Most of Facebook’s interactions are local interactions, either between members of a community or people we already know in real life. The connections which span continents are estimated to be around 12% and 16% of the total.

Ethan Zuckerman thinks that Facebook is being led astray by its grand vision of connecting the world together, when really it should be focusing in enabling deeper local connections:

The most challenging problems Facebook faces are not those of ensuring that all humanity is connected. The challenge is to manage the connections we already have. Facebook’s tendency to connect us most tightly with those who share our perspectives and views is part of the web of forces leading to polarization and the breakdown of civility in politics in the US and elsewhere. The tendency to pay attention to the struggles and difficulties of our friends distances us from struggles in other communities, even as networks make it more possible for us to connect with those directly effected. Before we take the next step in human evolution, we need to look closely at the downsides of the connectivity we’ve already achieved.

The Next Web:

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are probably soon going to dictate what traffic can or cannot arrive at people’s end devices. GOOG-FB-AMZN traffic would be the most common, due to their popularity among internet users. Because of this market demand, ISPs will likely provide cheap plans with access to GOOG-FB-AMZN, while offering more expensive plans with full internet access — and it’s already a reality in countries like Portugal.

This would expand even more the dominance the three tech giants already enjoy. There would be no more economical incentive for smaller businesses to have independent websites, and a gradual migration towards Facebook Pages would make more sense. Smaller e-commerce sites would be bought by AMZN or go bankrupt. Because most internet users couldn’t open all the sites, GOOG would have little incentive to be a mere bridge between people and sites. […]

The common pattern among these three internet giants is to grow beyond browsers, creating new virtual contexts where data is created and shared. The Web may die like most other technologies do, simply by becoming less attractive than newer technologies. And like most obsolete technologies, they don’t suddenly disappear, neither do they disappear completely.

Brad Frost:

But lately I’ve noticed the platform feeling increasingly grabby, to the point where they’ve broken the fourth wall with me and now the whole experience is no longer enjoyable. They’ve gotten so brazen in their tactics to keep users engaged (ENGAGED!) I think it’s no longer possible to be a casual Facebook user. […]

This is what happens when the metric of how much time users spend using your thing supersedes the goal of providing legitimate value to your users. The tricks, hooks, and tactics Facebook uses to keep people coming back have gotten more aggressive and explicit. And I feel that takes away from the actual value the platform provides.

Anch’io registro un numero sempre più consistente di notifiche fuffa, del tipo guarda cosa stavi facendo un anno fa, celebra due anni d’amicizia, questo tuo amico ha appena postato una foto, sono tre giorni che non fai x, etc.

Ben Thompson:

This, ultimately, is why yesterday’s keynote was so disappointing. Last year, before Facebook realized it could just leverage its network to squash Snap, Mark Zuckerberg spent most of his presentation laying out a long-term vision for all the areas in which Facebook wanted to innovate. This year couldn’t have been more different: there was no vision, just the wholesale adoption of Snap’s, plus a whole bunch of tech demos that never bothered to tell a story of why they actually mattered for Facebook’s users. It will work, at least for a while, but make no mistake, Facebook is the only winner.

Ben paragona la situazione fra Snapchat e Facebook — in cui una innova e l’altra copia senza ritegno — alla situazione fra Apple e Microsoft di anni fa. Snapchat si è definita, nei documenti presentati per la quotazione in borsa, una camera company — intendendo la fotocamera dello smartphone non solo come uno strumento per scattare fotografie, ma come un nuovo input di partenza. Un nuovo cursore:

In the way that the flashing cursor became the starting point for most products on desktop computers, we believe that the camera screen will be the starting point for most products on smartphones. This is because images created by smartphone cameras contain more context and richer information than other forms of input like text entered on a keyboard. This means that we are willing to take risks in an attempt to create innovative and different camera products that are better able to reflect and improve our life experiences.

Zuckerberg, durante il keynote d’apertura della conferenza di settimana scorsa (F8), ha praticamente ripetuto l’obiettivo che Snapchat si è data. La visione di Facebook è copiare Snapchat, e fino ad ora lo ha fatto bene (se non altro in Instagr.am — di Messenger non parliamo che è meglio) e con successo.

Ma non c’è altro. Non c’è una visione. C’erano, al contrario, un sacco di demo di prodotti inesistenti e futuristici.

New York Times:

In Mr. Zuckerberg’s telling, there are few boundaries for how this technology would evolve. He said he envisioned a world in which people can eventually point smartphone cameras at a bowl of cereal and have an app create tiny sharks swimming in the bowl of milk.

Fra visioni di delfini che nuotano nel latte, e videoconferenze con avatar che fluttuano, il futuro secondo Mark è scemo.

Un’estensione di Chrome che vi osserva mentre state su Facebook — per poi rivelarvi i dati che a sua volta Facebook colleziona su di voi, e come (in base a questi) vi classifica.

Da Hacker News:

In addition to the original password, we also accept the password if a user inadvertently has caps lock enabled, if their mobile device automatically capitalises the first character of the password, or if an extra character is added to the end of the password.

Provate a ispezionare una delle immagini del vostro news feed del Facebook: molto probabilmente avrà un tag alt, automaticamente popolato con attributi che la descrivono – sole, montagna, natura, etc. a seconda di quale che sia il soggetto. Questi attributi non sono inseriti dagli utenti, ma automaticamente da Facebook, che analizza ciascuna immagine caricata e prova a comprenderne il contenuto.

Un’estensione per Chrome vi dà un’idea della quantità di informazioni che Facebook può ricavare con questa tecnica, permettendovi ti testarne le capacità su qualsiasi immagine.

Il profilo del New York Times su Snopes – uno di quei siti di fact-checking che Facebook usa per verificare l’autenticità di quelle storie sospette di essere false:

Their first group of posts, back in 1995, tackled questions about Disneyland, such as whether there really was a secret restaurant at the park. (There was.) It was a time when the nascent web was seen as a force that would deliver enlightenment and truth to all.

Starting about two years ago, Snopes made an effort to professionalize itself. It added a dozen staff members just in time to become the go-to debunking site for an election full of venom. The number of unique users jumped 42 percent over 2015, peaking at nearly 2.5 million the day after the election.

Si discute molto in questi giorni della sezione trending topics di Facebook, che a differenza del news feed — nel quale la priorità di una notizia rispetto a un’altra viene determinata da un algoritmo — ha delle persone dietro che scelgono a quali notizie dare rilevanza. Pare, stando alle dichiarazioni di uno dei giornalisti che lavora a Facebook, che il social network abbia optato più volte per censurare una notizia a supporto del partito conservatore in favore del partito democratico.

In realtà, trending topics è una sezione piccola di Facebook che vive nella sidebar del sito. Facebook può sì influenzare i suoi utenti scegliendo a quali notizie dare risalto, ma che sicuramente ha più impatto sulle loro idee e scelte politiche è il news feed — e il news feed ahimè ha un problema ben più grosso: ci mostra solo quello che ci dà ragione, contribuendo a una polarizzazione generale delle nostre opinioni. È editoriale ma meno esplicitamente: non ha un gruppo di persone dietro che ne curano il contenuto — come trending topics —, ma ha un algoritmo basato comunque su un principio: suggerirci cose che ci piacciono.

Come scrive Ben Thompson, è il news feed che rischia di fare un danno maggiore alla società:

This, then, is the deep irony of this controversy: Facebook is receiving a huge amount of criticism for allegedly biasing the news via the empowerment of a team of human curators to make editorial decisions, as opposed to relying on what was previously thought to be an algorithm; it is an algorithm, though — the algorithm that powers the News Feed, with the goal of driving engagement — that is arguably doing more damage to our politics than the most biased human editor ever could. The fact of the matter is that, on the part of Facebook people actually see — the News Feed, not Trending News — conservatives see conservative stories, and liberals see liberal ones; the middle of the road is as hard to find as a viable business model for journalism (these things are not disconnected).

La verità è che il problema risiede nella premessa di Facebook di essere neutrale: né l’algoritmo che determina cosa mostrarci nel news feed, né la sezione curata manualmente da un gruppo di giornalisti, lo sono. Entrambi sono editoriali — ed è il news feed, l’idea che solo quello che ci piace ed è in sintonia con le nostre opinioni debba interessarci — che dovrebbe preoccuparci maggiormente.

Om Malik:

In other words, “the term ‘photographer’ is changing,” he [Peter Neubauer, the co-founder of the Swedish database company Neo Technology] said. As a result, photos are less markers of memories than they are Web-browser bookmarks for our lives. And, just as with bookmarks, after a few months it becomes hard to find photos or even to navigate back to the points worth remembering. Google made hoarding bookmarks futile. Today we think of something, and then we Google it. Photos are evolving along the same path as well.

Thanks to our obsession with photography—and, in particular, the cultural rise of selfies—the problem of how to sort all these images has left the realm of human capabilities. Instead, we need to augment humans with machines, which are better at sifting through thousands of photos, analyzing them, finding commonalities, and drawing inferences around moments that matter. Machines can start to learn our style of photography.

Il mio archivio fotografico non è mai stato così incasinato, al punto che da un paio d’anni a questa parte ho rinunciato a metterci mano. Confido e affido tutto al miglioramento di soluzioni come Google Photos o Forevery, che siano capaci di organizzare le foto automaticamente, per me.

Al contempo, ultimamente, mi chiedo spesso quanto abbia avuto senso scattare quasi quotidianamente così tante fotografie negli ultimi anni. Per il numero (piccolo) di volte in cui sono andato a riguardarle, e per via di funzioni e servizi come On This Day di Facebook, o Timehop, che vogliono ricordarmi ogni giorno quello che stavo facendo, pensando o scrivendo anni prima. Come scrive Om Malik utilizziamo oggi le foto come dei bookmark: non conta più la qualità della foto o l’importanza del momento, le foto sono diventate il modo più facile per appuntarci quello che ci sta succedendo. È utile, però, registrare tutto in maniera così estensiva? Servirà a qualcosa, o è un’ossessione al voler per forza ricordare tutto nei dettagli che non porta a nulla?

Così come internet ha facilitato il restare in contatto con le persone, ha reso anche difficile dimenticare — e un ricordo, una memoria, alla fine è fatta anche di questo. È una cosa sfumata e poco chiara — una cosa di cui ci si ricorda, ma che non si ha più o non è più. La dettagliata e sempre disponibile libreria fotografia dell’iPhone, e i post sui social network, rendono al contrario tutto attuale, registrano le cose esattamente com’erano nel momento in cui avvenivano — non come ce le ricordiamo noi dentro noi, con i buchi causati dal tempo.

Da un articolo già linkato alcune settimane fa:

Part of the palpable dissonance comes from the fact that many of our posts were never intended to become “memories” in the first place. An important question gets raised here: what’s the purpose of all this “content” we serve to platforms, if it’s useless in constructing a remotely valuable history of ourselves? Are we creating anything that’s built to last, that’s worth reflecting on, or have social media platforms led us to prize only the thoughts of the moment?

Quartz:

While WeChat is accessible to users all over the world, it runs on a different app inside and outside China. People or organizations anywhere can register for Chinese official accounts (roughly analogous to public Facebook pages), where they’re screened for sensitive content and visible to anyone. Separate official accounts exist for people located outside of China. Data from overseas accounts are stored on overseas servers, and not subject to the same censorship policies. They’re also not accessible to WeChat users who have registered from within China.

Facebook could employ similar tactics, in effect creating a “Great Firewall” from within Facebook itself. Chinese users might still be able to friend individuals outside the country, but be restricted from seeing some of their posts or creating pages the whole world could see. Likewise, foreign companies that create public pages might have to create separate ones for Chinese users.

Praticamente, ci sarebbero due Facebook: quello che usano tutti gli altri, e quello accessibile in Cina.

Interessante articolo di Slate sulle nuove reactions di Facebook (le aggiunte recenti al bottone like):

The new reactions aren’t designed to help users express how they really feel. They function more like patches for all those times when a like seems insufficient or inappropriate. […]

Facebook’s limited set of responses feels strangely more constricting than the solitary like button. The Facebook like, the Instagram heart, and the Twitter fave (recently rebranded as a like, too) are all just sunny euphemisms for a gesture of generalized acknowledgement. The like button was a nod. It said: “I see you.” Maybe it was meant to mean “I like the content of this post,” but it often felt like “I like you.” But the additional responses complicate that reading. Now a simple like risks feeling like: “I like this, but I don’t love it.” Or: “I acknowledge you’ve made a joke, but I won’t pretend it made me laugh.” Or “I know I have the option to signal that I’m sad about your dog dying, but I’m inconsiderate or dastardly enough to just like it anyway.”

Il thumbs down pare sia stato scartato perché ambiguo: cos’è che non ti è piaciuto, il post dell’utente o l’argomento che il post tratta?