25 posts tagged “facebook”

I recently commented that I was pleased to see that the JISC-funded EDINA service was engaging with a number of externally-hosted Web 2.0 services in order to “improve engagement with their user communities”. In my post I made an observation on the release of a Facebook application (one which provides access to the Suncat service). I was pleased to see that EDINA are willing to explore the potential of Facebook for providing a platform for accessing their service - in some circles Facebook is regarded as unacceptable, perhaps because of concerns over data lock-in and privacy concerns, but also on what might be regarded as ‘ideological grounds’. My view is that if such applications can deliver useful services to the users in a cost-effective manner, then that will probably be acceptable.

In response to my post Nicola Osborne, a developer at EDINA, commented:

If anyone has comments on the search app or features that should be added we’d be very keen to hear them as the gradual migration over to the new version of Facebook seems like a good time to reassess how our app is working and could be improved and expanded (it’s very basic at the moment).

Nicola’s comment is very timely as I think there is a need for a debate on exactly what it is we (developers and users) might expect from the development of such Facebook applications. We will also need to consider the resource implications in developing such applications and the longer term maintenance and support costs. 

The Facebook page for the Suncat page is shown below. It should be noticed that as well as the search interface itself (shown at the bottom of the image) the page also provides information about the service, allows users to become ‘fans’ of the application, provides a ‘minifeed’ of information about the application and has a ‘wall’ which provides a forum for user comments. What this would seem to provide is an open environment for discussions about an application and mechanisms for potentially for making contact with fans of the application.

If we look at the Copac Facebook application page developed by the JISC-funded MIMAS service we can see a related approach. Here we can see how the application can be added to (embedded within) other Facebook pages. I can also see my Facebook friends who have added this application. And as, in this case, the people shown are people whose views on digital library applications I trust this can potentially help me in deciding whether to install the application. And if, for example, my Facebook page is updated with a message saying that 50 of my friends have installed the Copac or Suncat application I’m likely to wonder what I’m missing. And if I install the application this may influence my Facebook friends. So the viral marketing aspect has the potential to enhance usage of a service which is made available in Facebook.

But if you actually use either of these application you will find that the experience is rather disappointing. Once you’ve entered a serach term and pressed submit you then leave the Facebook environment and are taken to the Suncat or Copac service. You do not have the seamless environment within Facebook you might expect.  And your use of of the service does not have any ’social’ context - if you have installed the application you are not informed of the numbers of your friends who have searched for a particular item. And you might be relieved at this, as you may not want your friends to see what you have been searching for. But if this is the case, if searching isn’t actually a social activity, what then is the point of providing the service within a social networking environment such as Facebook?

The answer to this question may be that the marketing aspects that social networks can provide is regarded as beneficial to the organisation developing the service. And as we have seen with popular applications such as Firefox large numbers of users are sometimes willing to associate themselves with an application (and I’ve just noticed that the Twitter application page in Facebook has 10,106 fans).  So perhaps a decision to develop a Facebook application would be one made by the marketing group for a service. Or perhaps there is an expectation that a thriving support service can be developed within popular social networking environments, in which case the decision would be made by those involved in providing the support infrastructure for a service.

But perhaps, based on the experiences I’ve had, we shouldn’t expect too much in terms of the functionality which a Facebook application can provide.  Is this a limitation of Facebook as a platform, or is it simply that, as Nicola has said about the Suncat application, the service is still very basic at present and EDINA are still exploring how the application might be developed? Or might Facebook applications have a useful role to play, but only in certain application areas. Earlier this year Seb Chan, on the blog described the Artshare Facebook application, developed by the Brooklyn Museum (one of the pioneers in a number of uses of Web 2.0 services). As Seb described:

“This allows you to add selected objects from museum collections to your Facebook profile. These object images then link to your museum’s collection records, the idea being that people can effectively ‘friend’ objects in your collection, promote them for you on their profiles, and drive traffic back to your website.“

Are the benefits, then, in providing access to objects which can, in some way, drive traffic back to your service? Or could Facebook provide an environment for games which provide educational benefits (Scrabulous for remedial English teaching, perhaps?)  But are there any significant benefits to be gained, apart from the marketing aspects, from providing search interface to services from within Facebook?

Back in November 2007 I wrote a post on UK Universities On Facebook, shortly after Facebook had announced that organisations could have a presence on their social networking service. I commented that a search for organisations containing the word ‘university’ revealed a total of 76 hits which included, in alphabetical order, the following UK Universities: Aston, Cardiff, Kent and the University of Central Lancashire (UCLan).

Now, over 6 months later, what is the position of UK University pages on Facebook? Well on 15^th June 2008 there were over 500 hits for a search for organisations containing the word ‘university’ (the exact numbers aren’t provided). This will include details of University departments and student clubs and societies, so the exact numbers will probably be confusing. What is interesting to observe is the numbers of fans of each University, which is used to order the search results. The Open University Facebook page is the top of all University pages, with 7,539 fans (with the University of Michigan way behind in second place with 5,313 fans (up from a count of 2,874 a month ago). The other most popular UK Universities are Aston University (2,976 fans), Royal Holloway (1,765), Aberystwyth University (1,655 fans), University of Central Lancashire (1,475 fans), Keele University (1,420 fans), Cardiff University (1,357 fans) and the University of Surrey (1,166 fans).

There seems to be a fairly consistent pattern of usage being taken to these pages. As can be seen form the accompanying image, institutions seem to be providing a series of useful links to the main areas of the institutional Web site on the right hand menu. The main body of the content is typically addresses and contacts details, together with news feeds which are automatically embedded using an Facebook RSS reader application.

In addition to this information which is either very brief or is dynamically embedded from other sources, there are wall posts and other messages which may need to be monitored and responded to. So there are resource implications in having a presence in Facebook. But there are also benefits as well, and the Open University and Aston University, for example, seem to be doing well from the stake they have claimed.

In addition to possible concerns over the costs of managing the resources and dialogue, people have expressed concerns over data lock-in and the licence conditions associated with use of Facebook. I would argue that if you manage your data in an open environment which is external to Facebook (e.g. your own institutional RSS feed or use of Flickr or YouTube for access to photographs and videos) then the data lock-in issue should not be of concern. And, as I’ve suggested previously, surely we should be encouraging third parties to make use of our marketing materials. And if they can make money out of the materials, then this can help to ensure the viability of their service.

Finally we should remember that our institutions have a well-established tradition of making use of delivery channels which are not interoperable - the physical world of magazines, newsletters and bill-board advertisements.

Indeed when I was in Taiwan recently I came across a poster advertising Northumbria University. My reaction was to applaud Northumbria for getting its message across to where potential students were, rather than to criticise them for their use of a non-interoperable dead tree delivery mechanism. We need to remember that interoperability isn’t always everything. Ask the marketing people - I suspect they’ll confirm this.

And some news just in. On 12^thJune 2008 the Techcrunch blog reported that Facebook [Is] No Longer The Second Largest Social Network- but rather than declining in popularity as some predicted (or perhaps hoped), Facebook has now overtaken MySpace in popularity, as the accompanying image shows.

Perhaps the popularity of the Open University page in Facebook isn’t so surprising considering the large numbers of Facebook users there are. Now that we have evidence of the large numbers of users and have seen patterns of usage from the early adopters, what reasons can there be for institutions not to engage with Facebook- whether this is simply creating a page containing RSS feeds and a set of links back to the institutional Web site or creating a Facebook application such as the Open University’s Course Profile app (initially described by Tony Hirst as a ’skunkwork’ project, but now, it seems, becoming mainstream)? And remember the need to factor in not only the resource implications of doing this, but also the missed opportunity costs of not doing so.

In the opening planary talk on Hands On The Internet at the Museums and the Web 2008 conference Michael Geist mentioned the popularity of Facebook in Canada - apparently Canada has the highigest per capita Facebook usage in the world. And, as described in a blog post on the talk by arkrausehardie Michael described the “enormous pressure a sort of flash-mob FaceBook group can bring to bare (sic!) on public policy such as the recent group started by Geist on copyright issues in Canada, now with more than 40,000 members“.

The interest in the potential of Facebook for engaging with a museum’s user community was described in a number of papers at the conference. For example Shelley Bernstein’s paper on “Where Do We Go From Here? Continuting with Web 2.0 at Brooklyn Museum” dscribed the ArtShare Facebook application they had developed to “share works of art from Museums around the world“. And a paper by Brian Kelly and colleagues at the Canada Science and Technology Museum on “Social Presence: New Value For Museums And Networked Audiences“  described “specific experiments with social media, including a detailed analysis of a Facebook group used by the Canada Science and Technology Museum Corporation’s Membership Program“. In addition the paper described “two theoretical models – the “Innovation Radar” and genre analysis – to help analyze the nature of the opportunities for innovation, and to develop a better understanding of the distinctive characteristics of alternate communication channels“.

And yet in some circle such use of Facebook is being derided with comments such as “It’s a closed garden“, “Its popularity is on the wane” or “Twitter is a better development environment” being made. I have to say that I foind that such comments tend to miss the point.  A recent post on “The Becoming Uninteresting Complex - Facebook versus Twitter” commented on the “pretty irrational questionings like “is Twitter replacing Facebook?“, Twitter doesn’t allow socialization. It simply allow instant interactions“.

And as can be seen from a SIteanalytics snapshot which compares usage of Facebook and Twitter,  it you want to make inappropriate comparisons, it’s Twitter which fares badly.

Making these points, I should add that we shouldn’t explore the potential of Facebook uncritically. But the early adopters do acknowledge some of the concerns which need to be recogonised. Dawson et al have commented that “There are, however, a variety of potential pitfalls with social networking sites. One concern is whether such sites are a fad or flash in the pan“. The paper goes on to add “Issues of privacy are another important factor. Users of social networking sites appear to be willing to live with great compromises in their privacy. However, even these broad boundaries have been tested a number of times. Facebook, for example, has risked alienating its users in controversies such as the introduction of the news feed in 2006 (boyd, 2006a), and the more recent introduction of the “Beacon” in 2007 (Hirsh, 2007).“

So let’s be realistic and continue the experoimentation and debate. But let’s also be critical of our preferred environments.  And although I’m a happy user of Twitter and participated in its use at MW2008, looking at the hashtag data for the mw2008 tag I would acknolwsdge that it was used primarily by a small group who knew each other - and indeed went out drinking together.  Twitter can be useful for some - but it’s not neccessarily the killer application for everybody.

Back in December 2007 Lorcan Dempsey wrote a blog post about the Nexus Facebook application, which provides a visualisation of your friends in Facebook. The highest density of his friends were his professional colleagues followed by “mostly UK friends (and the most highly connected nodes are people who work or worked at UKOLN“.

This seemed interesting so I installed the Nexus application and captured a screenshot of the representation of collections of my friends and contacts. As with Lorcan, the highest density represents professional colleagues across the UK Web management community. The second largest cluster, shown on the bottom right of the image, are mt rapper sword dancing and folkie friends.

It’s possible to interactive with the data, exploring who knows who and explore what the links are.

The concluding remark Lorcan made on his blog post was “Not sure it means much, but it was interesting to play with for a while ….“.

I agree with Lorcan that it’s fun to play with. But can it be used in any meaningful fashion? I’m inclined to think that it may have some potential in the support of information literacy.

Could this tool be used by students to explore the relationships across their groups of friends. Perhaps one could suggest that the students write a Daily Mail style expose´ based on the premise that “It’s 2028 and Carl Marks is the new leader of the Labour Party. Our Social Networking History Correspondent has managed to unearth the shocking details of what Carl got up to as a student. Read pages 1-5 for the shocking truth“. Or, in the interests of balance, write a article for the New Marxism Today on “On the day Prince William ascends to the throne we describe his student lifestyle“.

“Supporters threaten boycott of Permier League spnsors over foreign fixture plans” read a headline on the front page of the Guardian’s Sport section on Monday 11^th Febuary 2008.

I can sympathise with those views, but if I wanted to support such a boycott where would I go?  Well a search for “boycott premier league” in Facebook found the group on ”SAVE THE PREMIER LEAGUE - PETITION AND BOYCOTT” which was set up on 9^th February and already has 242 members.

Last August the BBC described how Facebook had been used to force the HSBC to make a U-turn on its plans to introduce student charges, a story which was picked up my many newspapers and bloggers.

Is, then, Facebook turning out to be the channel for mass protests, with only the hardline marxists arguing for a more politically correct channel?  OK, a tongue-in-cheek suggestion - but where else would you go to set up a mass campaign? I have discovered the Football Supporter’s Federation petition, but only through the Facebook group.

On 2^nd January 2008 I described various recent improvements to Facebook. I also pointed out that the research community has been developing tools for exporting data from Facebook for use in other applications. However my post added a note of caution:

Has the problem of data being trapped within Facebook now been solved? I don’t think so - remember that this is an experimental prototype … Perhaps more interestingly, though, are the ethics of exporting personal data to other applications.  The data I have received from my friends (their photos, contact details, interests, etc.)  has only been made available once we have mutually accepted friendship invitations.

Coincidentally the next day the blogosphere was full of discussions on this very topic, following an announcement (made initially on Twitter) that Robert Scoble had been banned from Facebook for using a scraping tool for exporting data from his Facebook account (”I got kicked off of Facebook because I was running a naughty script trying to get my friends info off of Facebook“).

Paul Miller and Nick Carr (”Scoble: freedom fighter or data thief?“) were amongst many bloggers who expressed their views on this incident in the immediate aftermath of this announcement.

My view if that it would be a mistake to portray this incident as a freedom fighter taking on the big evil corporate monster. I would also question the automatic assumption that people may have that they should be able to get out and reuse data they can access in networked services.  I feel that the nature of social networking services needs us to rethink assumptions which may have been valid in self-contained systems.

For example my email address and work details are freely available (on my Web site, my email signature, my business card, etc.)  However I took a deliberate decision not to publish my Skype and my MSN IDs and my mobile phone number in order to avoid both dangers of misuse (spam) and inappropriate use (being contacted out of work hours or being inundated with messages). 

But sometimes it would be useful to provide such information to others, but in a managed fashion. I do this from time to time, giving out my mobile phone number when I’m organising events (and am speaking at an event) so that conact can be made in case of problems, In such cases there may be an implied understanding that the information is provided only on a short term basis. However such understandings which may be reached by humans will not necessarily be the case in the networked world.

On Facebook when I befriend an individual this provides us with a mechanism for sharing information, which will include contact details as well as a wide range of other information.  But, whilst this information is managed in a Facebook environment I maintain control over this information, and can change the access conditions or even, by defriending people, withdraw access to my data.  And this is an important aspect of effective social networks. 

Circumventing such access control is therefore problematic, I feel. And this was the reason why I did not publish the FOAF file containing details of my Facebook friends.

Of course there are dangers of data lock-in if data cannot be exported from systems.  And if Facebook goes out of business there will be a lot of annoyed individuals if they cannot lose functionality and services they find useful.

It needs to be acknowledged that there does need to be a debate on how we should best proceed in addressing such tensions.  But this debate does need to be informed by an understanding of the diversity of requirements.

I was very pleased, therefore, to see a news item in Facebook from Dan Brickley about a WebCamp: SocialNetworkPortability event to be held in Cork on 2^nd March 2008. The event will look at “abstract approaches for social network portability”, “authentication methods for cross-SNS usage” and “giving permission for profile discovery on different social networks”.

These are some of the important issues which need to be thrashed out. And Robert Scoble’s approach of simply running a screenscraper to extract personal data ignores these important issues.  So Facebook should be applauded, IMHO, for stopping Robert from infringing Facebooks’ terms and conditions. And note that there is a Facebook aplication - Friendscsv- which allows contact details to be exported from Facebook. Aparently:

This application has been created in accordance with the terms and condition outlined in the Facebook Terms of Use (May 24, 2007), Facebook Privacy Policy (Sept 12, 2007), and the Facebook Platform Terms of Service and Platform Documentation (July 25, 2007). The data exported from your cadre of friends is obtained in accordance with their Privacy Settings and does not contain any contact information.

That sounds good. But: 

By using this application, you consent to allow the developers to create a basic entry for you on bigsight.org, a site they also own and maintain. Your use of this application represents your consent to the privacy policies laid out on bigsight.org. The developers of this application do not store any information (encrypted or otherwise) about your friends.

So a company (Bigsight) has already been set up which allows your contact data to be exported, provided the data is also uploaded to their social network. Now Bigsight is currently in beta and, according to their directory, there are only nine people from London registered.

But if a Facebook friend of mine uses this tool, will I find my personal details held on this service?  Is this something to be welcomed?  Or, to revisit the title of this post, should personal data in Facebook be exportable?

Whisper it, but has anybody noticed the various developments to Facebook which seems to be making it a better environment to work in?

There have been developments to the user interface, such as the Facebook status no longer has to start with “Brian is …” and messages delivered via email now contain the contents of the message, and not just the URI you have to go to in order to read the message.  Simple developments, but much welcomed by many Facebook users, I suspect.

It is also pleasing to see serious service providers providing access to their services through Facebook - just before Christmas, for example, Lorcan Dempsey commented on the availability of the Worldcat application for Facebook, which is illustrated below.

The research community is also engaging with Facebook.  I have recently joined the Facebook: Academic Research group which describes itself as “A group for anyone conducting (or interested in) academic research into Facebook. This includes sociologists, computer scientists, psychologists, information scientists, computer scientists, educators, philosophers, etc.“

I also noticed recently that several of my friends had joined The Semantic Web - Benefits, Education & Outreachgroup. I must admit that I was very pleased to see the pragmatic approach which is being taken by many of the Semantic Web evangelists in this group. One message addressed the question “Why create a facebook group to discuss the semantic web?“ by suggesting ”for the same reason tv shows are advertised on radio and tv schedules are listed in newspapers and magazines. You have to reach out to people where they are if you want to bring them somewhere new.“

In this group a thread on Getting FaceBook to open up provided a link to the Facebook Foaf Generator software which has been written by Mathew Rowe, a PhD student at Sheffield University.  The Foaf Generator is “a tool that generates a Foaf file from your Facebook profile, compiled from the information that Facebook has stored about you. It also includes details about your friends, along with geographical placement of your current location or hometown“.

As someone who has written a paper which explored the potential of FOAF back in 2004 I was intrigued by the possibility of making my Facebook data available as a FOAF file and then using a FOAF application to view the data. So I installed the application and created a FOAF file of my Facebook contacts. I explored several FOAF viewers before deciding that the Tabulator widget for the Opera Web browser seemed to provide the richest interface, and a screen shot of this is shown. 

What, then, does this show? Well it does seem to be possible to extract data from Facebook and make it available for use by other applications.  

Has the problem of data being trapped within Facebook now been solved? I don’t think so - remember that this is experimental developed by a PhD student, so there can be no guarantee of the quality of the service or that it will be available on a long term basis. And one simple experiment isn’t enough to explore how sophisticated (or not) the data export capabilities are. Perhaps more interestingly, though, are the ethics of exporting personal data to other applications.  The data I have received from my friends (their photos, contact details, interests, etc.)  has only been made available once we have mutually accepted friendship invitations.  Wouldn’t making a FOAF file of such data openly available infringe the implied privacy settings?   Or to put it another way, although Facebook may be improving, could it become too open?

  

For many of us it’s easy to find ‘friends’ on Facebook. Once you’ve got started and added a few friends it can often be easy to find other people you know. And the more links you have the easier it is to grow your network.

But how many of us have actively ‘defriended’ someone on Facebook? (And, incidentally, is this a word? The answer, it seems, is yes - see below). In real life we may lose touch with our friends, or chose not to have contact with them. But we probably haven’t publicly said ‘I’m not friends with you anymore ’since we were at school.

What is the etiquette, then, of pruning one’s list of Facebook friends? If we defriend someone, is this displayed on our respective News Feeds pages? And will this cause intrigue? And what happens if others then start to defriend the same person? Will they lose face?

Well I took the plunge recently, when I defriended someone for the first time. This was someone I had messaged, asking if she was the person I’d know when in Newcastle. It turns out that she wasn’t - but, as her message was ambiguous, I needed to befriended her to verify this. As we didn’t know each other, I defriended her - and felt slightly guilty as she only had one other Facebook friend. But at least this action wasn’t displayed on my page.

I do think we will need to start to defriend our Facebook friends. It would be helpful if there was a Facebook application which could help manage one’s friends, perhaps in some automated way. But we will still need to grasp the nettle and let go at some stage.

Perhaps we need a Letting Go Of Your Facebook Friends day?

PS A Google search for defriend revealed several definitions, including this one from the Enclopedia Dramatica:

To “defriend” is to remove someone from your LiveJournal’s Friends list; it is tantamount to “throwing down the gauntlet” and declaring one’s friendship at an end. Unsurprisingly, many people consider defriending a severe blow to their pride and reputation, and thus the act of defriending tends to stir up a lot of Internet drama.

and this one from the Urban Dictionary (which demonstrates that the term pre-dates the popularity of Facebook):

1. To remove someone from your livejournal friends list.
2. the act of removing a friend on your Myspace friend’s list. 
3. defriend smbd v , transitive de + friend; cf. befriend - to break off friendly relations (with smbd)

I should add that, as Andy Powell has observed recently, the Urban Dictionary has also defined the term Facebook limbo to refer to “the electronic space between accepting and rejecting a facebook friendship“. Is it worse to be rejected or to be ignored, I wonder?

Opening Up The Data

Via the Are there 100,000 people for open data in Facebook? group on Facebook I found the statement that “We already know that Mark Zuckerberg has committed Facebook to opening up its data“. The group description links to an article in Macworld entitled “Web 2.0: Facebook wants to make members’ data portable” which begins with the announcement that “Facebook wants to make the data its members enter into the social network’s profiles portable, so that they can move that data to other online services if they want, the company’s CEO said Wednesday“.

Opening Up Development

Back in March 2007 I wrote a post on Dapper - Web Mashup Development For All? which described how the Dapper Web-based can open up the development of Web-based applications. I recently discovered a FireFox extension called DapperFox which makes Dapper even easier to use.

More importantly I have just been alerted to a Dapper post which announces that the Dapper Facebook AppMaker Now Open to Public: “What this will allow you to do is take ANY Dapp and turn it into a fully independent Facebook app. Use your own header, footer, background styling — really make it yours — and with absolutely no programming“.

So now, it would appear, development of Facebook applications is opening up to, perhaps not the masses, but those with lightweight development skills or interests. And by taking data from public Web sites and making it available within a Facebook environment, you are not locking the data within Facebook, as the original data source is still available on the Web.

Enhancing Its Services

Facebook started off as a social networking environment. But as I wrote on 9 November Facebook now allows entries for organisations to be created within Facebook. And now, less than a month later, the Open University’s Facebook page shows that the oprganisation now has over 2,000 fans and what appears to be the start of a thriving discussion forum.

Phil Bradley recently provided a series of posts on a JIBS conference on Is library 2.0 a trivial pursuit?. One of his post described a talk on The British Library in Facebook. The British Library (BL) “sees the use of social networking sites as a way of getting out there, providing information in situations and places where people are”. They have set up a number of Facebook groups, including groups which support the exhibitions they are running and the BL’s business and SME support services, as well as a BL organisational pages and groups for internal use.

Conclusions

It’s here; it’s popular; it’s still developing; authoring tools are being developed; it’s getting more open. Can any organisation seriously argue that they shouldn’t be considering how Facebook can be used to support organisational aims? And shouldn’t those involved in IT development also be looking at what can be learnt from Facebook’s successes? And shouldn’t the Semantic Web purists acknowledge the views which Paul Miller sums up with his comment on the Nodalities blog:

“The noble vision of the Semantic Web is just that; a noble - and long term - vision. The years of seeking perfect answers to perfectly formed questions - a practice of which too many in the Semantic Web community are guilty - have not helped to move us nearly as far forward as we should have come. The over-reliance upon complex and impractically all-encompassing ontologies have bogged us down, and invited ridicule.”

In a post on Putting an official stamp on things Grainne Conole, professor of e-learning at the Open University responses to my post on UK Universities On Facebook, and reminisces about the problems she’d encountered in the early days of the Web:

The powers that be in the institution began to get wind of this ‘Internet’ thing; suddenly it began to appear on senior management’s agenda. One of the deans apparently was particularly concerned that ‘some academics even had pictures of their cats on their web sites!’ – guess who?

And once the powers that be had set up their working groups and established institutional policies, their decisions didn’t meet with Grainne’s approval:

what followed was a period of stagnation and the creation of over centralized, bureaucratic, institutional web presences, with policies and procedures and dos and don’ts as long as your arm.

But rather than getting despondent that we’ll be sharing a ‘groundhog day’ moment, I feel that we can learn from the past.

My thoughts on this:

• The institutional Web team should have a remit which covers the institution’s presence ‘out there’ in the wild west of the Web, and not just manage its own Web service.
• The policies should be focussed on the needs of the user communities, which will include the needs of the institution.
• The policies should not be driven by technical issues.
• It should be acknowledged that there may be risks in managing presences ‘out there’ - the service may not be sustainable, for example.
• The risk assessment should include the risks of not doing anything and the risks of being left behind.
• There will be times when a light-weight ‘just do it’ approach will be appropriate.

This would probably then lead to an institution initially claiming an organisational page on Facebook (possibly two, covering the ‘University of x’and ‘X University’ variants) but not necessarily publishing it immediately. This can then be followed by discussions over the purpose of the service. There should then be experimentation to identify Facebook applications which will enable content to be embedded from a managed source (note at present it seems only a small number of Facebook applications can be embedded on an organisational page). Finally mechanisms and responsibilities for monitoring user-generated content will need to be established.

Does this make sense? Or would this approach simply repeat the ‘over centralized, bureaucratic’ procedures which upset Grainne and others in the past? My approach has been to set up a Facebook page for the social group I am involved with (Northgate Rapper) in order to gain experience. The aims of this service (besides gained experiences for professional purposes)?

• To provide a prescence on Facebook for people who may be interested in Northgate Rapper and rapper sword dancing.
• To allow people who see us to have an easily found location up upload photos and videos (”go to Facebook and search for ‘Northgate Rapper’.  Then upload the video, and any comments you may have).
• To keep a record of where we’ve danced.
• To make it easy for other dancers to edit the page.

The template I’ve used for the page (Clubs) isn’t ideal, as it is aimed at clubs as a venue rather than a social group. But at least I’ve created a page with little effort: