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Jay Goldman has written an excellent description of Facebook Beacon.
The long-and-short of it?
- When you're done using Facebook, log out of Facebook. If you're not logged into Facebook, Facebook effectively rejects Beacon info. (Note that because you've probably got lingering Facebook cookies even after logging out, Facebook still knows who you are and where you're coming from. At this point, it appears that they terminate the rest of the Beacon setup.)
- If you are logged in to Facebook, don't ever go anywhere else unless you want Facebook to know about it and potentially publish it. Facebook knows about every transaction sent by a cooperating site, even if you've chosen not to publish it.
- Consider AdBlockPlus on Firefox; other suggestions for IE are in the post.
The Beacon functionality is really pretty elegant, but it's useful to note that "Beacon" is an excellent name. Like other web beacons or web bugs, it uses embedded JavaScript, effectively tracking your movements around the web in very much the same way that modern web tracking applications do so. In essence, Facebook is making itself a web analytics service for advertisers.
The irony here is that the information collected by Facebook is likely far more valuable than the publication of that information and whatever ad revenue they may get from it. However, to get advertisers to buy in, they needed the Beacon profile entries. But just imagine being able to track the flow of collaborative purchasing information. Imagine I buy a Diet Coke, and that gets published to my profile. Suddenly, members in one of my Facebook groups starts buying Diet Coke shortly after my purchase is published. Not only can Facebook tout its ability to spread the word about the Diet Coke thing, but it also can tell Coca Cola the characteristics (including n-orders of social graph characteristics) of those who buy Diet Coke.
Powerful stuff. Scary. But Powerful.
After some generally poor performance from NetNewsWire's NewsGator syncing today, I decided to take another look at Google Reader. The OPML export from NetNewsWire to Google Reader went perfectly. The next step was to read a few items in Google Reader and share them. Done. Next, I went to Facebook and added the application and gave it my userid so it could find the feed for my shared items. Finally, I checked out the shared items of my Friends (none) and my Networks (some.)
I can finally understand some of the hype this has been getting. I can't imagine I would find it all that meaningful if I had a network as large as Scoble's. However, I can see where, with a much more directed network, it could be very useful. At work, a group of us use particular tags and feeds and Yahoo! Pipes to provide a list of interesting things we'd like to share. This avoids the messy email issue of lots of emailed links.
The Facebook application addresses the same problem, but more easily and with dynamic group membership. If a user chooses to add the application and share their links, they'll be shared with the group. What's more, there is a means to measure the popularity of links. It's the sort of thing I think might make TWEN suck less.
What's missing at this stage? A feed of my network's shared links. I don't want to go into Facebook to read feeds. Any feeds. The application advertises that it's still in beta, and I hope an eventual feature is the addition of feeds of the shared links from the various networks and friends.
ZiefBrief points out that Westlaw's TWEN (The West Education Network) got touched up in
Last Wednesday, Westlaw unveiled a new look and feel for the law school home page, as well as some aesthetic and functional improvements for TWEN. One of the biggest changes is that you can now display only active courses on your "My Courses" page or only inactive or archived courses by clicking on either the "Active Courses" or "Hidden Courses" button. This is a nice feature that helps to reduce the clutter on your TWEN home page. If you'd like a quick five-minute tutorial that displays the latest TWEN changes, you can find the tutorial here.
I saw that, though I'm unconvinced it's an improvement. The old design was plain and ugly but workable. I'm unsure what's supposed to be on the front page of lawschool.westlaw.com, because it doesn't render at all in Firefox on the Mac. I could swear I've complained about TWEN more than just this in the past, but perhaps I'm wrong. Or perhaps it's just embedded in some of the others posts that mention TWEN.
What's wrong with TWEN? Here are a few major weaknesses.
Where are the feeds? In 2007, why am I being emailed (when someone chooses to notify by email) rather than being given an option to subscribe to feeds.
Where's the aggregator? Why doesn't TWEN allow a professor to set up a reading list of topical blogs? Or subscribe to a del.icio.us or Technorati or Google Reader shared links feed of tags for the class?
Where are the tags? Wouldn't it be great if you could tag content from around Westlaw with TWEN-aware tags? See a case on topic? Tag it. In fact, why doesn't Westlaw do this natively? Topic-based Key numbers are fine, but they're someone else's categorization.
And on that bigger topic, where's the Westlaw-wide integration? Isn't this supposed to be our first taste of West's crack? Why not really get us hooked, maybe with stuff we can use in the future.
West and TWEN (and Lexis, too) could stand to get out a little more. I may not think all is right with Facebook, but that's definitely a step in the right direction. Bring people together. Encourage sharing. Encourage networking. What's more, get them deeply integrated in the tools. That will really get them hooked.
More importantly, it will make the tools more useful.
First day of classes is August 20, 2007. The first day of my last year.
Have I gotten everything done I wanted to this summer? No.
My paper's not done; I've been suffering from serious writer's block. Outside a bunch of short pieces about like those that have been posted to the blog, I've gotten nowhere.
I haven't done any more work on expanding my site to allow for more collaboration among my fellow students. In part, it's because it's a lot of work. In larger part, I'm just not sure getting folks at school to use a collaborative application surrounding law school would be successful. It sits at around the same state it was in at this time last summer. That's unfortunate. Among other things, wouldn't it be nice if there was a good place for people to go to and ask, "Didn't you have London for Legal Ethics?" or "Have you had Markham for Antitrust?" (For me, the answers are no and yes, with the follow-on that while I did horribly in Antitrust, it was a great class, I feel like I learned a lot, and I've mostly chalked it up to a bad exam.) Instead, students are forced to ask around, email around, and in the end in many cases, just take a chance.
That brings me to my anti-Facebook rant. I've now taken the time to explore the API and programming environment a bit. It's really not that bad. Why do I bring that up? Because I could see how Facebook could be a reasonable way to share that information. The current system for entering courses is pretty raw for law school purposes. Among major flaws, there's not a law subject, and you can't add a course without a subject. It doesn't track the professor for the course. And because it seems to be aimed only at finding current students in a class, after you add courses, you can see a roster; however, once you complete a course, it removes it, doesn't ask any questions about it, and it just goes away.
That may be an opportunity for trying to write a Facebook application. First, of course, I'd have to get myself more interested in Facebook. Second, I'd have to find the time to do the server-side work needed to get that far (or learn more about the API to discover I wouldn't have to do that.) Third, it would be nice if one could actually determine who was actually a law student at USF from the goofy categorization scheme Facebook uses. In short, I wouldn't hold my breath.
Why? Well, it's July 20. School starts in a month!
Scoble's been going nuts over Facebook recently.
He pointed that he's he's been questioned about the value of these networks. I've been playing with Facebook recently, after having long tried to avoid it. On the other hand, I've been gradually building up my LinkedIn network.
My verdict at this point? As a business tool, neither seems to have great value to me right now. However, those people I'm interested in exist on LinkedIn but generally don't on Facebook.
For one thing, the organizational features of Facebook are atrocious. I'm in a group now that I feel would be very useful for networking going forward: my fellow law school classmates. Check out the myriad ways USF School of Law members/alums have listed the fact that they attend the law school. While I'm sure there are wonderful undergrads, I don't care about networking with them. LinkedIn? Very easy to find fellow USF SoLers. LinkedIn strikes me as being much more interested in people with more structured networks. Facebook -- though less so than MySpace -- seems to eschew structure.
Heck. I can't even list my entire technology work history with Facebook. Apparently, more than 5 jobs is no good. Great, great networking tool.
James Robertson points to Dare Obasanjo, who notes the tech bigwigs who are in Facebook. All of those but Steve Ballmer is also on LinkedIn. Of course, none of that necessarily validates either of these tools. Earnest usage is a much better validator.
One problem with Facebook, if Scoble properly described its Roach Motel-like characteristics, is that information checks in, but it never checks out. I haven't gotten involved enough to check out the API, but I have been following Marc Canter's open social networking pleas. LinkedIn is still behind on opening itself up. But what would definitely be ideal is the option to choose the right social network for the right task.
In short, I'm unimpressed by Facebook. I'm not overjoyed with LinkedIn. However, I am excited by the possibilities. Ideally, that could be done by open networks that share, rather than open networks that wall data off. In the meantime, with too many networks, too many people to keep up with, and not much value coming from any of them, I really don't see the added value in switching to Facebook.
Is it possible some people like Facebook better because they like all of the "friends" they get, versus the "connections" of LinkedIn?
Man. I didn't even get to how little value Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce are to me.
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