It seems to me that what we have been talking about last week is like a game between websites and users. The game of hide-and-seek, to be precise. We users use whatever tools we can find online to bar websites from finding the traces of our browsing history, while websites sneakily insert ‘trackers’ in our browsers in order to identify us and follow us wherever we go.

Every game has its rules and boundaries, so how about this game? Apparently, there is no specific rule governing what a website cannot track using the cookies implanted, neither is there a rule governing what a website can do with its data. Though Facebook is notably stingy in giving its data to third parties (such action, whatever its original intention is, actually protects users to a certain extent), there are just so many other companies that are much more generous in providing data (at a certain fee, of course). So there is no clear ‘boundary’ for websites in this game. The ‘Do Not Track’ system backed by FTC is, at best, a recommendation (and clearly not forceful enough) to website designers and browser builders.

While websites can track users in an almost limitless platform, what normal users could do is much more limited by the capabilities of tools online and their own understanding of the issue. The number of ‘trace-cleaning’ and ‘anti-tracing’ tools available is still too small and many of them do not function properly (removing certain cookies will cause user experience of certain websites to plummet). Moreover, users themselves are not as professional as website designers in detecting the possible trackers in a website and therefore could not implement effective solutions. Many others simply do not even know they are being tracked, and that constitutes a large percentage of normal users (no offense but IE users in particular).

What we see here is a game that leans towards one side – the websites. As a result of superior knowledge and insufficient restrictions, they simply can ‘catch’ almost every user they want. And no matter how hard a user tries to cover his online record, he could not hide in the dark for long before a website pinpoints him and starts tracking him again. Even if a certain website is barred by a user, there will always be a similar data-hoarding website taking its place and continue the unfinished task. What makes anti-tracking even harder is that the tracking websites have done so well in keeping a low profile that most of us have never heard of them before. It is the first time for me to know sites like DoubleClick (affiliated to Google), BlueKai, and Google Analytics, and I am afraid many people would never know such sites exist. Without knowing the existence of tracking sites, it is just impossible to block them.

Are users really going to lose out in this hide-and-seek game? Are there any remedies for them to get rid of their disadvantages and turn this game around? Since what the websites have done is not considered illegitimate, it is hard to use legislative tools to explicitly restrict their behavior. However, the online tracking action has indeed annoyed a lot of users, and many people are thinking of non-legislative ways which could be effective as well.

We have talked about websites like Panopticlick which aim to educate users about the vulnerability of their own browsers and computers. This is an important step to take since users and website designers are not competing on a fair platform now due to unequal knowledge in this field. But another question arises: are users willing to take the time to learn something that they could hardly use in other aspects of life? Personal data from online tracking is mostly used for purposes like consumer-targeted advertisement and marketing, which pose less harm to users (some could even see such purposes as beneficial). Despite the low level of threat currently, we should still take preventive measures because the harm such data is actually capable of posing could be a nightmare for everyone, and nobody knows whether or when such data will be used for more sinister purposes.

Our anti-tracking tools are consistently improving as well. Tools like Ghostery and ShareMeNot are at the frontier of anti-tracking and have gained the support of thousands of users. As long as sneaky tracking by certain websites still exist online, I have no doubt that some organizations will come out with better tools to give users more options in countering such behavior.

As this is the last of my FRS101 blog posts, I would like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who has viewed my articles. Special thanks to my professors and classmates for giving me the inspiration of many blog posts.

Wish everyone a wonderful winter break ahead!

I still remember the days when we were ‘forced’ to clear up every trace of food/garbage we left during our Outdoor Action Trips. And today when I was reviewing the contents of our class, I suddenly developed the idea of applying the ‘Leave No Trace’ (or LMT, i.e. Leave Minimum Trace) rule not only to our real life, but to our digital life as well.

With the availability of huge storage space in our computers and on the ‘cloud’, we can conveniently store almost everything related to us without ever worrying about running out of space. At first glance, this concept seems great: we can get rid of the emotional struggle experienced when we were hesitating over which photo to keep and which to discard. However, after giving it some more thought, I find this unlimited storage space is doing us more bad than we think.

When people were first introduced the concept of saving their personal stuff in digital format instead of hard copies, they happily dumped all their pictures, music and videos into the computer hard disk. At first, they will happily browse through the pictures, feeling fortunate that they can keep every piece of memory they have. However, as the materials pile up in the hard disk, people feel less and less willing to look through them and sort out those they really want. Instead, they will just leave them there, probably never going to look at them anymore. The large amount of information in our computers and in our Facebook accounts is making us more disorganized (since we keep adding materials inside and never clear up the ‘garbage’). Sometimes I feel scared that there is so much information about me online and a total stranger could easily know a lot about me in a few minutes. But at the same time I feel reluctant to remove the contents I do not like/want simply because, well, there is just so much of them.

Moreover, the low cost of saving personal information nowadays is making the task of forgetting something even harder. Human brains function in a way that makes it harder to forget a certain piece of memory than remember it, and the ever-present digital copies of information just adds difficulty to the process of forgetting. Though deleting a picture is easy on computer, we are just so used to keeping everything that we find it troublesome and time-consuming to selectively delete certain files. So we let them sit quietly in our hard disk like time-bombs, just that we have no idea when they will detonate. And what makes things worse is, even after you have devoted the time and effort to delete the relevant files on your computer, there could be copies stored online and shared on Facebook by others. Once you inadvertently run into the same picture/music, you are ‘forced’ to pick up that piece of memory once again and that could be painful.

Those are the reasons why I want to promote the idea of ‘LNT’ in our digital age. By LNT, I mean consciously choosing what to add to our computer and our Facebook accounts every time we take new pictures/find new songs/record new videos, and have the courage (yes, it does take courage) to discard the rest of the stuff we do not like. Instead of piling up everything in the computer and clearing the useless part in one shot, LNT means we do it in a continuous process, one bit at a time. This way, we feel less terrified by the task in front of us and at the same time reduce our unwanted trace (both the online and offline traces) by a large amount. This LNT does not mean we need to completely be ‘invisible’ by others. After all, we need to disclose certain personal information online for others to recognize and interact with us. What I would like to emphasize is the care taken to maintain the amount of information disclosed. We need to have some sense of what we could find about ourselves from the contents in our computers and online, and what others could find about us from our online information. If either of the two contains things we do not want to appear, we delete them immediately.

This concept might sound troublesome at first (which is quite the same as my feeling when I heard about LNT in the Outdoor Actions Trip), but just as LNT in real life is what keeps our natural environment clean and original as it is, LNT in virtual life is the element that keeps the virtual environment clean and maximizes our online benefit.

It’s not uncommon for someone under 13 to have a Facebook account today despite the restriction implemented in the “Terms of Service (ToS)” of Facebook. In fact, even Mark Zuckerberg himself acknowledged that children under 13 should have a chance to use Facebook to interact with their friends. So the restriction on the ToS exists only in name, with little efficacy. Instead of talking about the appropriateness or usefulness of the ban, I want to look at this issue from another angle – do people at a young age (before 13, probably) really need Facebook/Twitter/social networking sites?

When I was 13, I had neither Facebook nor Twitter account. True, both of the sites had not been founded at that time. But even if they had, I doubt whether I would use them. I met most of my friends on a daily basis (either in school or in my neighborhood) and my social life was full of fun and excitement even without the online interactions. However, with the advancements in entertainment technology online, people from a young age start to develop the habit of socializing in a virtual platform instead of in a face-to-face method.

That trend is worrisome for two reasons: First, as children put more and more emphasis online, they lose the opportunity to socially interact in a real and face-to-face setting (some people argue that online interaction complements daily socialization and helps children build strong, intimate friendship. I do not disagree with that conclusion but need to point out that such strong relationship exists mainly online with only a small real life component; the capability to communicate with someone face-to-face could not be simply developed by Facebook chats and posts). The gradual loss of effective communication skills in real life (including the use of appropriate gestures, facial expressions, tones etc. which Facebook socialization hardly requires) could negatively influence the child’s future course of life in college or at work. Second, the amount of information on Facebook and similar sites is just so huge that a child could be inundated. Since parents could not effectively monitor children’s Facebook usage (parents do not have so much time to sit by the side of their child every time they log into Facebook), it is highly possible that children could receive misleading information online. And since they are not equipped with the skills to distinguish the validity of such information, children are highly prone to such false information which could instill wrong ideas in their minds. Ideas formed at a young age are especially hard to uproot, thus the effect of such misleading information online could be detrimental.

I am not saying that letting young children use Facebook causes only harm but no benefit. The benefits and convenience of social networking sites are clear to see and need no further elaboration; however, the dark side, especially the harm on young children, is less obvious and is what needs to be brought to the spotlight.

I would also like to point out that the reason for many children under 13 to join Facebook or Twitter is not actually the content of the websites themselves but the influence of peer pressure. More interestingly, such peer pressure is a ‘circular’ rather than a ‘straight-line’ influence: when person A starts to use Facebook, he might influence his good friend B to register an account as well; B then influences C and C influences D. And the fact that B, C and D (who could be good friends of A as well) are now on Facebook further convinces A to stick to the website even though he might find the site less appealing than he thought. Such circular pressure makes the task of protecting children from harmful materials on Facebook very tough since they are reluctant to quit Facebook (and therefore sacrifice their friendship forged online) but at the same time they face the threat of misleading information on Facebook without appropriate filters.

Given the negative impacts of using Facebook and the difficulties in eliminating such impacts, I was actually glad that I started using Facebook and Twitter only at the age of 16 when I had some concepts (though basic) about right and wrong and could make sensible decisions about what to believe online.

Indeed, children nowadays can have thousands of ways to interact with their friends on Facebook, many of those I could never have imagined when I was 13. But I still miss the time when I went to the backyard of my friend’s house and played hide-and-seek from early afternoon until dusk. And I believe children today deserve more of those opportunities as well, instead of sitting in front of a computer screen and checking their friends’ status on FarmVille.

When I started to use Facebook about 5 years ago, there was no such thing called ‘Games’ in it. And just all of a sudden, I was spammed with feeds about FarmVille, Mafia Wars and MouseHunt on my News Feed. Despite being a little annoyed by the ceaseless and almost meaningless (at least to somebody who does not play the Game) posts, I was actually more intrigued by this whole list of ‘App Feeds’. Many people play games on Facebook not because of the actual contents of them, but rather the fact that they could interact with their friends (and possibly find new friends) by engaging in virtual cooperation and competition.

What is the difference between games on conventional gaming systems and games on Facebook and similar websites? Sony and Microsoft have both provided user-networking platforms on PS3 (PlayStation Platform) and XBox 360 (XBox LIVE), which are intended to give users the ‘social-networking experience’ while playing video games. However, their user counts are still dwarfed by the enormous 240 million of Zynga, the largest ‘social-networking game provider’. Taking into consideration the age of Zynga (founded in 2007) and the ages of XBox (first generation released in 2000) and Play Station (first generation released in the 1990s), we are even more amazed by the impact of social games on us users.

Most of the social games require very simple control methods, sometimes only a few clicks (exemplified by the game Cow Clicker). Instead of complaining about the lack of intellectual challenge compared to video games that usually involve complicated control systems and demand good body coordination, I believe such simple and ‘unintelligent’ gaming methods are exactly one of the reasons why people enjoy playing them so much. Sometimes people are so exhausted by tasks at work that they just need a simple way to relax. And a game that is player-friendly and at the same time helps one interact with one’s social circle could be the best choice. Without the trouble to figure out the proper way of playing the game, players could dive into the gaming environment almost instantly. That is why thousands of users are drawn to Cow Clicker and remain enthusiastic in this game despite it being somewhat ‘dumb’.

Having said that, many social games are actually not as ‘unintelligent’ as they appear to be. In order to obtain higher scores in a social game, there are certain strategies which need to be employed. These strategies deal not just with the mechanism of the games themselves, but often involve theories in human psychology and behavioral studies as well. The social games could be simple to play, but since people who are playing them can display complicated and unpredictable behaviors, the resultant interaction can provide profound knowledge on our insight of the human mind.

Moreover, the different intentions with which people play conventional video games and social games also influence the rapid user growth rate of social games. When we play games on PS3 and XBox 360, our primary intention is to explore the content of the games themselves. The part of ‘interacting with friends’ usually comes after that. However, when we open Mafia Wars or FarmVille, we are trying to use the tools in the game to compete with our friends online. So our top priority is social interaction instead of solely game-playing. And that means we will try our best to involve our friends (interact with their characters, obtain higher scores than they have, or post feeds on their wall) in the games. As a result, one user’s action could trigger multiple responses from many other users. This nearly exponential rate of user involvement in social games plays a significant role in the rapid growth of firms like Zynga, and is the primary factor that distinguishes social games from normal video games.

Social games have become so integrated into Facebook that they are now an indispensable part of our ‘social-networking experience’. Leaving the positive and negative influences of such experiences aside, I am more interested in the fact that firms are now connecting fields (gaming, music, news) that were not associated with social networking in the past to websites like Facebook and Google+ so as to enrich our online interactions. The list of fields associated with social-networking sites is constantly increasing and hopefully, one day our social life online could be as colorful as our daily life (or is it already more colorful than our daily life?).

(Apparently this blog post has a similar title as Amanda’s post last week. But I promise the contents are totally different.)

With the election going on so intensely, the idea of how closely Facebook (and similar social-networking websites) and politics are connected today comes to my mind once again. Candidates use these websites to launch their campaigns; users follow/like certain candidates to update themselves with election news; some advertisements encourage users to vote during the presidential election. All these are vivid examples of how social-networking websites are used by various parties to achieve various objectives related to politics.

In fact, this phenomenon is not unique to the US only; it has become global. Election candidates from many European countries, South-East Asian countries and South American countries are using Facebook and alike to promote their campaigns; during the Arab Spring, people in numerous Arabian countries used Facebook to organize political protests which eventually overthrown some dictatorships; Facebook users from Myanmar and Thailand disclosed (secretly) the chaotic situations in their countries during political upheavals and asked for help. In all the cases above, Facebook is treated as an important pathway (sometimes the only way) to disseminate information. And it makes no surprise that social-networking websites, instead of traditional media forms, are chosen to undertake this task: the cost is low, the rate of diffusion is very high, and total blockage is extremely difficult.

People tend to think of the relationship between politics and social-networking websites as a mutually beneficial one: the websites help certain groups achieve their political goals and, during the process, increase their own user recognition and user count. Moreover, in the cases like the Arab Spring, the social website (namely Facebook) itself has been brought under the spotlight and has become the topic of interest: many people seemed to care more about the involvement of Facebook in the series of events rather than the events themselves. Indeed, both sides benefit from such ‘cooperation’. But their relationship is not that simple: politics, in many cases, could be the roadblock for social-networking sites.

One famous (probably infamous) example is the total ban of Facebook in China. There is a lot of anti-China information being disseminated through Facebook and the Chinese government insists that letting Chinese people have access to such information could be a potential cause of political instability. Putting the validity of this argument aside, there are actually two points we could take away from this statement: first, social-networking websites could be so powerful that they sometimes pose a threat to governments; second, when politicians sense a threat from Facebook and alike, they will immediately turn their back against those websites. And despite the immense, immaterial power of Facebook (the “country of all countries”, as I have argued before), it still has to bend its knees when it comes to state laws and regulations that restrict its operation. Similar obstacles have been met in Iran, Pakistan and so on.

The nature of Facebook determines that it could not afford to censor certain information in order to fit the taste of one particular country, though this could bring billions’ worth of business to the site in countries like China. Just take the precedent of Google: in order to operate in the mainland, its Chinese site had to apply censors to a list of keywords (which are constantly updated by the government) and its service was closely monitored by the government (there were cases of government hackers breaking into Gmail accounts of political dissidents in China). Although Google made a huge fortune from China, it decided to quit the mainland market in 2010 because of the tight political controls which greatly affected the normal operation of the site. Those controls happened to a search engine, and they could happen to social-networking sites as well.

So the relationship between social-networking websites and politics is a complicated mix of love and hatred. When there is mutual benefit to be gained without hurting the other side, the two really work pretty well; but as long as one side senses a potential threat to its own interest, their sweet relationship breaks rapidly.

I am writing this article when Sandy stormed the States: the campus is closed, and I could do nothing in my dormitory except refreshing my Facebook page again and again. Most of my friends online are talking about how Sandy has devastated the cities, and of course, how many days of break they enjoy in their respective colleges. It is amazing to see that at times of emergency, members of the online community, who have varied interests and preferences, suddenly draw their focus to one single incident at the same time and discuss intensely the ramifications/implications to society.

I visited the 911 Memorial at Ground Zero just one day before Sandy arrived in New York (and I barely made my way back to Princeton). The visit reminded me a similar case in 2001 after the shocking terrorist attack which draws the whole world’s attention to the two skyscrapers in the city. Almost everyone in every online community (Facebook included) instantly dropped what they were discussing prior to the attack and started searching for ‘Al-Qaeda’ and ‘World Trade Center’.

So how are these incidents related to the ‘power’ of social-networking websites? Even without the online communities, we are still informed of the latest incidents through TV, newspaper, radio and other media forms. Websites like Facebook do not change how we receive information; it changes the way we interact with information we have. Instead of passive receivers of news, we feel more engaged in the current local/global activities by discussing it over the Internet. And websites like Facebook help spread our voices to people and places we might never know before. The widespread user-generated opinions create links among different groups, and those opinions which represent popular views are resonated and amplified and could themselves become the key factors in the courses of development of the news.

The shared anger displayed online after the 911 attack was one factor behind the US war in Afghanistan; the common sorrow expressed by millions of people around the world for the innocent lives lost in the attack urged the US government to build the memorial and designate 9/11 every year as the Patriot Day. Similarly, the general concern on Facebook towards those suffering from the hurricane is also pressurizing the government to do more for them, especially during the critical election period. All these facts testify the power of Facebook and other social-networking websites – instead of letting us witness the news of yesterday, they enable us normal users to create news of tomorrow.

This analysis also brought to my mind the earthquake in Sichuan, China in 2008. Millions of Renren users in China displayed great sorrow and organized voluntary donations online. But that was not the most astonishing power of the website. Renren actually became the platform for anonymous users to expose local governors who misused/appropriated donations for personal benefits! Hundreds of such incidents have been uncovered during that year and even the central government of China was shocked by the rampant corruption in many provincial and municipal governments. And of course, the general public was more than unhappy about these governors and many of them were dismissed immediately. The social-networking website became the place where normal citizens strongly influenced the political system of China which was rather uncommon before the rise of such websites. Everyone plays a key role in this political change as every piece of opinion shared online added intensity to the public fury; Renren united all these users and directed their common anger towards the government. Without any one of them, the change would not happen.

Natural disasters and man-made incidents have the power to take away lives and wreak havoc on our society, but social-networking websites have the power to unite us, no matter how different we are, so that we can counter the negative impacts and build a better world. We feel a sense of close involvement with what is happening in the world when we are using Facebook and similar websites. This feel is the power they endow us, and is exactly the reason why we enjoy using them.

I was thinking about this question when I read a post on Facebook:

More and more people are treating the ‘Add friend’ button on Facebook as the ‘Follow’ button on Twitter: they do not necessarily know you, neither do they really want to be your friends; they just want to know what is going on with you.

When someone tries to add you as friend, Facebook gives you information on the number of ‘common friends’ you two share. While that piece of information is being used by some people as an important determinant in accepting/rejecting friend requests, many simply do not care about this number and choose to accept the request right away. In fact, I have done a little experiment using my own Facebook account: I randomly typed in a name in the ‘search people’ section and sent friend requests to the first 20 people on the list whom I share no ‘common friends’ with (I apologize to those 20 guys puzzled by the friend request from this total stranger). To my surprise, 12 out of these 20 people accepted my friend request within a day; 4 more accepted my request within the next 2 days and the rest 4 did not respond. Nobody actually rejects me! Hooray!

I know my experiment design is not sophisticated enough to be foolproof, but at least it says something about our behavior online that could be different from what happens in the real world. People are curious about what is going on with others, even those they do not personally know. And if the cost of knowing others’ life is reduced to just one click on the ‘Add friend’ button, why not go ahead and do it? For those receiving the friend requests, they feel flattered (if not puzzled) if people are interested in his/her life. Few people actually click the ‘reject’ button because they do not want to disappoint the requester by being ‘rude’. They just choose to ignore the request which has similar effect as rejecting the request but saves face for both sides.

I am definitely not the first one to discover this, and there are many people online who are thinking about the same question as I do: how many ‘friends’ on Facebook are real and genuine friends of ours? One reply to that post above shows an answer to this question (and the person who replied happens to be my friend – on Facebook):

I am seriously considering un-friending my friends on Facebook one by one and then spend some time thinking about what this particular ‘friend’ means to me: if I can find a good reason, I will leave a sincere message to this friend and submit a friend request again; if not, then it does not hurt to un-friend this guy.

I am not sure whether he will add me again after un-friending me, but his idea absolutely intrigues me. At a time when everything is fast-paced and result-orientated, we really need some space to take a breath and reflect upon our definitions of basic ideas like ‘friends’. By randomly submitting and accepting friend requests, people are indeed more ‘connected’, but not in a way we actually want. We are blurring the boundary between ‘friends’ and ‘loosely connected strangers’. Maybe we really need to re-define our criteria for making friends online, though not necessarily in the way quoted above (unless you really have a lot of free time). Only with a clear set of criteria in mind can we really make more friends and strengthen our existing friendship on Facebook.

So you just added me as a friend on Facebook. But are we friends?

So Facebook has 1 billion users now. That means out of 7 people on earth, one has a Facebook account. And if you take into account that there is only 32.7% of world population with Internet access, the rate will be even higher.

Facebook has really grown into the “country of all countries”. If we treat Facebook as a sovereign state, it then becomes the third most populous country in the world (after China and India); its “GDP” of around $42,000 million (Facebook’s current market capitalization) makes it richer than countries like Iceland and Costa Rica (which is quite a tremendous achievement considering Facebook does not really “produce” and material goods); it does not have military or political influence over other countries, yet it is one of the major players behind civil uprisings in Egypt, Libya and many other Arab countries last year and indirectly caused the resignation of a few rulers; and it is undeniably the most culturally and ethnically diverse country in the world.

Given the astonishing power of Facebook, one question comes to my mind: who should be monitoring/governing this “state”? My initial answer was “Mark Zuckerberg” without much consideration. True, he controls more than half the wealth of Facebook and has executive power. But after some thought, I found an error in this naive answer: he is only “running” the site instead of “monitoring” it. It is like the difference between the Prime Minister and the Supreme Court: the Prime Minister is the one implementing economic and social policies to ensure smooth operation of the country, but the Supreme Court plays the ultimate role in deciding what is right and wrong according to the law. We have the Prime Minister of Facebook, but where is the Supreme Court?

So I changed my answer to “the United States government and the laws of the United States”. They, in some extent, provide guidelines and regulations to control the types of activities that can take place on Facebook. However, I soon realized that the laws can never evolve as fast as the Internet community. What is codified into the law as illegal behavior might have already taken place for months or years on Facebook and could have harmed millions of people. And when one trick is banned, ten “upgraded versions” might just come out simply because someone is profiting from them. Moreover, Facebook is a global community operating in different nations and has users with different backgrounds, and a set of rules from only one country is definitely insufficient to monitor its behavior. International cooperation to govern Facebook? Seems much too serious for a virtual community whose main purpose is to help people socialize, plus governors around the world have more urgent business to do (at least they think so).

What other choices am I left with? One seemingly highly unlikely answer appears: “users”. Few people think users have much say over what is right and wrong over the service they are using – they can provide opinions on how to improve the service, but when it comes to the basic rules guiding the functioning of the system, they seem to be the ones affected by the changes rather than making any changes. Does that mean I should give up on this answer as well? No. Facebook does not fit our conventional definition of “service provider”. Socialization involves people, and people constantly change the courses of socialization as a result of changes in communal beliefs, standards, etc. So users are not passive recipients of the Facebook service; they are part of the service. And as a constituent of the system, they therefore should be making decisions for Facebook. The voices of millions of users should be heard, and majority view respected. Compared to government officials and regulators who are usually distant from such social-networking services, we users are more updated with the current situation online and can provide nearly immediate counter-actions to malicious behaviors. Of course, that calls for responsible exercise of user judgment power.

So it turns out that we users are the ones who should and could monitor Facebook. And the first step we need to take is probably to convince Facebook that this “country” should listen to more feedback from its “citizens”.

Frankly speaking, it is the first time I know Facebook has a Data Science Team. But that comes as no surprise – a company sitting on petabytes (1 petabyte = 1 million gigabyte) of personal data definitely would not let the valuable information go to waste. Looking from this perspective, I begin to think Facebook not just as a company, but a social experiment as well, an experiment in which we are all test subjects.

When we share a video/picture from some websites, it shows our personal preferences to certain forms of intellectual creation; when we click on an advertisement, it indirectly tells people (whoever knows we clicked on that advertisement) our current needs and wants; when we engage in discussions/tagging with our friends, we are trying to build or strengthen our social ties. It is hard to observe all these actions if they happen in real world, especially when they involve a billion users literally everywhere on earth. But with Facebook, that observation becomes possible as all these social interactions are converted to “0”s and “1”s and logged in the data centers. And many experiment proposals that were “beyond imagination” to social scientists in the past can now be implemented with ease. In fact, that is what scientists are doing right now, both scientists from the Data Science Team and researchers from many other institutions.

While gaining economic return for Facebook is certainly one purpose for the Data Science Team to conduct numerous user-based researches every year, I believe the major objective is for us to better understand ourselves and the society we live in. Our understandings of how the interactions of individual social elements influence each other and the functioning of society as a whole remain shallow and sometimes naive. With the development of platforms like Facebook, we are building a virtual community which is essentially a projection of our conventional society onto the Internet. And the basic working mechanism of this online community is very similar to that of our real society – the mutual connections and interactions of “cells” give rise to an “organism” which is constantly growing and self-correcting. So by studying data collected by Facebook, scientists can definitely deduce many interesting/intriguing/shocking theories about human beings. And the unique part of this huge social experiment is that the test subjects do not even know they are being studied (people are merely socializing on Facebook and seldom consider the possibility that their actions will be closely observed). As a result, their responses to certain incidents are totally natural and genuine, and that is exactly what researchers want. Actually, even the purpose of gaining higher economic return can, in some sense, be incorporated into the experiment of understanding social behavior – firms are simply “researching” what kind of persuasions users are more prone to listen to.

However, some parts of the experiment process are not as smooth as we want them to be. Facebook currently restricts its data access to employees from the Data Science Team only. Although it recently agreed to let outside researchers examine its data in order to varify its research results, the process for researchers to get the permission itself is already time-consuming and involves too many restrictions. On the one hand, the scientific community needs access to Facebook’s data in order to give consent to the validity of its researches and to run more social science researches; on the other hand, Facebook has the obligation to “protect its users’ privacy and anonymity” (or so as it asserts) and could not let outsiders use its data freely. This dilemma is what keeps more revolutionary findings from coming out. The Data Science Team has done its job well, but some contributions from other competent scientists in the world would definitely make the experiment a more fruitful one.

Moreover, we users are not notified before being treated as test subjects. Facebook anonymizes data before conducting researches so that researchers could not identify certain users from the data they have (and many researchers do not pay much attention to individual data as compared to mass trend). And by not informing users they could be the target of the research, researchers could get the most genuine online behavior they want. But do we deserve the right to know that our actions are being monitored? Even though the feeling of being observed by some total stranger might make some people unnerved, at least we should have the option to be notified about what is going on.

When he founded Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg never imagined his website to become a platform for social research. And now Facebook has evolved into this giant virtual community, it is running both as a billion-dollar business and as the biggest social experiment ever. With greater data comes greater responsibility – at least it is true in this digitized world.

Image sources: http://www.userlogos.org/files/logos/axin89/renren.png http://www.simplyzesty.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/08/Facebook-logo.jpeg

Hansen mentioned the Chinese social-networking website Renren.com in his blog post, and that just reminds me to draw some similarities and differences between Facebook and its Chinese counterpart (thanks to Hansen for your reminder :D). After all, I am probably the only one in this class who frequently uses two social-networking websites located in two different regions of the world (i.e. non-China and China). And I feel obliged to share with you my observations as a loyal user at both sites.

Renren, which means “everyone” in Chinese, was founded in 2005 (a little younger than Facebook). Formerly named Xiaonei (which means “at school”), its original focus was to connect students from the same or different schools and to help adults find their long-lost schoolmates. And now it has evolved into the largest SNS (social-network service) website in China with 150 million users (more than 1/4 of the total number of network users in China) and counting. Its user group has also expanded from only students to virtually every social class.

The purpose for me to bring out this discussion is to give suggestions on how the two firms could learn from each other. So after listing some of the basic facts, I will move on to my observations.

Both firms face the challenge of making revenue from the huge user data they gather without annoying the users. Facebook focuses on advertising and applications development. Renren has also paid attention to these areas, but it has ventured beyond them. In March 2010, Renren introduced its own job-hunt platform which helps firms hire current college graduates. In return, firms pay Renren a certain amount of intermediary fee when they successfully hire someone. Renren’s large number of student users gives it a unique advantage when it comes to headhunting. Moreover, students could use this platform to find current employees in their interested firms and ask for advice on job applications. This way, the platform not only benefits firms but users as well. Although LinkedIn is already the market leader in providing similar service in the states, I believe Facebook could definitely grab this opportunity and work on this aspect. Its enormous user count of 600 million around the globe is a valuable resource to any firm in the world. But one thing just came to mind – the existence of that platform might deter some users from putting certain contents on their homepages as they could negatively affect their images in front of the employers. Maybe a modified user homepage specially targeted for employers?

Privacy is a headache, both for Facebook and Renren. The problems each faces are, however, slightly different. Renren had a PR crisis some time ago when it was rumored that its major shareholder is SoftBank, a Japanese multi-national conglomerate. Given the strong tension between China and Japan (which is inflamed by the recent incident of the purchase of some disputed islands by the Japanese government, by the way), many Chinese are disgruntled by the implication that their personal information could be accessible by a Japanese corporation. Renren has to make a public statement that its shareholder is no longer SoftBank in order to appease the public fury. However, that does not mean the user data on Renren is safe and secure – the Chinese government could be as dangerous as, if not more than, a foreign company. Renren, being a Chinese website, cannot escape the surveillance and implicit control of the government. All posts and comments contrary to national/economic interests are removed and relevant users could be investigated. So both firms leak private user data – Facebook leaks primarily to advertisers and application developers while Renren leaks primarily to the government (though involuntarily). And both of them deserve criticism for such leakage. They are at two ends of a spectrum – Facebook being too loose in terms of information control while Renren being monitored too tightly. It might be better if they both move to the middle of the spectrum: certain government control to prevent malicious third-parties and at the same time leaving some leeway to ensure normal users’ freedom of speech.

There are really a lot to say about these two firms – perhaps the two most influential SNS sites on earth (sorry, Google+). They are similar in so many aspects, yet remain so drastically different. As we are considering the “social impact of social networks”, I will definitely share more about what I have experienced in Renren with you. So stay tuned for more updates from China!