Posts tagged People
Data Visualization for People Who Don’t Visualize Data: CA ERwin 8.2
Feb 3rd
In enterprises everywhere, including even the largest ones, the transition to cloud-based architectures has brought a new class of managers into the computing process. Suddenly, personnel managers and folks whose purview had been limited to finance and personnel, are being doubled-up with oversight roles for cloud deployments. The back office is no longer in the back (or the basement), and now these new managers are wondering: What is all this we’re dealing with?
Donna Burbank – who’s a senior director of product marketing for CA Technologies’ long-time data visualization tool, ERwin, has a new phrase for this class of customers: business sponsors. “When I talk to our customers, they tell me it’s a whole new… thing, for lack of a more technical word. They’ve heard of SQL Server, but what is this SQL Azure thing? They don’t have the skill sets, and may be nervous about that. These business sponsors might not be moving the information, but they want to see it. And they don’t want to look at those database scripts. They want to look at something they can understand.”
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So it is that CA Technologies found itself in the business of manufacturing a class of software that a new and growing chunk of its customers might not actually care about all that much: database visualization tools. ERwin has been the market share leader in this category ever since its creation in 1998. Its typical customers have been database architects (DBAs), the people whose jobs are to model the classifications and structures for the relational data that businesses rely upon every day.
Welcome to Your World
But the shift to cloud technologies has partly been fueled by the need for tremendous space for data warehousing – to house the huge data stores generated by millions of Internet customer transactions. It’s that shift which is pushing data outside of the constraints of traditional SQL relational databases. That push is forcing businesses to examine, some for the very first time, the structure of their data. And what they’re seeing, they don’t understand.
“A lot of the move to the cloud is a business decision. The technical people doing the move are probably still the DBAs, but they’re challenged,” CA’s Burbank tells RWW. “There will always be that core group of people who want to use a data model, that’s our sweet spot right now: the data architect, the DBA. Those people and more would like to use a Web-based interface.”
ERwin’s new Web portal, she explains, is a browser-based interface for information that has otherwise been modeled for DBAs by ERwin Data Modeler (which itself moves to version 8.2 this week). This new portal will help both architects and Burbank’s “sponsors” to analyze the relationships of data from a business impact standpoint. “If I’m building a data warehouse, I want to see how data moves from the source system to the target warehouse to the reporting tool. Maybe I’m changing a data element; what other parts of the organization are affected? You could sort of get that through ERwin’s repository [in Model Manager] with some queries, but it wasn’t the tool for that.”
The new, more objective breakdown aims to give multiple classes of users a comprehension of the data that they may have never had before. A “sponsor” who wants to search for relationships is going to expect search to behave like Google, Burbank explains. So the Web Portal tool gives that user a text-based search query line (shown above). What that user gets in return will be something that may explain what tables or fields relate to the search criteria, but it might not directly correlate to the model as the original DBA intended.
As Burbank explains, the business user, not getting a complete overview from the initial response, may decide to export the data he’s seeing into Excel, and generate some PivotTables from them. The DBA, on the other hand, may use the Portal’s new graphical impact analysis tools to drill down further, or perhaps execute a “What If?” experiment. If a column is changed on a table, for instance, the DBA can see how the rest of the schema is impacted. “It’s that type of drilldown over the Web that they could never do before,” she remarks.
Big data vs. “lots of data”
All this said, ERwin is not quite yet a data warehousing assistance tool. While CA’s Donna Burbank says it’s something her company is considering, she points out that Hadoop and the restructuring of data it entails, lend themselves to very different situations.
“I’ve done several presentations where I’ve explained to people that there’s ‘big data,’ and then there’s ‘lots of data,’” she relates. “And these are different use cases. Maybe I’m an energy company, and I’m trying to use a Hadoop-type structure to see uses across my different [operating units], and I need to eventually manage that in a warehouse. It’s that analysis of that big data that then goes into a data model. One use case [involves] massive volume, real-time, more of a programmatic approach to data. There’s a lot of messaging there around, is data modeling going away? Is data warehousing going away? Today, it’s two different use cases. You’re doing an analysis, and then you use the data model to make sense of that raw data. And if I’m going to use it for a BI report, that’s when your data model comes in. I’ve done my data analysis with the big data; here’s my data model to say which pieces of that I used in the warehouse.”
Real-time analysis of big data, she goes on, may enable DBAs to add some elements to the relational data model that they may not have seen before.
As for the other use case, Burbank agrees that data modeling may never be appealing to 100% of the “sponsor” audience. But making it appeal to a somewhat greater audience through more intuitive graphics, along with Google-like search, could go a long way toward enabling those tasked with new responsibilities to be able to better understand what they are, and carry them out with a greater sense of confidence.
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Link for People, Not Search Engines
Feb 1st
There are hundreds of ways to build links the wrong way, and just as many ways to do it right. Your goal should be to be able to survive and thrive with or without Google. Never forget the quality, intent and relevancy of the link building process.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
How Targeting People Will Change Paid Search
Feb 1st
Google’s privacy policy revisions and the continued expansion of Google + are part of an important trend in paid search: targeting ads to people, not just search queries. The more relevant the ads, the more satisfied users, the more clicks on ads.
View full post on Search Engine Watch – Latest
People Are Actually Paying For Spotify After All
Jan 27th
When Spotify first launched in the U.S. over the summer, few doubted that the service would be popular among music fans. The real question has always been whether the company’s freemium business model would manage to convert enough users to paying subscribers. It’s still relatively early, but so far things look promising.
More than 3 million people are now paying to use Spotify, according to the Financial Times. That’s a conversion rate of more than 20%, a figure that has reportedly increased by 5% since the service hit 1 million users last year. In other words, not only is Spotify itself growing, but the rate at which people sign up for a premium or unlimited account is also increasing.
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This overall growth has been fueled in no small part by the company’s partnership with Facebook, which enables the kind of super-tight, frictionless integration that the social networking giant has been pushing since f8 last March. The flood of “so-and-so listened to such-and-such” news ticker updates may be too much for some people, but the partnership has succeeded in putting Spotify’s brand and functionality in front of millions of potential new users.
It also doesn’t hurt that the six-month window of unlimited, free streaming music for new users has begun coming to a close for the service’s earliest U.S. adopters. As that happens, those who are truly hooked on the service are forced to either put up with listening caps or cough up $5 per month to remove them. The company hasn’t said what percentage of those paid users have opted for the pricier “Premium” account, which allows for mobile streaming in addition to stripping out ads and listening caps.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t still major, outstanding questions about Spotify and the viability of the all-you-can-stream model it shares with the likes of Rdio and MOG. The music labels are evidently happy enough with the arrangement to stay on board for now, but the artists are a different story.
The streaming services pay out notoriously low royalty fees to artists, some of which have begun to question the value in being on the service. Sure, it’s a great way to promote one’s music, but it may not be economically advantageous for artists, especially if it ends up hurting record sales.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Nearly 1 Million People Jailbroke Their iPhone or iPad Over the Weekend
Jan 24th
People sure do love jailbreaking their iOS devices. In fact, after Friday’s launch of the Absinthe A5 tool, jailbreaking iOS 5 on A5-powered devices was almost as popular as the iPhone 4S itself when it first launched.
Nearly 1 million people jailbroke their iPhone 4S or iPad 2 between Friday and Monday, according a blog post from the Chronic-Dev Team, who took the lead in developing the untethered solution for jailbreaking iOS 5 on Apple’s newest gadgets.
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News of Friday’s launch of Absinthe A5 temporarily crashed the greenpois0n site, as it evidently gave hundreds of thousands of users a fun weekend mini-project. The initial tool was only released for Mac OS X, but a Windows version quickly followed over the weekend.
Not surprisingly, the iPhone 4S was the most-jailbroken device with over 491,325 phones broken free from the restrictions of the iTunes App Store. Since iOS 5 came pre-installed on the iPhone 4S, this is the first time its owners could jailbreak the device without tethering it to a computer, which is too cumbersome a process to be considered by most users. The iPad 2 saw n 308,967 new jailbreaks, on top of the 152,940 second generation iPads running iOS 4 that were re-jailbroken. Those users were likely waiting to upgrade to iOS 5 until this solution was available, which is one of the drawbacks of jailbreaking.
Why People Jailbreak
For devotees of the jailbreaking process, the drawbacks are vastly overshadowed by the benefits. Rather than be able to cite a single “killer app” that makes it worth it, most just prefer the general freedom and customizability it offers. That includes the ability to tweak the visual appearance of the device’s UI and run any number of unauthorized apps.
Cydia, the repository of apps for jailbroken iPhones and iPads, contains many applications that would never meet Apple’s approval requirements for inclusion in the official App Store. For some, it’s because of trademark or copyright issues, such as video game emulators or controversial music services like Grooveshark.
Quite often, the apps don’t adhere to Apple’s agreements with the carriers, who would obviously never approve of an app that lets users tether their phone to their laptop and use its data connection without paying extra. With the iPhone 4S, the feature that offers perhaps the most new potential for jailbreakers is Siri, which developers have wasted no time hacking and tinkering with.
As controversial and officially frowned-upon as the whole thing is, many of the experimental features available on jailbroken iOS devices actually end up being included in the next release of the OS. This was true of recording video, which was technically possible on a jailbroken iPhone 3G. Similarly, the overhauled Notification Center found in iOS 5 bears a striking resemblance to the notification system available on jailbroken devices running iOS 4.
Jailbreaking May Not Be Mainstream, But Its Popularity is Growing
As Apple’s gadgets continue to burn through sales records, there also appears to be a growing interest among users in doing more with their phones, much like Android device owners are already accustomed to.
Truth be told, jailbreaking probably isn’t something the average user is going to get into, given the nature of the process, its risks and the tools involved. It’s really something more geared toward tinkerers and those who want more control over what their device can do.
Given the massive number of iOS devices out in the wild, several hundred thousand new jailbreaks doesn’t come anywhere close to a constituting majority of of users. Rather, it’s the pace of the growth that’s interesting to see.
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Why People Have Fake Facebook Profiles
Jan 23rd
Does this sound like a familiar scenario? It’s late afternoon, and you’re clicking around on Facebook. Then you stumble upon a person who appears to be Facebook friends with many of your mutual friends. This person is active on Facebook, posting links, videos, images and status updates. Still, something just seems off. A bit more digging reveals that this user isn’t a real person. But Facebook hasn’t noticed.
“Facebook has always been based on a real name culture,” a Facebook spokesperson says to me via email. “We fundamentally believe this leads to greater accountability and a safer and more trusted environment for people who use the service.” But what if you need to maintain a fake profile for personal, professional, security or creative reasons?
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Fake Facebook Profile #1: When Full Disclosure Isn’t An Option
Chicago-based performance artist Daaimah Mubashshir maintains two Facebook profiles: one for her current self, which includes her theater work, and another for her “old” self. She is currently working on a show called “The Untangling at the Junction,” which delves directly into issues about being black and queer in an Islamic environment, and it’s something she prefers not to share with people from her past. (Full disclosure: Daaimah and I worked together about a year ago on a sketch comedy show “Aqua and Baum is Broke as Hell.”)
“My old/asexual profile is full of extended family, religious people from my childhood and work colleagues who are unfamiliar with my theater work,” she says. “I came to the decision that now, while I am in the development mode for these projects, it is not the time to be responding to comments or fielding questions about sensitive topics.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg will never live down his statement about how, if he were to recreate Facebook today, user information would be public by default. Sure, he backpedaled on that later and adjusted Facebook’s privacy settings, but that statement pretty much sums up his understanding of sensitive, personal information that people post.
“Facebook and Google are not at all interested in recreating identity,” says Mubashshir. “I think that these are businesses profiting from data gathering, so the identity piece is just a selling point to keep its users interested. Sure they could approach things differently but why would they when we give them what they want for free now?”
Fake Facebook Profile #2: The Importance of a Pen Name
Chicago-based writer Jerry Brennan has two Facebook profiles – oh wait, three, actually. When he first joined Facebook, Jerry was just himself. “It didn’t occur to me to have another for awhile,” he says. That was, until he published a book and started blogging under his pen name, Alfonso Mangione. But that was years before he set up his own Facebook profile.
“Indeed, in the course of getting my book reviewed, writing reviews for other peoples’ books, blogging, and generally trying to keep an active online presence, I ended up knowing several people only through my pen name,” says Brennan. And so Alfonso’s Facebook profile was born. He is a “real” person, he has published a book, and he regularly communicates with his friends.
“Alfonso Mangione also ended up becoming a different persona, someone who would do and say things I wouldn’t do or say–hopefully entertaining, and something to live up my friends’ Facebook feeds, but he can be an ass at times.”
Brennan also sees the importance of developing an online following. “We [writers] need to get an audience before we can get an audience.” His third fake Facebook profile is Muamar Gadhafi, but that didn’t end up as Brennan intended.
“I read about the Bronx Zoo’s Cobra’s rapid ascension in number of followers, and the various dead bin Ladens, and figured I’d have a go at it myself…except Gadhafi didn’t really take off like either of them, so I really wouldn’t mind if they killed him off.” (Full disclosure: I am reading Jerry’s latest manuscript, “Resistance,” a World War II mystery of sorts.)
Fake Facebook Profile #3: Just For Laughs…
Baumshaquita Siegel is a 20-something Jewigga wannabe famous rap star from the northern suburbs of Chicago. She spends her days frying chicken at Harold’s Chicken Shack, and her evenings either being a Lupe Fiasco wannabe or hanging out with her granny at their shared apartment in the orthodox Jewish West Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago.
As believable as this sounds, however, Baumshaquita (Baum for short) is not a real person. She is a sketch comedy character that I created and sometimes refer to as my “alter ego.”
I thought about creating a Twitter account for Baumshaquita (@shitbaumsayz), but she said more than just “shit.” Plus, all of Baum’s “friends” were on Facebook. Because of Facebook’s easy comment threads, she had a few very memorable conversations. One time she not-so-subtly hit on the person that I (Alicia) was dating. Another time she lamented the homelessness problem near her place of work. Baum is a general disrupter and Internet loudmouth, frequently calling out to all her “wiggas” who also chill on Facebook.
Baum is also a stereotype, simultaneously poking fun at herself and the idea of “wiggers,” which urbandictionary.com defines as “a male Caucasian, usually born and raised in the suburbs that displays a strong desire to emulate African-American Hip Hop culture and style through ‘bling’ fashion and generally accepted ‘thug life’ guiding principles.” Baum stayed on Facebook long after the show ended, making new friends and annoying old ones. She knows a lot of folks that I (Alicia) don’t.
Fake Facebook Profile #4: The Anonymous Security Professional
Fellow ReadWriteWeb Writer David Strom spoke with his friend who works as a security professional. Because of the sensitive nature of this person’s job, they maintain a number of Facebook profiles. This person was happy to answer questions anonymously.
“As a security professional, I needed to experience Facebook usage, controls, and risks first-hand,” this person writes. “However, I do prefer to keep my personal and business life separate. Moreover, if my Facebook account were to be targeted by those who might get a kick out of hacking a security professional, I didn’t want to expose my personal contacts to social engineering.” This person’s Facebook friends are entirely personal, and limited to people with whom they want to stay in close contact.
Interestingly, this same person maintains a real Twitter handle for business, and Facebook and Twitter personas exclusively for a charity. “In that case, uniform messaging is important, perhaps even essential. I just use both to extend marketing reach, other charities tend to follow us on Twitter, while individuals tend to ‘like’ us on Facebook.”
Fake Facebook Profiles #5: An 8-Year-Old Facebook Game Player
“My teenage daughter used to use a fake profile to help her garner more points in games,” says ReadWriteWeb’s Community Manager Robyn Tippins. “When she tired of it, my then 8-year-old son took it over to play Facebook games.”
I’m not going to reveal that fake Facebook profile’s name. Surprisingly, Facebook has never noticed it.
“Ironically,” says Robyn, “Facebook has twice shut down the 14-year-old’s real account mistakenly. So the one who complies with the terms of service has twice been shut down and reinstated.”
Meanwhile, the other profile still lives – and Robyn’s son is now 9-years-old.
How To Play By Facebook’s Rules
Angela Motola-Donofrio, owner of Free Spirit Yacht Cruises Inc., says she, too, has multiple Facebook accounts. But of all the people I spoke to, Angela is the only person who handles multiple accounts in the Facebook way.
Angela opened her personal Facebook account in December 2007, but didn’t do anything with it until the summer of 2008.
“I noticed people were posting pictures of their Free Spirit Yacht Cruises events on their pages and that got me interested in Facebook,” she says. “Once I started posting pictures and sharing with family and friends, I found it was easier than email and more fun. I do have Free Spirit clients as friends because I didn’t have a business or group page in the beginning, and a lot of our clients come back year after year and they are like friends.”
Angela did open a group page and a business page, but is now trying to get rid of the group page and focus only on the business page. “We like to share photos, blog posts, events, fun facts, videos on our business page,” she writes. “It’s not as interactive as we would like but still feel it’s a great resource for potential and existing clients.”
She also does not see Facebook as a reflection of who she is, which is more in line with who adults are using Facebook. “I have been using it more as a communication tool sharing experiences, photos…I believe in authenticity,” Angela says. “You should be able to have different handles, but people should know who you are.”
Facebook, Data and You
When I started writing this article, I was hoping Facebook would consider talking with me about the multi-faceted idea of identity in online communities. A Facebook spokesperson would have none of that, however.
“We require personal Profiles (Timelines) to be owned and run by a real-life person,” a Facebook spokesperson told me. “It’s against our terms of service to create more than one personal Profile. Instead, we encourage people to create a Page in order to establish a second presence on Facebook. Pages allow an organization, business, celebrity, band, pet or other entity to maintain a presence on Facebook.”
Jerry Brennan works as a data manager by day, and he understands Facebook’s “data mindset.”
“If you have a table behind the scenes called ‘Users,’ you want each record in the table to represent one person, and you don’t want any person to have more than one record, otherwise your database is not an accurate depiction of reality, and all sorts of craziness can ensue. It’s the same reason we so jealously guard our social security numbers.”
Facebook will also stick to its real-world name policy because it makes money off of ads which rely on real eyes from real, living people. If Facebook is populated by fake handles, pen names, sketch comedy characters, kids playing games, and security workers just trying to stay anonymous, well, Facebook’s ad numbers will not be as accurate.
Will anyone actually abide by Facebook’s rules? That is up to its users.
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This Is How You Defeat SOPA/PIPA: 7.5M People Sign Petitions, 40K Call Capitol Hill
Jan 19th
Yesterday Internet users across the United States rushed to their keyboards, sat up straight, and starred menacingly into their computer screens while silently saying in their heads: “Take that, Internet censorship!” Then they hit ENTER on nearly 8 million petitions to help stop SOPA/PIPA. Internet giants Reddit, Wikipedia and Craigslist joined in the protests by going dark for an entire day. The bill caught the attention of mainstream media sources, even dominating the New York Times’ homepage. Nineteen senators now oppose PIPA, including seven who formerly co-sponsored the bill. OpenCongress’s Protect IP Act Senate whip count currently shows 33 senators supporting PIPA, and 39 opposing it.
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Even though Google did not blackout its site, 7 million Internet users signed the petition.
The Progressive Change Campaign Committee’s petition logged 225,000 signatures on its joint petition with Reddit and Craigslist. Protestors made over 40,000 calls to Capitol Hill.
MoveOn.org participated in the Internet blackout day and also collected 310,000 signatures for its SOPA/PIPA petition. It raised Internet awareness with a few graphics, too, including “None Of The Links On Our Site Are Working Today”, which was viewed more than 23,000 times.
But SOPA/PIPA isn’t dead yet. Politico reports that Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), a cosponsor of the bill, and Jon Kyl (R-Ariz), who is leaning toward “no,” are in discussions to exempt search-result blocking from PIPA. For now, it’s still unclear whether the bill will pass. It is scheduled for a procedural vote on Tuesday.
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Study: Why Do People Use Facebook?
Jan 16th
Facebook is an accepted means of communication. It is a never-ending virtual social gathering filled with adopted puppies, cute LOL kitties, baby announcements, viral articles and videos, events, groups, organizations and fan pages. But why do people really use it?
A new study entitled “Why do people use Facebook?” from Boston University’s Ashwini Nadkarni and Stefan G. Hofmann proposes that the social network meets two primary human needs: (1) the need to belong and (2) the need for self-presentation. The study also acknowledges demographic and cultural factors as they relate to the belonging need, and the variation of personality types on Facebook usage.
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The study defines social networking sites (SNSs) as “Internet-based services that give individuals three major capabilities: The ability to construct a public or semi-private profile, identify a list of other users with whom a connection is shared, and view and track connections made by individuals and others.
Who Is Using Facebook? A Breakdown by Demographics
Before 2009, MySpace led the social network race. By April 2009, it was dead. A 2008 study by E. Hargittai found that Hispanic students made up 25% of the MySpace population as compared to only 14% of Facebook users. The demographics of Facebook are quite different. Women are more likely to use Facebook than men, and Hispanic students were less likely to use it than Caucasians.
A study from 2009 by Grasmuck, Martin & Zhao found that African Americans, Latinos and Indian students displayed “greater intensity of cultural selves (marked by specific consumer and popular culture preferences) than the White students and Vietnamese ancestry students.”
This is in line with findings from the Facebook Data team, which shows the steady increase of black and Hispanic users in early 2009, and a decline of the number of Asian users. This data looked at surnames on Facebook with data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau to see percentages of racial minorities on Facebook.
What Types of People Use Facebook? A Cyberpsychology Approach
Previous studies have looked at the similarities between offline personality portrayal and online personality, proving strong connections between real personality and Facebook-related behavior. Extroverts report the most friends and highest engagement levels. People categorized as conscientious types – disciplined, organized and achievement-oriented – report the least Facebook use.
Facebook engagement results in a trail of virtual residue, including photos, videos, links, status updates and other traces of a virtual presence. A 2009 study by Ross et al. found that personality types that ranked high on neuroticism claimed the Facebook Wall as their favorite component. People who were low on neuroticism, however, said photos were their favorite. A 2009 study by E.S. Orr, et. al. found that while shy individuals had fewer friends on Facebook relative to nonshy people, the shy individuals spent more time on Facebook and liked the social network more overall.
A 2010 study entitled “Narcissism and social networking web sites” found a positive association between narcissism and Facebook use, especially in relation to profiles and photos, both features that allow users to promote themselves. The study found that people with a high level of narcissism and people with low levels of self-esteem spent more than an hour per day on Facebook.
Frequent FB users “exhibit a high level of extraversion, low self-esteem, high levels of neuroticism and narcissism, and low levels of self-esteem and self-worth are associated with high FB use.” The study goes on to note that frequent Facebook use may be associated with lower academic performance, but it may lead to higher self-esteem and a sense of belonging.
We All Want To Be A Part…Of Something: Facebook and the Dual-Factor Model
Everyone just wants to belong, right? In the online aspect of our lives, Facebook offers us that virtual sense of belonging. The study claims that Facebook meets two basic social needs: (1) the need to belong and (2) the need for self-presentation. Self-esteem and self-worth are associated closely with the first basic social need, to belong. Facebook use is, of course, also influenced by sociodemographic and cultural factors. Females and ethnic minorities tended to use Facebook more than males and Caucasians.
This last part of the study looked at Facebook use in individualistic versus, which emphasize individual achievements and success, versus collectivistic cultures, which focus on harmony within the group. In these cultures, individual gain is less important than the social group. The study hypothesizes that “members from individualistic cultures are more likely to share private information with their Facebook friends and more likely to raise potentially controversial topics as compared to Facebook users from collectivistic cultures.”
People in collectivist cultures are more likely to stay in troubled marriages and jobs than people in individualistic cultures according to a 2000 study by Diener. As such, Facebook can serve as a support system for those people in collectivist cultures, who have frequent interactions and a close circle of Facebook friends.
A study called “Mirror, Mirror on my Facebook wall: Effects of exposure to Facebook on self-esteem,” looked at the results of being exposed to information presented on one’s Facebook profile, suggesting that it can help enhance self-esteem. This proved especially true when a person edited information about the self.
Can Facebook enhance self-esteem through offline friendships? A 2010 study by Lou in Dissertation Abstracts International: Section B: The Sciences and Engineering, 70, found that Facebook use intensity reduced perceived levels of loneliness, but FB’s improvement of a user’s social life did not improve the user’s self-esteem.
Other studies have found correlations between Facebook use and improvement of self-esteem. Yu and colleagues collected surveys from college students majoring in business at an undergraduate school in China. Results showed that FB use benefited socialization and social learning outcomes, including higher levels of self-esteem. The findings in this study suggest that “the association between self-esteem and Facebook use is complex and possibly moderated by cultural and social factors.” In collectivistic culture such as China, Facebook use may enhance self esteem. Still, more research must be conducted.
What about Facebook use and social connection? Disconnection often times motivates Facebook use, and being connected rewards it according to a 2011 study by Sheldon, Abad & Hirsch, the authors discovered that “frequent Facebook use correlated with feelings of general connection in life and also with feelings of general disconnection in life.” In yet another study, researchers found that “the correlation of disconnection with Facebook use was mediated by the tendency to cope with disconnection via Facebook.” In other words, Facebook became both the outlet for disconnection and the perpetuation of it.
Another 2011 study by Kim & Lee that visualizing social connects on Facebook actually boosted users’ self-esteem.
The Bottom Line: Facebook Fulfills Our Need for Self-Presentation
Studies have found that on Facebook, the self you portray is not idealized – it is the real you. But a 2008 study by Zhao, Grasmuck & Martin found that the Facebook selves appeared to be socially desirable identities that individuals aspired to have offline but do not have – yet. Furthermore, identities created on Facebook differed greatly from those constructed in anonymous online environments.
What about Facebook’s impact on impression formation? If you’re going on a date with someone you meet on OKCupid, for example, chances are you’ve friended them on Facebook to get a better idea of them. Recruiters are using Facebook to screen potential job applicants. An overabundance of friend connections actually produced doubts about FB users’ actual popularity, according to a 2008 study by Tong.
The study concludes this section with the idea that Facebook profiles reflect the users’ public persona, which appears to be “shaped by the need for self-presentation.” These types of needs guide the users’ behaviors, profile photo and number of friends, all of which make up one’s impression of the user.
So, Why Are We Really Using Facebook?
Facebook currently has 800 million users worldwide. According to the study, people use Facebook to fulfill two basic social needs: the need to belong and the need for self-presentation. Facebook use is also influenced by outside factors, such as cultural background, sociodemographic variables and personality traits.
These findings account for the oft-cited “shutting off Facebook for a period of time” social experiments that we tend to see floating about the Internet. In this “Facebook detox,” the user felt upset about the Facebook privacy settings, and a general sense of information overload. So, he “detoxed” for a period of 30 days.
A recent New York Times article entitled “The Facebook Resisters” sparked a similar controversy stemming from concerns about privacy, alienation and a feeling of information overload. Friends of mine have often times referred to Facebook as a “black hole.”
Mashable writer Sam Laird conducted a similar experiment. He deactivated his account in July 2011; five months later he wrote about it in “My Life Without Facebook: A Social Experiment.” While he did find that he no longer had the “should I post this to Facebook?” question lingering in the back of his mind all the time, and he spent less time in front of the computer overall, there was one thing he missed.
He missed those “funny Facebook photos from parties or nights out come up when hanging out with friends.” Laird wrote that he found himself “playing catch-up when someone brings up an article someone else shared on Facebook.”
He misses what most every Facebook user would miss if they shut down their account: that sense of belonging and of self-presentation. These are the reasons people use Facebook, despite its long list of privacy issues.
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How the Web and Mobile Tech Are Changing How People Learn Music
Jan 12th
That the Web has revolutionized music is not exactly a news flash, but most people typically think about that in terms of music consumption. iTunes. YouTube. SoundCloud. Spotify. Group listening sites like Turntable.fm. Recommendation engines like those of Pandora, Last.fm and the Echo Nest. Now voice-controlled Internet radio apps are coming pre-installed in new cars. There’s no doubt that they way people discover and listen to music has changed radically, and will continue to do so.
The Internet and mobile technology are beginning to have an equally significant impact on the creation of music itself. Extremely powerful recording, DJing and sequencing software is making its way from laptops to tablets and smartphones, for example. Now, the way people learn to play music in the first place is changing as well.
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From Skype to YouTube, Music Lessons Move Online
These days, instead of traveling across town to attend music lessons, many people are using tools like Skype to learn from a distance, just as they can do things like attend meetings and take academic courses regardless of their physical location. The new model allows for more flexible learning and in many cases improves the regularity of lessons since it avoids things like traffic jams and bad weather.
Even if one doesn’t get one-on-one lessons via Skype, the Web is loaded with music education resources for all skill levels. When a few friends and I started a band last year, I decided to brush up some more advanced drumming techniques, since it had been a few years since I last played. Much like Lynda.com and Tuts+offer video tutorials for software and coding, there a number of sites out there who do the same for drummers and other musicians. I found one in particular that published a free video podcast, enabling me to download the lessons to my phone or iPad and bring a virtual teacher down into the basement with me.
Online music lessons range from having the structure of a college course to being as loose and on-your-own-time as a series of YouTube searches. On YouTube, the quality of the material may vary, but there are quite a few dedicated sites with legitimate, high-quality video lessons available, sometimes for free.
For those who are especially serious and have the money to spend, the Berklee College of Music offers online-only courses and certifications through a website called BerkleeMusic. The courses don’t come cheap, but enrolling and paying for them is a straight-forward, Web-based process.
Learning Music Goes Mobile
The explosion of smartphones and tablets has impacted countless aspects of daily life for millions of people, and budding musicians are no exception. Not only can you watch video tutorials on your iPad or Android phone, but there’s a growing selection of educational apps that allow for casual learning from any location.
Some of the numerous mini-piano and keyboard apps for the iOS and Android, for example, come with built-in guides to musical notation, with some of them going into more depth about music theory. Other apps drill down further into music theory, such as Wolfram Alpha’s Music Theory Course Assistant app for iOS.
There’s a wide selection of instrument-specific learning apps for iOS alone, such as GuitarLab and Gibson Learn and Master Guitar or Piano Tutor and Virtuoso Piano.
Like with any learning process, the effectiveness of mobile apps and Web tutorials like these will depend somewhat on one’s approach and level of motivation. Ultimately, in-person music lessons may still work best for some. There will likely always be a place for one-on-one, in-the-flesh education, but these new tools and methods open things up to a wider group of people with virtually no restrictions on time and place.
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People Using Pseudonyms Leave Better Blog Comments [STUDY]
Jan 16th
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In addition to leaving more comments, people using pseudonyms are more likely to leave comments that get “likes” from other readers, according to Disqus, which operates blog commenting platforms for about one million Web sites, including ReadWriteWeb.
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Not only does the data throw the conventional web wisdom that people who use their real names leave better comment into question, it also gives Disqus and other comment platforms leverage to compete with Facebook, which has made inroads into the commenting space by allowing sites to let people leaving comments use their Facebook identities.
Disqus is one of the more than 400,000 Web sites that lets people use their Facebook profiles to leave comments. But Disqus said just 4% of its users preferred to use Facebook to leave comments with their real name, compared to 61% who used pseudonyms and 35% who logged in anonymously.
Of course Disqus has a vested interest in convincing publishers to allow anonymous comments and remarks left under a pseudonym.
But the company is maintaining that, based on its review of 500,000 comments left using its system, 61% of the comments left by those types of users gained positive reviews from other readers, as opposed to 51% for comments left by people using their identity and 34% for people who remained anonymous.
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