Facebook sure is generating a lot of attention with it's latest privacy kerfuffle. Here's Henry Blodget's take on why:

Step back and think about what Facebook is doing here.  It is pioneering an entirely new kind of service, one that most of its users have never seen before, one with no established practices or rules.  It is innovating in an area--the fine line between public and private--that has always freaked people out. It is allowing people to communicate and share information in ways they never have before. It is making decisions that affect hundreds of millions of people.  And it is trying to stay a step ahead of competitors that would like nothing better than to see it get scared and conservative and thus leave itself open to getting knocked off.

Source: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2010/05/15/businessinsider-facebook-privacy-innovation-2010-5.DTL#ixzz0oIjU9jm6

Now it's an open question as to whether's Facebooks incessant tweaking is about innovating new services for people rather than optimizing for advertisers' dollars. But let's assume for a second that it is truly all about pushing forward with new features for its users.

I've long thought that when it comes to innovation, you *can* have too much of a good thing. That is, you can innovate to a certain level, but if you're too far ahead of the curve, the world won't be ready for you, and won't accept what you are doing.

So to me, the key question with this latest round of privacy (or more accurately, users' control of what they make public) vs. Facebook is, have they crossed that invisible line where they get too far ahead of their users? Soo far, the answer appears to be no - as people continue flocking to the service.

Let's say you've determined that entering into social media is right for meeting your org's objectives. In my case it would be because we want to extend our web presence beyond the confines of our corporate website.

But let's say you trying to be realistic and you know that you are not properly resourced or organized to start a full blown social media factory. Even starting a blog can be daunting -- after all, while blogging may be easy, blogging well is not. (Take for instance the difference b/w this blog and those that really do cover similar territory well.)

So what's the entry point with the lowest barrier?

... And of course the koolaid-drinking chorus says: Twitter. I say, yes it's probably either that, or outbound commenting - listening and responding in various points around the web.

But. How easy is it really? These things take some planning. Like a 20-page Twitter strategy, or a bulletproof set of commenting and participation policies.

What I've found that developing these takes a lot more time than you'd think. I've been quite amazed at how challenging it's been for my team (even while liberally using the modern copy-paste-adjust method!). We're still far from nailing down exactly who does what, when and how often while representing the org online.

For example, we were working through the mechanics of how we would handle @replies on Twitter recently, and it's been quite surprising how much there is to cover. A partial list of what we're grappling with:

* how to handle official languages
* what microsyntax to use or avoid
* acceptable service standards and turnaround times
* triaging and handing off questions for response
* dealing with irrelevant or off-topic responses
* trolls and negative tweets vs legitimate complaints
* keeping it impartial
* privacy issues

And that's just one aspect of interaction on one particular social site. 

Anyhow -- What's your take? What are other low barrier entry points to social media for government? Are there any?

Like many Twitter users, my activity can be quite random. I'm far from being one of those "always on" types who spends the whole day with one eye on their tweetstream. I don't even have a predictable, routine time when I'm on Twitter from one day to the next.

Sometimes I'll check out my tweetstream in the morning on the bus, other times I'll spend a couple hours with it on in the background in the afternoon, or maybe in the evening.

As a result I find myself missing a lot of what my network is tweeting about. Sometimes I'll lose track of my favorite tweeters for days. And it's frankly tedious to scroll back through my timeline for cool links and info. So I rarely do it.

Enter Feedera. I signed up a few weeks back (via this post on Mashable -- as far as I can tell the offer is still active, but it seems like you can also just request to sign up via the Feedera site directly), and ever since, I've been receiving a daily email summarizing what my network's been sharing. Since getting this daily digest, I've been more easily able to see what's been top of mind for the people I follow. And I've been able to see activity from some familiar faces that I hadn't been lucky enough to stumble across in a while. Very nice.

Minor quibble: the email digest has a very nice layout to allow for quick info absorption,  but it's in HTML, so optimized for desktop or laptop use. I would love to get a text only version, since a lot of my email reading is done via mobile (an aging Blackberry to be precise). However it doesn't seem like I can choose to receive my digest as a text email. Or maybe I can and I just haven't figured that out yet.

RSS is Not for People

When was the last time you used an RSS Reader?

I was chatting with some of my peers via email (!) last week about RSS, Twitter and how we get news.

We've all noticed that most of us are nowadays using Twitter as the main way to keep up to date.

One of my colleagues likened the situation to what happened to Betamax when VHS arrived: Betamax was better, but VHS won out because that's what everyone started using, despite the fact that Betamax was better.

This made me think of the audio quality debate when mp3 arrived on the scene. Audiophiles decried mp3's poor quality, but it won out because of the convenience of the format.

I wrote:

On the the betamax:vcr analogy. It's not just network effects. I'd say there's a convenience factor. So I give you another analogy: mp3 vs. cd-quality audio. Like mp3, info streams [such as Twitter] are convenient. Whereas like cd-quality audio, rss readers offer higher fidelity. But convenience wins. (Think I'm actually paraphrasing vinh here)

The paraphrase that I referred to was Khoi Vinh's post on the convenience of mp3s and the concept of high definition.

The convenience of Twitter and similar streams of updates is that you don't have to manage them. You don't have to keep up. The stream just slides past. RSS readers offer higher fidelity in that you can get more detail on each post, you can organize your feeds, etc. But it looks and feels like you've got to keep up. That's more work that I don't need.

I also added:

Actually, it's only RSS as an end user format that is disappearing. Under the hood RSS is everywhere still. I wonder if things would have turned out differently if the dominant interface style for the most common RSS readers did not look and feel so much like email?

And today Dave Winer posted a few choice words on the email-style interface of Google Reader and similar feed-reading software.

A final thought. On Friday, I had a colleage ask me, "What's RSS?" Which again reminded me that RSS is simply not a user-focused technology. It's not for people -- it's for powering sites and services online. For everyone excepting few hardcore info-junkies, it's just not a factor.

I hear this refrain all the time from my colleagues in government communications. Usually it goes something along the lines of, "the web's not x, it's a communications vehicle/medium/platform/tool." I've echoed variations on this theme myself. After all, it's a catchy bit of sloganeering.

Except. The more time I spend doing digital, the less I am sure of the truth of this. Recent example:

A peer who was expressing frustation at people treating their organization's  web site as a document repository - like some giant S:\ drive that just happens to be publicly accessible and wrapped in a CLF 2.0 template. Talking of how reports and publications and such get posted and then are forgotten forever, never to be tocuhed again even if they are hopelessly out of date. Fair enough; it's frustrating to deal with this. So out comes the slogan - in this case, the web's not an IM tool, its...

But there are times when the web *is* a repository. Wikipedia is the prime example of this - although it is in danger apparently (losing close to 50k editors in Q1 of this year alone - http://twurl.nl/0n05cu). Further examples : http://www.archive.org, the Wayback Machine, Flickr and Delicious are other examples of the web as repository. GoC examples: the Canadian Parliamentry web site (http://parl.gc.ca) with Hansard and voting records for MPs and whatnot. Or PWGSC's meta-catalogue of government publications (http://publications.gc.ca). Clearly the web can be a repository and quite a useful one at that. Many of these websites are only about communications in a tangential sense.

There are other examples - when the web gets transactional (Amazon, PayPal, etc.), or when the web is about services (Canada Revenus Agency's online tax filing services, etc). There are times when digital is about other business functions than communications and marketing.

Of course the web a wonderful communications medium too. But the slogan doesn't admit that the web can be all sorts of different things, often all at once.