Archive for September, 2007

Social Media User’s Bill of Rights

Posted September 8, 2007 * Comments(0)

ame across this today, which seems to be gathering a body of support. I like the sentiments; pity it’s not enforceable!Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble, and Michael Arrington have authored a bill of rights for users of the social web. The bill states:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

  • Ownership of their own personal information, including:
    • their own profile data
    • the list of people they are connected to
    • the activity stream of content they create;
  • Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
  • Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

  • Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
  • Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
  • Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
  • Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

The Facebook debate - can we take you seriously if you’ve never used it?

Posted September 4, 2007 * Comments(3)

I’ve recently seen a flurry of blogs about the merits (or not) of Facebook as a social networking environment. I was stirred to action when I read Elsua’s blog this morning, which in turn refers to the question posed by Mitch Joel “Can you claim to be in social media without having a Facebook account”.

Now, whilst I don’t disagree with many of the points made by Elsua, or for that matter Euan Semple, who writes about Facebook being all froth and no substance, I would like to pose the following question:

If you’re serious about Social Media, and profess to be an ‘expert’, where there is a major gathering of like-minded socially-active individuals, can you afford to NOT be there?

Yes, there are a lot of shortcomings with Facebook, but if you want to comment about it with any authority, you need to be a part of it, not a bystander watching on the periphery.