FTC OKs Facebook’s privacy settlement
Tony Romm, writing at Politico:
The order means Facebook must now obtain consent before sharing a user’s information with advertisers or others in a way that differs from their current privacy settings, and it bars Facebook from again misrepresenting its privacy and security practices.
This settlement will be in place for twenty years. Will Facebook still be here in twenty years?
Only crazy people don’t use Facebook?
Zoe Fox, writing at Mashable:
Employers may suspect that an applicant’s absence from the social network means the account is so full of offensive material that it had to be deleted.
But what if I deleted my Facebook account because my friends’ accounts were so full of offensive material? Regardless, I certainly don’t want to work for someone who makes psychological judgments about me 1) without a relevant degree or experience making such diagnoses and 2) without any significant interaction with me.
Today’s job market, unfortunately, may leave some people without a choice: create and maintain a net-positive Facebook account or risk being overlooked for an interview. Then again, one study does not scientific fact make. And there’s my generally positive Twitter presence, for what it’s worth.
Howard Mittman, VP and publisher at Condé Nast property Wired Magazine, told Ad Age's Nat Ives:
I’m interested in ways to bring advertisers in front of our community. When Flipboard becomes that, I would love to reengage and reinvigorate our product. Until then, we have to wait and see and not allow intermediaries to build their own platforms without direct monetizable benefit back to us.
This is somewhere between a rock and a hard place. People who consume solely through Flipboard — a group I suspect is growing all the time — might not bother clicking through. The friction meant to induce users to view Wired.com might end up dramatically cutting the number of folks reading Wired’s content. I don’t know what the right answer is, but I don’t think it’s “teaser” sentences.
The ad experience on mobile is already dismal for the user — I only interact with mobile ads by accident. There must be a better way. I know Wired and other content creators need viable revenue streams, and that traditionally the primary stream has been advertising.
But the web, particularly the mobile web, doesn’t even allow for the glossy full-pagers that magazines do. Those full-pagers can be compelling, and what’s more, they can be blended with the magazine itself.
A glossy full-page ad about the newest gaming laptop would be well-received in an issue focusing on gaming hardware, consoles, and next-generation systems. The same connection is much harder to make on mobile, where space is as precious to the publisher selling the ads as it is to the reader teaching himself how to visually avoid them. Flipboard is so popular because it involves us in the content consumption beyond merely staring at a screen. It’s subtle, but that flip is oddly engaging.
If the platform won’t accomodate your advertising, it’s time for your advertising to accomodate the platform. A headline and a single teaser sentence make for bad user experience: either find a way to participate in full, or get out altogether. Half-measures suggest a lack of innovation and a willingness to make user experience secondary to revenue, when user experience is what brings (and keeps) the eyeballs that bring (and keep) the advertising dollars.
Why can’t an advertisement be “Flipboard-ized?” Why not include in Wired's Flipboard stream an article entitled “Ad: Alienware M18x Moves Gaming Laptops into the 21st Century,” accompanied by stunning images of the inner workings and outer design of the machine? This offers the same “unified experience” of which a full-page print magazine ad is capable, but maintains the user experience that makes Flipboard so popular.
Updated 8:30pm: Alexia Tsotsis briefly interviewed Flipboard CEO Mike McCue about the New York Times’ integration into Flipboard. All digital subscribers to the Times can access the newspaper’s full array of online content via Flipboard. More interesting is the fact that the paper’s Flipboard content will also include advertisements described by McCue as “full page, print style advertising.” I respectfully request some credit for at least independently coming up with the model used by the Flipboard/NYT partnership (I somehow missed Tsotsis’ headline while writing this post), but I’m happy to see someone is at least trying it out.
Something like this seems to be working for Facebook on mobile, according a story by Josh Constine at TechCrunch. Facebook’s formidable data farm social network struggled to find a viable advertising solution to massive uptake in mobile use, and they appear to be on to something.
Maybe organic inline advertising isn’t the solution for every mobile advertising problem, but it’s an example of the fact that this problem is solvable. My Flipboard/Wired suggestion probably has weaknesses, but let’s have that conversation. Let’s argue about how the interests of publishers, users, and adverstisers, for all of their apparent conflict, often converge on great value propositions: content and ads that are well-built, well-tailored, and complimentary to one another, rather than shoe-horned next to one another in a way that damages the user experience and decreases all forms of value for everyone.
Users log in to the network with their Facebook or Windows Live accounts.
There are two reasons I can’t help but be cynical about So.cl, Microsoft’s latest social search experiment. I have no “official” user experience training, but both of my reasons might be considered UX critiques:
First, Facebook login suggests an interest in reducing friction, but my experience was anything but smooth. The So.cl page offers to let you sign in, so I tried to sign in with my personal email address but was told that address wasn’t connected to a registered Windows Live account. So I tried to register the same email address with Windows Live. Then, I was told it was already connected to a Windows Live account. I registered a different email address as a new Windows Live account and then got a landing page saying they’d send me an invitation ASAP. So much for signing in.
Facebook has its claws in Microsoft’s little social experiment, and it’s probably profoundly easier to use than Microsoft’s own sign-up/in process. Unfortunately, anyone who doesn’t have a Facebook account must brave Microsoft’s abysmal Windows Live process. No third way. This is a classic case of fail, and Danny Sullivan’s experience, which he wrote about at his Marketing Land website, suggests the problems I had trying to get into the damn thing only continue as you dig deeper.
Second, Microsoft did stuff it didn’t need to waste time doing: creating a stand-alone site and allowing users to: make “rich” posts (read: blog), “riff” on other posts (read: reblog, a la Tumblr), and conduct “video parties” (read: Google Hangouts, but with less features).
As usual, I have some unsolicited advice for a massive technology corporation:
First, let users sign up with an email address. If you want to make that email address automatically a new Windows Live account, fine, but don’t ask for ZIP code and gender while you do it. Don’t use multiple redirects to sign-up stages, either. Make it simple.
Second, just integrate the experiment into Bing.com itself, which looks better every time I visit it. Show users a very prominent one-time explanation and allow interested folks to opt into the experiment. Then, make the So.cl bits a minimal but eye-catching and useful sub-component of each search result or something. Anything but a distinct site. If it feels like a new feature, it’s not as off-putting as a stand-alone site, which can feel like a new hungry content monster users are expected to feed.
Microsoft has impressed many people with their design direction on Bing, as well as Windows 8 and Windows Phone (aside from the unfortunate fact that we’re still calling the last two things “Windows” at all). Simple user experience stuff like this though shows they still have much room for improvement.
For the record, one of my favorite user experience designs is ifttt. Show us what you can help us do and how to do it in the same step. That, to me, is an epic UX win.
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