I’d finally figured out a balance that worked for me: I put my local friends and my family members on a list of their own, dragged that list to the top of my list of lists, and now when I open Facebook, they’re all I see. But then Facebook started messing with privacy settings again. For a more full story, check this out: Facebook’s New Privacy Changes: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. But here are the four things I did this morning in my battle to coexist with Facebook:

• Overwrote and then deleted some parts of the newly designated set of “publicly available information” (this includes your name, profile picture, current city, gender, networks, and the pages that you are a “fan” of). I overwrote what I could because I wanted to actually change the cached information in Facebook’s database, and then I deleted it because a) I don’t want to give that information away, and b) it was now bogus anyway.
• Clicked “edit profile” and then the little “edit” icon next to my Friends list and unchecked the box that says “show my friends on my profile” because that seems to be the only way to keep my friends lists out of the hands of apps and random passers by.
• Went to Facebook > Settings > Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites > What Your Friends Can Share About You and unchecked everything. I don’t like the idea that having a friend who answers quizzes on Facebook means that the quiz creators can gain access to a lot of my information.
• For good measure, took the opportunity to go through all the other privacy settings and make sure they still reflected my wishes.

Is this overly paranoid of me? Probably. (Tinfoil hats help keep warmth in, remember, and it’s pretty incredibly cold out right now.) The thing is, I’m not invested enough in Facebook to feel like the privacy trade-off is worth it for me. I’m there so I can keep up with my local friends. Full stop. I’m already making concessions by making myself available to the students who want to friend me there and by grudgingly admitting that I like the rolodex function it plays. But I feel zero motivation to give up more than I can help to Facebook and its third party developers. They can kindly leave me alone, please.

Looking back, I can see now that hashtags not only allowed people to gather together categories of posts, but they also gave a kind of short-hand context to those posts. A brief post like “Mediocre at best” reads differently if it’s tagged “#IL2009” or “#ProjectRunway.” The first sounds like a conference attendee who’s underwhelmed by a session. The second sounds like a critique of a fashion design on a reality TV show. Totally different contexts lead to totally different readings.

And as it turns out, short-hand contexts are pretty useful rhetorical things online, particularly in asynchronous conversations or when you’re only allowed a few words at a time. Lately the amateur anthropologist in me has been fascinated by the ways I’ve seen hashtags used not so much to allow people to gather posts together but instead to imply a category or topic that in turn supply a context for the preceding post. They let posters signal “I’m joking” or “here’s how I want you to interpret my post” without ruining the moment with a dry pronouncements of intent.

For example, I’d have had no idea what a friend was talking about if he’d just said, “Remember that part in Star Wars where the characters are running from the troopers in Mos Eisley, and they scramble on board the Millennium Falcon and then have to wait several hours for the weather to improve before they can blast off? Yeah, me neither” (from stevelawson on friendfeed). But then he added “#nasaisharshingmyfuture,” to let us know that he’s talking about the way that modern day space travel isn’t living up to the promise of science fiction. Context. There are no other posts with that hashtag, so it’s certainly not serving a gathering function, but it implies a category, implies that there could be many more examples of this particular phenomenon, and therefore builds a whole imaginary context for the original statement.

Fascinating.

Like any rhetorical device, though, it’s a skill that needs developing. Some of the people I follow seem to be really good at it. I, on the other hand, could really use some practice.

As far as I can tell, it died for three reasons: some people weren’t comfortable writing posts for it, people who rely on RSS to read blogs couldn’t deal with a blog that was locked down and therefore had no RSS option (one of those people was me me… no matter how useful, the site was dead to me without RSS), and everyone found they couldn’t get in the habit of clicking that bookmark and logging in to see if anything new had been posted recently.

Meanwhile, each of us continued to keep up with our own corners of the profession, some through email lists, some through professional journals, some through online social networks and blogs, and most through some combination of the three. But we all missed out on the richness that can come from hearing about things that affect our own worlds but originate in another person’s, and we all went back to been less and less aware of what interests and inspires our colleagues.

So this year we’re learning from the mistakes of our past effort and trying again, this time with more flexibility. I’ve set up a portal (still very much in progress) for those of us that really want a “home base” to check. There’s also a bookmarklet that will let people send annotated screenshots of web pages directly to my email account (using ToRead) for people who like that method of marking what they find, a Delicious tag for people who already use Delicious, and a general invitation to email me or pop in and tell me about interesting things that have come up.

So hopefully the collection piece will give people enough options that they don’t have to either conform or not participate. Hopefully there’s at least one option that will fit into each person’s existing habits, and people who are interested in experimenting with new-to-them options can do so without feeling locked into those options for all time.

Meanwhile, I’ll take whatever comes up and write a periodic blog post that glosses the things we’ve found (and behind the scenes, I’m going to see about getting password protected web-pub space on the college network so that I can link from the wide open blog to locked down documents that we aren’t comfortable sharing beyond ourselves). People can either subscribe to this newsletter via RSS or email, depending on their newsletter-reading preferences and workflow. It’ll also get fed into the portal for the “home base” folks. Just to round out our options, we’ll have low-key, face-to-face, brown bag lunch sessions once or twice a term for people who really prefer to discuss rather than read.

So hopefully the dissemination piece will also have enough options that people can work this seamlessly into their existing information-gathering processes.

The biggest challenge, then, will be striking the right balance between having a broad range of topics in each post/newsletter without overwhelming people with too many things that aren’t applicable to them. The idea is to have this be fun and interesting, not irrelevant and overwhelming. Wish me luck!

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Take my own history as an example. I started this blog and started reading other people’s blogs, and in the space of a few months found myself squarely in the middle of a vibrant community of librarian bloggers. A year or so later, Twitter and the LSW Meebo room started up. Conversations started in any of those places and bled over into our blogs, but there were also new people in the group — people who didn’t have blogs at all, or didn’t blog about libraries. And slowly the LSW Meebo room group became my center. A year or so later, the librarian Twitterati started shifting to FriendFeed, so I followed them (kicking and screaming, I might add — I had a bunch of problems with FriendFeed, some of which still bother me even though that’s become my social network of choice now). FriendFeed is slightly different in that conversations can happen within or across several “rooms,” and I’ve seen communities coalesce, wrap in on themselves, and then fray about the edges in several of these spaces within FriendFeed. Meanwhile, the blogging community had frayed about the edges (Meredith also just wrote about this).

Each time I’ve found myself in the midst of a new coalescing community I’ve met new people who inspire me, question me, encourage me, and generally be good friends to me. But each time it’s meant that people who used to represent the core of my network have shifted to peripheral status. Not unimportant, just less present.

And now I find myself on the fraying edges again. Almost certainly, this means that I’m about to find a new home, or re-find an old home, but at the moment things feel a little foundationless for me. Luckily, I have a couple of really interesting projects I’m working on (which I’ll probably write about soon-ish), so that should sustain me until my new center coalesces for me.

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Remember last week when Clinical Reader had only threatened a blogger, been exposed as having made up endorsements, started making up bogus Retweets, deleted incriminating tweets from their account, fired the pesky Canadians, and generally convinced thousands of people that they weren’t trustworthy? Since then, thing haven’t improved. Since then:

• Whoever is trying to sanitize Clinical Reader’s online reputation (I assume it’s co-founder Allan Marks, but who knows) has been switching the original twitter account’s name at the speed of light. This breaks links that people had used in blog posts, but it unfortunately doesn’t erase the history from the deep dark recesses of the Internet, or delete people’s screenshots from their hard drives. Most of the good stuff is still live on the links in my previous post, and even more lives in this post on the Disruptive Library Technology Jester. (Moral of the story: Don’t be stupid online because the stupid never dies.) As of this writing the account has moved from @clinicalreader to @clinical_tweets to @amarks7 to @amarks14 to @amarks_ to @a_marks1 to @allan_marks (See below for explanation of the change in the first two names. And don’t expect @allan_marks to be valid for more than, say, an hour. As of 7pm, the name has changed 4 times since 9am today.)

• Somebody took over the name @clinicalreader and posted a brief history of the debacle there.

• Somebody else took over @clinical_tweets (they claim to be the fired Canadians) and started cockily claiming that they’d done the job they were hired to do because just look at how many people now know about Clinical Reader. Their claim in a nutshell: “You’ve All Been Used. Bwahahahah.” They’ve now killed the account.

• A new twitter account went live: @clinical_reader. This had all sorts of tweets about how the real Clinical Reader wasn’t yet “officially” on Twitter but will let us all know when they are (this screencast from the Google Cache shows that if you hovered over an older version of the Clinical Reader site, it clearly linked to the original @clinicalreader twitter account). Then tweeted several rather official looking tweets about what a great service they are. Then denounced the other now-bogus accounts. And all of this while not officially tweeting! This morning, all their tweets had disappeared except for the ones saying that the tweets from @cliniclareader are not coming from the Clinical Reader service (which even whoever-it-is at @clinicalreader says, quite plainly).

• Another new twitter account went live: @clinical_tweet. This seems to be the new, new, new official twitter account. Or something. We’ll see how long it lasts.

• And now, the sockpuppetry really gets started. “Sally Jones” started a twitter account as @kensingtonlib in order to alternately level accusations at @lukelibrarian and laud Clinical Reader. I wonder who could possibly be using the name Sally Jones??

This is just too much fun. I’ll update this post if necessary (and add screenshots that I have on a different computer, later).

[Edit: 7pm on July 20th. I think I'm done now. If you haven't had enough, search FriendFeed for "Clinical Reader" and see if more drama has surfaced. I'll just add that I've been almost equally fascinated by the complexity of piecing together a coherent story when that story is playing out in so many social networks, by the flailing about of Clinical Reader, by the lessons this teaches about marketing online, and by the implications of this story in my own teaching. I think I'll have to work some discussion of this parable into sessions I teach about evaluating web content.]

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Have you ever heard of the service called Clinical Reader? Apparently it’s a new service that acts kind of like a feed reader, only they decide which feeds you read, and it’s aimed at the medical community. The salient facts here being: 1) it’s new, and 2) nobody had heard of it. Until this week.

This week they used twitter to threaten legal action against a blogger, explain that they’d overstepped and let some unknown junior colleague too close to the keyboard, argue with the blogger and her ever-growing posse, apologize to the blogger, and now send out bogus retweets.* (See the chronology below for the gory details.)

What fascinates me is how quickly (in the space of four days) hundreds of people have gone from knowing nothing about this service to being pretty sure that everyone at Clinical Reader is completely insane. The social web can be an incredibly rich marketing arena, but it has zero patience for companies that get stuff wrong, and it rather delights in calling out this kind of behavior. This is the flip-side of crowd-sourcing, and companies and libraries hoping to harness online social networks would do well to watch this real-life parable unfold.

Chronology:

The story is way more interesting if you see it unfolding, so here are the best places to get it in kind of chronological order. This blog-version of the summary is necessary because Twitter itself is kind of difficult to reconfigure in a way that makes sense after the fact, and because Clinical Reader has started deleting tweets. Oops.

1. Nikki noticed some less than ethical aspects of Clinical Reader’s site (which now includes edits linking to the apology she received)
   
2. Steve summarized day one of the saga
3. Nikki gathered together links to a bunch of stuff that happened after Steve’s post.
4. The RT shenanigans begin, but these need more space, and screenshots, so here we go…

Clinical Reader went wrong in two completely wrong ways with the retweeting. (By the way, read each of the screenshots from the bottom up, because I forgot I should reverse the order and don’t feel like fixing it now.)

First, they thanked people for retweets even if the people had never retweeted them.

Then they seem to have completely made up tweets to retweet.

Amazing. Pardon me while I go pop some popcorn and settle in for the amusing ride. You can follow along on FriendFeed if you want.

P.S. The founder of Clinical Reader now says: “I have taken control of this account & parted company with former acquaintances in Canada whose behaviour I can only describe as schoolboy” (cite), and he is now apologizing to people. [The following sentence is apparently no longer true... which is ironic, since I was poking fun at Clinical Reader for misunderstanding how it works: "The problem is, he doesn't realize that if he starts with one person's name, there's no guarantee that everyone else will be able to see what he writes, since Twitter only lets you see messages directed at mutual friends." Further testing reveals that the other people would be able to see this message if they clicked on their @[username] page but not in their main Twitter feed. So, still weird, but not as egregious.]

* For those who don’t use Twitter, RT means “retweet” and is a way to redistribute something somebody else said, complete with attribution. It’s very much like a cited quote in a paper, only with links. So if I say “Something Clever” on Twitter, somebody else could say “RT @ijastram – Something Clever” which means “retweeting Iris Jastram who said ‘Something Clever,’” and the “@ijastram” part automatically turns into a link to my tweets. Quotation and citation in 140 characters or less. Pretty slick.

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1. Enough knowledge of CSS to modify the site as you wish
2. Friends who know enough CSS to do that for you
3. The Internet, where you can find ready-made styles like this one

I know enough CSS to break things or tinker mildly with things that already exist, and I have friends who put up with my requests for help and whose code I steal mercilessly (hi Steve), and I have the Internet. So I started with this style, modified it to make it look more the way I wanted, begged for help making it look even more the way I wanted, and now have a small suite of style options (which you can copy and paste into new Stylish styles):

1. For when I’m in friend mode, at home: this cleaned up version. (last updated 5/29/2009)
2. For when I’m in work mode and really just want text to skim: this stripped down version that gets rid of user icons. (last updated 5/29/2009)
3. And since I’m not a very picture-oriented person, it seems: a style that makes all posted images into teensy thumbnails that I can click on to view in their larger sizes when I want to.

I have (1) and (3) running together at home, and I have (2) and (3) running at work.

Lest you think I’m at all good at this, I should point out that my tweaks were incredibly minor. Steve Lawson did the big stuff (by which I mean shrinking images to thumbnails, highlighting direct messages, and removing user icons). You’ll also notice, if you look carefully at the code, that I just commented out portions of the original code, so you can restore that stuff and tweak it if you want.

A couple of other people really liked seeing which services were responsible for individual FriendFeed posts (like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, etc). If you’re like them, try this Greasemonky script (after installing Greasemonkey, of course).

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• You can change your nickname by right-clicking on it in the room’s roster. Most people do, and it’s totally up to you, but expect people to ask you your real life name or place of employment. There’s very little anonymity in this room.
• People like to greet you as you enter and bid you farewell as you leave. They like it if you give them warning that you’re about to leave and then hang around for a bit so they have a chance to send you off in style… or at least send you off.
• Don’t worry if the conversation doesn’t stay “on topic” (whatever that is).
• Don’t worry if the conversation lags. Think of it like your living room on a quiet night… you know how it is. Somebody’s reading, somebody’s watching TV, and every once in a while somebody says, “Hey, guess what I just read,” and you talk about it for a bit and then go back to what you were doing. LSW is this living room.
• You aren’t obliged to look at all the pictures or watch all the videos in the media window. Just close the window if it bothers you and click the links to the things that interest you (I do).
• Assume we all know each other. And assume we all like each other. (Many of us have hung out there for well over a year, now.) Read everything with this assumption in mind, and share things with that in mind.
• It’s ok to ask questions and get help with everything from reference questions to technical questions. Basic questions are just as welcome as advanced questions. Really. I promise.
• It’s not ok to force people to respond to your comments. Either people have stepped away from the keyboard for a bit and the conversation moved on, or they just didn’t want to respond. If you didn’t get help with a question, though, ask again (especially if new people have entered the room).
• No TV spoilers! We come from many time zones, remember.
• If you have really personal stuff to share, try using the private IM function (right-click on the name of the person you want to talk with).
• If you want to show the room off at a conference or other public place, please stop by and give the room some warning so we can cleans the buffer if necessary. Things aren’t always neat and tidy in our room and we want it to look its best for company.
• It’s a great place to vent and get help with frustrating circumstances, but don’t sabotage your own career, please.
• Sharing food or beverages is always encouraged. If you don’t know how, just ask.
• Use of the Pacman emoticon is strictly prohibited… at least when I’m around. It’s the only thing I hate about the room. Any of the other emoticons are fair game, and are quite fun to play with.
• The room tends to be full of hard-working, intelligent, and generally cool people. Enter, know yourself to be a peer, and don’t be shy. We really are happy to see you.
• Remember, there’s a buffer of about 100 lines of chat transcript that newcomers can read when they enter. Don’t say anything you wouldn’t want to have show up in that buffer.
• Library folks from all kinds of libraries hang out there and genuinely respect each other’s work. In fact, Respect is the currency of highest value, edging above Fun by the narrowest of margins.

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A fair number have seen this happen with Twitter lately. Things got so unstable that finally, last week, a bunch of librarians fled to FriendFeed. I don’t often post about this kind of site, mainly because I’m really not in the market for more followers, but last week this whole saga got me to thinking about what it was we liked about Twitter, what it is that I don’t like about FriendFeed, and how this resonates with similar sagas I’m witnessing elsewhere in my life (namely, the Impending Moodle Bloat, and the Continuing Adventure of the Library Catalog).

Since nobody needs to know everything I think about Twitter and FriendFeed, here’s the key difference as they apply to my needs and my preferences. Twitter does a small set of functions and (when it’s functioning properly) does them well. It concentrates on reverse-chronological order, brevity (which forces a certain kind of creativity), and makes its other features slave to those two governing laws. FriendFeed is intended to aggregate stuff and allow conversations to spring up around that stuff. If I wanted, I could share all my bookmarks and photos and blogs and twitter stream and, and, and… basically anything with a feed and a few things without feeds. It’s kind of like the Facebook of microblogging. You can add all kinds of things to it and it does it’s best to present all that stuff in a way that makes sense. And for me, this overabundance of features diluted the site’s effectiveness (though I know others who love it). It ended up eating up more of my time than I wanted (even after I “hid” pretty much everything that people added to their lifestreams) because I had no good way to mentally mark a conversation as “read” since there might be new comments on it, and while I was reading things the screen might reorganize itself so I’d have to go back and figure out what was new and what was old all over again. Non-static reverse chronological order takes more mental energy than I would have thought.

Well, all of this reminded me of some of the worries I have for Moodle. As people come up with all kinds of new things that it could do and new ways to feed information into and out of it and new roles it could fill, will it lose focus enough to hamper its ability to do core functions well? What are it’s core functions, anyway? As it moves from being a “course” management system to a “learning” management system, will it go through Twitter-ish frantic instability?

And, of course, when I think of systems that try to do too many things and therefore fail to do any one thing well, I immediately think of library catalogs and the ILSs of which they are a part.

So after I’d convinced myself that every application should strive to do one thing or a small set of things, and do those things really well, I realized it’s not that simple. The tricky bit is that not everyone’s workflow and preferences are the same. So how do you build a system with mass appeal that only does a few things?

And since I have no answers for these questions, I’ll leave you to answer them for me while I ponder the temptation to do all things for all people after learning that you do one thing really well.

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I don’t know why it continues to surprise me, given the shear volume of interaction, that the social web is more than just social. It’s personal. I don’t mean “bare the hidden secrets of your family” or “gossip about people” personal. That’s almost never advisable. No, I mean “act kind of like an extended family” personal. For someone who’s never had boatloads of friends (being content with a few really good ones), I hadn’t expected to develop such close ties with people I’d never seen in real life. I still marvel that several of my very best friends don’t know what my voice sounds like when I’m excited, or have never decoded the set of my jaw and realized that I’m concentrating.

Even so, some of these people know me better than my extended family does (and mine is a fairly close-knit extended family). They know when I’m bursting with good news, when I’ve had a rough day, and when Pippin has snuggled in for a good cuddle-n-purr session. And what really gets me is this: they actually care to hear these things, just like I care to hear about similar things from them. Personally, I can’t imagine most of my cousins being interested in that kind of information.

This kind of personal affection and interest was highlighted this week when somebody in one of these social circles was killed in a car accident. I didn’t know this person at all. Our two circles overlapped, but we’d never “met.” And yet, the ripples of the tragedy spread quickly as the woman’s friends expressed shock and disbelief and spread this to their friends, who spread it to their friends, and so on. Very quickly, an entire social network seemed to have slowed to a crawl as everyone lost the will to share trivial thoughts in the face of such events. (The woman was young… my age, in fact, with very young children.)

And that’s when I realized that the social web is more than social. It’s personal. It’s intimate. And it is immensely powerful, though not necessarily in the way I’d thought before. It’s not enough just to “be where the patrons are.” I’ve never thought that sounded right, somehow. I’d hear that phrase and imagine it being like standing in the lobby of a dorm feeling foolish and not doing anyone any good. No, being involved with an online social network more than that. And if we don’t admit that to ourselves, I think we set ourselves up for stress, anxiety, and disappointment.

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