Plus One Me
Very cool new site from Clay Johnson (via Twitter). It’s called “Plus One Me,” and the tagline says it all:
You can rate your friends in three categories (social, mental, and physical), each with a number of different attributes with which you can “+1” your friends. Social attributes include leadership, romantic, and punctual; mental +1s feature honesty, innovation, and adventurous; make them blush with physical plusses like strength, beauty, and cuteness.
The list is growing, too. If your idea for an attribute is accepted, you get +1 creativity.
You can register on the site to collect +1s, but you can also send them anonymously to your friends via email – even if they aren’t registered on the site.
So go ahead, +1 me – I already gave myself one point for humility.
Tracking the Spitzer Scandal on Twitter
Shortly after 2:00pm today, the New York Times posted a front-page story announcing New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer was involved in an interstate prostitution ring. But if you wanted the absolute latest information, close your NYTimes.com browser window and head over to Twitter, where the news of Spitzer’s scandal spread so quickly it was difficult to keep up.
Using the third-party application Tweetscan, you can search for specific phrases and see only the tweets that include your search. In the half hour between 3 and 3:30 EST, there were more than 300 tweets that mentioned Spitzer.
It’s not just the news of the scandal that spread across Twitter; looking at the stream shows folks’ reactions to the news and inquiries about how the story will play out. Some folks are plain disappointed, others lament that he was caught in such a typical trap.
You can also get analyses of how the scandal plays out in the 2008 election. This tweet mentions that both Spitzer and his lieutenant governor are super-delegates supporting Hillary Clinton. Another criticizes the Times’ protrayal of the scandal that implies Spitzer was involved with running the ring, not just being a john.
As David All tweeted early after the scandal broke, the coverage of the Spitzer scandal shows that Twitter is indeed a utility, not just a play-thing. While it’s still a bit inaccessible to read specific topics from within Twitter itself, its open API allows for applications like TweetScan to fill in the gaps.
Facebook Changes “Political Views” Options to Political Parties
Yesterday Facebook changed the way it lets users identify their political views, replacing a simple spectrum of views with a cluttered list of international political parties. Organizing people into political parties allows Facebook to sell microtargeted ads to advertisers looking to reach, say, Democrats in Ohio. Unfortunately, the change in emphasizing in party over position will organize a small base of users who self-identify as members of the national parties, and scatter the rest into free-form identification.
From its inception Facebook offered a healthy handful of political views from which users can choose: very liberal, liberal, moderate, conservative, very conservative, as well as libertarian and apathetic. Most everyone with political views would feel comfortable selecting one of those seven segments. Though for some left-leaning people “liberal” was inadequate, and instead preferred “progressive.” In summer 2007 MoveOn.org staff Justin Hamilton (corrected) created a Facebook group asking the site to add “progressive” as a political views option, which to date has about 500 members.
What Facebook opened up today is far beyond what any users were asking for.
In its blog announcement, Facebook’s internationalization manager said the new changes allow people to express their political identities “just as you can with Religious Views.” This is not entirely true - Facebook organizes religions into two hierarchical categories. For instance, if you’re Catholic, the default selection as you type is “Christian - Catholic.” If you’re a Buddhist, you can select Buddhist, or you can specify you’re “Buddhist - Theravada.” If you want to say you’re a Democrat, you have to write out “Democratic P” to find our country’s party - otherwise you’ll end up in Venezuela’s Democratic Action Party. When you write out “Progressive” in political views, the field defaults to “Progressive Canadian Party” unless you click out of the box.
What Facebook should do is *actually* structure political views like religious views, into subcategories, rather than a giant list of international political parties. First, out of the site’s 65 million active users, only about one-third up to 60% (thx, Fred - Facebook needs to update its press page.) live outside the US. What incentive does Facebook have in defaulting to a list of political parties relevant to small clusters of users?
Political parties should be options as subcategories of political views, so users can still identify first by their positions and second by party affiliation, if any. For instance, just as you can say you’re “Buddhist - Theravada,” Facebook should make it easy to identify as “Progressive - Democratic Party,” “Conversative,” or “Moderate - Republican.”
Introducing two levels of political views is in Facebook’s financial interest; by effectively hiding US parties and encouraging free-form writing in “Political Views,” Facebook misses the opportunity to identify people across broad spectrums of political views. With yesterday’s changes, advertisers can target people who self-identify as members of the Republican or Democratic parties, but lose the ability to find neatly organized groups of people based on commonly accepted ideological identifiers. You can already see it starting to happen. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington writes in his glowing review of yesterdays’s changes:
I chose to support the “Alliance For Congo’s Renewal” party for now. Just because I really don’t need to see any more political ads.
Free-form political affiliation is all well and good, and that should be kept as-is; it just doesn’t make sense for Facebook to disperse this important information and include largely irrelevant options.
It’s good that Facebook is opening up its profile options for users, but they need to seriously rethink what they just did to their “Political Views.”
Screenshot of writing “Progressive” in “Political Views”
Screenshot of writing “Democrat” in “Political Views”