facebook

I presented earlier today at the Case District VII and VIII conference in Las Vegas. One of the things that struck me as I was getting my notes together for this talk is how using the current/upcoming tools require that organizations staff themselves differently. For example, you can't really write an OpenSocial app without coding skills, and while programmers are easy to hire, writing a good app requires a connection between spotting a need and writing code that addresses it. One of the other differences between where we are now and where we were as recently as a year ago is that people are beginning to understand the value of leveraging their existing community, as opposed to building everything new from scratch. Perhaps online forays, like Kaplan's into MySpace, have been a suitable object lesson in how not to use the social web.

The presentation is available here (ppt download).

Given the growing hullabaloo over Facebook’s newly released advertising program, the thing that surprises me the most is that people are actually surprised. In its Privacy Policy, Facebook contains the fairly broad statement in the “Third Party Advertisers” section:

Advertisements that appear on Facebook are sometimes delivered (or "served") directly to users by third party advertisers. They automatically receive your IP address when this happens. These third party advertisers may also download cookies to your computer, or use other technologies such as JavaScript and "web beacons" (also known as "1x1 gifs") to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. Doing this allows the advertising network to recognize your computer each time they send you an advertisement in order to measure the effectiveness of their ads and to personalize advertising content. In this way, they may compile information about where individuals using your computer or browser saw their advertisements and determine which advertisements are clicked. Facebook does not have access to or control of the cookies that may be placed by the third party advertisers. Third party advertisers have no access to your contact information stored on Facebook unless you choose to share it with them.

This privacy policy covers the use of cookies by Facebook and does not cover the use of cookies or other tracking technologies by any of its advertisers.”

Facebook also revels in unintentional irony:

Facebook is about sharing information with others

and

We allow you to choose the information you provide to friends and networks through Facebook.

These statements create the lines you need to read between. They do not specify whether you have an opt out or an opt in policy, but that’s not even the point. The point is, whether you opt in or opt out, Facebook still collects your data. Whether or not they show it onscreen or not is only marginally relevant. They have records of how you have used their site, and that information is valuable to people who want to sell you things.

And, according to their Terms of Service and Privacy Policy, which all site members have agreed to, they can use it as they see fit.

I'll admit it at the outset: I'm in a bad mood today.

But when I see things like this, and this, and this, all talking about running courses in Facebook, I can't help myself

(Okay, really I can. But in this case, I don't want to).

Read Facebook's terms of service.

The "User Content Posted on the Site" section is particularly relevant here:

When you post User Content to the Site, you authorize and direct us to make such copies thereof as we deem necessary in order to facilitate the posting and storage of the User Content on the Site. By posting User Content to any part of the Site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to the Company an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such User Content for any purpose on or in connection with the Site or the promotion thereof, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, such User Content, and to grant and authorize sublicenses of the foregoing.

While IANAL, these seems to render the site completely useless for aspiring writers looking for feedback, as even a private draft shared among friends is licensed to Facebook.

So, if you want to give away the rights to your intellectual property, post it on Facebook. I'm not even going to get into the other significant issues, although they should not be overlooked.

Granted, the traditional LMS is a monolith designed to serve the needs of institutions first, teachers second, and students a very distant third. And yes, a social learning space is a vast improvement. But, a space needs to offer more than just the potential for social learning for it to be a wise choice. Facebook offers some generic functionality that is an improvement over traditional LMS's, but this says more about the sorry state of existing LMS solutions than about the suitability of Facebook as a replacement.

If you want a social learning space, you have a bevy of open source solutions that get the job done more effectively and allow users to retain control of their content and their user data. Moodle, Drupal, or even WPMU are a better place to start.