My Facebook Inbox

Looking over my shoulder, Maya glances at the number of unread messages in my Facebook Inbox. "How do you have so many?" she asks. "Those aren't real messages from people." I say. And they aren't. As far as I am concerned, FB Inbox is not a real inbox.

I have two real inboxes: my personal gmail box (rebecca@ganglysister.com is Gmail) and my work mailbox which sits somewhere on the servers in my office where people named Alex can find it.

FB as it is designed now can never be a real mailbox for the following reasons:

• No forwarding of messages.
• No filing, tagging or archiving of messages.
• No searching messages or senders.
• No saving, backup or export of messages.

As far as I am concerned, the bottom line of this is that my messages in FB belong to FB, not to me. I'm pretty sure FB feels the same, considering the lighthanded way they can choose to simply discontinue their service at any time and you have no way to protect yourself by using an export or backup function. You can't even export your contacts.

I know some people use FB for real and even business/professional messages. I don't get it, but it's their funeral. I use my FB mailbox as a toy. My Inbox has invitations to events, messages from groups and fan pages, etc. Every now and again a friend writes me on my FB inbox, and I almost always answer them using my gmail account, so I have a gmail record and they will start using real mail to speak to me.

The main advantage of FB is you can send mail to anyone, even people you don't know. The main disadvantage of FB is anyone, even people you don't know, can send mail to you. I have found numerous business contacts through FB, and I have not sent them business email through that methodology. Either I come up with their business email legitimately (pretty easy to do, actually), or I don't write. As far as I am concerned, people are on FB for fun, and the last thing they want is to have people accosting them at the playground to do business. My FB inbox is just a playground. If you want to be serious with me, find me somewhere else.

Why would anyone watch me?

It suddenly hit me how bizarre the discussion on privacy is, after reading a blog by Steve Smith on how delighted he is that he's finally getting targeted advertising.

Regardless of where you stand on the privacy issue, the fact is that a great deal is known about us. Our browsers and web sites track where we've been (though our ISPs are forbidden from doing so). Our credit card companies know where we've been or what we've bought. Our supermarkets and pharmacies, if we have a frequent-buyer card, know to a high level of granularity exactly what we've bought. Our cell phones know where we are located, so in theory, our cell phone company knows at a minimum where we've been roaming to, but also in theory, who our friends are and how long we spend talking with them. Our employers can track our computer activity and know what we did on our computer all day long.

All of the above is for people who don't use things like Twitter, Facebook, Pandora, Skype, Plaxo, or instant messaging. If you use any of those, in theory, someone knows a lot more. In that case, potentially, anyone could know who your friends or colleagues are, what music you like, what parties you go to, and what you ate for breakfast this morning.

For most of us, that's at least a bit disturbing. For many of us, it's even intrusive or creepy. Most of us don't want to think too much about what could be done with that level of information, if it indeed could be made sense of (not trivial at all).

The sad, indeed, pathetic, part is that the only thing our society can think of to do with all that data is to sell us more stuff. Most of the privacy debate revolves around varying levels of outrage of what corporations are going to do with that data, what they are going to advertise to us, and how intrusive they will be in their marketing efforts. Now, I don't know about you, but I have a feeling I will be seing more, not less advertising in the future, and if it's going to be brash, at least let it be for feminine hygiene products and not for prostate treatments. (Either you agree with me on that one or feel just the opposite, as the case may be.) If it's not going to brash, let it be about ice cream and not cars (again, your taste may vary).

But back to my point.

What does it say about us that the only thing we can think of to do with personal data is to monetize it? Some of us are aware of how to use that data for the greater good, but at best, the implementaitons are marginal.

What does it say about us that our opposition to using personal data is revolved around corporations wanting to monetize it? Some of us are aware it could be used to really harm us or for our government (or someone else's government) to keep tabs on us, and we certainly oppose that, but it isn't the dominant conversation.

Yes, it is frightening that corporations own so much information about me personally.
But to me, it's even more frightening that we are living in a society where the primary, if not only, meaure of the worth of anything is in dollars.

War and Social Networking

I'm sure most of you have noticed that I've been living in a war zone for the last 3 weeks. Personally, the effects aren't major; the war is a hundred miles south of me and it's more-or-less business as usual in my life. I'm not going to write about that. As usual, what I'm going to write about is social media.

Some of my colleagues have made huge efforts to support Israel through various online media. I assume the other side also has its supporters doing the same, obviously not from the Gaza strip, because getting online is a problem, but they have their supporters outside the strip. I've gotten email from various international charities supporting humanitarian efforts, as well.

Before I go into the war specifically, let me be clear that social media and the internet have made an enormous contribution to the non-profit world and to do-gooders everywhere. The most obvious and successful examples are Kiva and One, but there are many, many more. I do not for a moment place doubt on the power of the digital media.

However, the digital and social media world isn't going to win the war. It isn't going to impact the war. It doesn't matter one byte, and these are the reasons:

1. War consists of things like killing people and destroying stuff. Your blog and youtube video are all nice, but they will neither destroy more stuff nor prevent stuff from being destroyed.
   
   
2. Your blog and youtube video aren't going to change anyone's opinion. That includes this blog. The sides are so far apart, and almost everyone following the news on this subject has an opinion already, so forget it. If you like watching videos of soldiers either helping or shooting guys on the other side, you will find videos to your taste. If you don't want to hear the other side's opinion (the most likely scenario), you won't watch those videos.
   
   
3. It could be argued that being bombarded with this much media desensitizes us to it. I don't know about that, but personally it just makes me sick, so I avoid it.
   
   
4. I know this will shock everyone (not!) but you know those online polls asking whether you support Israel or the Palestinians? They don't actually influence the results. They don't actually influence international opinion either. The only thing they represent is how fast Jews can pass along email as opposed to how fast Arabs can pass along email. Since I think we all know the answer to that question, you don't have to feel any obligation to cast your vote in those anymore.
   
   
5. And finally, the reason that social media won't win the war is that the concept of winning the war is an oxymoron. It just isn't conceivable to me that killing people and destroying stuff is "winning". I mean, it's measurable, and that's all good and fine, and we definitely got a higher "score" on destroying stuff, but what kind of "win" is that? We're going to end up paying for putting it back together, directly or indirectly, so it's a little ridiculous.
   
   
6. Moreover, the huge amount of media attention is counterproductive, in particular to Israel. Israel is constantly complaining how it gets the short end of the stick, how it is accused unfairly of atrocities, etc. Ya know, it would help if we would just shut our traps for a while. The more we talk, the more we get other people to talk about it. We say "when x country committed worse crimes, nobody said anything..." Yeah, because they knew how to shut their traps. We just can't shut up, and then we complain how the world looks at us with a magnifying glass. Honestly, keeping our traps shut would serve us a lot better than trying to win a war of words. Nobody can measure that, anyway.
   

It's been common knowledge for a long time that this kind of war doesn't solve anything. The conflict will be resolved through negotiation, if at all. Meanwhile, the debates in the social media are counter productive. It really doesn't matter who is right, or who is horrid, who is generous, who is winning, or who did what to whom first. It happens to matter who is dead and what is destroyed, because the more dead and the more destroyed, the less chance to reach a compromise both sides can live with. It also matters that we spend our time accusing others and justifying ourselves instead of working towards something productive.

I'm not saying the other side is right. I'm saying, it doesn't matter who is right because we are both losing and we are using old-fashioned metrics to try and prove that we aren't.

It's about time we took responsibility for our words and actions in the social media, and stopped thinking in terms of "winning the war of words". It's completely irrelevant. Save your breath and your bytes and start thinking of how to say, do, and post something that could bring about a solution in the future rather than describe misdeeds of the past.

Inactivity

It's been a long time since I blogged, for two main reasons:

• I have a new job at a cool startup and it's keeping me busy.
  
• I have given some thought about where I want this blog to go, and it wasn't clear to me yet.
  

While the state of social media is still of some interest, at this point it's way overblogged. Anyone following the blogs of Chris Brogan or Jeff Pulver will get that they have started to run a bit thin on material that specifically talks about social networking. Like any technology, at first there were lots of new and cool things happening, and now it's just kind of a part of life.
Also, regarding social media, I use it more and more as part of my daily life. As a marketing tool, it's unbelievably effective in getting me where I want to go. However, I am not at liberty to talk too much about what I am doing at my company, at least not on a weekly basis.
So, the blog is going to morph a bit.
First of all, I'll add a bit more about my personal life and adventures, including my personal use of social media and some of the fun stuff I get to do in my job. Secondly, I'll talk about marketing in general, and social media and community will be part of that.
Secondly, I am writing the company blog at AdsVantage. Since the company is in the area of ratings and advertising, it should be of interest to those of you who are following me because I talk about marketing. For those of you who are following me because I have a sense of humor, you may be out of luck. Or not. For those of you who just like me, the intention is that this blog will be a bit more fun and a bit less business, and that I will continue to update every week.
And for those of you who are concerned about "the situation": I am safe, life is pretty much business as usual, and there is some chance I will blog about it in the coming week.

Roaming Salsa

The concierge recommended a club in LA where we could both eat Cuban cuisine and dance to a live Salsa band, but when we got there, the joint was empty, in a seedy neighborhood, and the proprieter had had a tiff with the band leader, so there was no music. So there we were: myself, my boss, a colleague whose booth we were sharing, and his PR agent, somewhere in LA, hungry and without a dance floor.

First thing's first: one of us whips out a phone with a GPS and we start looking for a place to eat. Easy-peasy, you might think. The problem is, all you get is the name of the place. No star rating, no description of the cuisine, no pricing, nothing. Just a name and a street. Eventually we gave up on that and just picked a restaurant that looked nice and had a lot of customers in it.

Next, we started to try to figure out where to go Salsa dancing. Now, we had already looked on Google, and this first place didn't work out, but what else could we do? Actually, none of us wanted to surf to look for a place because roaming charges for data are so outrageous, it's cheaper wasting petrol than accessing the internet. So we asked around, and were instructed to drive about 15 minutes to a place which we found to be... closed. Again.

At this point, the one member of our group with a US phone made some attempts to surf and find something suitable, with no success.

I had a similar problem the next day, looking for a hotel in Chicago (more about my new life in a future post). The important and relevant parameters to me were: price, proximity to public transport, and shuttle to the airport. It was simply impossible to search with those parameters. In the end, I asked some friends and was directed to somewhere just great. I had to order on the phone, though, since you can't order online for the same night because it takes time to process.

I could add to that my failed attempts to find a good British Pub online during my London stay, my inability to locate a printer in Anaheim through the Internet, and a slew of other informational and technological disappiontments.

In theory, we should have never had to ask a concierge, the girl on the street, or the friend about hotels or restaurants. In theory, it should have been easy to find an open dance club, and maybe even get some live video of the dance floor. In theory, it shouldn't take 10 minutes, much less 10 hours, to process my online order for a hotel. In theory, restaraunt star ratings could be incorporated into your GPS listing. And, mostly, in theory, it should not cost an outrageous sum to surf the internet just because you are out of your "home" mobile zone. It also shouldn't take so damn long to get a response from the network.

In fact, the best way to find a good restaurant, hotel, or dance club still appears to be by word of mouth. It's a good thing we can all still depend on the kindness of strangers, because the technology is still practically very far from helpful in a real crunch. And no, we never found a place to dance and ended up in a bizzarre piano dive.

LinkedIn Catchup

While the high-tech world has a tendency to favor first-movers, moving second can have its benefits. LinkedIn is arguably way ehind Facebook in terms of forming groups, and just recently LinkedIn has made it simple to use applications. I've been waiting for this capability since I saw LinkedIn and Google showing off the calendar application on the release of OpenSocial.

Although Facebook is increasingly being used for serious networking and setting up get-togethers, including business networking meetings, Facebook isn't intrinsically designed to be serious. Facebook is fun and colorful, while LinkedIn is black-and-white, I've heard it said, but I don't wear my party shirts to business meetings.

For business networking, LinkedIn is far and away the most popular social network, and by adding groups and applications, they are poised to really take a leap. A minority of users are actively using the professional lists, the bias is clear. If you go to LinkedIn to set up a group, you are doing so for professional networking purposes, and dramatically enhancing your reach to other professionals in the area.

I've been warmly welcomed to every group I attempted to join, and offered connectivity to other group members. This is networking at its best.
You may have some doubts as to the quality of the links acquired through this type of networking, and I agree. However, fundamentally, it's no different than having a coffee at a professional conference with someone. You still don't know the person; you might not necessarily recommend them or refer them to a colleague; but you would be inclined to at least read the e-mail they send to you. The major significant difference in the LinkedIn connection is: you can actually remember you have it and search for it when you need it. Whether you store your paper business cards in a binder of a box, no matter what sorting system you use, there's no denying that it's going to be easier to find a LinkedIn connection than a business card.

The only major feature lacking is "notes", such as you would scribble on the back of a business card. I would like to see that feature on a social network: the ability to write your own personal comments on how you met the person and the ability to apply your own tags for later search of the person's profile.

Apps are just in the nascent stage, and don't yet include the kinds of tools that will connect online to real life encounters. To do that, applications need to correspond real-world activities with online and professional profiles. For example, if you are attending an event, and you want to meet a certain type of professional, you should be able to make the proper search. If you are on business in a foreign city or a particular hotel, you could use some kind of application to put together a minyan, or find someone to go jogging with who is also a professional in your field.

Most business travelers find themselves alone much of the time they travel, so this could be incredibly effective. Imagine being able to find the right person to sit next to on a flight instead of ending up next to the crying baby. Not that I have anything against crying babies; I've had a couple of my own. Still, when on business, the benefit of sitting in a plane next to someone visiting the same conference or belonging to the same industry is clear.

At this stage, the applications tend to restrict your life to the virtual. I'm looking forward to LinkedIn's providing apps that cross the gaps and create meaningful relationships. Recent developments lead me to believe that time is drawing near.

Skype Gripes and Swipes

I've heard plenty of gripes about Skype. I've heard analysts and bystanders say that Skype can't compete with other VoIP platforms. I've heard it's got security holes. I've heard people say it's annoying to talk from your computer. I agree that ebay paid too much for Skype.

Despite all this talk, Skype is now used for real business. As far as I can tell, it's at least as popular as fixed line.

In other words, these gripes and swipes simply aren't true. While it is true that Skype is essentially a proprietary client, and other softphones are "standard" SIP (I know enough about SIP for the idea of standard to be in quotes.), meaning they should be able to call one another, in fact this isn't of much concern to anyone. People still use regular phone numbers and for all intents and purposes, SkypeOut and SkypeIn are no different than the interfaces of any other VoIP interfaces.

For all the talk of Skype security problems, I have not heard one live actual account of a security breach due to Skype. I spoke to one of the Skype founders who told me the same thing. Not one live incident. If you know of one instance, by all means comment (and I don't mean you heard of it or read it on the Internet -- I mean, do you know an individual who had such a problem, not an IT manager who claimed it was a problem).

The bottom line, basically is that Skype has got it right. I can't put my finger on exactly what is right, but everybody has it on their desktop. Today, it's absolutely acceptable to tell a business contact to Skype you, and it's relatively rare for anyone (at least in the technology industry) to say they don't Skype.

The main convenience of Skype over other forms of communication is what people in the industry call "presence". That means I know if you are available before I, um, "dial", the, um, "device". It's also convenient that it's free, you don't really dial, and you see people's name instead of their telephone number, but those features don't change the basic functionality the way presence does.

Presence is revolutionary for two reasons. The main reason is that we no longer need to set fixed meeting times. I recently set a teleconferences with a collegues defining the time as "Some time between 4-6 pm. Look for me on Skype." We didn't have to sit by our desks, worry about stopping in the middle of the previous call, or any of that. We just "saw" one another online. Another meeting was defined by "Wednesday or Thursday afternoon next week when we are both online." Obviously, these weren't the most important meetings on my schedule, and they didn't involve more than 2 people (though Skype is amazing for that, too.), but you get the idea. Using Skype is changing our concept of scheduling. I don't know whether this is good or bad, it just is.

The other reason presence is revolutionary is that getting a phone call really never needs to be an annoyance anymore. Although sales guys have my Skype address, they don't take advantage of it any more than my regular fixed or cell number. I'm an extremely accessible person, being as I have customer-facing as well as spokesperson roles at my company. It's easy to find my cell phone phone number.

Despite my accessibility, my experience is that the best sales people are never an intrusion. With Skype, if they want to call, the usually will open a "chat" first and ask if it's a convenient time. Yes, they could have done the same thing by picking up the phone, but somehow, the quick chat is much less of a bother. Sales people who don't use Skype are starting to be much more of a bother to me than those who have access to knowlege about whether I'm online.

Given this, it makes sense that Skype would also integrate a feature that would allow me to define "work" and "real" friends, and define my status accordingly. That is, when I'm at work, my work colleagues would see me online, but they wouldn't see me online when I am at home. If it integrated with Plaxo to adopt those attributes, wow, I'd really be in heaven then.

Meanwhile, feel free to Skype anytime.