I’m noticing that these things are moving to the next level. We are seeing the next stage of social manipulation. These are attempts to grab attention where the mechanisms for detecting such grabs are still under-developed. An arms race. Only this time – it’s happening on a personal level. The friend list.

Our friends and contacts (as we discussed at last week’s IIW2006 session on Reputation, “who you hang with”) say a lot about who we are and what type of person we are. So, therefore, it follows that this list of people would become a vector of attack for manipulating that reputation calculation. And it seems so wrong…

Bruce Schneier captures the sense of strangeness – and the fascination of watching this unfold:

Hacking Reputation in MySpace and Facebook

I’ll be the first to admit it: I know next to nothing about MySpace or Facebook. I do know that they’re social networking sites, and that — at least to some extent — your reputation is based on who are your “friends” and what they say about you.

Which means that this follows, like day follows night. “Fake Your Space” is a site where you can hire fake friends to leave their pictures and personalized comments on your page. Now you can pretend that you’re more popular than you actually are:

FakeYourSpace is an exciting new service that enables normal everyday people like me and you to have Hot friends on popular social networking sites such as MySpace and FaceBook. Not only will you be able to see these Gorgeous friends on your friends list, but FakeYourSpace enables you to create customized messages and comments for our Models to leave you on your comment wall. FakeYourSpace makes it easy for any regular person to make it seem like they have a Model for a friend. It doesn’t stop there however. Maybe you want to appear as if you have a Model for a lover. FakeYourSpace can make this happen!

What’s next? Services that verify friends on your friends’ MySpace pages? Services that block friend verification services? Where will this all end up?

( via Howard Greenstein at Social Media Club )

As for how this ties into reputation management software? I think the goal of reputation management software should be to make public and make explicit those connections we want to publish about ourselves. But with that comes a responsibility on the part of both the publisher and the consumer to understand the metadata surrounding those connections and those claims.

We need tools to be able to verify things – follow leads – trace back and investigate. Without that, everything really is a popularity contest that can be gamed very easily. We need the ability to see who is lying. Social norms will sort out the punishment.

Of course, that assumes that people are watching and that people care, which is another matter altogether.

This is exactly what they should do and what they should have provided at the time of the launch of Mini-Feed and News Feed.

Both Fred and danah have weighed in and for the most part, I think this will be a truly pivotal moment for Facebook. They’ve messed up, said as much, and provided a set of tools to win back the trust of their community. The students will not flee – and the next Friendster has yet to be identified.

Good job Facebook.

And like I said, they do get it and they will change things to make it work. The fact that they knew they were racing the clock is a good indication of how they’ll fare. Don’t count them out yet.

An Open Letter from Mark Zuckerberg:

We really messed this one up. When we launched News Feed and Mini-Feed we were trying to provide you with a stream of information about your social world. Instead, we did a bad job of explaining what the new features were and an even worse job of giving you control of them. I’d like to try to correct those errors now.

When I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better. I wanted to create an environment where people could share whatever information they wanted, but also have control over whom they shared that information with. I think a lot of the success we’ve seen is because of these basic principles.

We made the site so that all of our members are a part of smaller networks like schools, companies or regions, so you can only see the profiles of people who are in your networks and your friends. We did this to make sure you could share information with the people you care about. This is the same reason we have built extensive privacy settings – to give you even more control over who you share your information with.

Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about. If you have more comments, please send them over.

This may sound silly, but I want to thank all of you who have written in and created groups and protested. Even though I wish I hadn’t made so many of you angry, I am glad we got to hear you. And I am also glad that News Feed highlighted all these groups so people could find them and share their opinions with each other as well.

About a week ago I created a group called Free Flow of Information on the Internet, because that’s what I believe in – helping people share information with the people they want to share it with. I’d encourage you to check it out to learn more about what guides those of us who make Facebook. Tomorrow at 4pm est, I will be in that group with a bunch of people from Facebook, and we would love to discuss all of this with you. It would be great to see you there.

Thanks for taking the time to read this,

Mark

Update: Just found Charlie O’Donnell’s post. Sharing a mind is a tough assignment.

The students of the Facebook are currently working through the newfound reality of their complete Facebook activity being front-and-center to all their ‘friends’. The new mini-feed of their activity within Facebook (comments, notes, adding/removing of pictures, friends and groups) is now broadcast to all their friends’ dashboards automatically and without their consent. As of today, there is not an option to remove this functionality either – mini-feed items can only be deleted after the fact.

i love information. i love my friends. i love information about my friends; however, i don’t like everyone knowing information about what my friends and I do. good networking is like good flirting: leave something to the imagination!

There are two views of these mini-feeds:

1) A user looking at their own page sees a reflection of all their friends’ activity within the system for the last couple weeks – a ‘fortnight story’ of their friends’ activities/updates.

2) A user looking at another user’s page will see what that particular user has been up to the last couple weeks – a ‘fortnight story’ for someone else.

I think this move was inevitable and I applaud it. But I’ve got a longer view than someone using the Facebook today. I would be upset if my information was suddenly available like this. I am not sure why they didn’t have a smaller rollout with some feedback testing. I feel they’re going to get burned by public opinion in the days to come.

I agree, this new facebook is ridiculous! It makes me want to remove my account. I don’t want everyone knowing what I am doing at all times…it has become creepy. Please change it back!!

Normal is shifting.

The users of the Facebook were living in a dream world. Of course their activity was being logged – it’s how Facebook became Facebook. It’s just that the users of the site, until today, didn’t expect their information to be aggregated in quite this way – simply because it hadn’t happened before. And I feel sorry for those who have been ‘outed’ by this system and will continue to feel the brunt of these changes in the next few days as the changes propagate and begin to have a ripple effect on behavior within the system.

I don’t want everybody seeing who i friended, whose wall I wrote on, and when I change my relationship status everytime they sign on. This is a total violation of everyones [sic] privacy. We all hate it. If we want to see something about someone, we will go to their profiles our selves.

This information – this activity information – was already public. It was already part of a public discussion that the users were engaged in by being a member of the community. These students were spreading their political views, their personal habits, their class schedules and friendship networks for all to see (well, all within the Facebook). However, they had the luxury of assuming that most of the people looking at them would have to dig for that information themselves. Someone who wanted the aggregated view of a new aquaintance had some work to do. There was some social friction to knowing too much. And this was comforting – to a point. There was a barrier to entry that insulated the students from the reality.

This change brings them kicking and screaming into the light.

I love facebook, I really do, but this “new facebook” is not improved, it’s horrible! I dont want everyone to know what I am always doing! I wonder what we can do to have it changed?

What we’re seeing is the birth pains of a third generation of social networking.

The first generation was email/IM buddy lists. These allowed us to connect and keep track of our people across distance and time in a way that was more efficient and more seamless than ever before. We knew who was on our lists and we managed the connections. Visibility was limited but we were hooked.

The second generation is our current crop led by Friendster and now MySpace/LiveJournal/Facebook. These sites allow for users to keep track of one another and add a layer of visibility that was quite dramatic when first ‘discovered’. Users were very excited about sharing pictures and collecting as many friends as possible because all these were visible to those who were watching. It was like the mall and middle school all over again. To be seen was the thing.

The third generation will expose the history of this visibility. The full history of what you’ve done in the network. A record of how you’ve behaved in the past will be available in the future. This will (and should) affect your behavior and your friend lists and your decision about which pictures to post.

I really don’t care, i think its a bad move to make it default on with no opt out… …i’m just worried that i will be caught in lies… like saying i am busy working on something, add a friend, and have another friend know i was lying to them, because at 7:34pm i was on facebook…

And this is a good thing – as it mirrors the real world. You shouldn’t lie to your friends. As I’ve said before, the real world is a quaint place where actions matter and people remember. It’s also a place where this virtual overlay we’re playing in today will be taken for granted in only a few very short years. The decisions you make online today will, and should, matter tomorrow.

Students of the Facebook… Play hard, but play smart – and know that everyone is watching.

P.S. I’ll go out on a limb here and say that I expect Facebook to make these mini-feeds optional very shortly. The feedback has been very loud. That said, a dose of reality this big is understandably hard to take.

Update: Just over two days later and the first changes are live.  They’ll survive just fine.