Gotta Catch Some Mandatory Fun

Growing up as an Army Brat, I experienced many situations in which we were required to participate in mandatory fun. When I read the assignment for this blog post, it brought those days to mind. As an Army Brat, mandatory fun usually consisted of attending Organization Day, which was a giant picnic/barbecue with lots of silly games and competitions. As an NCO, Dad was effectively required to bring his family along to participate in the fun. If our commanding officer, er, I mean instructor has ordered me to have fun over break than I am up for the task.

I generally work during Fall Break, which leaves no good window for travel and little time for shenanigans. Mostly Fall Break is about catching up on sleep. However, driven by the need to write about something fun, I decided to torment my husband over break to give me something more than sleeping in to write about.

My preferred means of tormenting him is to drag him on photo walks out in some sort of natural surroundings. We’re both shutterbugs. Unfortunately, I’m working through a plantar fasciitis flare up at the moment and that means long (or even medium length) hikes are pretty much out. Getting too far away from places where I can make sad eyes at my husband and ask him to go get the car if necessary is not the best idea in the middle of a flare up. From past experience I know I will get through it faster if I can get in lots of short bursts of walking with rest in between. Just walking bores me, especially when I’m stuck either walking slow or being in enough pain to end the walk too soon. I find it really hard to be motivated to walk when I know it will make my foot hurt.

Enter the “Pokéwalk”. Pokémon Go is a phone/tablet game that came out last summer. It was incredibly popular for a little while. The popularity seems to have died off fairly quickly, but my husband and I got into the game late.  The Pokémon slogan is “Gotta catch ‘em all!” and we haven’t even come close yet.

Pokémon Go makes for a nice distraction while walking and also gives us a reason besides my cranky foot to keep it slow and pause often. We have to pause to collect resources from Poké Stops and to catch Pokémon along the way. I also get to torment my husband by dragging him along and making him play too, which makes it win/win. Okay, okay, he does enjoy the game somewhat and definitely enjoys humoring me so it’s not really tormenting him to make him go on a Pokéwalk.

Over the week of Fall Break, in order to acquire sufficient mandatory fun for blogging purposes, my husband and I went on several Pokéwalks. It may sound low key or possibly even boring, but we enjoy it. The leaves are turning lovely colors. It’s cooler, but not cold yet - perfect walking weather.

Academic Blog - Critical Response to TED Talk “The Tribes We Lead” by Seth Godin

I get the feeling that this is supposed to be a highly inspirational TED Talk, but for me, it falls flat. However, I could just be in a bad mood as I’m writing this. Part of the problem is that the organization is lacking. Godin goes from point to point without much connection between many of them. Another part of the problem is that Godin seems to think that people in general try to change things. My experience, or perhaps my cynicism, tells me the opposite. People are generally more inclined to fight change than embrace it. People who seek and work for change are rare.

In the SPCA example that he uses to support his apparent argument that people seek change, the details of the story more strongly support the counter argument that people fight change. Godin tells us how Nathan Winograd and his boss at the SPCA had to fight to get a change in how stray animals were handled in San Francisco. People from other SPCAs and humane shelters were willing to fly to San Francisco to fight against this change. People in general resist change. Change happens when a person or small group are willing to go all out fighting for it.

The San Francisco SPCA was only able to focus on making San Francisco a no-kill city after giving up their existing animal control responsibilities. If you look at this timeline at Best Friends, you’ll see that it took Rich Avanzino (Winograd’s boss) 10 years and surrendering animal control responsibility the Department of Animal Care and Control that had to be formed due to Avanzino ending the SPCA’s contract with the city (with 5 years notice), to make San Francisco a no-kill city. It actually took five years beyond when San Francisco SPCA handed animal control over to the Department of Animal Care and Control for them to establish an adoption pact with the city run service to make San Francisco a no-kill city.

Their efforts and dedication are admirable, but I think they make an excellent example of how fiercely people resist change. This is clearly not the point he’s trying to make.

Watching again for the third or fourth time, I think that he might have made a stronger argument if he somehow made it clear that he told the SPCA story at the beginning to demonstrate how much harder it was to connect with people and encourage them to embrace change prior to the explosion of social media. Then again, he didn’t mention how long it took for Winograd and Avanzino to bring about the change they fought for. Godin probably intended that first example as support for his arguments about connection and tribes.

I do agree with the argument that tribes and the human drive to connect are the way to change the world, although I didn’t feel that Godin supported it very strongly with his talk. Godin seems to alternate between providing examples of connection and providing examples of leaders. He doesn’t link the examples together very well in the structure of his talk, and this makes his call to action at the end weaker than it could have been.

Musing on Hashtag Popularity

The current module in #engl211 has us delving into the murky world of social media marketing.

What makes one hashtag trend and another fade into oblivion?

Nobody really knows. There are lots of people out there writing essays on the subject. People who want to sell you on  their social media marketing expertise will make lists of ways to get more eyeballs on your content and write them up in neat little bite sized articles. But they don’t really know. They’re making educated guesses. Sometimes their advice works, sometimes it drives people away.  

Our assignment right now is to go on Twitter and promote a hashtag of our own design. The group I’m in decided to go with #BorderlandPics. It is a brand new hashtag so we can shape it any way we want without interference from or piggybacking on preexisting tweets. On my Twitter account I introduced it with this new pinned tweet:

Our idea was inspired by another hashtag - #WolWednesday. This is a hashtag that was started by author Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) back in March 2015. This hashtag, which is all about sharing pictures of owls, is still going. Apparently lots of people like owls. Er, I’m sorry, I mean wols.

You might wonder how sharing owl pictures could possibly be marketing. My Twitter experience is largely in the publishing world. I follow authors, publishers, and the like. From what I’ve observed, if an author goes on Twitter and just tweets about his or her books, that drives potential readers away. I know I unfollow an author after two many straight up promotional tweets and I am not alone in that. Therefore, authors on Twitter generally only do straightforward promotion during specific times. If an author normally tweets like a human being making connections, tweeting excitedly about a book release is quite acceptable. Whether he did it deliberately or is just Sam Sykes being Sam Sykes, the #WolWednesday promotes Sam Sykes author brand by drawing people to his Twitter account in a fun way. This is an indirect form of marketing.

We don’t actually have a product to promote, so the indirect marketing of a picture sharing hashtag seemed like a fun way to go. If anything, we are promoting where we live.

So far, my group has shared a few pictures and we’ve gotten one post to our hashtag from someone not in our group. We’ve only be going for a few days now, so I won’t speculate on reasons why we’re not getting more eyeballs. Of the tweets I’ve shared, this has been my most popular:

I know exactly why it has gotten all that attention. One of the re-tweets was @poisonedpen and that put it in front of a lot of people. Poisoned Pen Bookstore has almost seven thousand followers on Twitter. Given time we can get more tweets in front of more people. Eventually some might join in.

One final thought - after Tuesday’s election, I’m starting to wish I had suggested my other idea for a hashtag - #WarmFuzzyTwitter. The idea behind that one would have been to spread kind and supportive words throughout Twitter and encourage others to do the same. A hashtag like that could be helpful to a lot of people any time, but right now especially. Small joys keep us going in dark times. I thought it was too silly to share, but now it doesn't feel quite so silly.

The Assignment I Didn't Want to Do

I started the Twitter assignment like any reasonable adult would. There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth. There may even have been some pouting. Poor @tonydero had to listen to a ton of whining about this horrible, awful, evil assignment.

I decided to make a new account so I wouldn't break my real Twitter. All the way through set up to the point of adding a cover photo, and Twitter decides I’m a #robot. Locked me out and insisted that I provide a phone number to get back in. Twitter does not need my frakking phone number. Grrrr... Cue more wailing and gnashing of teeth. I melted down. October has not been an awesome month and my resilience for minor setbacks was down to nil. But the meltdown ended, as meltdowns do, and I decided to just do this thing on my real Twitter. #pout.

Process

First step - send @KurtDepnerENGL a screenshot showing my starting follower count.

Cropped version of what I sent @KurtDepnerENGL

Second step - pin a tweet so that anyone who’s already following me will know what the heck is going on.

Mildly cranky Pinned Tweet

Third step - mentally review the materials provided and decide how to go about this craziness. There are lots of legitimate and ethical ways to get followers.

Since I used my real Twitter account I only wanted to do things that fit well with who I am. I made three basic changes to my Twitter behavior.

1. Tweet or Retweet a few times every single day.
2. Use #hashtags more often.
3. Follow back new followers ASAP.

The first and second changes were no big deal. Although I tend to be more of a #lurker than a tweeter most days, participating actively is a simple change. Using #hashtags is not something I ever thought about much, but again - an easy change. Neither of these behaviors go against who I am at all. The third behavior is a bit more of a stretch, as I prefer to limit how many people I follow. However, this was a matter of doing something outside my comfort zone rather than going against my character. Stepping outside your comfort zone is good.

I kept my strategy simple with the thought that I’d most likely have to try different changes after the first couple of days. It turned out that these three steps produced a steadily increasing follower count over the course of the assignment.

Tweeting or Retweeting Daily

This part was easy. Tweeting or retweeting on a daily basis was as simple as changing my passive #lurking on Twitter into a more active endeavor. As a side effect, I think it may have actually reduced the total time I spent on Twitter. Tweeting or retweeting a few things gave me a sense of closure that made it easier to move on to other tasks. When I’m just reading Twitter it is far too easy to scroll down just a bit more, then a bit more, then a bit more. #JustOneMoreTurn

#hashtags

Although I had rarely thought about them in the past, this assignment taught me that #hashtags are awesome. They help you connect with your tribe. Use #hashtags so that people who share your interests see your tweets. I’ll likely continue to use #hashtags more often in the future.

Some #hashtags I used:

Jaxon photobombed, but he's part Catahoula so it's OK 

#engl211

#bookworm & #bookwyrm)
#BannedBooksWeek

#bannedbooks
#librarylife

#saturdaylibrarian

#libraryclerk 
#wolwednesday
#homework
#amwriting
#NationalCatDay
#haiku

There were times that I could have come up with #hashtags and failed to do so. It is not an automatic habit for me. Here’s one example:

What #hashtags would you have used?

Following Back

In my experience on Twitter, there are tons of people that are only interested in following you if you follow them back. I didn’t want to deal with the usual dance of people following then unfollowing me because I didn’t follow back quickly enough during this module. I made a point of following any account that didn’t raise red flags for me within 24 hours.

I did follow some accounts that I typically wouldn’t have. I’m now following more accounts than I want to be following. Over the next several days, I will likely unfollow several accounts that are too #promotiony for my taste. This means my follower count will certainly drop some. I’m totally happy with that. Among those accounts that I typically wouldn’t have followed are some that seem to be awesome. So I’ve been missing out with my practice of waiting to follow back. I will likely be more diligent about deciding whether or not I want to follow people back in the future.

Top Tweets

3 of my top 5 tweets @-ed someone. Twitter is all about connecting.

Final Thoughts

Part of the assignment is to share our follower count at the end. Here's mine:

I was beyond reluctant about this assignment in the beginning and had so much fun with it by the end. Using #hashtags helped me connect with the kind of people that I’m on Twitter to connect with. Although I’m not big on collecting followers, I found it valuable to step outside my comfort zone and learned that I can connect with more people on Twitter and still be me.

All in all, this assignment that I didn’t want to do is now my favorite of the semester.

The Dark Side of Social Media

Today we have a critical response to When Online Shaming Spirals out of Control TED Talk , an academic blog post for #engl211.

In this TED Talk, Jon Ronson claims that Twitter was originally “a place of radical de-shaming” where the voiceless found a powerful voice. He argues that this was good, but it evolved into something terrible. A few tweets that picked up momentum could make a giant corporation realize that people are watching and they aren’t going to get away with being heartless or evil. From giving the voiceless a voice, Twitter evolved into a place where people didn’t just keep corporations from being evil, but also went after people who are perceived to have had and abused privilege.

Ronson supports his assertion with two examples. The first was pop science writer Jonah Lehrer. After being caught faking quotes, self-plagiarizing (re-using prior material without noting it was from prior work), and plagiarizing the work of others. Mr. Lehrer had a speaking engagement that would give him the opportunity to apologize for his intellectual misconduct. The foundation that he spoke before set up two screens with Twitter feeds, one that the audience could see and another that he could see while he was making his speech.

The people watching the live streamed event made comments to and about Mr. Lehrer on Twitter while he was speaking. Seeing a privileged white man make a speech about his poor decision making brought out some of the ugliness of the online world.  

With the help of a stapler and a conveniently placed down arrow key, I scrolled down in the #infoneeds feed to the day of the speech. The comments that are there now are mostly not that bad. I understand that people can delete tweets and a bunch of negative comments may have been deleted. However, the overall tone of it now is a bit of negativity with a lot of reasonable tweets and the occasional reminder to be civil.

I have to admit that although it is ugly to have a man apologizing for getting caught in a pattern of journalistic misconduct while surrounded by a Twitter feed that contains a number of negative comments, I find it hard to sympathize with him. His intellectual dishonesty benefited him and he was apologizing because he was caught. If he had to be uncomfortable while apologizing, I’m sure the $20K honorarium that he received for his speech was a comfort. I find it interesting that a Knight Foundation post the day after Mr. Lehrer’s speech says that they regret paying him a speaking fee.

While the story of Jonah Lehrer is indeed an example of online shaming, I think Ronson could have found many better examples to support his argument. That may be why he spent more time on the second example which is much stronger.

Justine Sacco, a PR professional with a small following on Twitter, made a stupid ugly tweet while traveling. One of her followers sent that tweet to a journalist with many followers and a massive Twitter storm ensued. Being a woman on the Internet is far more dangerous than being a man, and the kinds of responses she got for a moment of indiscretion were terrible. As Ronson says:

Women always have it worse than men. When a man gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired." When a woman gets shamed, it's, "I'm going to get you fired and raped and cut out your uterus."

I was on Twitter when the Justine Sacco Twitter storm hit. I remember seeing this woman’s name pop up in my feed and thinking that her tweet was terrible. I wondered if she was really that racist and ignorant or if it was somehow supposed to be a joke that just didn’t make sense to me. I remember being shocked that a PR professional could come up with such a tweet.

Having watched the Justine Sacco Twitter storm play out in real time, I can only agree with what Ronson says about mob behavior on Twitter. It starts out small with disbelief and shock that quickly turns to anger and personal threats. The more people talk about something like this, the more likely it is that someone will say something negative. Negative tweets bounce around the echo chamber and can lead to horrible threats.

This was a valuable talk on a difficult reality of social media. Ronson makes solid points and supports them well with real life examples. In the after talk he notes that it is important to stand up for people who are being shamed so that there’s a “babble of voices” instead of straight negativity. He suggests this, knowing that standing up for the target of a Twitter mob makes you a target too. He suggests this as a way to keep the Internet from turning into a place where fear silences us.

The Internet is an ugly place. If you make a mistake that goes viral, it can literally ruin your life. Both of the people Ronson used as examples were eventually able to start over, but the recovery process is long and difficult. Ronson ends his talk with a call to action. Don’t let the Internet turn into a place where we give up our voices to survive.

News and Social Media

And here we have another academic blog post for English 211G. The mission - write a critical response to The Facebook Effect on the News.

In this Atlantic Monthly article from February 2014, Derek Thompson argues that in 2013 claiming that Facebook and Twitter were the Internet’s new homepages might have been a nearly original observation, but in 2014, such a statement had become fact.

Thompson supports this argument by noting that traffic from homepages had dropped across many websites while traffic from social media dramatically increased. He includes a supporting graph showing that in December 2011, Google and Facebook sent near equal numbers of clicks to the Buzzfeed network. By December 2013, Facebook’s share of the traffic was more than three times that of Google's.

Do we want news or cat pictures?

From that foundation, he goes on to consider the question of what kinds of stories do people click on from Facebook. He notes that The Atlantic’s most successful Facebook stories ‘aren’t news-pegged’ but are “what journalists call ‘evergreen’ stories”. Evergreen stories aren’t about recent events. They are about subjects of ongoing interest such as happiness, dieting, and decision making. He notes that these are stories of the sort that Upworthy specializes in and that Upworthy was definitely enjoying an abundance of clicks from Facebook pages.

Thompson points out that Facebook’s News Feed isn’t really a news feed at all. As Thompson says it can be better described as an entertainment portal. He cites a 2013 Pew study that fewer that half of Facebook users ever even read news on Facebook and only 10 percent log into Facebook specifically to see news.

To support this observation Thompson supplies Top 20 lists of Twitter’s top stories in 2013, the Top 20 most searched stories for 2013, and Buzzfeed’s Top 20 most viral stories. The Buzzfeed stories being the ones most clicked on from Facebook. Based on those lists, Twitter seems to be a blend of news and evergreen stories, heavily skewed towards entertainment news. The most searched stories are much more strongly focused on news stories. The Facebook (Buzzfeed viral) stories are largely entertainment and evergreen stories.

Cats can be awfully cute.

He goes on to claim that the primary difference between Facebook and older forms of entertainment is that the Facebook News Feed is “entirely our creation”. This is the first statement in the article that I have to disagree with. I can’t actually recall how the News Feed was in 2014, but it currently is only somewhat based on your activity. Yes, we do choose our friends and how we interact with our friends’ posts, but that only gives us the illusion of creating our own News Feed.

I can think of at least one reported instances of Facebook manipulating News Feeds:

Facebook Tinkers With User’s Emotions in News Feed Experiment, Stirring Outcry

Even when not manipulating the New Feed actively, the Facebook algorithm exercises a great deal of control over what we are shown. Follow someone and interact with every single post that appears in your News Feed and Facebook still won’t show you all of their posts. Follow a page and it is even worse. Facebook wants page owners to pay for advertising and limits how many of their followers see each post organically.

Me? I prefer dog pictures.

While we can certainly influence what we see on Facebook, we do not create our own News Feeds. Although I disagree that the Facebook News Feed is “entirely our creation” I do agree that it does indicate users’ preferences.

All in all, Thompson’s article was worth reading and very appropriate to this class. He highlights one of the major differences between social media (Facebook and Twitter) and other means of getting information from the Web. I found it interesting that Twitter usage skewed more towards news seeking than Facebook usage. I would have thought that the shorter format of Twitter would not encourage that. It shouldn’t have surprised me though. Even though I follow mostly authors and publishing related people on Twitter, I still see a ton of news come through my feed.

What do you think? Do you know anyone who’s Facebook (or Twitter) feed is all news all the time?

Speculating on Ethical Behavior in the Founding of Facebook

Ethical behavior can be defined in many ways. For the purposes of this post, let’s keep it simple:

Ethical behavior - Behavior that is consistent with what society believes to be good morals.

There are several incidents on the road to Facebook where Mark Zuckerberg may have felt he was behaving ethically. These same incidents, when viewed from another person’s perspective may appear unethical.

The movie The Social Network portrays Zuckerberg largely as a socially awkward villain. Other sources of information about the founding of Facebook, including “The Accidental Billionaires” book offer slightly more balanced views.

Ethical behavior is understood in part based on what society is judging it.

Cultural Differences

As members of the Porcellian Club, the most exclusive final club on campus, the Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss lived in a very different world from Mark Zuckerberg. Even his friend, Eduardo Saverin lived in a different world from Mark Zuckerberg.

The primary difference between their worlds is that Saverin and the Winklevoss twins live in the world of business, although at different levels. Zuckerberg lives in the world of computers. Although some types of ethical behavior may be considered universal, the world of business and the world of computers do have different standards by which behavior can be judged to be ethical or unethical.

Hacker Culture

When Zuckerberg created www.facemash.com, he accessed information that was not open to the public. He hacked into the computer networks of various Harvard houses in order to obtain the pictures to be used in his “Hot or Not” style program. An article in The Harvard Crimson that is still available online - 

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creator-survives-ad-board-the/ 

discusses the results of the Administrative Board hearing he was called before after creating the site. He was charged with security, copyright, and privacy violations.

It is likely that Zuckerberg did not believe he was behaving unethically in creation of the site for several reasons. First, Zuckerberg states that he did not mean for the site to go to such a wide audience. He forwarded it only to a few friends, who then forwarded it on to others. The spread was viral rather than deliberate as implied in the movie. Second, Zuckerberg took the site down himself, having some understanding about the privacy violation it created. Third, he had created the site as an interesting programming problem, not a payback for being dumped as implied by the movie.

Breaking into the Harvard house networks may anger the authorities, but in the hacker community, angering authorities is a good thing. If security can be broken then it was too weak and information wants to be free. His actions (probably unintentionally) pointed out several security weaknesses of the campus network and likely led to them being fixed. Highlighting the weaknesses of a network without doing real harm might actually be considered ethical behavior in hacker culture. He also apparently documented what he was doing as he did it and posted it on the site itself. In researching this post, I couldn’t find anything that said whether or not he turned that information over to the folks responsible for IT security at Harvard after taking the site down. If he did turn it over, then he actually did provide a service. Although such a service, if it occurred was certainly not in a form they would have liked.

The fact that he sent the program out to only a few friends for feedback shows some awareness that it might not be something that should be shared with the wider world. He might genuinely have not known that it would go viral while he wasn’t looking. The movie shows him watching it explode across campus. Other sources indicate that he went off to class or a meeting and was away from his dorm while it was growing. This experience may also have led him to thinking more seriously about privacy options when the time came to create Facebook.

In hacker culture, computer geek society, solving interesting programing problems has intrinsic value. While the implementation might be sketchy ethically, the primary purpose of making a comparison algorithm work elegantly is not.

Business Culture

The Winklevoss twins saw what Zuckerberg did as a violation of ethics according to business culture. In their perception, the creation of his own social network while he was supposed to be working on theirs was a huge violation of their trust.

Various sources indicate that the one truly unethical thing that Zuckerberg did concerning the Winklevoss twins and Harvard Connection or ConnectU was lead them to believe that he was working on their site so that he could release his first. This gave him the ‘first mover’ advantage.

However, since they had no formal business agreements and hadn’t even discussed paying him anything for his work, Zuckerberg’s creation of his own site was not actually unethical in and of itself. There already were several social media sites out there and putting a new spin on one was not a unique idea by any stretch.

Money and Ethics

You can’t have an online presence without servers, and servers cost money. This means that TheFacebook would never have gotten off the ground at Harvard even without the help of investors. The first investor was Eduardo Saverin, a friend of Mark Zuckerberg. Later early funding was obtained from Peter Thiel. As FaceMash proved, using Zuckerberg’s personal computer as a server would not be sufficient to cover even the Harvard undergraduate population.

First some definitions:

Angel investor - Person who invests their own personal funds into a start-up business to help it grow. Angel investors usually get some sort of ownership equity in return for their investment. If the business fails, they get nothing. If it succeeds, the angel investor owns a chunk of a successful business.

Venture capitalist - A person or group who invests into small, growing businesses. Venture capital is generally sought by businesses that are small and growing rapidly. Venture capitalists often help the firm grow with business model and marketing strategy advice as well as providing funds. Venture capitalists make their profits when the company grows big enough to sell shares to the public through an initial public offering or when the business is sold to a larger company.

Eduardo Saverin’s initial investment into TheFacebook was an angel investment. Venture capitalist Peter Thiel’s initial investment into Facebook was also an angel investment. Although as a venture capitalist, and member of Facebook’s board of directors he seems to have provided significant assistance in developing Facebook’s business model and structure even if he was not involved in day-to-day decision making.

One of the ethical obligations of a business that accepts investments is to work hard to succeed. When Saverin froze the account that was keeping TheFacebook’s servers up and running, he created a major threat to the fledgling business. Downtime can kill a fledgling social network. After he does this, Zuckerberg takes steps to cut Saverin out of the business. Zuckerberg’s actions to cut Saverin off from having any sort of position or power with Facebook are ethical in the sense that he is protecting investors from a threat to their investment.

Gender Relationships

Although the other sources I’ve looked at in the process of researching this blog post rather strongly indicate that The Social Network movie is an extremely fictionalized account of the Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook, his behavior towards as portrayed in the film is quite problematic. It starts with a scene where he is extremely rude to his girlfriend who then dumps him. In reaction he posts a demeaning blog about her personally. Then he goes to work creating Facemash which compares and ranks the attractiveness of Harvard undergrads. In the movie it shows the program only comparing women. He does at least refrain from comparing them to farm animals. The movie does not show him having any positive relationships with women at all, although towards the end he is at least polite to one of the women in the law firm.

Social Network Exclusivity

One of the goals in the creation of Facebook was to create an online social network where you actually knew the people you were connected with. This was the idea behind keeping it exclusive to Harvard at first and later exclusive to colleges and universities in general. Several of the design features show ethical decision making.

People are encouraged to sign up with their real names so that they may connect with their real friends. It is not a dating site so much as a site that builds connections. There are privacy options built in that the user has control over. Facebook users may share too much, but what they share is by their own choice. Even if the oversharing is sometimes through ignorance of how the system works there are privacy settings and instructions on how to use them readily available.

Earlier social network sites were more focused on meeting new people. Facebook focused on connecting with people you already knew to some degree. Zuckerberg wasn’t interested in creating another dating style social network.

Additional information about the founding of Facebook:

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-mark-zuckerberg-booted-his-co-founder-out-of-the-company-2012-5

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2010/09/08/mark-zuckerberg-at-harvard-the-truth-behind-the-social-network.html

http://www.thecrimson.com/article/2003/11/19/facemash-creator-survives-ad-board-the/

The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich is an account of the early history using information gathered from several sources. Mark Zuckerberg provided no information for this book. It is a fast fun read.

The Social Network (2010) is a movie loosely based on The Accidental Billionaires.