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Kevin Champion

Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Four reasons you should remove yourself from Face... - 0 views

  • According to recent reports, there have been significant privacy concerns at the Facebook HQ. It seems that Facebook employees get a great perk – spying on whomever they want. It seems that an employee can learn a lot about you, without you ever knowing it. Not only that, but they can see information on whose profile you’ve been looking at. Do you really want that information tracked?
  • Every time you sign up to play Texas Hold’em or hit your friends with rotten pumpkins (if someone makes this app), you’re giving away all of you personal information to these application providers. How often do you when you play games on yahoo, or MSN first give away all of your information? There are even more applications that exist solely to extract your personal data, and to be used for whatever they want.
  • Now, although not a surprise, the latest deal with Microsoft may make the internet a smaller place. Next time you’re searching on the internet and you find yourself being served advertisements for beer when you’re on a random florist website, it may be thanks to your Facebook cookie. When Facebook launches their new “SocialAds” platform on November 6th, it will unleash a network of sites with information not only on your browsing habits, but on all of your personal information.
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  • Remember the announcement of an Facebook’s public listing search of users on Google? Announced on September 5th, you will now be able to search on Google, or any other search engine and see the profile picture of one of the 50 million people on Facebook. Thankfully I’ve already opted out of this service, but for those of you who didn’t set your privacy controls, the display picture of you drinking with your buddies may be plastered all over the web for future employers to see.
Adam Bohannon

On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data - New York Times - 0 views

  • “One of the holy grails of social science is the degree to which taste determines friendship, or to which friendship determines taste,” said Jason Kaufman, an associate professor of sociology at Harvard and a member of the research team. “Do birds of a feather flock together, or do you become more like your friends?”
  • Facebook’s network of 58 million active users and its status as the sixth-most-trafficked Web site in the United States have made it an irresistible subject for many types of academic research.
  • Nicole Ellison, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, and colleagues found that Facebook use could have a positive impact on students’ well-being.
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  • An important finding, Ms. Ellison said, was that students who reported low satisfaction with life and low self-esteem, and who used Facebook intensively, accumulated a form of social capital linked to what sociologists call “weak ties.” A weak tie is a fellow classmate or someone you meet at a party, not a friend or family member. Weak ties are significant, scholars say, because they are likely to provide people with new perspectives and opportunities that they might not get from close friends and family. “With close friends and family we’ve already shared information,” Ms. Ellison said.
  • Ms. Ellison and her colleagues suggest the information gleaned from Facebook may be more accurate than personal information offered elsewhere online, such as chat room profiles, because Facebook is largely based in real-world relationships that originate in confined communities like campuses.
  • Eszter Hargittai, a professor at Northwestern, found in a study that Hispanic students were significantly less likely to use Facebook, and much more likely to use MySpace. White, Asian and Asian-American students, the study found, were much more likely to use Facebook and significantly less likely to use MySpace.
Kevin Champion

Slap in the Facebook: It's Time for Social Networks to Open Up - 0 views

  • Therein lies the rub. When entering data into Facebook, you're sending it on a one-way trip. Want to show somebody a video or a picture you posted to your profile? Unless they also have an account, they can't see it. Your pictures, videos and everything else is stranded in a walled garden, cut off from the rest of the web.
  • Like locked cell phones and copy-protected music, Facebook is on the wrong side of the open-network debate. Facebook is a sealed bubble. Facebook users are locked into Facebook, just as iTunes locks music fans to Apple's iPod.
    • Kevin Champion
       
      This is exactly why I have always been reluctant to use Facebook. It´s the same reason I don´t have an ipod. I cannot stand the thought that my content or media will be confined to one place. It seems Facebook starts closed and is slowly opening, whereas this article suggests starting open and then slowly closing might be better (perhaps not closing at all). The one thing Facebook has been successful with is getting people to use it. However, I submit there is something wrong when it´s most discerning users still are not comfortable with it.
  • We would like to place an open call to the web-programming community to solve this problem. We need a new framework based on open standards. Think of it as a structure that links individual sites and makes explicit social relationships, a way of defining micro social networks within the larger network of the web.
    • Kevin Champion
       
      This is very similar to the ideas I have been having about what the quorum online would look like. All of these services suffer the fate of trying to be the end-all service. The one and only greatest. This is fragmenting us and keeping us from meeting up online. I want to collaborate with people but it seems like most of the time I first have to convince them to use the tool/service I am using to collaborate with, or I have to submit and use theirs. Our conversations can´t even begin until we´ve hashed out these meta-conversations (conversations about how best to have conversations). It all becomes incredibly taxing, and so we are just left fragmented.
Kevin Champion

Kiva.org - Loans that change lives - 0 views

  • Kiva lets you connect with and loan money to unique small businesses in the developing world. By choosing a business on Kiva.org, you can "sponsor a business" and help the world's working poor make great strides towards economic independence. Throughout the course of the loan (usually 6-12 months), you can receive email journal updates from the business you've sponsored. As loans are repaid, you get your loan money back.
  • Kiva partners with existing microfinance institutions. In doing so, we gain access to outstanding entrepreneurs from impoverished communities world-wide. Our partners are experts in choosing qualified borrowers. That said, they are usually short on funds. Through Kiva.org, our partners upload their borrower profiles directly to the site so you can lend to them.
  • Kiva provides a data-rich, transparent lending platform for the poor. We are constantly working to make the system more transparent to show how money flows throughout the entire cycle. The below diagram shows briefly how money gets from you to a third-world borrower, and back!
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  • Kiva is using the power of the internet to facilitate one-to-one connections that were previously prohibitively expensive. Child sponsorship has always been a high overhead business. Kiva creates a similar interpersonal connection at much lower costs due to the instant, inexpensive nature of internet delivery. The individuals featured on our website are real people who need a loan and are waiting for socially-minded individuals like you to lend them money.
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