Google Launches Facebook Disconnect

I've always found Facebook's cavalier attitude toward its users' privacy a little worrisome, but I still maintained my Facebook account. Even after they rolled out feature after feature that was always "opt out" instead of "opt in." Instead, I barely used it, logging in once a week or less for 10 minutes at a time. (Given that the average Facebook user spent 7 hours a month on the site in February, it seems like my account is getting dusty by comparison.)

Then, Facebook rolled out "Facebook Connect" in May, which allowed its users to see which article his or her friends were reading (or "like"ing) on sites other than Facebook. Many news websites reported a traffic boom as a result of the service. Other sites, like Boing Boing, ran articles like "Six reasons to hate Facebook's new anti-privacy system, 'Connections'" citing a serious lack of privacy concerns on the part of the company.

Now, Google, the other kind-of-evil internet company that everyone still uses anyway, has rolled out it's own new weapon in the battle to be the biggest company to control the user experience: Facebook Disconnect. This seems like a good step for those who would rather not have Facebook track all of the sites you're visiting, but given that Google has had some of its own privacy flubs, it makes me wonder what Google's real motivation is here. I'm guessing it's not just about concern for my privacy.

According to Technorati, Blogging Is Male, Old

Technorati released results of their study of the blogosphere today. According to the research they found, by and large, bloggers are male.

It's something that we've seen replicated in other new media paradigms (and some old ones). Men make up the majority of "popular" Twitter users and men have dominated "old media" -- especially among high-level editor positions -- for centuries.

We might be tempted to write this off as The Way Things Are, but I think it reflects some deeper gender stereotypes. After all, many men I know don't think twice about putting their opinions on the web in a professional context and many women are more hesitant.

When I first started blogging, waaaay back in February of 2007, I couldn't come up with a name for it so I named it after myself. That, I figured, wouldn't change. (For all of you out there waiting for me to change my name if I get married let me just pause to assure you that it ain't gonna happen.) My colleague at the time and blogger at Feministing, Ann Friedman, marveled at this. In the feminist blogosphere, many women adopt psudeonyms. Many of the stereotypes and social cues we take about how to act in life translate to other kinds of media.

What's more, it sounds like of the female bloggers out there, they tend to be older women. Only 9 percent of active female bloggers are between the ages of 18 and 24. That's pretty dismal. Research also found that women are more likely to be "personal" bloggers and their style is more likely to be "conversational."

But there is one thing to be optimistic about: Although two-thirds of global bloggers are male, the stats are slightly better in the United States. Here, only 57 percent of bloggers are male. It's still disproportionate, but it's better than in Asia and Europe.

Cross posted.

Txt Me L8R

Sometimes The New Yorker makes itself just sound old. At least, that’s what I thought when I read this article on text messaging by Louis Menand. The article makes a lot of good points about how linguists find the unique misspellings in text messaging fascinating, but Ezra points out a lot of the flaws.

I have one more to add.

This passage is just weird:

Usually, if you can text a person you can much more quickly and efficiently call that person. But people sometimes text when they are close enough to talk face to face. People like to text. Why is that?

Crystal’s answer is that texting is, partly, a game. It’s like writing a sonnet (well, sort of): the requirement is to adapt the message to immutable formal constraints. A sonnet can’t have more than fourteen lines, and a mobile-phone message can’t have more than a hundred and forty bytes, which is usually enough for a hundred and sixty characters. This is a challenge to ingenuity, not an invitation to anarchy.

Okay, sure. Text messaging is like writing a sonnet. But Menand also seems to forget that a lot of times text messaging serves a practical purpose. Probably the reason people are texting each other while standing next to one another is because it’s a way to send a private message to someone even if you’re in a big group. It’s also really useful when you’re in a loud club or bar to locate a friend. Rather than attempting to scream into your cell phone louder than the background noise, you simply send a written text message to your friend sitting in the back booth. It eliminates the need to waste time searching for your friends and reduces the annoying nature of public cell phone use.

Perhaps next time The New Yorker should commission an article about text messaging from someone who actually uses it well instead of getting 56-year-old Menand, excellent writer though he may be, to cover a new technology he clearly isn’t all that familiar with.

Cross posted at Pushback.