So guess what's trending high on Google searches? "how do I delete my Facebook account?" Facebook is experiencing a backlash amongst its users at the moment as concerns mount over its privacy policies or lack of fair ones. So today after recent hacks and leaks of Facebook users data, like accidentally making users' profiles completely public, I have decided to delete my Facebook account. Some other reasons that lead me to this decision are; Facebook's Terms Of Service state that they own your data, your posts, photos everything. Facebook gets you to share information that you might not otherwise share, and then unknown to you they make it publicly available. Your private data and all the accessible data of all your friends is shared with applications that you install, Dogbook, Farmville, Mafia Wars etc etc most consumers will have no idea that this data is basically public. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account. The account deletion process is incredibly (and I think intentionally) confusing. And if you do delete your account for the next 14 days if you or any linked application or website tries to log back in to that account, you're back like nothing ever happened, undeleted and you will have no idea! Go here for instructions if you need to http://www.wikihow.com/Permanently-Delete-a-Facebook-Account One interesting open source alternative gaining some popularity is Diaspora at http://www.joindiaspora.com/ and it does not even really exist yet.
Do you use twitter lists? Twitter Lists are groups you make and is a new way to organise the people you’re following or find new people. Its a way for you to collect together other users on Twitter into groups so that you can get an overview of what they are all tweeting. These Twitter streams give you a snapshot of the list by viewing that list’s page. Lists allow you to organise the people you’re following into groups that make sense to you, and even to add people you’re not following.
This got me to thinking about developing a capability for using social media for market research. The Internet is fundamentally changing how market research and data collection is done. Using social media tools to ask questions is part of a broader trend called crowd sourcing and is tapping into the collective intelligence of the public. Low cost online survey tools like Survey Monkey make it easy to design, and conduct survey research. Even easier is using social media sites and tools to ask questions and bloggers have long used their blogs to ask questions of their audience, but if you don't blog you can still ask questions online.
LinkedIn has a section where users can ask questions and Twitter can also be used for market research in addition to getting a lot of answers and good information if the number of Twitter users following you big enough. Used by companies like Innocentive and Amazons Mechanical Turk which uses crowd sourcing to solve corporate research and other task oriented problems.
New third party services like Brizzly have a fun approach to understanding the world's trends. Brizzly allows you to see why topics are trending on Twitter, and edit their descriptions yourself. No longer wonder why a certain event or company is suddenly in the news.
Speaking of research I have just read a very interesting book, The Abc Of Xyz: Understanding The Global Generations by Mark McCrindle and Emily Wolfinger. With marketers so interested in generational attitudes the book makes the tidy little definition of what a generation is, 'generations are people of a comparable life stage and age who's attitudes were shaped by the same developments, events and trends'. This short synopsis from the publisher "The Abc Of Xyz is designed for educators, business managers and parents who want a brief and useful introduction to Australia's living generations and how they interact. It begins by exploring what a generation is, how its definition has changed, and the trends that are emerging for the future. It goes on to examine specific generational conflict in schools, home and the workplace, and the ways in which they can be understood and resolved. Interspersed with useful tables and figures, the book also offers insights into how our generations compare to their counterparts in Japan, the US and even Finland, and what might lie beyond Z". ISBN: 9781742230351
