I was talking with a friend of mine today who is a senior at a technology-centered high school in California. Dylan Field and his friends are by no means representative of US teens but I always love his perspective on tech practices... As someone who has argued about the challenge of Twitter being public (to all who hold power over teens), What Dylan is pointing out is that the issue is that Facebook is public (to everyone who matters) and Twitter can be private because of the combination of tools AND the fact that it's not broadly popular. My guess is that if Twitter does take off among teens and Dylan's friends feel pressured to let peers and parents and everyone else follow them, the same problem will arise and Twitter will become public in the same sense as Facebook. This of course raises a critical question: will teens continue to be passionate about systems that become "public" (to all that matter) simply because there's social pressure to connect to "everyone"?
Imagine if every twelve weeks Facebook: * shut down all the groups you belonged to, * deleted all your forum posts, * removed all the photos, videos, and other files you had shared, and * forgot who your friends were.
Millions in the UK are already registered with Facebook, or similar social networking tools such as MySpace, Bebo and Friendster, to conduct part of their private lives online, and it's growing at a huge rate.
Student-driven revision/moan group for BS3035 on Facebook. Interesting to see evidence of concerted email campaign to elicit information about exam questions.
"Socializing doesn’t scale. Once a group reaches a certain size, each participant starts to feel anonymous again, and the person they’re following — who once seemed proximal, like a friend — now seems larger than life and remote." And that's why we don't want to run a University-wide Tornado server
R. Gross, A. Acquisti, and H. Heinz. WPES '05: Proceedings of the 2005 ACM workshop on Privacy in the electronic society, page 71--80. New York, NY, USA, ACM, (2005)