The It Gets Better Project is so good, so spot-on, that it ought to be celebrated as a triumph of Internet video, social media and even the English language. I can’t find one damn reason to be cynical about it.

You’ve probably seen at least a piece of this campaign. It’s an online media project started last month in response to a series of suicides by gay youth who were bullied in school. Writer Dan Savage started a website and YouTube channel seeking videos of adults counseling kids to hang in there, it’s going to get better. Savage recorded the first video with his husband, and promoted it in Savage Love, his nationally published sex column.

The site describes the mission in three succinct sentences:

“Many LGBT youth can’t picture what their lives might be like as openly gay adults. They can’t imagine a future for themselves. So let’s show them what our lives are like, let’s show them what the future may hold in store for them.”

Some earnest LGBT supporters have criticized it as just another act of “raising awareness”—a publicity campaign that spreads a message but doesn’t solve anything. I disagree. The problem of kids being bullied into suicide is one of those rare problems that can actually be improved directly and immediately through words.

Middle and high school is a terrible time. I got teased for being a nerd. But I had good parents, teachers, church members, and Boy Scout leaders who consistently told me people who get picked on in school end up doing well as adults. I got the support I needed. Gay kids are systemically denied that support.

The It Gets Better Project has led to an outpouring of videos from adults of all sexual orientations assuring those kids struggling with bad times that they’ll make it through. President Obama recorded one. Governor Patterson recorded one. Tim Gunn recorded one. So have a lot of other celebrities. But the best ones are by people you’ve never heard of. In the last 11 days, the video of Joel Burns delivering his It Gets Better speech at a Fort Worth city council meeting has been played over 2 million times.

The campaign has also, impressively, caught on among clergy. (I chose to embed a video of Bishop Gene Robinson at the top of this post.) Some of the It Gets Better videos are nothing more or less than small-town pastors and rabbis sitting in their studies, speaking into webcams, telling gay kids that God loves them as they are. Who would have guessed it would take Dan Savage to finally give these good people a national platform!

The genius of the It Gets Better Project is that it carries a near-universal message between generations. It’s a precise, three-word incantation that almost every adult understands, and that almost every child still needs to learn. It’s like the time machine we all wish we could use to give advice to the younger version of ourselves. Saying “It gets better” demonstrates compassion and understanding. How many lives has this phrase already saved?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I might have been better off just letting it go, but I wanted to do the right thing. Unfortunately, it became a huge frustration rather than a positive communications experience. Basically, I was letting a company I heretofore never cared about suddenly push me around, demanding my picture and phone number and a big chunk of my time. (You may have already guessed that the site I’m talking about is Yelp.) How annoying!

How many different websites do you use to share your profile, make connections, and respond to people who want to communicate on that platform? Probably at least two, maybe six, maybe ten. It’s a lot of time. Which of these efforts will pay off, and which are pointless work?

We’re all developing profile fatigue. The more common profile fatigue becomes, the harder it is to start a new web business that requires people to set up a login. For years, tech companies have been searching for an answer to this problem. The road to now is littered with burnt-out hulks of multi-site identity systems that didn’t work. (When was the last time you updated your Windows Live profile?)

But for the first time, a universal login seems within reach. The smart money is on Facebook. Almost every new identity-based site being developed today is designed to mesh with Facebook’s infrastructure. You can tap Facebook’s “open graph” for identification the way you tap the power company for energy.

Consider the implications. In a world where our Facebook profiles are displayed everywhere, including in connection with our jobs, we will all be far more careful about what we share. I’d eliminate anything vaguely controversial or mildly rude, for fear of presenting an unwelcoming face to customers.

That means if I wanted to write a post criticizing Christine O’Donnell for not knowing the First Amendment, I might hold my tongue, to keep from souring future encounters with people who support her. I wouldn’t complain about Yelp’s website, in case one day in the future I want to do business with that brand. I wouldn’t write about how some people in my neighborhood get on my nerves, because people in the neighborhood might connect it to my job. To be as professional as possible, I would make sure everything I post on Facebook is as inoffensive as a pair of brown loafers.

I don’t worry much about privacy. But I worry deeply about free expression. When Facebook becomes our public face, there will be intense pressure to be extremely dull. To me, that’s scarier than any privacy breach. Will the social future make us boring?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Before 2007, the two words “social” and “graph” had occasionally been used in academia to discuss, literally, a visualization showing how people were connected by social relationships.

The earliest reference I can find to the modern sense of “social graph” is from a Facebook press release issued May 24, 2007:

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg today unveiled Facebook Platform, calling on all developers to build the next-generation of applications with deep integration into Facebook, distribution across its “social graph” and an opportunity to build new businesses.
…
Applications will gain distribution through what Zuckerberg called the “social graph,” the network of real connections through which people communicate and share information.

So there’s Definition One. Almost immediately following that press release, tech pundits began using the phrase aggressively in blogs and PowerPoint presentations. The first reference to it I can find in the popular media is a London Times article from September 11, 2007, which defined social graph as “a vast database of its users’ social and professional relationships.”

By September 2007, people were already growing suspicious that “social graph” didn’t actually mean anything new. Media and technology writer Dave Winter wrote, “Social network is a much less confusing term, so why don’t we just stick with it?”

But despite Winter’s early warning, “social graph” was here to stay. In October 2007, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked to define the phrase during a talk at the Web 2.0 Summit. Zuckerberg said:

When we talk about the social graph, we’re talking about the set of connections, whether it’s friendships, business connections, acquaintances, that everyone has in the world. And this has always existed, we didn’t invent it. So all that we’re trying to do at Facebook is take the social graph that exists in the world and just map it out. Try to figure out all the connections people have in the world, the real connections. We’re not trying to make new connections. And once we have as accurate of a model, or approaching an accurate model of the social graph, then we can expose those connections in a way that our users our comfortable with their privacy settings, to a set of applications. Those applications can use those connections to help people share information more effectively. … The social graph is just this thing that exists in the the world and we just try to map it out.

In a November 2007 blog post, Tim Berners-Lee, who gave us the World Wide Web, lent his endorsement to the phrase:

Its not the Social Network Sites that are interesting — it is the Social Network itself. The Social Graph. The way I am connected, not the way my Web pages are connected. We can use the word Graph, now, to distinguish from Web.

Since then, the use of the phrase has morphed and expanded. Today the term “social graph” regularly appears in news stories, presentations and marketing copy. Here are a few current examples:

• In a Forbes article this week, Dan Woods of Evolved Technologist divides the “social graph” into two, one for business and one for every other relationship, and says the enterprise-level social network still needs to be built. He writes, ”The enterprise social graph will likely outstrip the public social graph in both complexity and usefulness.”
• This month Mashable writer Adam Ostrow described social media as “providing users with an identity and social graph that follows them across the web.”
• An Internet advertising company markets itself this way: “Using patent-pending technology and social graph data, Media6Degrees provides major marketers with scalable ad campaigns that deliver a high return on investment.”
• A recent ClickZ article by Kate Kaye says, “Facebook has observers wondering whether the company will transform its sprawling social graph into an advertising network.”
• The Wikipedia entry on “social graph” says: “Concern has focused on the fact that Facebook’s social graph is owned by the company and is not shared with other services.”

So depending on who’s talking…

• There is one social graph.
• There are multiple social graphs for various uses.
• The social graph has always existed.
• The social graph was created by social networking sites.
• The social graph is an abstract set of connections.
• A social graph is a database that can be owned.
• A social graph can be transformed into an ad network.
• A social graph can follow people around.

Obviously there are some contradictions here. There appears to be just one point on which everyone agrees:

• A social graph is not a graph.

My point of this rather tedious blog post is that nobody agrees what “social graph” means because it was never precisely defined by the company that coined it, Facebook. “Social graph” has become one of those vague phrases people use to sound smart.

Fortunately, we can now use it as a bullshit detector. The next time you see or hear someone use the phrase “social graph,” ask yourself, “Does this person really know what they’re talking about?”

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Wait a minute. That makes no sense.

This latest wave of fear-mongering comes out of New Hampshire. Last week, WMUR published a story headlined, Police: Thieves Robbed Homes Based On Facebook, Social Media Sites:

NASHUA, N.H. — Nashua police are crediting an alert off-duty police officer who heard fireworks with cracking a burglary ring that targeted homes known to be empty because of Facebook postings…

“Be careful of what you post on these social networking sites,” said Capt. Ron Dickerson. “We know for a fact that some of these players, some of these criminals, were looking on these sites and identifying their targets through these social networking sites.”

The Nashua Telegram had a similar story, apparently based on the same September 9 press conference.

This story reverberated across the Internet over the weekend, and almost every tech blog I read linked to either WMUR or the Telegram, dutifully repeating the premise without skepticism. David Lohr of AOL News appears to be the only national-level reporter who tried to advance the story. He teased an additional quote out of a Nashua police official and found news reports of burglaries in two other states that were blamed on Facebook posts.

(Update, September 18: Jeff Jarvis also did some reporting on this, which I didn’t see until after I had researched this post.)

Let’s look at those other two cases. In one in Indiana, a couple told CBS that they think the man who burglarized them is someone they know, who learned on Facebook they were out at a concert. The family then posted photos of this person online, captured from their own personal surveillance video cameras. As for the other alleged burglary, in Tennessee, a family told a local TV station someone robbed their home as the result of a Facebook posting, but “Due to the ongoing police investigation, the McCubbins don’t feel comfortable discussing how they know the thief found them on Facebook.” Both cases seem odd.

Not much to go on, really. In the New Hampshire case, we don’t even know how many of the burglarized homes where chosen based on Facebook postings, or what the postings indicated. And in the other two, given that the families appear to have been victimized by people they know, couldn’t those “friends” have figured out they were away through some more conventional means? How good are these crooks at computers, anyway?

Suppose we accept the argument that criminals are scouring Facebook to find people who aren’t home. To test this, I spent a few minutes on Facebook trying to find residents of my neighborhood with status updates indicating they were away from their homes. I found none. You can’t search Facebook for those variables, so you’re reduced to hunting and pecking at random. The odds seem incredibly small that you’d find people who (a) identified themselves as out of town and, (b) could be connected to a specific residential address.

But let’s suspend disbelieve and say you could. Maybe you look at the RSVP lists for public events, such as concerts or rallies or conferences. Maybe you’re a wiz at the FourSquare and Twitter APIs and can follow the template of Please Rob Me to deduce where people are. Is that enough intelligence to break into somebody’s house?

I wouldn’t think so. Just because one person is away doesn’t mean a home is empty. You’d need to case the joint first. And if you’re going to do that, you might as well skip the Internet and just roam around looking for piles of newspapers in a driveway, or people strapping lawn chairs to the roofs of minivans.

Even if it’s happened two or three times, I’d argue the Facebook-to-robberies correlation is what Jack Shafer at Slate might call a bogus trend. It’s fueled by police departments doing their best to protect their citizens, and putting out some alarmist information in the process. Really, the risk of someone using your location for nefarious purposes is extremely low. It’s far lower than the threat that you’ll be the victim of a random crime.

This isn’t just nitpicking. It matters. We are about to enter a world where geo-location is always on. With location-aware devices like smart phones, your position will always be trackable (as will the position of your car, boat, bike, whatever). You already carry things that disclose your location, albiet to private databases (like the banking and cellular networks) rather than public ones (like Facebook). Eventually you will have the choice to make this data available to friends and family and the general public. Realtime, connected geo-location is so cheap, so simple, and has so many benefits that it will just happen naturally. It will almost certainly solve more problems than it causes. Obviously some information should always be kept secret. But we’re being told, by the police and the media, to always err on the side of caution when it comes to privacy. Let’s challenge that idea.

I have no problem announcing online when I’m traveling. It’s fun, it connects me with friends, and I enjoy bragging. Plus I have nothing to worry about. My home is secure because it is surrounded by a moat teeming with hungry sharks. Do you doubt me? Check it out for yourself — It says so right there on the Internet.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Bad idea.

One thing I love about digital music is the freedom to find and play insipid novelty songs. This dates to college, when we figured out how to share MP3s on the LAN, and somebody dug up a recording of “New Age Girl” by Deadeye Dick. This is an achingly stupid song, and everyone played it constantly. I still play it. Shouldn’t I have the right to listen to tasteless music in my own home without everyone knowing? Do I really want to feel like I’m expending social capital when I put on a Roxette song? Do I want my friends seeing a notice that says, “Your friend Daryl enjoys music by Genesis.”?

Online radio program Pandora integrated some of its features with Facebook recently, enabling a little box that shows what artists your Facebook friends like. I swiftly disabled it after a message appeared saying “Your former girlfriend also enjoys the Yeah Yeah Yeahs.” I imagined a reciprocal message announcing, “Daryl is currently listening to Ke$ha” and decided to put a lid on that.

To be sure, my most-played list in iTunes isn’t particularly shameful. It’s a lot of power pop and catchy music by indie singers like Neko Case and Ben Folds. Entirely appropriate to my branding as a geeky writer in Brooklyn. But scroll down and there’s “Skipper Dan” by Weird Al Yankovic, played 48 times. There’s “Love Grows Where My Rosemary Goes,” by Edison Lighthouse, played 44 times. Below that are “That’s Not My Name” by the Ting Tings, and “High School Never Ends” by Bowling for Soup. For these songs, I offer no explanation. I just say, “Mind your own business.” On the blog, I can do this, but on iTunes Ping, I might not have that luxury of context. Is it acceptable to announce that I’m a Brad Paisley fan?

I don’t want to worry about what people think of me when I load up my iPod. I need the small joy of listening to totally uncool music. That’s my message to Apple and Pandora and everyone else working to encode word-of-mouth marketing into a software program that extracts our money $1.29 at a time.

Come to think of it, this isn’t an Apple problem or even a music problem. It’s a social media problem. Quite often, what we share doesn’t reflect our actual behavior. It reflects whom we aspire to be, or whom we want our friends to think we are. As we get used to sharing things—what we watch, what we listen to, where we go out to eat—I’m worried that social media is pressuring us to pretend to be things we’re not. In the future, we will all listen to Grizzly Bear for 15 minutes. Then we’ll disconnect from the Internet and crank up some Steve Winwood, tapping our toes in delicious secrecy.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

* * * *

Yahoo News is one of the most popular news web sites in the world. It has a problem, though. Every major story comes with a generous helping of the most vile hate speech you’ve ever seen.

Earlier this year, Yahoo News restored its long-mothballed comments feature. The given explanation was that Yahoo’s readers demanded a platform to interact with the news. A Yahoo exec told PaidContent.org: ”[T]the feedback from the audience was that the right to comment was sort of an extension of their First Amendment rights.” User engagement is also good for business, since time on site is one metric Internet companies use to set ad rates.

I’m a fan of interaction and free discourse, but let’s face it: Comments on news stories are about the lamest form of user engagement on the Internet. On the some of the more popular sites, comments are a festering cesspool of pure mean. The nastiness comes from two sources. The first is trolls: Creative geeks who make a hobby out of posting the most offensive messages they can think of, to get a rise out of people. The second is true bigots, some of whom post creepy threats of violence. I have a bad feeling that a lot of the people posting comments on Yahoo are not goofing around. This a thriving community of actual racists!

Compared to its peers—AOL, USA Today, The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC—Yahoo comments are spectacularly bad, and they show up in your face, at the bottom of every story. Anyone reading the news, including children curious about the world they live in, will certainly see them.

How bad are we talking about? I’ve collected a few choice comments from Yahoo News over the last few days. Read on. Warning: Rough language ahead.

* * * *

Comment: Texas_Dave: blacks….the bodies of humans…the minds of animals.

Comment: Joeg: Too many colored people in office !

Comment: AlwaysRight: If it wasn’t for white people… blacks and browns would still be poking bugs with sharp pointy sticks in thier loin cloths.

Comment: Zorro: Moslems live to kill each other,but they prefer to kill non-muslims, that’s why Pakistan and Afghanistan will never cooperate with the West.We should not intervene and let those animals exterminate each other.

Comment: DISTURBED: I HAVE AN IDEA: WE ERECT A HUGE CATTLE FUNNEL IN THE MIDDLE OF THE FENCE WITH A SIGN READING: FREE LEGAL U.S. ENTRY 3 DAYS ONLY! OUR OBAMA ADMINISTRATION WILL LEAD THE WAY! AND ON OUR SIDE BY THE OPENING YOU SET ME UP IN A TOWER- WITH FLOODLIGHTS, MY CHAINGUN, AND 5 MILLION ROUNDS! OH AND LOUDSPEAKERS WITH THE STAR SPANGLED BANNER CRANKED 24/7 ! I THINK AFTER THE FIRST DAY THEY’LL GET THE POINT- YOU’RE NOT WELCOME !

Comment: Bigfoot: She is an ugly racist B_itch, hang her and hang her high

Comment: BeRevealer: This is an example of how black people run their country. Not one country with black leadership is without violence on a large scale and poverty of the masses but not the leadership. Could be coming to a city near you the way things are heading in the USA!!

Comment: Burney D: Solution to Border problem, kill all the men and breed all the women, soon they’ll all be white.

* * * *

Whew. Welcome back from the worst place in the universe.

But please don’t form your opinion from my sampling alone. Go to Yahoo News, pick any story, and read the comments yourself. As I write this, the story about Obama apologizing to Sherrod has 29,000 comments. The one about unemployment benefits has 44,000.

Yahoo has some filters, including a peer voting system that’s supposed to hide offensive comments. None of the comments above was blocked when I found it. But some are. If you spend any time on Yahoo News, you’ll notice that comments denouncing the hate or affirming a liberal point of view are often slammed with Yahoo’s “thumbs down” button until they are hidden from view. This comment was blocked: “Right-wing corporate media (FOX) loves to lie to the stupit & racist people they will belive anything.” And so was this one: “We need to ban guns from the continent to stop the violence.”

Meanwhile, this comment on the immigration story has 16 thumbs-up and zero thumbs-down:

By now, you’re probably feeling angry. Here’s what I’d like you to do with that feeling. Go about your business and remember that one day you might bump into someone who works for Yahoo News. I want you to make that person a hero. When you see them, ask them:

• Are you proud of the Yahoo News comments feature?
• Are your managers proud of the comments feature? Do they even know about it?
• Do millions of pages of hate speech make Yahoo a better company and the world a better place?
• Wouldn’t it feel awesome to be the person who solves this problem?

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

Today, however, I’m feeling mostly recovered. I planned to spend the full day for a long bike ride. Unfortunately, once I woke up, I couldn’t muster the motivation to spend a full day outside in this heat. (It hit 98 today in Central Park.) Instead I rode a loop out to Coney Island and back.

On today’s bike ride, I used a free mobile application called InstaMapper to track my route on a map. I’ve tried InstaMapper before with limited success; the GPS on my Blackberry isn’t always reliable, and the program itself seemed to shut itself down randomly. Today, however, it worked brilliantly. Assuming it’s all still working, you can see an interactive map below showing my ride with pretty good precision. I find this kind of thing amazing.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

I mean, what is that? A shot of the old Pier 1 warehouses seen from Manhattan? Or Omaha, Nebraska, on a hazy afternoon?

It’s not like we have a shortage of icons. A rooftop water tower. A slice of pizza. The F train climbing the Culver Viaduct. The Williamsburgh Savings Bank Building clock tower. The Parachute Jump. The Cyclone. And isn’t there a bridge in Brooklyn that people might recognize?

Come on, Facebook. The 2.5 million residents of Kings County deserve better.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.

A couple of months ago, I noticed a curious phrase showing up on lots of blogs.

“You should follow me on Twitter here.”

This phrase stands out for being terse, awkward, even rude. Most people would write “Please…” instead of “You should…” Yet this specific line of clunky self-promo copy spread like the flu. A Google search for that exact phrase returns 154,000 results! (For comparison, a search for “Please follow me on Twitter here” returns 1,690 results.)

We can trace this phenomenon to blogger Dustin Curtis, who used testing to find the optimal way to convince people to follow him on Twitter. “You should follow me on Twitter here” was proven to be the most persuasive sentence. You should read about his experiment here.

I have conflicted feelings about this. On one hand, I don’t want to endorse shoddy writing edited by machines. On the other hand, shouldn’t you use every weapon in your arsenal to make your writing more effective? You should!

I decided to try a test of my own. For the last six weeks, visitors to this blog have been part of an experiment.

* * *

On my home page and at the top of this blog, I’ve been running a link asking people to give money to a charity bike ride I’m doing this Saturday and Sunday. I wrote a simple program that randomly shows one of a series of pre-programmed messages, then records how many times each message was displayed, and how many times people followed the link from that message. I use that data to calculate the percentage of clicks each link got. Then I compared the click-through rate of each phrase against other phrases that ran at the same time.

Turns out Dustin Curtis was right. Adding “You should” to the front of a sentence significantly increases the number of people who click on a link. So does adding “You can.” Longer sentences produce better results. Adding a user benefit helps. Including a dollar value helps sometimes, but not always—I tried $5, $10, $25, but only $25 had an impact.

The results of my test follow.

But first a few notes: This was more for fun than for science. Because my site gets relatively little traffic, it would have been a stronger test if I had chosen fewer phrases or let each test run for more time. Additionally, a lot of my traffic comes from spiders for search engines; my simple program counted them as visitors. I figured spiders behave in predictable ways and were unlikely to skew the results of the test, but counting them may have contributed to higher- or lower-than-normal click-through rates. There was also a significant swing in the number of total clicks from week to week, perhaps due to the behavior of spiders.

* * *

* * *

Summary: “You can help fight MS with a $25 gift to my Bike MS ride” was the most powerful phrase of the bunch. However, the real point is not whether it motivated people to click, but whether it motivated people to give. Sadly, it did not. During the time I ran this test I received 14 donations. (P.S.: Thank you!) I am fairly sure sure all of the people who gave found out about my bike ride from e-mail or Facebook postings, not from this web site. You could argue that some might have seen this message here as well, and that reinforced their behavior. But still: Nobody followed a link and then decided to give.

But that can change right now! You can help fight MS with a $25 gift to my Bike MS ride.

This post first appeared on the History Eraser Button blog.