Three weeks ago, I started my sporadic series of blog posts where I share my experiences improving my online manners through social networking websites, many of which are powered by MySQL. My first target was the traveller site Dopplr, and the second one was Google’s picture sharing site Picasa Web.

This time, I’m taking a look at Facebook. As I said in the first (Dopplr related) blog post, I feel like a slow follower in the discipline of social networking on the web. And Facebook was a true case in point, where “everybody else” was there before me (my team, my boss, my aunt, my nephew, my goddaughter, countless colleagues; you get the picture).

Actually, there’s an advantage to being a follower: It’s easy to grow your network quickly. A mere 24 h ago I wasn’t even registered on Facebook, and now, I have over a hundred confirmed friends. And the fact that we’re talking about confirmed friends I take as a testimony to the power of Facebook: People actually use Facebook, actively. My Dopplr account hasn’t filled up in nearly a month to even half the amount of Facebook contacts in less than a day. Sure, Dopplr isn’t for my aunt, nephew or goddaughter, but still — the activity level correlates with the usefulness.

The two most distinct advantages of Facebook is its worldwide coverage and its technical connectivity. The worldwide coverage is quite a bit weaker in large, well-developed non-English-speaking countries (such as Germany). There is near-zero motivation for my children (13 and 14 years old) to join, as “everyone that matters” to them is on Lokalisten.de, the older siblings of “everyone that matters” are on StudiVZ and their parents on Xing.com. Some similar situation prevails in Japan or China, but not so in Finland. There, all age groups go on Facebook. And this provides lots of value: Sharing pictures with my aunt is done with the same medium as I can ask my goddaughter’s bigger sister for a favour, i.e. using her newly-acquired driver’s license to pick up my son from Helsinki airport for a pre-Christmas party next weekend. Sure, I could have called her mobile phone, but Facebook was much less intrusive. She’s there anyway!

The technical connectivity provides “networking effects between the networks“, if you will. I have connected Facebook to my Doppler and Twitter accounts, and to my Google Reader. So status changes in Twitter propagate to Facebook. And new blog entries on Google Reader propagate to my notes / feed on Facebook. And given that, in turn, I have connected Twitter to my SMS and Google Reader to my blogs, it means that my Facebook news page gets automatically updated through my SMS tweets and blog entries. Without any further effort my side. (Sure, it was non-trivial to set up blog aggregation on Google Reader, but I had already gone through that for my home page http://kaj.arno.fi).

For those who neither tweet nor blog, automatic updates of a Facebook page may not sound like nirvana. Yet, that’s very close to what it is, within the realm of social networking on the web. What’s the purpose of tweeting or blogging or writing stuff for the web, if nobody reads what you write? Or rather, to be more reader centric, which web updates would you rather follow — those that you get easily notified about in an app where you are anyway, or those for which you have to make a conscious effort to read, by starting a new app or web page? The effort should be on the side of the writer, and with Facebook, the effort is kept to a very manageable level of setup work, after which the updates propagate.

In order for the sentence “it’s less than 24 h before I registered on Facebook” to be fully honest, let me now proceed to my summary:

	Positive experiences: Very many, quite significant + Suprisingly many friends, relatives, colleagues already connected + Good to get reminded of their existence and their daily life + Very good worldwide penetration + Great that Facebook integrates with Google Reader and my blogs + Great that Facebook integrates with Twitter, as this means that I can share things happening through SMS messages + Great that I could export an LDIF file from Thunderbird (my email program) and import them into Facebook, which based on email addresses identified already-connected friends very easily
	Negative experiences: Few, if any - Biggest irritation: When I uploaded the LDIF file at what seemingly was a peak time for Facebook, the connection broke several times — but after a sufficient number of re-tries, the time-outs didn’t reoccur - There’s a lot to learn in Facebook (private messages, public messages, updates etc.) - I didn’t find any outward-facing non-member landing page for invitations, along the lines of facebook.com/profile/kajarno
	My own confusion — no fault of the social network itself I’m using Facebook in Swedish (hey, why use a foreign language?), and this isn’t the language that the majority of my friends use in it — so I don’t know what “Upplagt”, “Anteckningar” and other similar concepts are in their languages My network presence isn’t monolingual, and all of my friends don’t read all of the languages I use. So I end up spamming those who don’t understand Swedish with updates in Swedish. On the other hand, some stuff isn’t interesting for anybody else except those who read Swedish. I just have to hope that my friends aren’t annoyed by updates in languages they don’t understand. It isn’t 100% clear to me what I should be public about. Why should I share the books I’ve read? The films I like? My favourite quotes? So far, I haven’t
	Remaining questions from my side People ask me to verify that we “worked at Polycon 1995-2000″ or “we travelled to Sorrento in 2006″ and I have verified that, but where do I update my past activities myself? And do I have any real benefit from entering past data? How do I best group my many contacts into groups, such as based on what language I use with them, where I met them, etc.? Should I invite real-life friends who are not yet on Facebook, to join? When should I share pics using Picasa Web, when using Flickr, when using Facebook? What is the intended use of “puffa” (I think it’s “nudge” in English)?

All in all, Facebook is a scalable way of maintaining a social life, to keep in contact with people with a maximum of social interaction and a minimum of technical overhead. With less than a day’s experience, I expect to use Facebook several times a week, and improve my offline real social life through online activities.

Links:

• Facebook: http://www.facebook.com
• My Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=16….somethingverylong
• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook

MySQL powers many of the social networks of Web 2.0. While it’s great that we constitute one of the tools of Web 2.0, we should also ourselves utilise the tools Web 2.0 provides for social networking. Comparing myself to colleagues, I feel like a slow follower in this discipline. “Everybody else” is already on Twitter, has hundreds and hundreds of contacts on LinkedIn, Xing and Facebook, puts their pics on Picasa and Flickr, bookmarks their pages on del.icio.us, and has fancy blogs that are registered everywhere. Myself, I have been half-heartedly entering contacts into LinkedIn, I have mismanaged my Xing account, I uploaded a tiny amount of pictures on Flickr two years ago, and have now taken my first steps trying out Twitter and Picasa. I’m not even registered on Facebook or del.icio.us.

And therefore I thought I would take a look at how to improve my online manners.

So what I’ll do over the next two months or so is to take a look at both the websites I’ve been mismanaging, and the new ones others have invited me to. I’ll do my best to fit in, but I’ll also come with some subjective commentary on what I experienced.

First in line is Dopplr, the social network for travellers.

I got invited to Dopplr by David Axmark in September 2007. I didn’t do anything with the invitation, as there were “other more important things to do”. In December 2007, I got invited by Giuseppe Maxia. One would think that these two invitations would have triggered me to do something about it, but no. I waited until I had to fix a complex set of travel involving David replacing myself in Japan so that I could go to South Africa. At the same time, I was asking Giuseppe about his travel plans and felt silly I had to ask and re-ask Giuseppe only because finding the relevant, freshest email was too cumbersome. That was the trigger that made me accept Giuseppe’s Dopplr invitation.

So I entered my basic data, which didn’t take many minutes. I could then see David’s and Giuseppe’s travel profiles, conveniently available under http://www.dopplr.com/ traveller/DavidAxmark and http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/gmaxia respectively. Looking at the right hand side on David’s data from today, it’s easy to see when he is where. I don’t need to ask him, nor does anyone else.

Next, I entered my travel plans for the rest of the year. Then, from my own itinerary, I noted something I hadn’t thought of. On the way back from Buenos Aires, I have a stopover in Frankfurt, which happens to coincide with when Giuseppe is there for a meeting. If the stopover is long enough, or Giuseppe has extra time to come to the airport, we might meet just because we happen to be in the same place at the same time. And that’s what Doppler is a lot about: Facilitating serendipitous meetings with people you know.

Next, I saw all the cool stats that Giuseppe and David had, based on having joined Dopplr a lot earlier. So I entered my 2008 travel, which took quite a while as I’ve travelled a lot and emitted carbon in a most horrible way. But it didn’t help — Dopplr still said I had travelled “0 km so far”. All that data entry in vain! Too bad.

But luckily, the stats were calculated for me overnight, in some kind of a batch job. I now have a nice timeline, telling me that I’ve been more on the road than at home in 2008:


I also have learnt that I’m as fast as a squirrel, with an average speed of 22,93 km/h.

Coolest of all is The Dopplr Raumzeitgeist, which tells me where I’ve been for the time period for which I’ve entered data into Dopplr:

If I had a cool web page to which I aggregate blogs and other stuff, such as Colin Charles does, I could paste the nice badge Dopplr provides me onto it. Either the small format (the first pic on this blog), or a big one, like this:

And this brings me to my first frustration with Dopplr. It tells me I’ve frequently been to “Nauvo”. No, no, no! I most certainly refer to the place I’ve been to as “Nagu”, not “Nauvo”. It’s a place with two names, of which in this case, I happen to use the same name as the majority of people living there. In the case of the second-most frequently visited place, I personally use “Helsingfors” (the Swedish name), but I can understand most people would use “Helsinki” (Finnish). And again, on fourth place, I’ve got one more place with multiple names. With most people I’ve discussed that trip, I’ve used the name “Wolkenstein“, which Dopplr expands to a long dual name, “Selva di Val Gardena - Wolkenstein in Groeden”. Better than just Selva, but still, not what I would pick myself.

Which brings me to my summary:

	Positive experiences: Many, and significant   + Great to instantly see where friends and colleagues travel + Great not to have disturb them with questions on “when are you where” + Great to get alerted to serendipitous presence in the same location, for my own planned trips + Cool to get all kinds of travel stat + Cool to see pics from Flickr automatically associated with trips
	Negative experiences: Few, and all related to Dopplr Big-Brother-changing place names   - Very irritating that Dopplr converted names like “Mariehamn” and “Nagu” to “Maarianhamina” and “Nauvo”, which are used only by a small minority of their respective inhabitants - Irritating that Dopplr converted “Helsingfors” (which is how I refer to my birth town) to “Helsinki” - Irritating that Dopplr converted “Wolkenstein” to the very long “Selva di Val Gardena - Wolkenstein in Groeden”
	My own confusion — no fault of the social network itself  I was first disappointed that Dopplr didn’t calculate my past travel stats, but happy again the following morning when they had been done My bad conscience for my carbon footprint didn’t exactly diminish It isn’t 100% clear to me whether it’s in my interest to allow the data to be visible for everyone, or just my approved co-travellers
	Remaining questions from my side   Will I have any real benefit from entering past data from years before 2008? Will there be an easy way to enter many past trips in batch, e.g. over email? When will fellow travellers allow me to see their travel plans? Should I enter “travel tips”? Will I find some benefit from using the data entry from my mobile phone or Twitter?

All in all, Dopplr was a very positive experience, and I do expect to manage my travel in it, and get lots of good vibes from it going forward.

Links:

• Dopplr: http://www.dopplr.com
• My Dopplr page: http://www.dopplr.com/traveller/KajArno
• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dopplr