I’m a control freak. I run my own web servers, mail server, IRC server, CI server, SVN server, so I have control. If I could afford the colocation, I’d run them on my own hardware. Hell, if I could afford the bandwidth, I’d install a rack in my closet.

But most importantly, I want control of the data. My data.

Facebook recently made two changes to their service that signal a significant and frightening shift in their position on data—specifically who owns and has control over data. They automatically linked interests to public pages, and they introduced “Social Plugins and Instant Personalization.”

Until now, even if I decided to be permissive with my data, I still felt like I was in control of them on Facebook. With the new “connections” feature, as the EFF says, “Facebook users now face a Hobson’s choice between the new Connections and no listed interests at all.” I no longer have the option to share my data with the subset of people I know: either I share them with everyone, in particular advertisers, or I don’t post data at all.

I mention advertisers because they are most likely consumer of the vast quantities of aggregate data Facebook is creating with the new connections feature. Surely no individual will gain anything from knowing that several million people share their interest in Lady Gaga.

And until now, I had the ability to whitelist the applications with which I shared data. I routinely hit a wall as I browsed my friends’ activity, where I would be asked to choose between sharing my data with an application or not seeing its content. More often than not, I chose not to share, and live without the content.

This makes three things about the Instant Personalization onerous: the presumptive sharing with third parties; the shift to a blacklist, where I must specifically opt out; and the willingness to share data even if I have opted out in general.

• Facebook has decided that Yelp, Microsoft’s Docs.com, and Pandora should have access to my data. I was not part of that decision.
• If I opt out and turn off Instant Personalization, Facebook will still share my data with these third parties, if my friends choose to use their services. Again, I am not part of that decision.
• In order to prevent Facebook from sharing my data with them, I have to manually block each application. That’s annoying, but manageable when it’s just three applications, but it’s not scalable.

This is all scary. Facebook could not have made these changes if they honestly believed that I own my data, and they have access with my permission. These changes indicate that Facebook believes they own my data, and will do with them what they please, unless I go out of my way to ask them not to.

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the protest groups that form on Facebook after every major change. Sure, Facebook staff are more likely to notice a Facebook group with 100,000 members than 100,000 individual blog posts, but in our socio-economic system, the real way to signal displeasure to a business is to stop using that business—the online equivalent of “voting with your wallet.”

So, like a few others, I’m taking my data and going home.

I’m willing to share my data with Facebook as long as I ultimately feel in control. It’s possible that I’ll come back to Facebook if they’re willing to not only fix these particular issues but also make it clear that I am ultimately in control of my own data. That doesn’t seem likely.

What do you think about Facebook, these changes, and your data? Let me know in the comments.

Facebook served as an aggregator of my activity online, and now all those aggregated feeds are alone and disparate again. I’m looking at turning jamessocol.com into a lifestream/aggregator to make up for it. I looked at Planet Venus but wasn’t thrilled with it. If you know of any cool software for that, let me know. Otherwise I’ll write something and play with things like Redis, Node.js, Tornado, and/or other neat stuff.

And yes, I know Tornado is from Facebook.

If someone invented a 21st century hammer it wouldn’t dramatically change the training and experience a contractor would need to build a house. Nor would anyone suggest that “tool fluency” is now the soul of carpentry. And so it is with information literacy. It dramatically expands access to information. It doesn’t change how we process it.

The emphasis is mine. Now, whether tools like Twitter or Today’s Meet are useful in classrooms is a broader discussion than I want to deal with right now*, but here’s a more specific question: does the way we access information alter the ways we process it?

Let’s look at the history of writing in general: Socrates was against it. He felt that writing diminished the ability of the reader/listener to question and interact with the author/speaker, and, in an eerily familiar concern, that the written word destroy our memories. Socrates worked by his eponymous method, a rhetorical strategy of questioning to ferret out truth and expose falsehood and fallacy. When he was presented with a written argument, he was not able to evaluate its author, nor to directly question the author’s deductions.

Here we have a physiological shift in how we process information: from listening with our ears to reading with our eyes. I’m not a neurologist, but I’m sure those processes involve different areas of the brain—though surely with much overlap.

But more crucially, the reader typically processes much larger chunks of content than the listener. The listener is able to interrupt, clarify, disagree with any particular point.  The listener can be persuaded by discussion while the reader must accept what is written, or not. Readers who wish to respond often do so en masse, with equal-length writings, rather than specific questions.

The technology of writing changed how we access information, how we process it, and how we respond to it.

For all the downfalls, and all of Socrates concerns, writing spread throughout the civilized world, because it has several key advantages over the oral/aural tradition. Writing can be stored for later, copied, distributed. A performance of The Iliad requires the audience to come together at a time and place; the book can be read by individuals at their leisure, passed around and carried to new places—though it loses the meter, rhythm and excitement imparted by the performer.

From our historical point of view, writing enables us to create more “complete” works, uninterrupted by the audience, with more time to contemplate, and forces us to form arguments on a larger scale than when speaking. From Socrates point of view, those were not advantages.

So, when Stuart comments

Many things that are really worth knowing — whether world history or human anatomy or advanced physics — will demand that a student be able to pay attention to dense texts for long periods of time, along with memorizing quite a bit of what is printed there.

remember that the books he’s praising would not, could not, exist without writing, a technology that altered our way of storing and accessing information. (And without the printing press, we wouldn’t have homework, either, and kids would not be expected to read those books.)

Let’s stick with writing and jump ahead, way past the typewriter to the word processor. Why the word processor?

If you are writing by hand, chiseling in rock, painting on papyrus, or even using a typewriter, writing and editing are essentially linear processes. You write in order. Changing the order is a cumbersome process, and nearly any edit requires a complete re-type.

With the advent of the word processor, non-linear editing is possible. The way we approach, and critique, writing is so significantly different, thanks only to cut, copy, and paste, that I doubt many of us can truly appreciate the shift. Ask someone about the difference between linear and non-linear video editing and I think you may start to catch a glimpse of that shift.

When the computer and word processor were first introduced, there was not an immediate productivity increase over typewriters. It took time for users’ methods of processing the information to adapt and assimilate the new technology, even though they keyboard was essentially unchanged. The access to information (our own writing) in a new way altered the way we processed and created that information.

In the most modern era, critics of multitasking argue that accessing multiple sources of information simultaneous alters our method of processing that information (for the worse, or they wouldn’t be critics). They cite fMRIs and other scans indicating a physiological shift in information processing, stemming simply from a change in access.

It is difficult to accept the claim that new methods of accessing information have no effect on our processing of that information, regardless of your opinion of social media, social networking, and/or education. The dichotomy of content and delivery is hardly clear-cut. If it were, why should teachers mind students watching a movie in lieu of reading a book? This blurring is the very basis of “differentiated instruction,” an admission that all processing  paths are not equal in all students.

* For the record, I agree with Mr. Pondiscio on many—if not most—points, especially with his concern that teachers spend too much time making any particular technology an end in and of itself. However, I think there is a very fine line to walk when a psychosocial moratorium is not possible. I’ll write more about modeling interactions with new tools, from e-mail to social media.

There has always been a small thorn in my paw about social media marketing. It’s the same thing that bothers me when people come on TV and promise to help make you rich. All you have to do is… sell a book that promises to make people rich! It’s the same feeling I get when I read Problogger and wonder: “Do I want to listen to advice from a blog about blogging? Would I do better to listen to someone like Jeff Atwood?”

For months—years—the “social media space” has been dominated by, well, social media users. There are lots of people, from Brogan and Pistachio on down, promising to help you leverage tools like Twitter. But who was the audience on Twitter? Early-adopters. Geeks. Other “social media marketers.”

Of course Chris Brogan can sell himself on Twitter: it was his ideal audience. But when it comes to marketing the end product, who’s listening?

Twitter use has skyrocketed over the last 9 or 10 months. Once the morning shows started talking about Twitter (unfortunately, giving very false impressions) the cascade was probably inevitable. And the people who are joining now are not the same people who joined a year and a half ago.

The time for social media marketers—the real ones, dealing with consumers, not meta-marketers selling advice on selling—to prove themselves is right now.

This is your chance.

Prove to me that this can work; that what you do is worth it.

I don’t mean to pick on Chris Brogan. I’m sure his company, CrossTech Media, has a portfolio of successful campaigns. What doesn’t impress me is convincing the early adopters of the potential of the space. If there’s a more apt example of “preaching to the choir,” I don’t know it.

There has been a reinforcement loop in this field. “We should follow Chris Brogan, he knows what he’s talking about!” “Chris Brogan has 18,000 followers, he must know what he’s talking about!”

“I’ll subscribe to Problogger because they’ll help me get more subscribers. They must be good, look how many subscribers they have!”

Now there is finally an opportunity to put all this theory into practice. Can you use Chris Brogan’s advice to build relationships on Twitter with people who aren’t already excited about building relationships on Twitter? Can you use Darren Rowse’s advice to build an audience of people who aren’t other bloggers?

If I could sit down with Chris Brogan and Laura Fitton and Darren Rowse now, I wouldn’t be asking “who is the audience.” I would just say “Ok, the audience is here. Now show me.”

Twitter is not for everyone, and I respect that, but the author, Alex Groves, seems to be basing his entire point of view on Ashton Kutcher. Alex claims (and this may well be true; I don’t know since I’m never on Facebook) that “[t]he only problem with all this twittering by celebrities and politicians is that they are on Facebook much more often.”

Based on this, Alex argues that Twitter is an “unnecessary” alternative to Facebook walls and warns that “[b]y spending more time on social networks and the Internet than we need to, we enable ourselves to become reclusive, sheltered from family and friends.”

What Alex is ignoring is that most people are not (just) following celebrities. If we look at the number of “following” relationships—even relatively inactive people often follow 30 or 40 others—the 1 million “follows” of Mr. Kutcher seems much, much less impressive.

What occurs to me, the more I see Twitter on newspaper websites and on the Today show, is that there are multiple communities within a larger community like Twitter.

On the very smallest scale, you may have a “community” of family and friends that are mostly following each other. You may have a TweetDeck group set up for them. That kind of mutual relationship leads to what Clive Thompson of the Times called “ambient awareness“. I would encourage Alex to read Mr. Thompson’s article, it might answer his question: “How does one know if his friends are OK?”

Now, Alex is absolutely right that spending too much time on the internet can take time away from other meaningful activities, like “enjoy[ing] a crisp, clean-smelling spring morning.” (With my allergies, I don’t think I have ever “enjoy[ed]” that.)

But the same could be said about almost any aspect of life. Too much time at work causes you to lose time with the family. Too much time away from work can make you lose your job. Too much time using computers can give you carpal tunnel.

On the large end of communities, I think you could classify several, such as “people interested in social networking,” “people interested in marketing,” “people interested in programming” (I’m in all three of these communities) “people interested in celebrities,” “people interested in news,” “people interested in <insert your special topic here>.”

I would argue that these communities reflect real-life relationships the same way the small communities do. A person who is more likely to read Us Weekly is probably more likely to follow more celebrities. A person who enjoys Britney Spears’ music is more likely to follow her. Just as I am more likely to make a joke about the word “const” on a construction sign, I am more likely to follow John Resig.

Alex asks, “[w]ith all the good we can do online, including disseminating information and spreading knowledge, why do we become obsessed with Britney Spears tweeting about playing with the boys on tour?”

I contend that the people Alex is really criticizing (surely many of the newest users) are the same people snapping up People at the checkout lane and watching TMZ in the mornings. Furthermore, he fails to recognize the rather large community of users that uses Twitter to share information and resources, follow the lives of people who may be emotionally, but not physically close, or generate other types of value.

The complaints he levies could—arguably should—be equally directed at Facebook, MySpace, several websites, magazines and TV shows. Alex is confusing “Twitter” with a culture of “celebrity worship.”

I argue that the people creating value off Twitter (and Facebook) are the same people creating it on Twitter. If all you follow on Twitter are celebrities, you obviously aren’t contributing much to that community’s conversation. On the other hand, if your community is broad, and includes peers, friends, family, then you have a unique opportunity to both benefit from, and provide benefit to, that community.

Fortunately, the way Twitter works, I don’t need to follow those celebrities. And neither do you, Alex.

1) Have no name, photo, bio, or website.

Avoid looking like a real person at all, in fact. If you arbitrarily capitalize and ignore the 140 character limit, you can look even more like a robot.

These are at the top of your profile. The only things I know about you are your profile info and your last 20 tweets (last 4 or 5 if you don’t convince me to scroll down). That’s not much time to grab my attention and sell yourself to me. Don’t waste that precious “above the fold” space.

2) Follow 3,000 people before you bother updating.

This goes back to number 1. Bot-like behavior is definitely appreciated. It’s even better if you follow completely disparate people, like you just grabbed all the users off the public timeline for an hour.

If you have no followers and no updates, there’s no compelling reason to think you actually listen to any of those followers.  When you follow thousands of people, you’re devaluing every one of them. Yeah, there are some broadcasters who make a point to follow most of their followers, but getting @chrisbrogan’s attention is nearly impossible.

3) Never reply to or retweet anyone.

Make a point to ignore everyone you follow, especially if you follow thousands of people (see #2). If people think you’re listening to them, it gives them power over you.

If you think of Twitter as a one-way medium, you’re missing out. Interact with people and have conversations, or you’re slightly less interesting than a radio DJ. At least they take requests sometimes. Yeah there are broadcasters, @nytimes comes to mind, but if you think you’re the New York Times, you’re too delusional for me to care, anyway.

If you’re lucky, I’ll see 7 or 8 posts at the top of your profile. If none of those are replies, you might as well not not have any. Keep the dialog going.

4) Include Your URL in Every Tweet.

The two best uses of Twitter are to promote your own stuff and to drive up your Google rankings. Make sure every tweet has a link to you!

I will unfollow with extreme prejudice if I think your only goal is to drive people to your site. Twitter is not push marketing. Twitter is a community and a network. I will not visit your site, and Twitter puts rel="nofollow" on links. It’s a waste of time and its annoying.

Don’t share the same link over and over, don’t only link your blog, and don’t link yourself constantly. Do share good, new content, whether it’s yours or not.

5) Definitely Be Inconsistent.

Don’t post anything for two weeks, then dump seven or eight tweets in the space of an hour. It’s your job to keep your followers on their toes.

Whether I’m following you for fun (@dr_crane) or for information (@mashable) resist the urges flood and to go dark. Don’t be afraid to go to that meeting, take that long weekend away from the computer, or whatever it is that you do, but please don’t fill my entire stream when you come back. You really should keep some of those little tidbits in your head.

If you honestly discover 6 great things in 10 minutes, and want to share them all, then go for it. I’ll thank you. Short of that, try to rate-limit yourself.

That’s why I unfollowed you.

Why would you unfollow somone?

Update: #6. You sent an automated Direct Message after I followed you.

If I want bots, I’ll follow @nytimes. I don’t really care if it’s a “thank you” or a pitch: bots are annoying. Chris Brogan is right.

Comcast (@comcastcares), JetBlue (@jetblue), Biggby Coffee (@biggbybob) and Starbucks (@starbucks), even Britney Spears (sorry, I refuse to link that one) have all shown up on Twitter with very real, human exchanges.

I’m not sure, behind the scenes, whether there are several people or one incredibly busy person at each of these companies, but they’ve decided to drop the corporate suit and engage their followers. They aren’t using Twitter as a broadcasting medium, but as a networking and conversation tool.

They get it.

Here is one of my favorite examples:

threeofus: @Starbucks Who actually types the tweets for Starbucks?

Starbucks: @threeofus Hi, I’m Brad, I work in the online team. How are you?

So what’s the trick? What did Starbucks/Brad do right?

• Use the First Person. “I,” “me,” “my,” all make your tweet feel more personal. No real surprise there. “We,” “us,” and “our” work, but not nearly as well. You sound like a spokesperson, instead of a person.
• Own the Conversation. By introducing and naming himself, Brad is taking ownership of the interaction. Even if Starbucks has 10 people reading and responding to tweets, threeofus can feel like she’s talking to one person.
• Engage. Read and respond to other users, especially @-replies. Read, retweet and share. If you’re only sending information one way, you aren’t part of the community. You can also use tools like Twitter search to find and respond to users talking about you or your company.
• Show Emotion. “This is so cool,” “Wow, long day” or even just “:-)” are all things that a person would say, but a press release never would. You don’t need to wear your heart on every tweet, but let some of your feelings come out—at least the good ones.
• Be Active. For most of us, Twitter is ambient information. You need to update regularly to get in to that stream.
• Don’t “Always Be Closing.” Don’t make every tweet a pitch or a request. That doesn’t mean you can’t pitch: I link my blog posts on Twitter, my friend @alecrj mentions his shows. But if every tweet sounds like an advertisement, then you sum up to an infomercial.

Here’s a comparison: Lansing’s alternative paper recently started twittering at @CityPulse. Right now, the biggest words in their tweet cloud are their URL, “city,” “pulse,” “check,” “out,” “pick,” and “up.” Every tweet is trying to drive me to their website or pick up a copy of the paper. They’ve sent no @ messages, used the word “I” once, and have gone a week at a time without updating.

And despite following almost 300 people, they’ve only got 100 followers.

This is what confuses traditional marketing about Twitter: the community won’t listen to you until you listen to the community.

Of course, there are robots on Twitter, too, and some are very popular, like @nytimes and @BarackObama. They are broadcasters, not community members. They perform very specific roles and are backed by very unique content. They add enough value that they don’t need to engage the community.

And yet, if they did, they would be even more powerful.

So do you and your company get it?