KyleLibra.com

This has been a really awful Summer for movies. Between Marmaduke and The Last Airbender someone might think Hollywood has totally given up on even trying to make something good. Check the teaser trailer below.

Most people would let out a huge groan if they were told Hollywood’s latest idea was to make a movie about Facebook. But with David Fincher directing (Se7en, Fight Club), Aaron Sorkin writing (A Few Good Men, West Wing), Jesse Eisenberg starring (Adventureland, Zombieland), Justin Timberlake co-starring (the funny guy from SNL) and Trent Reznor doing the music (Nine Inch Nails) this film is something to get very excited about.

The movie is based on the best selling book with the same title (The Social Network actually the book is called “Accidental Billionaires”), but is going to be known as “the facebook movie” to most people. What excites me even more than the possibility of something good to see in theaters is the knowledge that at least a few people are going to give my Why I Quit Facebook post another read.

What do you think? Does this sound like a recipe for a hit? Getting excited?

I’ve had a lot of people ask me why I quit Facebook last week. The short answer is that I can no longer be part of what Noam Chomsky calls the bewildered herd. More and more I couldn’t agree with what was going on, so I took a stand. I quit Facebook and I do not plan on going back. Read my reasons and decide for yourself if this is something you can continue to go along with. If you choose to just ignore this and go about your day, that’s fine, but remember what Chomsky would say about you.

Facebook has turned into a total privacy nightmare. What’s worse is that privacy has disappeared as Facebook’s market share has increased. Boing Boing shows a brief timeline of how this has happened. I’ve added the image below.

As Facebook’s power has grown, so has their disregard for privacy. Definitely a disturbing trend. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had to settle a huge lawsuit surrounding accusations of ripping off the idea from fellow Harvard students he ripped off. I won’t get into the details around the lawsuit, but there is information out there if you are curious.

Recently a college friend of Zuckerberg’s released instant messages to Business Insider. Below are some of the messages, keep in mind this was when he was a poor college student running a web site out of his dorm room. Now his net worth is estimated to be in the neighborhood of five billion dollars.

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don’t know why.

Zuck: They “trust me”

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Not the best track record so far, but how about some more specifics about these privacy “changes” as Facebook is calling them. A blogger named Matt McKeon came up with a great animation to show the growing availability of personal information. You can see the progression on his blog, below are images showing the difference between 2005 and 2010.

Facebook today isn’t what I signed up for back in 2005. I understand that you should take precautions putting information online assuming it will be private, but this is ridiculous. My problem is less with the erosion of privacy and more with Facebook’s approach. Instead of making all of this sharing and instant personalization (previous post on this alarming “feature”) features users can opt-in to, they have made it so there are choices buried within the options allowing you to opt-out. That is, if you actually know Facebook has changed the options. With each major update, they routinely attempt to reset user’s options to the defaults. No surprise here, but the defaults involve everything being public.

Just how confusing have these options become? The New York Times has a great interactive feature highlighting the complexity. Some of the interesting highlights include Facebook’s privacy policy being longer than the U.S. Constitution and the tidbit that even if you have made your account totally private, your friends can still share all of your information with others.

Facebook has had a ton of security exploits. Most recently, users were able to witness live chat between other members without their knowledge. Another security issue resulted in private messages being randomly send to different users. What would you say if your e-mail account did this one day? It’s also now in the top ten of most target sites for phishing according to Mashable.

What about Google and all the other companies we are sharing all of our information with? It’s easy. None of those groups are basing entire business plans around making all of your information public. None of those companies have a track record of screwing people over. None of those companies have had privacy violations anywhere close to the scope of those made by Facebook. Google is quickly emerging as the largest rival to Facebook. Google represents the open, transparent web, while Facebook wants a closed system they control.

Think about everything that has been said here so far about Facebook. Here is a quick story about Google for comparison. Google’s company motto is “do no evil.” The Chinese government hacked into gmail to find out information about known political dissidents. Google decided this was the final straw and stopped censoring search results in China even though the popular search engine is now blocked by the great firewall of China as a result. The Google founders decided standing up for what they believed in was more important than becoming a major player in a market worth billions. What would Zuckerberg have done in this situation? It’s ok to share information on the internet, it’s the future of the web, just be careful who you share it with.

The bottom line is that Facebook has gone too far and have done absolutely nothing which would make me believe they are suddenly going to do otherwise. You have a choice, by doing nothing you have made one.

Since graduation I had pretty much forgotten about my alma mater’s school newspaper, The Rambler. Several weeks ago that changed. I received a call from one of the newspaper’s writers wanting to do an article about my involvement in the Fiesta Movement. The article itself isn’t bad, although they did misquote me and there is a huge typo*. You can read it for yourself right here. My issue is not with the article written about me. I was flattered that they wrote an article about me and that it ran on the front page no less.

My issue is with The Rambler itself. I found out the article had been published when a friend tweeted this. I went searching for The Rambler’s web site to read the article for myself. After reading the article itself and then spending about ten minutes browsing the rest of the web site and reading through a few of the articles I got to thinking. The conclusion I came to is simple: The Rambler could and should be doing a lot better, not only in terms of content, but delivery.

The following is a collection of my thoughts on something that could stand to be improved. This is meant as constructive criticism, although it will probably come off as the bitter ramblings of an alumnus. Either way I’m ok with it.

Problem 1: The Web Address
If you want to be taken seriously you need to register a top level domain, not transyrambler.wordpress.com. So many things would be better than this. A domain name and hosting cost next to nothing. A domain name at the most is $10 a year, but some hosts will throw it in for free if you sign up for extended hosting. My host has a hosting package which would more than cover the traffic the online edition of The Rambler for a mere $7 a month. With tuition now topping $25,000 at Transylvania I would hope the school newspaper would have enough in it’s budget to cover these expenses.

Problem 2: Lack of a Strategy
Although I referred to it as the “online edition” above, a more accurate term would be “the stories from the print edition copied and pasted onto the web and then never given a second thought.” It’s obvious that a second thought has never really been given to the “online edition.” It all starts with a cohesive strategy. The obvious starting point would be to figure out the audience. An online edition would be able to start researching what other college’s are doing with their online editions.

Problem 3: Design
Everyone’s a critic when it comes to design. Say what you will about my own design choices, the core purpose is for this to be read as a blog, one post after another. The opposite could not be more true for The Rambler’s site. Built on WordPress, it reads like a run of the mill blog. WordPress can be used as a versatile content management platform. For a good example of what I’m talking about, check out Cal State Fresno’s Collegian Newspaper. The site is powered by WordPress, but made to look more like a newspaper. There are tons of tools out there already to make this happen with WordPress, it wouldn’t require hiring a team of designers. This is something just about any CS student could figure out.

Problem 4: Lack of Web Only Content
The paper’s most immediate audience is Transylvania’s student body. Without web exclusive content they have absolutely no incentive to look up the paper online. There is so much opportunity here. Web only content could be more timely news, such as what is happening in Lexington over the weekend. This could also include content aimed at audiences outside of the student body who might only read the online edition. Think Lexington area residents or Transylvania alumni.

Problem 5: Lack of Discussion
Very rarely have I seen a comment posted. The heavy moderation of comments discourages discussion. I had to go back several pages to find an actual comment, and when I did find one it was “For once your column makes me smile” followed by “Thank you! That makes two of us.” The internet is built on openness. If you only approve positive comments, no one is ever going to say what they are actually thinking. You have to allow honest and open discussion. If you try to censor conversation and only allow the positive to come through people will see right through you. Unfortunately this is something Transylvania has never really understood. Not only will supporting discussion help create a sense of community around the “online edition” of The Rambler, it will also help increase web traffic. When people start heavily discussing stories, they will also start heavily sharing stories.

Problem 6: No Social Media Integration
I’m still surprised Transylvania as a University is on twitter. They are usually really behind when it comes to understanding technology and progress. What is even stranger is that the student run newspaper is absent. Not just from twitter, but from all forms of social media. At the very least there needs to be a “share this” button at the bottom of posts.

Problem 7: Realities of a 1,100 Student Campus
An unfortunate reality is that students are busy. Most are too busy to write for the paper. Instead of depending on every writer to produce one hundred articles in a school year, figure out how to encourage hundreds of students to produce one article over the course of the year. I have two suggestions on possible ways to make this happen. The first way would be to modify the freshman English curriculum to include one assignment that requires students to write something with the intention of getting it published. If you get published, you get an A. This would encourage quality submissions of content, of which you can never have too much. A second way would be to monetize with advertisements. The money would never be enough to pay an entire staff of students, but could instead be used to encourage more students to submit quality content. Writers could be paid based on which articles are most popular based on a mathematical formula. WordPress already has a good way to track this called Popularity Contest.

Conclusion
This probably has come out as negative, but it’s really meant as some constructive criticism. There are endless possibilities with an online edition of The Rambler, it bugs me to no end to see it in it’s current state. As an alumnus I’d really like to have a reason to read the school’s newspaper online, but right now I don’t. Unless of course they’ve written an article about me.

*The misquote is in the final paragraph. I only said what is within the first set of parentheses. The typo I’m referring to is when they said “Delta Sigma Phil” instead of “Delta Sigma Phi,” that one should have been obvious considering the article ran on the front page of the paper.

This is video from this weekend, listen closely to what the protesters are saying at the end.

Dennis Kucinich testified in front of the House Judiciary Committee today. This thing is definitely gaining momentum.