European Tribune - Community, Politics & Progress.

Think before you poke

by Sven Triloqvist
Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 08:16:42 AM EST

It's a dilemma faced by millions of users of social networking sites: how do you fend off unwanted attention from a former lover?
Other devotees of sites such as Facebook, Bebo and MySpace are just as confused about how to decline an online invitation to a party without causing offence.
Now Debrett's, the arbiter of all things good and proper, has come to the rescue with a guide on how to behave in these confusing, and sometimes awkward, new social situations.

Not that this would pertain to any ETers, naturally...

Debrett's "golden rules" for polite social networking are:

You don't have to make friends with people you don't know. It's not a competition to see how many friends you can get. Think before you poke.

Always wait 24 hours before accepting or removing someone as a friend. The delay will help you gather your thoughts.

Birthdays, engagements and weddings are not "virtual" events. Always send birthday cards or call your friends when there's important news.

Consider your friends' feelings before posting pictures. Put yourself in their shoes before uploading.

Think carefully about your profile picture. If you don't want to see it in your local newspaper, don't put it online.

Any road, back to the netiquette, me ducks.

Incognito
I don't know about you, but I have not made it particularly difficult at ET to find out who I am, except to the casual visitor. There is enough stuff out there in other places that my rantings here would hardly affect the possibility of the sky falling in. But I respect other people's desire for anonymity. Some ETers have been happy to correspond offline, some not. The many ET meets testify that internally we are, as a group, much more than nicks in the noosphere.

SEDO - Search Engine DeOptimization.
I once posted a pic here at ET of the leader of Finnish band and Eurovision winner Lordi - without his monster garb, with a little story, and ET got a large spike in visitors. I doubt if anyone interested in Lordi would actually be interested in anything else about ET, they were just lemming-links. But, of course, there is always ATinNM, whose taste in music is entirely unpredictable ;-)

So I learned a lesson: to obfuscate any keywords that might be searched, where appropriate.

BTW You might like to understand Google's business model around keywords. You can pay Google to have a link to your site be connected to a keyword - that is, if someone searches for that keyword in Google, your site will pop up in the search list. Google auctions these keywords. The organization or individual who bids the most for a particular keyword will appear at the top of the search list.

You, the bidder, pay per hit. So if you've bid 50 cents and your keyword gets a million hits, that'll be 500.000 bucks. <Ching> "Thanks you very much, have a nice day". You can put a block on the number of hits, for instance, per day. DrinkDrive defendant attorneys in the States, "We talk, You walk", are known to pay as much as 50 bucks a hit. Interesting possibilities for economic activism here, I think.

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Think before you poke | 19 comments (19 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

Re: Think before you poke (none / 1)

A poke is a comment in Facebook slang <it says here>

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 09:00:34 AM EST

Re: Think before you poke (4.00 / 4)

You mean, we can find out who you are, as in you're real. Wow, I never knew.

ET, it's like Rumsie said
"As we know,
There are people we know we know.
We also know there are people we know we don't know.
But there are also people we don't know we know and finally there are the people we don't know we don't know."

keep to the Fen Causeway

by Helen (lareinagal at yahoo dot co dot uk) on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 10:09:03 AM EST

Re: Think before you poke (4.00 / 3)

Yup, I represent a product of the latest theories of a branch of cybernetics called AU - or Artificial Unintelligence

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 10:56:06 AM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Think before you poke (4.00 / 3)

"Poke" is a facebook thing. I think it is a bit like tapping one on the shoulder.

I was debating the whole "how to choose a facebook friend" with PIGL for a while. I've basically decided that if I am or would want to be friends IRL, I'd want to be friends on facebook. Also, being a friend on facebook or myspace doesn't really obligate you to anything or replace real life relationships.

I think a good rule of thumb is to never assume you can be anonymous online. If people want to find out who you are, they usually can. It's mostly a matter of how easy/difficult you want to make it for them. So far as I can tell, active members of ET don't try terribly hard to hide their real identities.

I have a theory about this stuff. Not long ago people were extremely paranoid about putting any personal information online. And it is still probably a smart idea to limit that. But as more and more and more people are putting personal information online in blogs and social networking sites, the "noise level" increases. I am personally shocked, shocked! by what I see my younger siblings and cousins posting online. They've pretty much only ever known a world where cyberspace is intrinsic to reality. In the same way, my parents freak out when I tell them I am getting together IRL with some friend I met on-line. How do I know they are not an ax murderer?! Well, how do you know the guy you are talking to at the supermarket is not an ax murderer? The internet did not invent psychos. Anyway, what I was saying was that while it's no more difficult to find information about someone, the amount of personal information out there in cyberspace is so vast that I think in future generations, the concern will not be protecting one's personal information, but regulating how it can used by others. For example, do we chide people for putting their names in phonebooks? Not at all. In fact, I think you have to ask to NOT be listed. But we are very cautious about people putting their phone numbers on line. A bad person could get ahold of it! Phone books are free to the public. Are people listed asking to be stalked? No. ...It's just a shift in our expectations.

"This is nothing compared to how Putin rigged Eurovision."

by poemless on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 12:33:39 PM EST

Re: Think before you poke (none / 1)

Facebook's business model includes commercial trend analysis ie automated market research produced by the target group itself. The information is stripped of any names - individuals are not important to the marketeers. But over 15 million active visitors produce useful geographical trend data in a wide variety of markets.

<Only the messenger technology>

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 12:44:35 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: Think before you poke (none / 1)

poke: kinda like finger(1) back in the day. Some tiresome remarks occur to me, about the usenet group soc.singles that I used to frequent from about 85 until the mid 90s. Pretty much everyone in those days was readily identifiable cause you had an email address, and plus they were unix users, so your could mostly track them. You'd be surprised what people would talk about in a totally public forum, much less private than facebook. And all those exchanges are still archived and retrievable if you want to look hard enough.

Some friends of mine won't join facebook because they figger CIA is out to get them. I politely inform these people that they are crazy. I mean, they're Irish musicians and biology students, not the bloody Squamish 5, who were caught with no difficulty whatever in spite of their total absence from facebook.

Best advice, don't confide anything to a computer that you wouldn't want your mother to read; and chose your online friends as slowly and carefully as wise person would chose friends IRL.

But as for facebook, I have about 45 "friends", of which 2/3 are or have been close friends IRL, at least at one time. I'm no better at writing long emails or notes to people than I am at writing real letters or making phone calls, but I do value the renewed connections, however slight, that facebook has made possible. These younger people that have like 240 "friends", I don't get that at all. I don't recognise that many faces!

by PIGL on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 11:04:13 PM EST
[ Parent ]

ATinNM (none / 1)

Apologies for taking your name in vein (sic) ;-)

Is the importance of keywords, in searching, of any relevance to your research?

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 12:47:34 PM EST

Re: ATinNM (4.00 / 3)

No biggie. I assume you used my handle as The Example of the Height of Musical Insight :-)

The Keyword/Statistic approach has been tried by a horde of truly intelligent, creative, and determined researchers over the past 50 years in several different 'flavors.' The upshot: it really doesn't work very well. Google, et.al., is based on that approach and while they're better than nothing they're still not all that zippy great.

Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!

by ATinNM on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 01:16:53 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ATinNM (4.00 / 2)

Thank you, Oh Fount of all Musical Insight.

I hope the Love Guru is going to be a funny movie. I like Mike Myers work...

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 01:24:58 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ATinNM (none / 0)

Google not just better than nothing, it's better than anything else!

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 01:32:57 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ATinNM (none / 1)

Google out jumps the competition and I use it a lot.

But the bar isn't very high.

Basically, I want the Star Trek computer. I want responsive answers to my questions. I want the computer to go out and find what I tell it to find. I want the computer to understand or at least mimic understanding at some human or human-like level of human or human-like communication protocols.

Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!

by ATinNM on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 02:23:29 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ATinNM (4.00 / 2)

Yes. As Google search lists are increasingly influenced by an ever-expanding range of paid keyword links, it will be harder to find the information you are looking for.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 02:28:05 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ATinNM (4.00 / 6)

I didn't even think of that. Good point.

Arise ye prisoners of pre-packaged information!
Cast off the chains of pre-determined search inter-relationships!

(H'mmm. Needs Work.)

The Internet is the most complex machine built by our species. The time and effort spent constructing that machine dwarfs all previous endeavors. The machine considered as a whole is awe inspiring.

The input tools are nuanced, easily used, and sophisticated.

The output tools suck as well as being easily manipulated by Authority.

Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!

by ATinNM on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 02:44:36 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Last main point of your diary, right? (4.00 / 2)

So Google, having built up the best search engine on the web, is now selling it out for cash and trashing it? Quelle surprise!

I guess it is time for the open-source people to start developing search engines. They have my encouragement and best wishes.

by Gaianne on Sat Jun 14th, 2008 at 07:25:43 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Google adwords (4.00 / 2)

It has been their business model from the start! It wasn't until they released Google Adwords and Google Analytics that everybody and his brother started fixing the searches.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Sun Jun 15th, 2008 at 01:40:06 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ATinNM (none / 1)

Do you want a computer or a secretary?

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 02:39:30 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ATinNM (4.00 / 4)

I want my very own digital (or analog (or analog/digital)) information slave, obedient to my every whim.

Actually I'd settle for a Query Resolution System 1/100th as intelligent as I am that consistently gives me an "answer" having some vague relationship to the actual question. Knowing the difference between Adjectives and Verbs would be a small step. ;-)

Och nu den svenska kocken bakar en Alaskan älg jägare. Bonk! Bonk! Bonk!

by ATinNM on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 02:51:25 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ATinNM (4.00 / 2)

A secretary with a computer?

When the capital development of a country becomes a by-product of the activities of a casino, the job is likely to be ill-done. — John M. Keynes

by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Fri Jun 13th, 2008 at 03:44:04 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Re: ATinNM (4.00 / 4)

No its the information slave he wants, the whole idea of sitting on a throne demanding internet answers with a bullwhip strangely appeals.

Life should consist in at least fifty percent pure waste of time, and the rest doing what you please.

by ceebs (bunchofwankers (at) gmail (dot) com) on Sat Jun 14th, 2008 at 06:57:34 PM EST
[ Parent ]

Think before you poke | 19 comments (19 topical, 0 editorial, 0 hidden)

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