Fun On Friday #146: Facebook fool

It was this article that particularly caught my eye: Criminally Stupid.

International Money Pile in Cash and Coins,
a photo by epSos.de on Flickr.

Clearly the robber in Criminally Stupid has never had an Internet safety lesson, or if he has, it wasn't very effective! It made me wonder if funny news stories like this could be used as a starter to more serious topics.

Backbytes in general is worth a read. Other recent stories that amuse me include An education in tweeting, The very definition of a geek, and They know where you live.

What's your favourite?

facebook for data collection

Back after a long gap with a post prompted by a conversation with Daughter Number 2, who said that a friend of hers had recently set up a facebook event that wasn't an event...

The idea was that, instead of describing an event, her friend asked a question. Then, people could respond to the question by selecting one of the three attendance options available in facebook events. For example, you could make a statement, such as "School Computing helps prepare pupils for real world computing uses.", and map the responses as follows:

Attending --> Agree
Maybe --> Not sure
No --> Disagree

Obviously, you can substitute any question/statement you like and define whatever mapping for the answers suits your purpose. As long as you are content with only three responses, this looks like a quick and dirty way to collect data. Here's one I made earlier:

I thought this was interesting. It uses a technology with which students are already familiar (arguably "addicted to" in the case of my daughters) and so requires no special logins or hurdles to jump through for the participants. Also, it is easy to use existing friends and contact groups to restrict who can see and respond to your question. Finally, because you have to choose a date for the event, you automatically have a deadline by which the responses have to be made.

It is not entirely satisfactory, however, because you cannot change the response buttons, so you have to explain the mapping to potential respondents and there is no way to export the responses for further analysis. Therefore, I had a quick look to see how else it could be done and found that there is a facebook poll app that allows you to create your own response options. It draws a decent graph and can export the results to Excel. Also, if you are willing to pay, you can get other useful features.

Clearly, neither solution is as flexible as dedicated poll/questionnaire tools such as SurveyMonkey and Poll Everywhere but I think that doing everything in facebook is an interesting approach. I especially like the way you can take something created for one purpose (event management) and subvert it for an alternative use (data collection).

Have a go at my event poll and my facebook poll and then let me know what you think. Would you use either method, or is it just a daft idea?

Facebook Privacy Settings

Saw a great post today on the new Facebook Privacy settings policy: Facebook privacy settings: What you need to know. It makes interesting reading (and watching as there is an embedded video).

Te blog's author, Graham Cluley, gives excellent advice on the settings you should use on facebook. In fact, he gives good general advice, for example, he admits to lying about his date of birth on facebook. This is a tactic I've adopted for some time on a variety of sites that insist I give them my date of birth. Often I can see that they need to know I am over a certain age but I don't see why most of them need to know my date of birth. Surely a check box to assert that I am the appropriate age (is it fourteen for facebook?) is effectively fulfilling the same function?

I was pleased to see that I had already set my privacy settings to the levels he suggested. Also, just to reassure myself, I had a look to see what I had filled in on my profile and again was pleased to see I had omitted most of the more sensitive information anyway. Having said that, I am aware that I have been using the Internet a long time and I am sure there is information out there that I have revealed in the past that I probably wouldn't reveal now.

For a slightly different take on the same issue, can I recommend The Joy of Tech.

Question
What do you think? Storm in a privacy teacup? Is it a case of, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to fear?

Twitter let me down… sort of.

…Or Facebook comes to the rescue. While trying to put together a presentation, I was looking for a link to a site I half remembered. Since I needed an instant answer, Twitter seemed to be the obvious place to go.

day 207 - 24.03.2009 - so not ready
Originally uploaded by ardenswayoflife

Here's the message I posted on Twitter:

I think I've seen a photo project with people holding hand written notices in front of their faces. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

It didn't exactly draw a flurry of responses, so I reposted a short time later. One response came from gbrown057 who suggested the Bob Dylan sequence from Don't Look Back. This was good, but not what I was looking for. I in turn referred him to the Dylan message generator where you can add your own messages to Bob's boards. Both digitalmaverick and pkkelly half remembered something too but essentially, I drew a blank with Twitter on Friday night.

I decided to have another go on Saturday morning.The Saturday morning set of Twitter contacts might help where Friday night's lot failed but once again, despite repeating the message a couple of times, no answer was forthcoming.

Then on Sunday, Daughter Number 2 asked if the video she sent me was what I was looking for. This caused me a bit of confusion until she said Facebook. I was asking on Twitter but I'd forgotten that my Twitter messages automagically update my Facebook status. And four people had responded there: my sister, my daughter, a friend from university and a chap I've never met but made contact with through Flickr and a shared love of the music of Rush. They were all making suggestions and getting miffed that I wasn't responding.

Silly me. I had my answer… I was just looking in the wrong place. The suggested answers were:

• Daughter Number 1: All American Rejects: Dirty Little Secret. Interesting and is connected to the PostSecret site. Not what I wanted but an interesting project that I had forgotten about.
• University friend: Suggested A Vision Of Students Today. Again, it was good, but not quite right. (To coin a catchphrase.)
• My sister: Sent a link to a song of palindromes called Bob by Weird Al Yankovic Which was interesting since it's a parody of the Bob Dylan song that Gordon had suggested on Twitter.

However, the link that if it's not the one I was thinking of is at least as close as I'm going to get was sent by my fellow Flickr using Rush fan who suggested the Someone Once Told Me group on Flickr.

Lessons learned: two social media tools are better than one and sometimes you find the answer in unexpected places.

Any other lessons I should have learned? (Or any other suggestions?)