from search parties, all of whom were adult strangers. They were rescued only when the search parties clued into this and brought children with them
• The online world is probably not the place to introduce adult strangers
• There’s been a pervasive sense of “Stranger Danger” since 2000
• It’s a problem for reasearchers trying to talk to kids
• Adults are doing a bad job of navigating the future — you’ll have to navigate the future yourself

Have you seen any differences in the ways boys and girls use social networking sites?

• “Most of it’s not surprising”
• Many boys’ profiles are created by their girlfriends
• There seems to be equal numbers of boys and girls
• When it comes to ad-hoc socialization, it seems to be stronger on the girls’ side. Data from Pew Research confirms that they use to maintain contacts
• Boys are more likely to talk to strangers — “especially hot ones” and more likely to collect strangers in their friends lists
• Girls more active in terms of deep participation
• Girls know the copy/paste stuff, boys know HTML and proxies

• The predator panic did damage to MySpace
• Kids are switching to Facebook because “it’s where my friends are and it’s where mom lets me go”

There was some discussion about the “NYU 2011″ Facebook group, a group of kids who are graduating from high school this summer and will be attending New York University as the class fo 2011 in the fall. In essence, they’ll be “meeting” each other ahead of time, something that wasn’t possible when most of us were in college.

• This sort of “pre-meeting” online might take away from the excitement
• Might foster self-selecting groups — consider homophily
• It’s not clear what cause-and-effects of homophily are
• More things in common: more likely that you’ll stick
• Consider the side effect of “Stranger Danger”
• Colleges are social experiments

What are the reasons provided by the minority of kids who don’t participate in these sites?

• Parents don’t allow it
• Church doesn’t allow it — although some are providing alternatives like Jerry Falwell’s Battle Cry
• Some claim that they’re “too cool” to participate
• Of the people who aren’t already online, 75% don’t want to be
• Online access transcends race and class, although the kids in inner cities know how to access the proxies

Moms with kids use the net to skip past time constraints. Do teen parents use the net similarly?

• Typically, teens with kids are living at home and get their advice from their parents
• Social networking sites are not being used by teen parents as a way of communicating with other teen parents

Social networking sites are now a part of youth culture. What do you think we should do?

• Currently, there are 57 pieces of legislation to ban these sites
• We need to educate people about negotiating these publics
• Rather than give edicts to young people, make them think about these publics. One way: Morality plays that start with the question “How would you feel if…?” — Ask questions, make ‘em work on hypotheticals!
• We make so much fuss about online sexual predators, and then jail them, only to release them a very short time later. Don’t make new laws, enforce the existing ones!
• Street outreach programs have proven their worth in the real world — perhaps it’s time for an online equivalent
• We need to figure out what to do about “Stranger Danger”

If the purpose of technology is to make life better, then the big news isn’t about the so-called leaked outline of Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote, General Electric’s and Microsoft’s discussions about buying Dow Jones or AIR being the name for the Adobe tool formerly known as Apollo.

It’s about a wedding that took place on Friday here in Toronto, thanks to a little help from Craigslist.