The Social Network

One of the best ways to think about social media is in terms of the energy expended to get a result.
Facebook is the king of low energy expenditure.
And let's talk about event pages.
And the art of the FB post.
And getting OTHER people to post about you.
(But don't completely forget about good old-fashioned email blasts.)

Coordination of activities like this one.

A discussion you didn't know you were having

Dan doubts that it's advancing or transforming communication. Anyone want to argue?
Matt D. doubts it's transforming journalism.
John says FB sometimes breaks stories ahead of the journalists.


We need to talk about the criticisms, especially the terms of service criticism

I found this amazing page on FB privacy-- scroll all the way down and see some of the encyclopedic content.
Matt D. did a privacy survey
M. Fitz thinks the hacking and messing-with is the decline and fall.
Kasey thinks the very notion of privacy might be changing.
Tina on the Obama threat.



Matt D. thinks it's a mall.
MFitz can walk us through fan pages.

Life and death and the personal and the private.
A divorce is personal. Does a FB divorce cheapen life?
Relationship status, anyone?
A lot of you are pondering FB and death: Tina here.
This from CA is the kind of definition thing I was looking for. Part 1 has some good stuff too.
Lisa is also asking: what is it?
So is Jessica. (Remind me to say that the WAY Jessica got on FB is significant.)
I do want to talk about what a friend is. Tina on that.
I had my own experience with that, which was widely covered.

remind myself to show Dillon and Tripp and Rizzo and my new friend Michael.

remind myself to talk about the changing nature of transit through life -- re Wendy and the widening of the opinion circle.

A Tutorial

Old school vs. FB

I found this, oddly enough, on Facebook.

FB$$$$

How does information travel? Alyssa wonders if it travels too fast and with too little control on FB, at least in certain circumstances. I think it's a great question. The new media has certai nrules on how to handle stuff like that. (In fact, think back to last week and ask yourself how the Enfield hostage crisis might have played out if the husband had been more of an FB guy.)

Kasey points out that lawyers are being trained to use Facebook.
Tina thinks Boomers are killing the platform. But that means there's a right and wrong way to use it.


And Jessica -- great post right here! -- is reading the rules and asking some interesting questions about who can get what from Facebook. (I'll ask one of my privacy guys if he has any input one this.) Kevin is following the money too. The more I look at these questions, the more I think that Facebook must be sitting on an insanely valuable galaxy of information, right?

A lot of the business analyses I've seen are somewhat out of date. This guy tries to keep up and links out to some cool stuff, so I've included his Facebook tab. Check the first comment on this post. The comment comes from a guy who blogs about social media for realtors. It's interesting, because the mass media remains much more interested in Twitter than in Facebook, but the people who are dipply into it seem to get that Facebook is expanding much faster.

FBIII

Courtney A. found this, and I'm going to say it's a must-read.

Even more to the point, I think it's important, as you use Facebook, to do two things:
a. see if you can make it do something beyond the things you typically make it do.
b. ask yourselves some searching question about what this thing is. And then answer them on your blogs. What I mean is: pull back and take an astronaut's view of Facebook. What is that huge presence hanging there in space.

FBII

Did you know that this profile exists?

There's probably a lot of stuff we don't know.
(I'm totally looking into x-friends, but it doesn't seem to work off that link.)
Here's a major compiler of FB information.
I found it partly because of this post.

Not so brightening but interesting

Death and FB. Either the expansion of "the personal"or the dilution of "the private."

FBI WHY?

I wanted to transition over the Facebook this week partly because it has gigantic implications for the legacy journalists we were talking about last night, but also because the topic is so big that we may need other sessions to work on it.
In fact, our "what is a journalist" talk from last night would reverberate with this formuer publisher learning new tricks.

One thing we can rely on is that just about every day some new piece of journalism comes out about Facebook. And those stories will create other stories.

Your inbox is full (of spies)

Keeping track of Facebook issues will be almost a full time job.

13 ways of looking at Facebook

The story itself is interesting enough, but I'm intrigued by the way different institutions cover it.
Contrast this blog from a mainstream news outlet with this Reuters story, which was linked from this Slate evening aggregator. Mashable makes an interesting point: FB is so much more vast than Twitter, but if all you read was the last six momnths of news coverage, you would conclude that Twitter was far more important. Here's young advertising pundit on her own blog. While I was searching for more stuff, I found this interesting blog. I think it might be time to remind ourselves of this year's worst piece of social media journalism. But where would YOU go if you wanted to learn about this development? There is no right answer. What would you be looking for? What the heck: let's look at some TV coverage.

A moment at the end of last night's class ...

... inspired me to write this.

One of my former blogging students is working on a thesis involving this guy. Part of such an argument might be that hearing sad news from the saddest -- as opposed to the most credentialed -- person in your media universe is more primal, more human, more connected to our true nature as (tribal) communicators.