Mark Zuckerberg's Sister Posts "Private" Facebook Photo That Became "Public"

Oops :)

Recently, Randi Zuckerberg (a/k/a "Mark's sister") posted a photo she intended for viewing only with her Facebook "friends." Well, thanks to Facebook's new "poke" device, a person one degree of separation from Ms. Zuckerberg saw the photo. Before you could say "privacy policy," the photo became the principal message of a tweet.

In a delicious twist of irony, Mark's sister was, ahem, unhappy with this alleged breach of social network etiquette. She apparently was less unhappy with the opaque rigamarole known as Facebook's privacy policy, a situation that contributed to Ms. Zuckerberg's contretemps.

The story, as reported by the Los Angeles Times, was picked up in today's siliconvalley.com. Who said the day after Christmas was a "dead" news day?

Hundreds of LA Skateboarders, LAPD Involved in Hollywood Tangle

The movie involved in the Hollywood skateboard incident.

In what must be a first, hundreds of skateboarders who had congregated on Hollywood Boulevard for a movie premiere last night tangled with Los Angeles Police Department officers. The crowd, according to an LA Times blog post on the incident, were gathered for a movie opening. A Hollywood Patch story offers more details about the episode, which LAPD appears to have tried to downplay.

LA has experienced this sort of thing before, notably a Kaskade event last year in which a swarm of people appeared mostly through the influence of Twitter and other forms of "social."

Man Updates Facebook Page While Holding Hostage

FYI: according to the Reuters story
which appeared in siliconvalley.com,
Facebook took down the perp's page
at the request of law enforcement.

Crimes of passion, crimes for material gain, or crimes of lust for power, have taken a new twist with developments in social media.

The subject of the post, taken word-for-word from siliconvalley.com, tells the story. The episode took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on Friday. It's wild to envision someone in the midst of a criminal act reaching out to his or her Facebook "friends" list and providing a psychological window into their activity and thinking. What kind of community dialogue would be generated? What about "likes"? Yikes!

One missing element was a perpetrator-generated YouTube video of the incident, but I may be premature in that assertion.

Social Media Firms Unplug Their Telephone Customer Service

One aspect of the technology "revolution" is its nearly religious belief that greater efficiency leads to a greater good. This largely unquestioned perspective has created commercial drives in which individual users become data points rather than living, breathing human beings. When a tech firm's system doesn't work, does not adequately serve a user's legitimate expectations, or leaves a user puzzled, what happens?

Well, don't expect social media or search engine customer service over the phone, according to a story buried in slow-news Saturday editions of The New York Times, Reporter Amy O'Leary's useful article details how tech's titans disdain offering any telephone service at all. Instead, users are typically directed to a relevant website, where supposedly they will find succor from the service providers.

The delicious irony in the story is O'Leary's attempts to get firms to speak on the telephone for comment on her piece. "Officials at Facebook, Google and Twitter (all reached first by e-mail) say their users prefer to go online, finding it more pleasant and efficient than wading through a phone tree."

Ah, but social media business development is much more important than the "user experience." As Zendesk chief executive Mikkel Svane noted to O'Leary, the social media firms have "paved the way in large-scale customer service by keeping everything online." However, while social media and search engine firms' ambitions are certainly "large-scale," they have carefully considered how to "small scale" customer service expectation and interaction with a human being to its logical vanishing point.

Mikkel Svane
(photo from Twitter)

In tech's world view, absolutely nothing can be permitted to distract the enterprise from its focus. That includes interactions with human beings, who have an annoying tendency to act out of sync with algorithmically estimated probabilities of behavior. The Times story slyly makes this point by going inside the belly of the data-driven beast:

"In Foursquare's offices in New York, phone calls are considered a distraction to the developers and are conducted away from the main work area, in British-style red phone booths, the company's spokeswoman said, explaining that calls are not part of developer culture."

They aren't part of social media's arrogant perspective on service culture, either.

Report: Women Form Majority of Social Media Users

An item in today's Ideas@Innovations blog in The Washington Post observes that more than 50% of social media users are female. Some other findings: women are the majority of Pinterest advocates and, surprisingly, game players. Nearly three of every five Twitter users are women, something I would not have guessed. The report also notes how social media has become a primary conduit for family information. That finding would imply social media's use by older age groups, as the swamping of Facebook with baby picture posts would amply suggest.

However, some things don't change: females form a decided minority of LinkedIn users. The world of work continues to interest males more than the Pinterest proposition of sharing thoughts about the nest with "like-minded individuals".

Internet Firm Sues Former Employee Over Migration of His Twitter Followers

Just who or what "owns" a Twitter following? This question is one of social media's stickier wickets. The obvious answer might revolve around interpretations of non-compete contract language and definitions of intellectual property. However, as an article in today's siliconvalley.com implied, it's not always that simple. The story notes some intriguing details that those interested in the business side of social media should carefully consider. (For the record, the story appears to have chased the tail of an article by John Biggs in The New York Times on Christmas Day.)

The case involves Noah Kravitz, a former employee of the Internet news and review firm PhoneDog. He left the company to start his own enterprise. Kravitz's new venture allegedly used Twitter account information gained from his work with PhoneDog. Significantly, the plaintiffs in the case, in their court filings, attributed a monetary value to each Twitter account associated with the defendant. In this instance, each Twitter account was worth $2.50 per month. That's right -- two dollars and fifty cents. An intellectual property lawyer quoted in the siliconvalley.com piece doubted the figure would stand up to legal scrutiny. However, it does beg the larger question of how to sensibly value social media user information.

Two-fifty doesn't sound like much, until it's multiplied by the number of Twitter accounts associated with the firm's efforts. In its litigation, PhoneDog asserted the defendant had 17,000 Twitter followers per month. The term in dispute was eight months. The total figure comes to what a Ferrari might cost.

Auric Goldfinger, from the James Bond movie Goldfinger

The legal activity suggests there's gold to "monetize" in them thar' social media hills. (In fairness, Kravitz's Twitter site includes the slogan "People are not property. Love over gold.") There's also anxiety among bloggers, as vator.tv correspondent Krystal Peak noted, about the fate of their "curated Twitter followings."  These considerations lead one to wonder about the gold being mined by some of the Internet's leading transaction firms and what it's worth. Do you think $2.50 per "follower" sounds like the right value? What is your social media worth?