My Facebook has Tipped

Malcolm Gladwell says that everything has a Tipping Point, that point at which a virus goes epidemic, when the hip new thing goes mainstream. Think Uggs.

Well, my Facebook world has just tipped.

I'm not talking about the quantity of my friends, but rather the breadth and depth.

In the past month, I have friended or been friended by:

• my 73 year old mother (we like to play Scrabble)
• my 16 year old niece (she has WAY more friends than I do, which is not surprising)
• former students
• almost everyone I used to swim with in my high school swimming days
• long lost college roommates
• my oldest brother

What started over a year ago as a professional experiment in the name of eLearning has just gotten plain weird.

Has your Facebook tipped?

Half of Companies Blocking Facebook

Christy Tucker has been musing on Social Networking as LMS: Problems and Opportunities. One real problem is corporate fear of social networking tools.

This August 21 article posted by Sharon Gaudin in Information Week reports that Half of Companies are Blocking Facebook:

"Employers are increasingly blocking access to Facebook because they're concerned about the time wasted and the information leaked when workers use social networks on company time."

I'm no Facebook super-user and I haven't experienced a huge time suck from it, but I suppose it's possible. But what information is it that is actually being "leaked" through Facebook by these irresponsible employees ?

The article gives no specifics, making me wonder if the threat is real or just imagined by the corporate control freaks.

Update: Also be sure to check out this Facebook post over at the Read/Write Web that follows this same "study." I thought the comments were insightful. (Thanks to Jane Hart for pointing this one out.)

Is Facebook the next Microsoft?

Have you seen this article from TechCrunch: Could Facebook Become The Next Microsoft?

The Real World, SecondLife and FaceBook/MySpace

Over the past few weeks I've conducted about 17 interviews with current college students and recent graduates. All women. A few of my interviews have been with older alumnae, but I'll leave them out of this discussion for the moment and stick to the younger crowd, the "digital natives." These are real people, about to enter or recently in the job market.

I've been asking various questions about technology and tools in order to get a sense of where people are at, while also soliciting ideas and input for improving the use of technology to support learning throughout their member organization.

In general, the young women I have interviewed describe themselves as "very comfortable with technology." Some claim to feel lost without an Internet connection, but hey, don't we all? Computers are a fact of their lives.

Some things have surprised me, most have not. A few trends:

• Not ONE person has even heard of Second Life. This was a little wake up call to me as I sit in my little e-Learning world, trying to immerse myself in all that is new. The rest of the world is not in this technology bubble yet. I would explain a bit about SL and the general response was, "that sounds interesting."
  

• Not ONE person has a blog. A few people have "read" a few blogs -- written by friends with photos of children. One woman told me that she used to blog in LiveJournal, but there was just way too much personal information that was getting shared with the universe, so she deleted her account.

• Everyone who has graduated from college since 2005 has a FaceBook account. Most everyone accesses it multiple times within a day. This is a main way of staying connected to friends.

• A couple of people also had MySpace accounts. But mostly not. MySpace is seen as being too "creepy". Too much information is out there. "It's not safe." I'm not sure how this relates to danah boyd's recent blog article on Viewing American class divisions through FaceBook and MySpace. These young women are all college educated. I had read Danah's article before starting my interviews and was listening for any judgment based on class. I didn't hear anything direct or obvious. Safety and creepy were the big buzzwords I heard. A few people commented that MySpace is too garish; the FaceBook look and feel is more classic.
  

• Only two people admitted to any regular game play. One of the gamers plays with her brother; the other described obsessively playing Dance Dance Revolution with college roommates at her house. I wonder how this would differ if I had been asking young college males about gaming? Hmm....It appears to me that the gaming gender divide is alive and well.

• No Blackberrys or Treos in the crowd. Lots of cellphones. Lots of laptops.

Can you confirm or deny any of these trends? Does any of this matter?

Check out A Deserted Second Life and My First Second Life Experience if you want to hear more about how actual people are interacting with Second Life.

The Gin System

As I've been trying to sort out the role of FaceBook lately, I can't help but wonder "where's the content?" It seems to me that FaceBook is a great networking tool. You can point people to outside links, but I haven't yet seen a great way to include content. Then again, perhaps I'm missing something. I've only been playing around with FB for a couple of weeks now.

Today, in one of my student interviews, I came across a new web-based application called The Gin System. "Gin" stands for Group Interactive Network. It's about "facilitating communication." The only people that have access to "your Gin" are the people in your gin. Membership driven; password protected.

I called the company (they're based in Gainesville, Florida) and spoke with one of their friendly sales reps. She gave me a tour of the application.

The Gin System provides you with (among other things):

• Secure login
• Calendar of events
• Phone & Email lists
• Email groups ("public" f0r all members; or private for designated members only)
• Questions: Allows for easy posting of questions. Can be posted anonymously. Answers can be sent view email or text message.
• Files: Virtually any file type can be uploaded (mp3, zip, jpg) to the system. Files can be stored in folders. Everyone can see a folder, but you can set a specific file to be only viewed by specific users or groups of users. Files can be password protected
• Discussion Boards

In August, Gin Premiere is launching with new features, including instant messaging, a "who's online" feature, skinning features, and the ability to upload pictures with your profile.

So who's using The Gin System?

At this point, roughly 90% of their market is with sororities and fraternities, but they've begun to move into the corporate/commercial sector. (I viewed the "Office" demo of The Gin System.)

Here's some examples of who's on Gin:

• A national non-profit organization.
• A gym franchise with over 400 locations has put all of their training files onto their GIN.
• Sororities and Fraternities are using their Gins to communicate with members.
• A private elementary school is using it to communicate with teachers and parents.
• A preschool has signed up -- they liked the text messaging option as a way to globally broadcast messages. In the case of an emergency, they can text message every parent at the same time.

Pricing model (from their website):

We don't charge per user or have traditional 'license fees'. We charge per month with a couple of break points to separate small, medium and large user groups. Communication is enhanced when everyone is able to participate. We don't want to create a system that requires you to do a cost-benefit analysis on whether each member, intern or employee should be added. Larger groups result in larger traffic for our servers...it makes sense that this should result in slightly higher prices. But per user? Doesn't make much sense to us...

I was told anywhere from $60-120 a month depending on the size of the org.

It seems to me that a system like this could provide some of the networking that FaceBook provides -- within an organization -- and provide a lot of content.

Have you heard of it?

Facebook for the Enterprise

I'm still mucking around in Facebook, trying to get it.

Found this article, via Alec Saunders: Facebook for the Enterprise = Facebook. Provides some real examples of how business-folk are using FB; compares Facebook (emotional attachment) to LinkedIn (static resume).

But for the first time I can merge my social and business lives in ways that are not intrusive, that feel intuitive and which are both highly productive and deeply satisfying.

Getting Pysched for FaceBook

I'm definitely feeling out-of-my element in this whole FaceBook thing. I'm trying to get into it and discover it's potential professional uses. I now have five friends (in case you were wondering). And I've joined a group: FaceBook for Business in which I've posted some questions, gotten some answers, and been asked to participate in a beta test for a FaceBook widget.

I'm just scratching the surface, I suppose. There must be more, or is there?

Ran across this article, The Psychology of FaceBook, which talks about the collecting of friends and relationships aspect of it all.

FaceBook is in transition, that's for sure. I am joining for the first time with completely professional interests. Others have established identities and networks built on personal interests. Is it ok to blend this all together? Doesn't that threaten to get too weird?

I see FaceBook groups for instructional designers, but not much is going on there. There's an e-Learning group -- on first glance it appears to be just a collection of people without the content of the blogosphere.

If you're interested in exploring, please friend me. I'm feeling lonely and really nerdy. I need a bigger collection. I'd like to push this somehow, but I'm not sure.

Using FaceBook

I'm trying to expand my horizons a bit these days and have been taking a closer look at a whole bunch of tools out there, including SecondLife and FaceBook.

FaceBook seems like such a student-world application, and yet folks say more and more "grown-ups" are using it. There was a great NYTimes article a few weeks ago about a mom signing up for a FaceBook account, completely appalling her teenage daughter. (I'd go look up the link for you, but why bother? You'd have to be a paying customer...)

My kids are far from their teen years, so I went ahead and created my own FaceBook account awhile back. I initially had just one friend, who I think had joined to find a FaceBook dating scene that didn't exist. It didn't feel like FaceBook would have a lot of professional promise.

Then, just this week, Michele Martin asked me to be her FaceBook friend and I felt like I'd been promoted to the popular kids' club. We traded emails and I wrote a message on her wall. That's about as far as it's gone. But it's a start.

So I've got this client I'm working with to help define an e-Learning strategy, and I'm thinking about what role FaceBook should/could play in their plan. This client has a cross-generational membership -- from college students to older alumnae. Very close ties to universities. No firewall or technical infrastructure. A lot of the membership already has FaceBook accounts. I'm interested in how we could leverage that existing community for better communication, learning opportunities, networking, etc.

The challenge is that my client would want to have a private, closed community that would only be accessed by its membership.

I know FaceBook does provide a fair amount of control as to who you can let view your profile. That's all set at the individual level.

I'm interested in how one would mix communities. So if a user is a member of this "closed-community" but also has an existing FaceBook presence, can you keep these worlds separate?

Would the better approach be to create a real-closed community using something like Ning? Or Moodle? Although I think there's a real downside to creating multiple profiles and pages all over the place....

Any experience in this front? Any suggestions?