Control, dependency and changes

Preparation

If you’re planning to do slides, you’ll need to set them up for Present sections and anything else you want to cover.

Summary

Present

Social media is often a website or service that is created and maintained by a single company. Because of this, you’re not in control of the service and there are a variety of things that can happen that could make the service unusable.

This section talks about the things that can happen and the possible ways to alleviate those problems.

Terms of service

Present

In order to use the service, the company requires you to abide by their terms of service. If you violate the terms of service, they can suspend or terminate your account preventing you from accessing the service and your data.

The terms of service are written in legalese and are often difficult to read for people who aren’t trained to read legal language.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation maintains a list of “terms of (ab)use” which is both informative and eye-opening [1].

[1]http://www.eff.org/issues/terms-of-abuse

Activity: Read a Terms of Service

Have participants pick a social media web-site, find the Terms of Service link, and skim through it. Read the parts that seem interesting.

Go around and mention things you saw in the Terms of Service that were surprising.

Customer support

Present

Most social media service companies don’t have someone you can call for support. Sometimes they have email addresses that you can write to with issues, but often they don’t respond or aren’t very useful.

One of the reasons for this is that the social media service company consists of 100 people, but they have a user base of millions of people. They can’t possibly handle the issues so they make it difficult to report problems. They do their best to help, but generally, their best isn’t very good.

For example, it’s almost impossible to get someone from Google to help you out if you encounter a problem. There is no telephone number you can call to talk to a human being. They do have a support email address, but when the response you get back is not helpful, there’s little that you can do.

Activity: Find the support

Have participants pick a social media site. Go through the web-site and find the “help” and “support” pages (if there are any).

Is there a customer support help forum?

Is there a form for requesting help?

Is there an email address for requesting help?

Is there a telephone number you can call for support?

When your account is disabled

Present

Social media sites often disable accounts. Sometimes it happens because the person breaks the Terms of Service. Sometimes it happens by mistake. There are probably other reasons.

If your account is disabled, how does that affect your ability to participate in workflows using that tool?

For example, if you use your Google account for many things and it’s disabled, how does that affect you? What can you do about it?

Outages and service interruptions

Present

When the service has an outage, there’s nothing you can do but wait for it to get resolved.

Changes

Present

If the service is discontinued or changed in some fundamental way, you either have to roll with it or find another service. This is true of all service providers, but with social media services, it happens very often.

For example:

  • Facebook changed their privacy policy in November of 2009, December of 2009, April of 2010 and then again in May 2010 after a public outcry. [2] [3]
  • Etherpad was bought by Google and discontinued their Etherpad system in April 2010.
  • Ning (social site system) announced they’re changing from free accounts to paid accounts in May, 2010.
  • Radar (photo sharing site) folded in May, 2010.
  • Socializr (event coordination site) folded in September, 2009.
  • Google released Google Buzz in February, 2010 which when it launched automatically enabled connections and data sharing between users and who they’re most likely to want to connect to creating a huge privacy mess.
  • A bug in Facebook caused private messages to get sent to the wrong users in February, 2010.
  • Twitter goes down periodically. 2009 was particularly bad year for the service. 2010 has had fewer outages.
[2]http://mattmckeon.com/facebook-privacy/
[3]http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/facebook-timeline

Things to keep in mind

Present

If the social media service removes a feature you require, changes their terms of service in a way you can’t work with, disables your account, or otherwise prevents you from using the service:

  • do you have a backup plan?
  • can you use another service?
  • are you able to export your data in order to back it up?

Some social media services run software that you can host yourself on your own server. When you do this, then you’re in control of your data and you’re in control of changes.

However, running your own software brings its own set of administrative and expertise problems.

Sometimes you can pay for a service and in doing so, you should have a contract which gives you some rights to how the service changes in the future. Sometimes this can help.

There are FLOSS project alternatives and options to many social media services. Choosing a FLOSS alternative allows you to host your own instance, but also allows you to participate in future development of the software.

For example, Status.net [4] is a FLOSS alternative to Twitter. LimeSurvey [5] is a FLOSS alternative to SurveyMonkey. WordPress (the software) [6] is an alternative to WordPress (the service) [7].

[4]Status.net: http://status.net/
[5]LimeSurvey: http://limesurvey.org/
[6]WordPress (the software): http://wordpress.org/
[7]WordPress (the service): http://wordpress.com/

Resources and articles

http://www.jonobacon.org/2010/03/26/facebook-account-disabled/
Jono Bacon’s facebook account is disabled and he wasn’t able to do anything about it until he blogged about it. Jono Bacon is a minor celebrity in the FLOSS world.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/15/twitter-down-check-status_n_463134.html
Twitter service ups and downs over 2010.
http://adage.com/digitalnext/post?article_id=133896
Craig Daitch talks about when his Facebook account was disabled.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13577_3-20002611-36.html
Ning announces that they’re moving from free accounts to paid accounts.
http://www.chrisbrogan.com/when-google-owns-you-a-new-chapter/
Chris Brogan’s Google account is disabled. He lists the things he’s no longer able to do and what happened afterwards. Chris Brogan is a minor celebrity in the podcasting world.
http://techcrunch.com/tag/deadpool/
The “deadpool” tag on TechCrunch holds articles about social media sites and Web 2.0 sites that have gone out of business and closed.