Disruptive Conversations

Some time back I became a Facebook "friend" with someone I had known professionally for several years. I did not work with the person all that much, but had great respect for the person based on the several dealings I had had with them. However, now that we were "friends" I was almost immediately exposed to two pieces of information that they had included in their Facebook profile: political affiliation and religion. As it happened, this particular person's views were pretty much completely opposite to my own and before I could really think about it I experienced a deep knee-jerk reaction of "Oh, you're kidding, he/she is not really one of them?" For a brief moment, until my brain could re-engage, my respect for that person plummeted through the floor. A moment or two later, the rational side of my brain kicked in and reminded me that I had had a great amount of professional respect for the person 10 seconds before and nothing had changed that should have altered that. Still, there was that deep emotional response.

Politics? Religion? In the workplace? With professional colleagues? Huh?

At least here in North America, those are two topics that are generally taboo in the work environment. Verboten. In fact, in most areas you are not legally allowed to ask employees or potential employees about those topics. Within a work place there of course may be lunchroom discussions about recent politics and so you may learn of others viewpoints. Religion might come up, but again probably with people with whom you work closely.

But with customers? Or partners?

Never. At least in my experience.

And why should it come up, really? When you are buying a product/service from someone, or selling it to someone, what do politics or religion matter? (or gender or race?) If you are partnering with someone to deliver a service/product, again, why does it matter? What matters is whether both of you can work together and deliver the product/service - and presumably make some money through the deal.

Religion and politics should not matter in business dealings.

Now, of course, there are "business directories" that many churches offer trying to connect people within the church community, but that's a different matter as it is within that community and trying to help each out. There are also websites out there that can help you steer your business toward companies with similar views as yours. But in general, the political leanings and religious preference of a supplier or customer do not factor into the normal course of business.

Yet here we are in Facebook choosing (or not) to provide all that information to (potential) customers.

I recognize that there are a good number of folks out there who are apathetic about all things related to politics and/or religion. They don't care at all about what someone's religion is or what their politics are. I've met many. Often they say they don't care about religious/spiritual issues, haven't attended a church (or spiritual service) in years (or ever) and haven't voted in any elections. Religion and/or politics mean nothing to them and so they take no offense or don't even notice when someone states their political or religious preference.

Leaving the completely apathetic aside, though, most people have some opinion about politics and some view about religion/spirituality. The stronger those views, of course, the more deep the emotional reactions. A hard-core liberal in the US may have (or at least appreciate) a bumper sticker "Friends don't let friends vote Republican". A hard-core conservative may view all liberals as traitors and the source of all the country's problems. A strong "born again" Christian may see that the problems of the world are because people have not accepted Jesus Christ as their lord and savior and need to do so. A strong atheist may see that the problems of the world are because of the very existence of religion and that it is the root of all evil. These are deeply-ingrained views:

Politics and religion are part of our core identity that helps form who we define ourselves to be.

When that part of our identity is confronted by a polar opposite, we naturally react. Conservative Christians will have second thoughts about atheists, and atheists will have second thoughts about conservative Christians. Ultra-liberal Democrats will instinctively distrust ultra-conservative Republicans - and vice-versa. It's just part and parcel of being human and building these beliefs into your identity.

Within the work environment, though, these twin areas of politics and religion have not been part of normal discourse... but yet, if you choose to fill out those fields in Facebook, they are suddenly exposed to all your "friends".

It works the other way, of course. Some time back I added another "friend" whose politics and religion closely aligned with me. Again, without any rational thinking, the thought popped into my brain "Oh, he/she's that. No wonder why we got along so well." In the mass of people out there, we seek out those communities of like-minded people... those affinities that we can use to build stronger connections.

Which is why having fields for politics and religion make so much sense for Facebook's original audience of college students. You are about to land in a campus of 10,000 people, of whom you know basically no one. How do you find new people? How do you find potential friends? Searching on "interests" is one way... but searching on political views or religion is another great way. Odds are that if they claim a similar religious view (or upbringing), they probably have a similar world view to yours. Likewise if they have similar political leanings, you probably have more in common upon which to potentially build a friendship. It makes total sense in that environment. Likewise, if Facebook is just used among your "friends", odds are that they probably already know these views about you. But today we are overloading the term "friend" and so now it encompasses true "friends", family... and business contacts.

So it's one thing to share political/religious info with friends, family and classmates, but in business? I don't know... on the one hand there is the greater "transparency" and the chance to make connections with other people. On the other hand, there is the strong chance of potentially alienating others.

In any event, the fields are there in your Facebook profile if you choose to fill them out (and many people seem to during the process of signing up). Of course, you are limited to the choices that Facebook provides for politics. They don't offer the "It's Complicated" choice that they have for relationships, which would be quite useful. The "Religious Views" field is free text entry, so you can really write whatever you want there. It seems to me that you really have four choices:

1. Leave them blank - probably the safest choice, but potentially then losing out on some networking possibilities.
2. Enter generic choices - you could be safe and choose "Moderate" and write in something vague for a religion.
3. Fill out only one - you'll see I have a political entry but not a religious entry.
4. Fill them both out - embrace full transparency and let the world know (or at least your "friends") your affiliations and beliefs.

To me this is just yet another one of those areas where we don't fully understand the full impact of the profiles of Facebook and, in fairness, all the other social networking services. In the rush to join these services, we just fill out all sorts of information, not necessarily taking the time to think about the potential impact exposing that information may have.

What do you think? If you are a Facebook user, have you filled out those two fields? Do you think people should in an effort to be more transparent? Do you think we understand the full ramifications of exposing information like this? (Or do you think the issue I raise here is really not an issue?)

Technorati Tags: culture, facebook, politics, religion

I had to laugh when I saw in my Facebook News Feed that several of my friends had joined a new Facebook group "I am a screen shot addict" (You must be a Facebook member to see the group). I laughed a bit more when I saw Betsy Weber's blog post which in turn pointed me to the creator of the Facebook group, Bryan Eisenberg, and his post "Confessions of a Screen Shot Addict".

You see, I am a screen shot addict. Always have been. Probably largely because I used to write a lot of courseware related to computer programs and so naturally I needed to illustrate those documents with screenshots. Now, I take screenshots galore for these blogs. I just like illustrating my articles with graphics... and screen shots are one of the best ways to do that.

On my Windows laptop, I was using TechSmith's SnagIt and loving it. I was also using TechSmith's Jing Project for quick screen shots that I wanted to reference in, typically, an IM conversation. Now that I'm on the Mac, I've got a wonderful built in utility (I love Shift+Ctrl+Cmd+4) and I'm also checking out Jing for the Mac.

So yes, I love screenshots... if you do, too, and are a Facebook user, feel free to "join the group".

Technorati Tags: facebook, bryan eisenberg, screencaptures, screenshots

Given that I tend to travel a good bit (and expect that to continue with most of the jobs I might take), I often find myself sending messages like the one I sent today to a group of people saying "Will any of you be out at the Podcast Expo next week?" Some of them answered... for others it was just an another annoying email in their inbox.

Wouldn't it be nice to simply know where your friends/colleagues are? (Assuming they shared that information with you?)

One approach is what you see with Facebook Events, where people can RSVP into the Event inside of Facebook. You can then simply look through the list and see who is there. Upcoming.org works in a similar fashion as do probably half a dozen other services.

The challenge is that they are all about events. But what if you are going to be in Boston for one event and a friend/colleague is going to be in Boston for another event? By these event-driven sites, you won't necessarily know that.

Dopplr, on the other hand, is location-driven. When you enter in a trip you are taking, it ties it to a standard geographic location. The advantage to this is that you can then look in the city you are going and see: a) who among your circle of friends lives in the city; and b) who will be traveling to the city (provided they are sharing their trip information with you. From their "About" page:

How does Dopplr work? It lets you share your future travel plans with a group of trusted fellow travellers whom you have chosen. It also reminds you of friends and colleagues who live in the cities you're planning to visit. You can use the service with your personal computer and mobile phone.

It's an interesting idea to me, given how often I'm going places. To be useful, of course, it needs to have a certain mass of people using it. If you do use it, my URL is http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/DanYork If you would like to try it out, drop me a note and I can send you an invite.

P.S. Congrats to the Dopplr team for receiving early stage funding from an impressive group of investors!

Technorati Tags: dopplr, location, socialnetworking, travel

Google yesterday quietly rolled out their "Shared Stuff" social bookmarking/sharing service and predictably there were a slew of postings in the blogosphere. Here's my little quick tour for you. First, you add a link on your bookmark bar:

Now you just click on the bookmark whenever you are on a page you want to share, very much like you do with del.icio.us, Facebook, digg or any of a zillion other services. The result is a popup page that looks like this:

Once you do any of the optional things like add a comment, change the picture or add tags, you simply hit "Share" and you get a page telling you of your success and giving you the link to your Shared Stuff page:

Clicking on the link brings me to my own private version of the "Shared Stuff" page (because I'm logged in with my Google account):

which looks sort of like the public page you all will see (which I get by clicking the "As everyone sees it") link:

You'll immediately note that the page everyone sees only has one of my two items on it. I can't explain why... and I've forced a browser refresh multiple times to try to see if it was a browser issue but that seemed to do nothing.

Now I could not for the life of me figure out any way to edit the listing I had on the page, but by simply sharing the same URL again, it seems to have corrected the issue (and I also could change the picture associated with it).

It is somewhat annoying that for the "article preview", it grabs the blog subtitle instead of the first bit of the actual post text - and there seems to be no way to change that, although you can add a comment. However, I have the same problem with Facebook "Shared links" and its preview.

Speaking of Facebook, the Google Email/Share feature has a "More..." link that brings you to a second page where you can share the link on Facebook, Furl, del.icio.us, Social Poster (which I'd not heard of), Reddit and Digg:

I clicked on "Facebook" and got the standard Facebook sharing screen:

You also can email a link (and add it at the same time) which is naturally integrated with Gmail:

The "Shared Stuff" feature does have some other interesting aspects, such as RSS feeds, the ability to see stuff shared by others (based on your Gmail address book) and the ability to search for stuff shared by other users based on domain or tag. However, as I discovered, there is this minor detail that tags must be separated by commas although it doesn't tell you that! Being used to del.icio.us, I put a space between my tags, with the resulting amusement:

It is looking here for the most popular stuff tagged "pme podcastexpo podcasting socialmedia" all as one giant tag. Oops. I shared it again and inserted commas, after which it worked fine. However, I did have to change the image again as it defaulted back to the first image (my picture) instead of the one I had chosen.

Given that I am a heavy user of del.icio.us and am already all set up to use that, and that I'm also sharing stuff within the walls of Facebook, I'm not really sure how much I'll use this new Google service. However, given that it's Google and one might expect that some of this information might ultimately show up in search rankings (or at least affect search results), there's a good chance it might be worth at least continuing to experiment with it.

What do you think? Will you use this new service? Or will you stick with the others?

Some other articles:

• Read/Write Web: The Best and Worst Things About Google's Shared Stuff
• Google Operating System: Google Shared Stuff
• Marketing Pilgrim: Shared Stuff is Delicious
• Guardian Technology: Google Shared Stuff slips out, disappoints

Technorati Tags: google, sharedstuff, tools

I'm delighted to say that I'll now definitely be at the Podcast and New Media Expo at the end of next week (and into the weekend) out in Ontario, California. I was debating whether or not to go because I'll be at AstriCon the previous few days in Phoenix, Arizona. Originally I was intending to just do AstriCon, but I've changed my schedule a bit so that I'll fly from Phoenix to Ontario, CA, on Thursday night so that I can participate in PME events on Friday through Sunday. Taking the good old red-eye home Sunday night.

I went to last year's PME and very much enjoyed spending time with all the various podcasters and bloggers that I've come to know. Should be a good bit of fun this year as well, although my focus will be a wee bit different. One of the various new paths I'm very seriously considering is to head into consulting and may do more with social media work. I've already been advising several companies about podcasts, blogs, etc.... I may turn that into something more formal. So my trip to PME will be much more business-focused than last year... and I'll be looking to talk to a number of folks about potential partnership opportunities. (Are you interested in potentially partnering with me? or engaging my services? Let's talk. ;-)

In any event, most of all it will simply be just plain fun to reconnect face-to-face with so many of the other members of the social media community whom I know now as friends!

If you read this and are going to be out at the PME, please do drop a line as I'm always interested to connect with folks.

Technorati Tags: pme, podcastexpo, podcasting, tools

I have to blame Chris Brogan. Some time back he had a picture in his left sidebar of him with some other people, and in that picture, his hair was parted on his right. However, above that, he had a picture in his banner with his hair parted on his left (as you can see in his banner now). Other pictures he put in his header were also different from his left sidebar picture. Now, realizing that people do change their hair parts, I asked him this when we were in the middle of some other other conversation. His answer was something like this:

No, the issue is that the MacBook camera reverses the image.

So naturally when I bought a MacBook Pro, one of the things I did check out was the camera and it's image. Sure enough, it gives you a mirror image. For instance, here's the picture I just recorded in a Facebook video:

Note that my hair is parted on my right. Now, if you were to see me, or take a digital picture of me, you would see that my hair is normally parted on my left:

So this latter one is a more accurate representation of how I look.

Now, the issue with hair parts is not really a huge deal (at least to me), but where this gets more of an issue is with words. For instance, here's some piece of advertising in my hotel room, shot through the normal MacBook Pro camera:

Do we see a problem here? In fact, the image should really be:

How did I correct the image? Well, it turns out that there's a great little piece of software from ecamm network called (of course) iGlasses. For $9.95 you can download this little piece of software that will work with iChat, Photo Booth, Skype and pretty much any other Mac apps that work with the embedded camera. (Except, I discovered, for Facebook video, which seems to use some Flash applet that doesn't appear to make use of iGlasses.) Here's the control panel:

Note the nice little check box at the bottom for "Mirror". Ta da... words read correctly (and hair is parted correctly :-).

Now the question for me is why this isn't something that Apple can just do automagically inside their software? Who at Apple decided that we ought to see mirror images through the camera? Very bizarre to me that they would make that choice. Hopefully sometime they'll fix it.

In the meantime, I've paid my $10 and can show my image correctly (outside of Facebook video).

Technorati Tags: apple, blogging, macbookpro, video, images, tools

One of the greatest bits of buzz around Facebook these days is the application APIs, the "Facebook Platform".  It's also one of the most frustrating aspects from a user perspective.  Very often I'll see on my News Feed that someone installed an application and I'll think to myself that I should check out that app.  However, if I don't do it right at that precise moment, well, the odds are that I won't... because it seems next to impossible to find apps in the directory!

Has anyone else been able to successfully use the "search" feature in Facebook's Application Directory?

Take today... I saw on my Facebook News Feed at some point in the day that someone I know had installed the "Appsaholic" application.  Subsequently in a lunchtime conversation I wound up learning about this app enough that I got curious.  So I went to my Applications page inside my Facebook account and entered "Appsaholic" in the search box.  This was the result (click on image for larger version):

Oops.  I tried several other variations on the name to no avail.  Finally, I just went to Google and searched on "facebook apps-a-holic" which brought me to this article which gave me the application URL inside of Facebook.

Crazy.

Why should I have to go outside of Facebook in order to find an application? 

Unfortunately, this has been my experience several times on different days, and I find it a bit of a concern.  So much of developing an app for Facebook is about being found.  Obviously the viral path through newsfeeds is one way to be found, but the application directory is an obvious one.  If you make it to one of the provided lists, you'll be found, but searching should work, one would think.

Have others experienced this problem?

(Now I would note that I couldn't find any of the applications I've already installed when I searched in the directory - perhaps the issue is that the search engine is down itself.  If so, it would be best for Facebook to put up a statement that the search engine is having problems rather than just saying "No applications found.")

One of the immediate challenges with moving over to a Mac was the fact that I needed an offline editor for blogging. As readers know, on my Windows PC, I've been a huge fan of Windows Live Writer, but obviously that doesn't work natively on the Mac. My next thought was to use Parallels in Coherence mode to use WLW, and I may still ultimately do that, but right now I need to get XP running on Parallels first. And meanwhile I want to blog!

So I went back to a tool I used to use on Windows, before I become a fan of WLW..... ecto.

I have to say that I was immediately impressed by the fact that it went to TypePad and brought over the settings for all my weblogs. With WLW, I had to add each weblog individually. This was much nicer. Now I'll start putting it through its paces.

Technorati Tags: blogeditors, blogging, ecto, tools

I'm Ottawa-bound early tomorrow morning for two days of closing off my activities with Mitel. Heading back to Vermont on Thursday.  If anyone reading this wants to connect with me in Ottawa tomorrow or Wednesday, please do drop an email, contact me on Skype ("danyork") or leave a comment here.  I will be staying out in the Kanata area.

UPDATE - I gave in and bought a MacBook Pro (with 4 GB of RAM!).  More on that later...

With my impending change in employment, I need to get a new laptop and, given that I'm thinking strongly of going the consulting route, I'm going to pick it up myself right now (versus waiting for an employer).  Obviously I want a laptop that works very well for participating in the world of social media.  An integrated webcam seems to be an absolute must.   People involved with video tell me that Apple Macbooks have the best quality video cameras and, being relatively agnostic toward operating systems, I'm open to Macbooks.  I'd love to get a laptop with a built-in camera that can rotate so that you can face it away from the user and toward the other people in a room, for instance.  But it seems that the current crop of laptops no longer have that - they all seem to have fixed cameras. 

Another "must-have" is the ability to work with a second monitor, but that's usually simple with a laptop.

So I've got a couple of questions for those of you working out there with blogs, podcasts, flickr, etc.:

• Do you have any specific thoughts on the best laptop for "social media" participation?
• Any recommendations about specific laptops with integrated cameras?  Know of any that aren't fixed?  (I've looked at the major vendors and they all seem to now be fixed.)
• Mac versus PC?  Mac users who still have to use Windows apps, have you been happy with Parallels? (Or vmWare Fusion?)

Any suggestions would be appreciated.  Thanks.