goblin cartoons

Just now, I tweeted: “Dear Google: Opt-in social networks are good. Opt-out social networks are bad. Please remember this.” I was speaking in regards to Google Buzz, the company’s latest social networking release. Buzz is a social aggregator, like FriendFeed, pulling your content from different sites into one stream, where your friends can comment on your content, as well as pulling your friends’ content into the same stream.

I was excited about Buzz and gave it a try as soon as Google bestowed it upon me. It didn’t take long for me to grow frustrated and annoyed with it, though, and I gave up on it after less than a day’s use. Reflecting on it more, I’ve come to see Buzz as a massive screw-up in terms of social networking. Because Buzz is opt-out social networking, not opt-in.

If you sign up for MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed or a host of other social websites, you have to seek out friends. You can sometimes use your email contact list to find other people on those sites, or you have to find people one by one to friend. You also have to go to that site (or a desktop or mobile phone app) for access (and socializing).

Buzz, on the other hand, sits right there in your Gmail. By default, you get any and all updates to Buzz both in your Buzz inbox and in your Gmail inbox. (You can filter the emails out of your Gmail, but it’s not something you can really turn off.) Your Gmail contacts are automatically your Buzz contacts. Following contacts in Buzz automatically adds them to the people you follow in Google Reader (which increased my unread posts in Reader A LOT), even if you disconnect Reader from Buzz (and Reader is pulled into your Buzz stream by default, unless you choose to disconnect it). When you post straight to Buzz, you can choose to make a post private rather than public, but unless you disconnect everything from Buzz, your stream will continue to flow, allowing your friends to see posts and comment on them, even if you turn Buzz off (which you can only do by clicking on a tiny link at the bottom of your Gmail page).

In short, Google Buzz is opt-out social networking, not opt-in. If you don’t want to participate, you have to go through steps to turn it off, rather than going through steps to turn it on if you want to participate. Google has deployed Buzz to everyone with Gmail, causing a number of my friends to wonder what the hell it was and how to turn it off.

Opt-out social networking is a moronic and intrusive idea. Just because you use email doesn’t mean you want more social networking. Just because you emailed someone once or twice doesn’t mean you want to see everything they post to the internet (and it doesn’t mean you want them seeing everything you post to the internet). You might like fish and you might like salty food, but that doesn’t mean people should assume you want anchovies on your pizza, and you definitely shouldn’t have to ask to have to anchovies removed if you don’t want them.

Google Wave and Buzz are making me think Google Labs is some socially-isolated workshop where no usability studies are being done. It’s stunningly bad design. I’m going to be very wary of whatever Google releases next.

Most of the time, I think my optimism and enthusiasm is justified, because life regularly turns out to be at least as amazing as I expect and imagine it will be. But sometimes…not so much.

I was really, really excited about Google Wave when I first learned about it. I snagged an invite to start playing with it as soon as I could. And after two months of experimenting with Google Wave, I have to say…meh.

I’ve tried using it for conversation, but it doesn’t facilitate conversation any better than email, IM, Twitter or FriendFeed. I’ve tried using it for collaboration, but it doesn’t do that better than Google Docs. I appreciate that it’s in beta, and I’m prepared to believe that in a year or two or three, Google Wave will be where it’s at. But right now, it’s a lot like Second Life to me: flashy and interesting, but ultimately kind of boring and of little real use to me.

As much as I inherently cast a suspicious eye towards large companies, I have to say, Google regularly knocks my socks off. I’ve just learned more about their huge new project, Google Wave, and not only are my socks knocked off, my jaw is on the floor and my eyes are popping out of my skull. Google Wave is “email, if it were created today”–but it’s much more than that. It’s a groovy orgy of email, IM, wikis, collaborative documents (like Google Docs) and more. My gut instinct is to agree with Jason Griffey when he says “it’s the biggest revolution in communication online since the invention of email.” I think the implications and possibilities of this technology are astounding. But what makes it even more amazing in potential is that Google is making Wave open source and encouraging developers to create extensions and robots, but also to make of the platform and the protocol what they will. Seriously, this could he huge.

To get a better sense of how Google Wave will work and what the potential is, watch the video of the developer preview from Google I/O 2009. (Warning: the video is over an hour long and not always incredibly exciting. I watched it in chunks over 3 days.)

For a different perspective on Google Wave, check out “Five Reasons to Be Terrified of Google Wave.” Personally, I think the worrying sounds a bit shrill, but it’s good to look at all sides of the matter.

Sometimes the universe hands you a goody and makes your day. Sometimes that “universe” is Blake Carver of LISNews, and the “goody” is a brand-spanking-new website for the Library Society of the World. Check it out!

http://thelsw.org/

It’s not fully operational yet. A group of us are trying to figure out Drupal and get content and functionality onto the site. But it’s there, and you can register and create a profile. If anyone out there in Libraryland is good with Drupal and has some time and energy to spare, let us know. The LSW needs your help.

I’m just so happy about this! Blake is such a good guy for doing this. I’m very, very excited at the possibilities of the new site. It’s LSW 2.0! Let’s have fun with this!

Bobbie Newman tagged me for this meme, and since it involves the pretty word clouds of Wordle, why would I not take the challenge? So, I wandered over to Project Gutenberg, took the text from one of my all-time favorite novels, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars, plugged it into Wordle, and voila!

However, I’m going to be a stump and not tag anyone for this meme. Basically, if you feel like doing it, and it harms no one, go for it.

After playing with it a bit, I’ve decided Wordle is just plain neat. Being a fan of words and visual poetry, I love that you can create some really interesting visuals with words. Here’s the first one I created by importing my del.icio.us tags:

And here’s one I created using the entire text of this blog:

You can change the color scheme, the font, the way the word cloud lays out, and more. The only downsides: you need to have the latest version of Java (OK, so that’s not really that big a deal), and as far as I can tell, the only way to save the images to your computer so far is by doing a screen capture. Still, this could be awfully addictive!

I haven’t posted here in a while. Computers in Libraries and KLA really got me fired up, but I’ve since been very busy with work and my personal life. I’m hoping that despite any continuing business, I’ll be posting more from now on.

One of the things I’ve been busy with is preparing for a presentation I gave this morning on Web 2.0 for the Mid-America chapter of the Association of Fundraising Professionals. (Thanks to David Lee King for recommending me for this gig.) I spoke to around 20 people for about 45 minutes (leaving time at the end for questions) on a basic look at what Web 2.0 is, why using Web 2.0 tools might be a good idea, what some cheap or free and relatively easy to use Web2.0 tools are, and some possible issues with Web 2.0. I think the presentation went well. It wasn’t my usual audience (I’m used to babbling at librarians), but I felt comfortable, people laughed at the appropriate times, and nobody threw fruit or bagels at me.

I uploaded the Powerpoint to Slideshare, in case anyone wants to see what I showed while I rambled on.

At our Kansas Library Association conference presentation, an attendee asked a very good question: with all of this social networking on the internet, where the personal and the professional often blurs, what happens if a potential employer does an internet search on you and finds things that could be taken badly out of context or just outright makes them not want to hire you?

This has actually happened, hasn’t it? A potential employer finds your Facebook or MySpace page, or old blog posts, or Flickr photos, or what have you, and discovers that you’re a recovering alcoholic or a Fundamentalist Christian or a homosexual or an enthusiastic Doctor Who fan or a swinger or…well, pick something that’s perfectly legal but potentially off-putting or downright offensive to someone somewhere. And this hypothetical employer decides not to hire hypothetical you on the basis of this dug-up information. Should you do everything you can to make your online persona as professionally inoffensive as possible, to make sure this doesn’t happen? Should you lock anything potentially iffy away behind secure, friends-only barriers?

I really don’t have the right answer for you. I have what I think is the right answer for me.

So, I’ll come clean and out myself to the world. On something of a dare, I casually threw the phrase “hookers and blow” into our presentation at Computers in Libraries. And if you listen carefully during the video of the Computers in Libraries Pecha Kucha session, you can hear me yell it out from the audience. It also shows up in the caption of a picture taken of me at the conference. The phrase came from a joke I’d started in Twitter a few days before the conference, although it actually started as a joke between my wife and me. At any rate, by the end of the conference, I was joking that my professional career was over, thanks to my liberal use of the phrase at inappropriate times.

But here’s the thing: if a potential employer does an internet search and finds my professional name associated with the phrase “hookers and blow” and doesn’t bother to find out more of the context…I don’t want to work for them. If a potential employer does know the context and still doesn’t find it the least bit amusing…we won’t work well together, and it’s probably for the best if you don’t hire me.

In my life, I’ve done things I’m not proud of, things I’d do differently if I could. But I’m not going to hide who I am, I’m not going to censor my online expression, just to make sure I don’t put off any and all potential employers. There are people in this world I wouldn’t want to work with or associate with, and I’m not going to waste my time worrying about what they could find out about me that they wouldn’t like. I’ve got bigger yaks to fry.

I’ve just created a Library Society of the World page on Facebook. We’re everywhere!

Thanks to my conference sister Rikhei Harris, the Library Society of the World now has a group on LibraryThing. w00t!