miércoles, 10 de septiembre de 2008

Facebook, twitter, y la "intimidad digital"

Según el artículo a continuación, si tienes más de 30 años, probablemente esto del Facebook, del Twitter y similares, o no sabes qué diablos es o, si es que tienes una idea, no le encuentras ningún sentido. Funciona perfectamente en mi caso. Por eso el artículo me ha parecido tan instructivo. Ver del New York Times Magazine, "Brave New World of Digital Intimacy".

"On Sept. 5, 2006, Mark Zuckerberg changed the way that Facebook worked, and in the process he inspired a revolt.

Zuckerberg, a doe-eyed 24-year-old C.E.O., founded Facebook in his dorm room at Harvard two years earlier, and the site quickly amassed nine million users. By 2006, students were posting heaps of personal details onto their Facebook pages, including lists of their favorite TV shows, whether they were dating (and whom), what music they had in rotation and the various ad hoc “groups” they had joined (like “Sex and the City” Lovers). All day long, they’d post “status” notes explaining their moods — “hating Monday,” “skipping class b/c i’m hung over.” After each party, they’d stagger home to the dorm and upload pictures of the soused revelry, and spend the morning after commenting on how wasted everybody looked. Facebook became the de facto public commons — the way students found out what everyone around them was like and what he or she was doing.

But Zuckerberg knew Facebook had one major problem: It required a lot of active surfing on the part of its users. Sure, every day your Facebook friends would update their profiles with some new tidbits; it might even be something particularly juicy, like changing their relationship status to “single” when they got dumped. But unless you visited each friend’s page every day, it might be days or weeks before you noticed the news, or you might miss it entirely. Browsing Facebook was like constantly poking your head into someone’s room to see how she was doing. It took work and forethought. In a sense, this gave Facebook an inherent, built-in level of privacy, simply because if you had 200 friends on the site — a fairly typical number — there weren’t enough hours in the day to keep tabs on every friend all the time.

“It was very primitive,” Zuckerberg told me when I asked him about it last month. And so he decided to modernize. He developed something he called News Feed, a built-in service that would actively broadcast changes in a user’s page to every one of his or her friends. Students would no longer need to spend their time zipping around to examine each friend’s page, checking to see if there was any new information. Instead, they would just log into Facebook, and News Feed would appear: a single page that — like a social gazette from the 18th century — delivered a long list of up-to-the-minute gossip about their friends, around the clock, all in one place. “A stream of everything that’s going on in their lives,” as Zuckerberg put it.

When students woke up that September morning and saw News Feed, the first reaction, generally, was one of panic. Just about every little thing you changed on your page was now instantly blasted out to hundreds of friends, including potentially mortifying bits of news — Tim and Lisa broke up; Persaud is no longer friends with Matthew — and drunken photos someone snapped, then uploaded and tagged with names. Facebook had lost its vestigial bit of privacy. For students, it was now like being at a giant, open party filled with everyone you know, able to eavesdrop on what everyone else was saying, all the time.

“Everyone was freaking out,” Ben Parr, then a junior at Northwestern University, told me recently. What particularly enraged Parr was that there wasn’t any way to opt out of News Feed, to “go private” and have all your information kept quiet. He created a Facebook group demanding Zuckerberg either scrap News Feed or provide privacy options. “Facebook users really think Facebook is becoming the Big Brother of the Internet, recording every single move,” a California student told The Star-Ledger of Newark. Another chimed in, “Frankly, I don’t need to know or care that Billy broke up with Sally, and Ted has become friends with Steve.” By lunchtime of the first day, 10,000 people had joined Parr’s group, and by the next day it had 284,000.

Zuckerberg, surprised by the outcry, quickly made two decisions. The first was to add a privacy feature to News Feed, letting users decide what kind of information went out. But the second decision was to leave News Feed otherwise intact. He suspected that once people tried it and got over their shock, they’d like it..."

Ver: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?ref=magazine&pagewanted=all

5 comentarios:

Anónimo dijo...

holas:
como estas espero que bien yo aca recoriendo tu extenso, interesante e exelente blog espero que sigas asi con tu trabajo que no cambies y que tengas suerte era eso nada mas ha me olvidava me encanta tu banner te deseo lo mejor

Roberto dijo...

martín! he retrocedido al 2006! ahora entiendo por qué nadie entendía en esa época sobre la importancia de estas herramientas! je.

saludos!

Tinta Floja dijo...

Privacidad? jajaja, Facebook puede ser comparado a otra herramienta usada en nuestra patria con mucha eficiencia, el ampay televisado ;creo que el máximo exponente es una tal Magaly Medina? nunca he visto su programa pero me topo con comentarios de su trabajo en casi todos los diarios que leo en Internet.
Gracias por mantener mi mente aceitada.

Andrea Naranjo dijo...

Las redes sociales son interesantes y prácticas, funcionales y además nuevos medios de socialización digital pero respecto a la opción de privacidad de los mini feed de Facebook, no es que Mark Zuckerberg decidiera y sorprendido poner la opción de privacidad para ese feed sino que sino me equivoco, cerca de 700 000 usuarios protestaron e hicieron una petición legal a Facebook en el 2006 pidiendo que se que los feed o permitir a los usuarios manejar las opciones de privacidad. Hoy en día Facebook está en el ojo de las organizaciones por la privacidad en medios electrónicos.
Facebook están valorada en 15 millones de dólares a casi 300 dólares por usuario/datos. Este año corre una denuncia en canada por 22 violaciones de laley de privacidad de facebook.
Uno de los problemas es que facebook u otra red social, al ser comprada por terceros puede tener acceso a los datos de los usuarios y usar éstos para objetivos desconocidos ( spam es lo más "suave").
Los grados en los que la gente usuaria de una red social ( yo incluida) llega a exponer su vida sin fijarse en las opciones de privacidad es increíble.
Y pensar que mis datos en facebook valen 300 dólares al mejor postor.

saludos¡

Andrea Naranjo dijo...

Otrosí
Hay otro punto en las redes sociales como facebook es la movilización política que ha logrado desde las movilizaciones por teléfonos celulares en el 2002
(sobre eso ya he escrito) crear esta herramienta en la esfera pública digital. Plataformas de redes sociales como facebook son grandes medidores de procesos y evolución en la opinión política gracias a la gran cantidad de infromación que dan los usuarios a estas redes, donde además "desarrollan" una vida digital expresiva de la llamada vida real. Los clásicos ejemplos son el de la movilización de las FARC o el de B.Obamaque tiene en Zuckerberg un asesor.
saludos¡