Two quotations about Facebook

Facebook’s popularity is based on the reality that human beings are social creatures. Staying connected with people we know is innate to us. But maintaining separate social groups that we don’t want to clash is also innate.

via The Five Stages of Facebook Grief

In some ways, it’s a good thing. Maybe we’d all be a little better off if we could provide a more unified persona to the world. It would be bad if we simply became more private and less authentic, but what if we all just relaxed a little bit about the social norms that cause us to shield big and real parts of ourselves.

It’s interesting to note which groups we want to self-censor for. Our parents’ generation, our workplaces, religious groups. Maybe it’s good for everybody if those groups are forced to confront a more accurate picture of our lives.

via callmejay on MeFi

Obviously I agree with the latter idea, since my entire online persona is tied back to my real name. My website links to my CV right next to my twitter feed filled with snark. In short, I’ve decided that I won’t apologize for who I am.

As a final thought: the world is headed towards a point where everyone has embarrassing pictures online. This is, for all intents and purposes, the same as a world where no one does.

Lessons for article recommendation services

Today someone proposed the creation of a sub-reddit where scientists could recommend papers to each other. While it’s a nice thought, I can almost guarantee that it’s going to be a failed effort. There are already sites like Faculty of 1000, which try to use panels of experts to recommend good papers. In my experience, they mostly fail at listing things that I want to read.

The main reason such sites are useless is that we scientists are uber-specialized, so what you think is the greatest paper ever will likely have very litle interest for me. It’s not that I don’t want to read about cool discoveries in other fields, it’s just that I don’t have time to. Until they invent the matrix-esque brain-jack for rapid learning, I have to prioritize my time, and my field and my work will always come first.

There are only two systems I’ve found that work well. The first are recommendation systems based on what you’ve read in the past, and what your colleagues are reading. CiteULike, for example, recommends users that have bookmarked similar papers to you, and perusing through their libraries gives me an excellent source of material. The other quality source of recommendations is FriendFeed, where I can subscribe to the feeds of other bioinformaticians with similar interests, and we can swap links to papers and comments about those papers.

Both of these systems are all about building micro-communities, with a focus that you can’t achieve in larger communities like Reddit. In this way, it’s sort of like a decentralized version of departmental journal clubs, or specialized scientific conferences. Any site that ignores the value of creating this type of community is pretty much doomed to failure from the start.

Your life is in your data. Own it.

I’ve been using google documents a lot lately, as I like the convenience of being able to close a document at work, then come back home and pick up right where I left off after dinner. It’s got me thinking about this new fangled idea that our digital lives should live in the cloud, though.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I love my gmail. I just worry that people have no qualms about entrusting their important data exclusively to third parties anymore. Three illustrative stories:

1. Ma.gnolia, host to the online bookmarks of tens of thousands of people, suffers massive “data corruption and loss”. The end result is that many people have to start from scratch.
2. A gmail user wakes up one day to find that he is locked out of his account for no reason, and it takes him over a week to get his access restored.
3. AOL Hometown, a sort of neo-geocities, shuts down with very little notice:
   

   We’re talking about terabytes, terabytes of data, of hundreds of thousands of man-hours of work, crafted by people, an anthropological bonanza and a critical part of online history, wiped out because someone had to show that they were cutting costs this quarter.

   It’s an eviction; a mass eviction that happened under our noses and we let it happen.

Think, for a second, about what’s in your email archives: phone numbers and addresses of your friends, instructions for getting that tricky system at work to function correctly, love letters, pictures of your family vacation.

Sure there’s a lot of chaff mixed in, but some of this content is irreplaceable. Ever seen the love letters that your grandfather wrote your grandmother? Sure, we’re exchanging sappy poetry in a different medium now, but shouldn’t your grandkids have the same opportunity?

So stop trusting the cloud to keep this stuff safe for you. Set up Thunderbird to keep a local copy of your email. Use Google Docs Download or gdatacopier to keep copies of your online documents. Don’t ever delete local copies of those pictures after you upload them to Flickr. And for the love of pete, stop using services like Hotmail that give you no way to download your mail. Who’s mail is it, anyway?

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Update: Some more discussion over at Friend Feed