Tag: social media

ABC702 Weekends: Facebook and your Family

How do we use social media safely and effectively.

For the first 702Sydney Weekend program for the year ABC 702 Sydney Paul Wallbank and Ian Rogerson looked at how to use Facebook safely.

Facebook and other social media services are becoming an increasingly important part of our lives, so it’s important we understand the benefits and the risks involved in using the web.

All the details of what we discussed in the program are available at the Facebook and Your Family post.

One listener’s question we said we’d get back to was Emma who asked about Microsoft Word stopping her Mac from closing down.

This is usually due to problems with an office plug in or the normal template. To attempt to fix the template, follow the instructions at the Word Mac site.

As Ian suggested, it may be time to consider a more up to date program as Office 2001 is seriously outdated.

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Facebook and Families

Family use of social media can be problematic

As the Internet has become a normal part of our family lives, social media services like Facebook are becoming important in the way people, particularly our kids, socialise and communicate.

Most of this web use is positive however there are risks with these online tools so we do need to know how to manage social media services and reduce any problems we may have in our families and businesses.

Understand the risks

Facebook is an online service and all web based platforms share the same risks such as stranger danger, bullying, fraud and offensive behaviour – both kids and adults need to understand the risks.

A good start is sitting down with younger kids and using some of the online resources available, the US Virginia Department of Education has a good interactive presentation on online safety.

For Australian specific content, the Federal government’s Cyber Smart website offers advice to families at all ages; from grandparents to kids.

Respect the rules

All online services have rules that govern behaviour, one of the most common is a restriction on under 13s. This is partly because of the US COPPA law that restricts websites and social media services from advertising to children.

Of the other rules that can cause problems Facebook has bans on hate speech and an almost pathological obsession with nudity. It pay to read the terms and conditions so you know what is acceptable.

Under 13s should not use Facebook

While for many kids Facebook is the way to talk to their friends online, parents should resist the pressure to sign their kids up until they are of the legal age.

Regardless of what you think of the rules, many kids don’t have the maturity of to understand or deal with the issues of using social media sites. For that matter, neither do many adults.

Should Facebook find out that an account is owned by a child under 13, they will shut it down immediately.

Choose your friends carefully

Everybody – kids and adults – should be cautious about friends they make online. Just accepting friend requests from anybody, or from those who look cute or cool, can lead to problems later.

Set your privacy

In Facebook you should set your default privacy settings to “Friends”. You can do this by clicking the arrow pointing down in the top right hand corner of the Facebook screen and selecting privacy.

Having set your default privacy settings to Friends, you may want to further improve your privacy by continuing down the privacy screen and selecting functions like not allowing friends to post to your Facebook wall.

Be careful what you like

Liking products and pages can have consequences, at the very least others know what causes you’ve joined.

Joining hate or bullying campaigns or pages is not a good look, so don’t do it if you think you may upset people around you.

You are what you post

Anything you put online is in writing against your name. If it’s going to upset people or cause trouble then don’t do it.

In the United States one teenager found this out the hard way when her father discovered a Facebook post criticising him and her mother. He shot her laptop and then posted the video onto her Facebook page.

Practice Safe Computing

Services do get hijacked, so have strong passwords, up to date virus checkers and make sure the computer is fully up to date with security patches.

Never share passwords with friends or siblings and use different passwords on each service so if Minecraft gets compromised, Facebook or email doesnt’ as well.

Put computers in common areas

Kids’ computers should be in common areas and use of any Internet enabled devices like iPods and mobile phones in places like bedrooms should be strongly discouraged.

Be open to talking

If anyone in your family seems to have a problem with computer use such as getting upset, socially withdrawal or acting unusually then talk to them. This happens with adults as well.

One thing to remember is that punishing people, particularly kids, rarely works well with these technologies so it’s best to make it clear they won’t be in trouble if they come to you with a problem they are having on the net.

It’s not just kids

We have to remember its not just kids who get into trouble online, there’s no shortage of adults who have created problems for themselves and their families through irresponsible online behaviour. So parents need to watch their own social media usage as well.

Should someone in your family be having a problem, then don’t hesitate to talk to the school, employer or Internet provider if there’s issues that need to be addressed.

There’s lot of online services services and resources such as Cybersafe listed above. Also don’t hesitate to call any support lines such as Lifeline or Beyond Blue if you are seriously concerned about a family member’s wellbeing.

On balance, the web and social media are positive influences on most people’s lives so by using commonsense and playing safely, the majority of families will avoid the really terrible stories we hear about online problems.

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Paying the piper – the cost of the internet’s walled gardens

The web’s walled gardens have a real business cost

With the web increasingly dominated by four major, and many minor, fiefdoms the cost of being part of those groups is gradually becoming clear.

As part of Facebook filings in advance of their public float they published the key agreements with their developer partners including that with games provider Zygna, technology journalist Tom Foremski has a disturbing look at Facebook’s conditions that illustrate the costs and risks.

In terms of the costs, Tom identifies Clause 2.1 of Facebook’s “Statement of Rights and Responsibilities” – shown as Annex 1 in the Developers  as probably the biggest price for all content creators;

… you grant us a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook (“IP License”). This IP License ends when you delete your IP content or your account unless your content has been shared with others, and they have not deleted it.

So by sharing something on Facebook, you grant Facebook the right to do what they like with what you’ve created. That’s something worth thinking about.

For anybody trying to make a living off Facebook, it’s important to consider they also retain the right to throw you off the service at any time. From clause 4.10 of the Statement Of Rights Annex;

If you select a username for your account we reserve the right to remove or reclaim it if we believe appropriate (such as when a trademark owner complains about a username that does not closely relate to a user’s actual name).

So get into a trademark dispute with a big corporation – and often their lawyers cast a very wide net on potential similar spellings – and your account is shut down.

There’s also the specifics of the Zynga agreement that should concern anyone investing in the games company. Right at the beginning of the agreement we see this clause;

The parties further acknowledge that Zynga is making a significant commitment to the Facebook Platform (i.e., using Facebook as the exclusive Social Platform on the Zynga Properties and granting FB certain title exclusivities to Zynga games on the Facebook Platform). In exchange for such commitment, [*] the parties have committed to set certain growth targets for monthly unique users of Covered Zynga Games.

So Zynga is closely tied into the fortunes of Facebook, we knew that on a business level but now we know just how deep and binding the agreements are.

We should be clear, all the major social media and online services have similar clauses on intellectual property and copyright infringements; there’s no shortage of businesses who’ve been caught out by eBay or Paypal and plenty of people found their Google accounts shut down by their obsession with real names.

For all businesses the message is clear – be careful before committing totally to one online platform or another. Should you end up in a dispute, or find you’ve backed the wrong service, it may be a very costly process to get your company off that platform.

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The Internet Kool-Aide Machine

Don’t buy the hype when you read about the hot new product

Every few months, the web lights up with hype about the latest technology or website. For a few weeks, every tech conversation mentions this hot new product.

Almost always this hype is driven by the company in question duchessing a few key “opinion leaders” in the tech, social media or other circles. These folk start writing up this product and, if they are lucky, the stories get picked up by the broader media and the product becomes “hot.”

The aim is to find the greater fools, for the investors and founders of these business they want to cash out by selling the operation to a bigger entity.

When you read the hype about the latest user generated, online sharing social media service that’s growing at a remarkable rate be aware you’re actually seeing a pitch to a big company being framed along the lines that “you can’t afford to miss out.”

By all means sign up to the service to have a look but don’t buy the hype and remember you’re not the customer – the gullible big business manager looking for the next big thing is.

Image courtesy of Blary54 through sxh.hu

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Valuing Facebook

Is Facebook really worth fifty billion dollars?

After over a year of speculation, Facebook has finally announced the terms of its US stock market float, valuing the company at $50 billion dollars according to Facebook’s SEC filing.

The financial details that we’ve speculated over are now public and we can now make more than informed guesses about what Facebook is worth.

What jumps out when first looking at Facebook’s financial figures is the exponential growth in their revenue from 153 million dollars in 2007 to $3,700 million last year. A twenty-fold increase over four years.

Expenses though haven’t grown at the same rate going from 277 million to 1.95 billion over the same period. Like all bigger social media and web 2.0 companies, sales and marketing is the biggest expense.

The Google Experience

The closest comparison to Facebook is Google’s float in 2004. Google floated at a market capitalisation of 23 billion dollars on a reported revenue in their SEC statement of 389 million.

At the time, Google’s profit margins were substantially lower with costs coming in at 234 million. These figures alone indicate Facebook today is a better prospect that Google was at the time of being floated.

Google today is valued at $190 billion on a revenue of $38 billion and a profit of $25 billion. On those measures, Facebook investors will be expecting that exponential growth to continue.

Growing Income

How Facebook continues to grow their revenue is the big question. Currently over half of their revenue comes from advertising in the United States and the bulk of the rest from Canada, Australia and Western Europe.

If online advertising continues to grow spectacularly, as a  2010 Morgan Stanley research paper illustrated then  Facebook, as the biggest social medial platform, will get a large slice of that $50 billion global market opportunity. This in itself would justify their valuation.

One of Facebook’s biggest growth opportunities comes from games. Already Zynga, the developers of Farmville and Mafia Wars, contribute 12% of Facebook’s revenues.

The global games business is valued at 60 billion dollars and much of this market is moving to web based, online platforms. Facebook’s 30% cut of income from games on their service is another lucrative revenue stream with few operating costs.

While advertising remains Facebook’s main income stream, other payments from games and online payments went from almost 0 in 2010 to nearly 17% of income at the end of 2011.

The threats

This isn’t to say Facebook doesn’t face any threats in their businesses. The concentration of income from North America, Europe and Australia exposes how the service is a first world phenomenon, although they have high penetration rates in some countries like Chile and hope to achieve similar in India.

Social media though is a fast moving field and there are plenty of opportunities for upstart businesses to displace Facebook just as MySpace faded away.

In their established markets there’s the question of how sustainable social media as an advertising platform is; until recently social media was a novelty to most households and still is to businesses and advertisers.

User fatigue is possible in the mature markets and Facebook – along with other social media services – not achieve the advertising revenue they hope.

Privacy issues are also another concern; as users realise the value of their private information it may be that they demand more for it than seeing where their friends are drinking or playing an online game for free.

Overall though, Facebook does appear to be worth the 50 billion dollar valuation when compared to other similar businesses like Google and is probably more sensibly priced than recent other IPOs like Groupon and Zynga.

Whether the service will deliver on its promise remains to be seen, but those are the risks when investing in new industries.

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Facebook and your Family: 702 Sydney Weekend computers

How should you use Facebook in your house?

Tune into ABC 702 Sydney this Sunday, February 5 from 10.15am to join Paul Wallbank and Simon Marnie discussing how to use Facebook in your family.

Some of the topics we’ll be looking at include;

  • What are the minimum ages for using Facebook
  • How should parents monitor usage
  • Setting up privacy settings
  • Being careful about sharing
  • Deciding what applications should you allow
  • How do other social networks affect your family

We love to hear from listeners so feel free call in with your questions or comments on 1300 222 702 or text on 19922702. If you’re on Twitter you can tweet 702 Sydney on @702sydney and Paul at @paulwallbank.

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So you thought you quit working for a boss

Have you traded one set of rules for another?

One of the weirdest things about the Internet’s free culture is how services that make money out of reselling people’s donated labour tie their contributors up with rules.

Many of the people contributing for free have given up their day jobs to do so. If you asked them why, I’m sure many would say they were sick of restrictive rules, anal retentive bosses and generally feeling suffocated by a big organisation.

Yet now they are subject to a bunch of rules arbitrarily enforced by anonymous and unaccountable bureaucrats running social media or cloud computing services.

So why on Earth are you doing the same thing for free? At least when you’re in a cubicle you’re getting paid for dealing with idiots.

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