Social networking word-of-the-day: “thinvisibility”

Posted on August 10, 2010 by Ira Nathenson

A new word for Facebookers and social networkers who cavalierly post embarrassing information about themselves to the web: thinvisibility: Here’s a starting definition:

Thinvisibility: n.

Being neither completely visible nor completely invisible.
Being a tiny, shiny needle in a haystack of information overload.
Being invisible to everyone except data aggregators and digital preservationists such as Google, the Wayback Machine, the NSA, and others.
Being invisible to employers, colleges, police, neighbors, friends, exes, stalkers, acquaintances, and others, who are not interested in you, until they are.
Being visible.

Comcast and the creepiness factor

Posted on July 24, 2008 by Ira Nathenson

I’ve written before about the “creepiness factor,” the uneasy feeling some get when they realize their blogs and social-networking postings are read by “unwanted” visitors like police, employers, professors, etc. Add to that list corporate America. The New York Times writes about Comcast’s efforts to reach customers complaining about it on blogs and social-networking sites. One student complained about Comcast on his blog:

Shortly afterward, he received an e-mail message from Comcast, thanking him for the feedback and adding that it was working on a new interactive guide that might “illuminate the issues that you are currently experiencing.”

[He] found it all a bit creepy. “The rest of his e-mail may as well have read, ‘Big Brother is watching you,’ ” he said.

A woman’s Twitter complaint about Comcast led to a quick but unexpected response:

“It’s one thing to spit vitriol about a company when they can’t hear you,” she said in an interview. It’s another, she said, when the company replies. “I immediately backed down and softened my tone when I knew I was talking to a real person.”

I can see why some people might be creeped out by Comcast’s outreach efforts, but they shouldn’t be. People keep assuming that the relative anonymity of the web will keep their postings effectively invisible. That’s naive. There’s nothing anonymous about the Internet when postings are quickly found by those who want to see what you’re doing (such as prosecutors, as Kaimipono Wenger blogged about recently), or by companies who want to know what you’re saying about them. The sooner people realize that “relative” web anonymity is not really anonymity at all, the more savvy they’ll hopefully become about their online postings.

Plus, done tactfully and personally, direct outreach by companies might be a good thing. Direct emails? Sure. Public comments on blogs or Facebook walls? Not so good. It might embarrass already-angry customers and put them on the defensive. Worse, it might trigger flame wars involving others. But a direct email is far less confrontational, and far more likely to lead to satisfied, albeit occasionally creeped-out customers.

LibraryThing awesomeness and memories of my Amiga 3000

Posted on December 31, 2006 by Ira Nathenson

Way back in the late 80′s, I had a couple of Commodore Amiga personal computers. The Amiga was perhaps the first (or one of the first) consumer PCs to incorporate a mouse, graphical interface, fast color graphics, and real pre-emptive multitasking. As cool as Mac users thought their system was, I recall that the Amiga had color graphics long before the Mac did. It was so powerful that the Amiga was even used as a platform for video editing.

So what did I do? For my fancy graphics-intensive computer, I bought a database program and used it to catalogue my books and records. My wife — we were newly married and she had yet to realize what a geek I truly am — thought that cataloguing books (by year and by ISBN, which I thought was very cool) was one of the saddest wastes of time she had ever seen.

Maybe she was right, but for different reasons. It was a waste of time because the fruits of my labors were short-lived due to the short life of the Amiga platform. I had two Amigas in succession, first an Amiga 500 like the one pictured above, and later an Amiga 3000 (with a real hard drive!). I loved my Amigas but they never caught on with the public. Very little software was ever written for it. A cool but unsupported computer is a paperweight.

Frustrated at the lack of software for the Amiga, I sold my Amiga 3000 around 15 years ago. I also long ago threw away the database discs, which were in a proprietary AmigaDOS format, and probably in a proprietary database format as well, neither of which would probably have been readable (or easily readable) on a Windows PC. Digital garbage to the core.

Anyway, though my Amiga is long gone, now the web allows me to do the same thing, better and in tandem with thousands of other book cataloguing geeks. A while back, the Wall Street Journal reported on a very cool site, LibraryThing.com. Think of MySpace meets the Dewey Decimal System. It’s an online card catalog that you can use to list all your books, to see others who own the same books, to get recommendations, and to write and read reviews. Books can be tagged Web 2.0 style, and thumbnails are shown when they’re available. It’s a great example of the power of social networking. You can enter up to 200 books for free, but after that, you need to purchase a membership. Better yet, you can export your data, quelling my Amiga file incompatibility woes.

I’ve entered some of my books into the site; you can see my listings at http://www.librarything.com/catalog.php?view=nathenson.

I do suspect, however, that some people will only list books that make them look thoughtful and intelligent. (Count me guilty.) At least for now I can point to the 200-book limit as an excuse for not entering my embarrassingly large collection of Star Trek novels (though I did list Spock Must Die, a true classic and the first original Trek novel published by Bantam Books.)

Check out the sidebar for a LibraryThing widget with random books from my collection. I’ll add more.

Hat tip to Boing Boing. And thanks to Farnea at Flickr, who licensed the Amiga 500 photo shown above through this Creative Common license.