I admit it; as anyone who is a frequent reader I am not a Facebook devotee; for that matter, I’m not a lover of social media in general, which includes MMOG sites such as World of Warcraft.

What people who know me don’t understand is that my dislike goes beyond my personal feelings.

Gently put, I am tired of and disgusted with number of intelligent, talented people who contact me for help balancing the demands on their time.

Don’t get me wrong, I like to help people and rarely charge for one-off questions, but it’s getting ridiculous.

For years I found that the problem wasn’t so much one of time management, but one of saying yes too often.

But, as the saying goes, that was then and this is now.

Now, after a week of time tracking exercises and analysis they come back and admit to two, five, eight or even more hours spent on various forms of social media.

Most are surprised; they had no realization that the number was so high.

I suggest they cut back and use the time where they feel pinched—the reason they contacted me in the first place.

Some are sheepish, others are defiant, but most are reluctant to reduce their time.

I didn’t need to read about “FOMO addiction” (the fear of missing out on something or someone more interesting, exciting or better than what we’re currently doing), I was hearing about it directly from the addicts.

So it was with great delight that I read that there is a growing rebellion.

The main reasons for their social media sabbaticals were not having enough time to dedicate to pruning their profiles, an overall decrease in their interest in the site, and the general sentiment that Facebook was a major waste of time.
About 4 percent cited privacy and security concerns as contributing to their departure. Although those users eventually resumed their regular activity, another 20 percent of Facebook users admitted to deleting their accounts.
(…)The report found that 42 percent of Facebook users from the ages of 18 to 29 said that the average time they spent on the site in a typical day had decreased in the last year. A much smaller portion, 23 percent, of older Facebook users, those over 50, reported a drop in Facebook usage over the same period.

Perhaps people are finally kicking their FOMO addiction, facing up to their time usage and figuring out that there is more to life than what’s online.

I find it most interesting that the decrease in Facebook usage is twice as high in the young (18-29) than in the over 50 crowd.

Who’d a thunk it?

Flickr image credit: birgerking

It’s well-known to my readers that I’m no lover of social media; that I think it’s a giant time-waster; a black hole for energy more rewardingly spent in the real-world and with the serious potential to ruin a person’s career and even life.

But, as I am constantly told, a digital dinosaur such as me has no real ability to evaluate, let alone judge, the value of social media to others.

For all of you who feel that way, and for all your friends who don’t know me from Adam, I have proof from someone whose credentials can’t be impugned.

I’m referring to Ryan Block, former editor in chief of AOL’s Engadget and the co-founder of tech community gdgt.com.

In a guest post he explains why he quit Instagram and muses on the value and role social media should play in a person’s life.

We’d all be much better off simplifying our technological footprints and consolidating our trust in the few services that provide us the greatest value with the fewest unintended side effects. In the end, I’m not afraid to admit it. I’m a quitter.

And you should be, too. People wondering what there is to gain by thinning their online accounts sometimes ask: “Why quit?” Instead, I think every once in a while we should all ask ourselves: “Why stay?”

So before you tweet his post or add it to your Facebook page, why not take a few minutes and give some thought to your own actions in light of Ryan’s comments.

Flickr image credit: kris krüg

As an official digital dinosaur I never heard of Klout; now that I have I wish I could go back to my ignorance.

Watching stupidity unfold is never pleasant, but watching stupidity that has the power to destroy lives is much worse.

It started when I saw a recent article on TechCrunch, talking about a Salesforce.com job ad requiring a Klout score above 35.

I searched for more info and found what seems to be the earliest article from Wired back in April

Klout uses a proprietary algorithm to crunch your activities in social media, especially Twitter, to assign you a score.

The scores are calculated using variables that can include number of followers, frequency of updates, the Klout scores of your friends and followers, and the number of likes, retweets, and shares that your updates receive. High-scoring Klout users can qualify for Klout Perks, free goodies from companies hoping to garner some influential praise

Worse, employers are using them as a hiring make-or-break.

The interviewer pulled up the web page for Klout.com—a service that purports to measure users’ online influence on a scale from 1 to 100—and angled the monitor so that [Sam] Fiorella could see the humbling result for himself: His score was 34. “He cut the interview short pretty soon after that,” Fiorella says. Later he learned that he’d been eliminated as a candidate specifically because his Klout score was too low. “They hired a guy whose score was 67.”

I saw ridiculous job requirements in my 20 years as a headhunter and more since then, but to use a criteria that so easily manipulated is nuts.

There are four actions you can take to raise your score according to product director Chris Makarsky.

1. Tweet a lot more; this is strictly a quantity not quality thing, food porn works well.
2. Concentrate on one topic instead of spreading yourself to thin.
3. Develop relationships with high-Klout people who might respond to your tweets, propagate them, and extend your influence to new population groups.
4. Keep things upbeat. “We find that positive sentiment drives more action than negative.”

It works.

Partly intrigued, partly scared, Fiorella spent the next six months working feverishly to boost his Klout score, eventually hitting 72. As his score rose, so did the number of job offers and speaking invitations he received. “Fifteen years of accomplishments weren’t as important as that score.”

People are always looking for shortcuts to evaluate and rate the people they meet. I’m old enough to remember when the first question people asked upon meeting was “what’s your sign?”

With the rise of MySpace and Facebook it was “how many friends do you have;” then Twitter arrived and the questions was “how many followers.”

Now there’s Klout to promote arrogance or undermine confidence and accomplishments, damage people’s psyches, and give them yet another false yardstick that has nothing to do with skills, value, accomplishments or any of those old fashioned intangibles like loyalty, honesty, ethics, empathy, the list is endless.

But Klout doesn’t care.

Flickr image credit: seanrnicholson

Do you look for peer reviews, such as those on Yelp, Amazon and most consumer sites, before buying the product, visiting the restaurant or booking the hotel?

Before the Internet we asked our friends and checked critics’ comments in newspapers and magazines, in order to increase the odds for a favorable experience.

These days we check the Internet.

“The wheels of online commerce run on positive reviews,” said Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois, Chicago (…) Mr. Liu estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake.

Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.

Do rankings based on the number of followers people have influence your trust level or opinion of them? But how do you know they are real?

And it’s not just ego-driven blogger types. Celebrities, politicians, start-ups, aspiring rock stars, reality show hopefuls — anyone who might benefit from having a larger social media footprint — are known to have bought large blocks of Twitter followers.

Are you impressed when someone’s Facebook wall is filled with beautiful people?

They are for sale, too.

His idea, he said, was “to turn cyberlosers into social-networking magnets” by providing fictitious postings from attractive people. The postings are written by the client or by Mr. Walker and his employees, who base the messages on the client’s requests.

If having to choose between being a chump and a cynic isn’t up your alley, perhaps the best advice when it comes to reviews, followers and friends is ‘buyer beware’ and ‘if it seems to good to be true it probably is’.

Flickr image credit: birgerking

A Friday series exploring Startups and the people who make them go. Read all If the Shoe Fits posts here

Cheating is nothing new, and perhaps the fact that cheating is so universal at all levels of school is partly responsible for the easy slide into various types of corporate cheating like Facebook’s infamous privacy stunts and its gaming words.

Many of Google’s recent actions seem to violate its “don’t be evil” mantra.

And according to Marco Camisani Calzolari, a corporate communication and digital languages professor in Milan, 46% of followers of corporate Twitter accounts are bots.

“The number of followers is no longer a valid indicator of the popularity of a Twitter user, and can no longer be analyzed separately from qualitative information.”

Startups live or die based on their creativity, but studies have linked creativity and unethical behavior.

The financial industry may lead the pack when it comes to behaving unethically, but they certainly don’t have an exclusive on unethical behavior.

Company executives are paid to maximize profits, not to behave ethically. Evidence suggests that they behave as corruptly as they can, within whatever constraints are imposed by law and reputation.

Now it seems that the sleeping giant, AKA, the public, AKA, your customers, are waking up to the problem and their trust levels are plummeting—with cause.

Customers and users have no reason to blindly accept your word that you’re trustworthy, so don’t expect them to.

Companies from startups to giants have to prove they are trustworthy—not once, but over and over as long as they are in business.

Option Sanity™ is trustworthy.

Come visit Option Sanity for an easy-to-understand, simple-to-implement stock allocation system.  It’s so easy a CEO can do it.

Warning.
Do not attempt to use Option Sanity™ without a strong commitment to business planning, financial controls, honesty, ethics, and “doing the right thing.”
Use only as directed.
Users of Option Sanity may experience sudden increases in team cohesion and worker satisfaction. In cases where team productivity, retention and company success is greater than typical, expect media interest and invitations as keynote speaker.

Flickr image credit: HikingArtist

I’m not on Facebook, but Option Sanity™ is, so if I am forced to sign into Facebook to comment I sign in using the Option Sanity login. I rarely do it, because I have no trust in how Facebook might use it.

Turns out my distrust was prescient.

Typically, endorsements are a paid deal, i.e., company X pays whomever for saying publicly that they use or like the product.

Social networks like Facebook provided a way for people to tell their friends about their preferences by tweeting, sharing or liking.

Facebook is constantly looking for ways to increase revenue and they found it in millions of ‘likes’ and shared links.

Nick Bergus came across a link to an odd product on Amazon.com: a 55-gallon barrel of … personal lubricant. … he posted the link on Facebook, adding a comment: “For Valentine’s Day. And every day. For the rest of your life.” Facebook — or rather, one of its algorithms — had seen his post as an endorsement and transformed it into an advertisement, paid for by Amazon.

Of course, algorithms have no sense of humor, nor can they tell the difference between sarcasm or irony and simple statement.

I sent the article to a friend with a biting wit who posts hysterically funny comments about political candidates and other subjects—or he used to. I sent him the article and he said he’s going back to sending them by email, “I’ll be damned if I take a chance on Facebook algorithms twisting my comments into an endorsement.”

Think my friend is over reacting?

It [Facebook] matched its users political affiliations with where their physical locations. The map went far beyond the red state versus blue state divide, with far more fine grained information about where Facebook users checked in in various parts of the country.

Twitter has analyzed usage to figure out when users sleep, allowing it to maximize its advertising.

All this intelligence is potentially lucrative for a global communications business like Twitter. It can inform when to serve up advertisements on the site and potentially for what kinds of products. It also produces very cool graphs and charts.

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And while we’re on the subject of Facebook, don’t expect any help if your account is hijacked unless you go to the media—they seem to believe you would rather fix it yourself.

Fred Wolens, a spokesman for Facebook said that Facebook believes that its users prefer “self-remediation” — basically, online solutions they find without help — to dealing with Facebook employees.

But does Samuel Reed, the guy who was hacked, agree?

“Facebook makes its money from my personal information and the personal information of millions of other people,” he said. That creates an obligation, he went on. “My big thing is this — what kind of corporate culture does Facebook want to convey?”

Flickr image credit: weisunc

Three or so decades ago friends called me a “health food nut” because I took supplements (still do). These days they call me a “privacy freak” because although I’m on LinkedIn I refuse to join Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or whatever comes next; I don’t carry a cell, find many GPS apps creepy and love my solitude.

As Aristotle said, “He is his own best friend, and takes delight in privacy whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy and is afraid of solitude.”

Ayn Rand said, “Civilization is the progress toward a society of privacy. The savage’s whole existence is public, ruled by the laws of his tribe. Civilization is the process of setting man free from men.” If that’s true, the world is headed straight back to barbarism.

Edward P. Morgan’s words ring truer today than at any time in history, “A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man’s mind can get both provocation and privacy.”

I wonder if David Brin was channeling Mark Zukerberg when he said, “When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.”

As stated, I’m not a Facebook fan for many reasons and Jaron Lanier states a major one, “Facebook says, ‘Privacy is theft,’ because they’re selling your lack of privacy to the advertisers who might show up one day.” Maybe that’s why Zukerberg doesn’t have a Facebook presence—ya think?

Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research, “Defaults around how we interact have changed. A conversation in the hallway is private by default, public by effort. Online, our interactions become public by default, private by effort.”

But it is John Perry Barlow who sounds a warning that US citizens would do well to heed, “Relying on the government to protect your privacy is like asking a peeping tom to install your window blinds.”

Image credit: opensource.com

(no ducks today:)

Every time someone gets in trouble or is fired for mouthing off about a boss or employer on social media people go up in flames citing their right to Freedom of Speech, but guess what?

The First Amendment doesn’t cover the workplace.

According to Wharton legal studies and business ethics professor Janice Bellace it just ain’t so.

She says in the U.S., anyone trying to challenge such a practice in court would have almost no legal ground to stand on. “People think they have more rights than they actually have; they seem to think they have rights that are just not there.” For example, she notes that employment law for decades has said that non-unionized workers could always be fired for taking actions that publicly disparage their employers.

Does the First Amendment protect candidates when they are asked for access to their social media? Probably not.

“It has always been the case that employers could ask others about you for a reference and, if you refuse to give them names, they can refuse to hire you.”

For years I’ve enviously read about privacy rights in Europe and watched the European Union enforce them, no matter the political/economic clout of the companies.

And for years friends and business associates laughed at my concerns and cited the First Amendment as our best protection.

While it is marvelous protection for political and religious freedom, it would be wise to remember that it has no protective power in the wonderful world of work.

Sure, that may change, but you have to function in the current reality no matter how hard you are willing to work to change it.

Flickr image credit: William F. Yurasko

Have you ever wondered what people will make of the first Twitter messages in 30 years? Will there be another wave of technological change that makes that world radically different from today?

Long before Twitter and social media there was Usenet; a communal meeting place for scientists, developers, hackers and other early adopters.

Along with the more mundane Usenet was the place of firsts, including some of the most amazing technological announcements of the last 30 years.

Usenet offers thousands of “first mentions,” including Microsoft MS-DOS, MTV, fax machines, Lisa, Macintosh and Apple’s original Super Bowl commercial and a review of the first IBM pc

For $ 1,565 you get a keyboard and logic unit with 16K RAM and a Basic interpreter in 40K ROM.  A cassette interface is built in, I think; but no diskette or monitor at this price — you use your TV set. … A “business configuration” with 64K, dual diskettes, printer, and “color graphics” goes for about $ 4,500.

Among the many ‘firsts’ are some that boggle the mind.

In 1991 there were two that forever changed our world.

Tim Berners-Lee posted an executive summary for a new idea and invited people to “mail me with any queries.”

WorldWideWeb – Executive Summary: The WWW project merges the techniques of information retrieval and hypertext to make an easy but powerful global information system.

Linus Torvalds announcement provided jet fuel for the open source movement.

“I’m working on a free version of a minix-lookalike for AT-386 computers.  It has finally reached the stage where it’s even usable (though may not be depending on what you want), and I am willing to put out the sources for wider distribution.”

Read the ‘firsts’ timeline at Google Groups.

Hat tip to TNW Insider for introducing me to the Usenet Firsts.

Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho

So much of Twitter use in the US is banal, but the rest of the world is finding serious use for those 134 characters, like fighting crime. An administrative chief in a Kenyan village does just that using it to find stolen cows or sheep and even thwart a home invasion.

When the administrative chief of this western Kenyan village received an urgent 4 a.m. call that thieves were invading a school teacher’s home, he sent a message on Twitter. Within minutes residents in this village of stone houses gathered outside the home, and the thugs fled.

It’s fortunate that I’m extremely healthy, because I’m not a lover of the medical world. Individuals do great things, but I don’t trust the profession as a whole and those feelings have been reinforced by the secrecy surrounding the connections between doctors and pharmaceutical companies, but that’s about to change.

Under the new standards, if a company has just one product covered by Medicare or Medicaid, it will have to disclose all its payments to doctors other than its own employees. The federal government will post the payment data on a Web site where it will be available to the public.

Household vinegar has long been the go-to ingredient for a host of household cleaners and solutions to everyday problems (just ask Heloise). Now humble, cheap vinegar is saving lives (not in the US, of course).

…a remarkably simple, brief and inexpensive procedure, one with the potential to do for poor countries what the Pap smear did for rich ones: end cervical cancer’s reign as the No. 1 cancer killer of women. The magic ingredient? Household vinegar.

Crowdsourcing is making waves in many areas, from funding startups to improving government processes to jump-starting medical innovation. Who knew?

“Offering a $100,000 prize has yielded ideas in six months that would have taken four to five years to develop at ten times the cost,” said Sanofi’s Dennis Urbaniak, VP US diabetes.

If you read nothing else today I hope you read this final link and consider registering. After all, can’t hurt and could save a life.

Q: What do you get when you combine a driving entrepreneur with a mission and an algorithm?
A: The National Kidney Register and the longest domino set of transplant surgeries to date; 64 to be exact!

Chain 124, as it was labeled by the nonprofit National Kidney Registry, required lockstep coordination over four months among 17 hospitals in 11 states. It was born of innovations in computer matching, surgical technique and organ shipping, as well as the determination of a Long Island businessman named Garet Hil, who was inspired by his own daughter’s illness to supercharge the notion of “paying it forward.”

Flickr image credit: pedroelcarvalho