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  • Facebook Software Puts It Front and Center on Android Phones

    Jim Wilson/The New York Times
    Mark Zuckerberg introduced the Facebook Home app at the company’s Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters.
     
     
    APRIL 4, 2013, 1:16 PM

    Facebook Software Puts It Front and Center on Android Phones

    By SOMINI SENGUPTA

    9:20 p.m. | Updated Added more details and analysis.

    MENLO PARK, Calif. — Cellphones have long been Facebook’s Achilles’ heel. With its users flocking to mobile phones by the millions — and many of its newest users never accessing the services on computers at all — the company has struggled to catch up to them.

    On Thursday, Facebook unveiled its latest, most ambitious effort to crack the challenge: a package of mobile software called Facebook Home that is designed to draw more users and nudge them to be more active on the social network.

    The new suite of applications effectively turns the Facebook news feed into the screen saver of a smartphone, updating it constantly and seamlessly with Facebook posts and messages.

    In so doing, Facebook has cleverly, perhaps also dangerously, exploited technology owned by one of its leading rivals, Google. Facebook Home works on Google’s Android operating system, which has become the most popular underlying software for smartphones in the world.

    The Facebook News Feed appears as soon as the phone is turned on. Pictures take up most of the real estate, with each news feed entry scrolling by like a slide show. Messages and notifications pop up on the home page. To “like” something requires no more than two taps. Facebook apps are within easy reach, making the phone essentially synonymous with the Facebook ecosystem.

    “Today, our phones are designed around apps, not people,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, at a news conference here at the company’s headquarters. “We want to flip that around.”

    Facebook Home will be available for download from Google’s app store, Play, on April 12 for four popular, moderately priced phones that use Android and are made by HTC and Samsung. A fifth one, a new model called the HTC First, will be sold by AT&T for $100 with the software already loaded.

    For the time being, Facebook will not show ads on the phone’s home screen, which Facebook is calling Cover Feed. Since advertising revenue is crucial to the company’s finances, however, it will almost certainly display ads there in the future.

    Facebook Home is also clearly designed to get Facebook users to return to their news feeds even more frequently than they do now. Every time they glance at their phone at the supermarket checkout line or on the bus to work, they will, in essence, be looking at their Facebook page.

    “It’s going to convert idle moments to Facebook moments,” said Chris Silva, a mobile industry analyst with the Altimeter Group. “I’m ‘liking’ things, I’m messaging people, and when ads roll out, I’m interacting with them and letting Facebook monetize me as a user.”

    Krishna Subramanian, the chief marketing officer at Velti, a San Francisco-based company that buys targeted advertisements online on behalf of brands, pointed out that even without showing ads on the mobile cover feed, Facebook Home could prove to be a lucrative tool.

    By nudging its users to do more on the social network, he said, the company will inevitably get “an explosion of mobile data that can be tied back into desktop advertising” to Facebook users.

    A majority of Facebook’s one billion-plus users log in on their cellphones. Most Americans now have an Internet-enabled phone, and smartphone penetration is growing especially fast in emerging market countries, where Facebook has substantial blocs of its users.

    At Thursday’s press event, Mr. Zuckerberg repeatedly signaled that he wanted the new product to enable a mass, global audience to connect to Facebook, especially those have yet to get on the Internet. “We want to build something that’s accessible to everyone,” he said.

    Although HTC is rolling out the first new phone with Facebook Home installed, and AT&T has agreed to sell it, other phone makers and carriers may be reluctant to load the software.

    Jan Dawson, a telecom analyst at Ovum, said that Apple’s iPhone and many Android smartphones already do a good job of integrating the Facebook application into their phones. And he said phone carriers were unlikely to give a Facebook phone made by HTC much support because the Taiwanese phone maker’s past attempt at a Facebook phone — the ChaCha, which had a physical button for posting photos on Facebook — sold poorly.

    “HTC may be desperate enough to do this, but carriers aren’t likely to promote it heavily,” Mr. Dawson said. “As a gimmick, it may bring customers into stores, but they’ll mostly end up buying something else.”

    At Facebook headquarters Thursday, HTC’s chief executive, Peter Chou, showed off a model of his new Facebook phone, called HTC First, in lipstick red. “HTC First is the ultimate social phone,” he said. “It combines the new Facebook Home and great HTC design.”

    Whether consumers will embrace a phone that emphasizes Facebook over everything else also remains to be seen. Some are likely to have concerns about how much personal information they are being asked to share with Facebook. Additionally, checking Facebook dozens of times every day could result in hefty data use charges, unless users are connected to a Wi-Fi network or negotiate special packages with carriers.

    Facebook and AT&T executives said they had taken that into account. Users will be notified when they are about to reach their data limits. The software can also be set to download data-heavy content like video only when the user is connected to a Wi-Fi network, and then save it in its memory.

    The software’s most powerful feature is to turn the cellphone into a starkly personal gadget.

    Facebook employees, current and past, were invited to the product announcement, a sign of how crucial it has been for Facebook to crack the mobile puzzle. Silicon Valley has whispered for months about the prospects of a Facebook phone. Mr. Zuckerberg has consistently denied building one.

    Thursday’s announcement signaled that Facebook had stopped short of even building an operating system. Instead, it had simply altered its rival Google’s technology.

    The Android platform, Mr. Zuckerberg said, was built to be open to new integrations. Asked at the news conference whether he feared that Google executives would change their mind about Facebook using it to advance its mobile aims, he turned somewhat testy.

    “Anything can change in the future,” he said. “We think Google takes its commitment to openness very seriously.”

    Google, for its part, was notably genteel. “This latest collaboration demonstrates the openness and flexibility that has made Android so popular,” the company said in an e-mailed statement. “And it’s a win for users who want a customized Facebook experience from Google Play — the heart of the Android ecosystem — along with their favorite Google services like Gmail, Search and Google Maps.”

    Brian X. Chen contributed reporting.

     

    Copyright. 2013 . The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

  • Pompom Girl for Feminism

    Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

     

    Go to Columnist Page February 23, Pompom Girl for Feminism

     

    By MAUREEN DOWD
     
     

     

    SHERYL SANDBERG is not one to settle for being the It Girl of Silicon Valley.

    Nor is the chief operating officer of Facebook willing to write a book that people might merely read.

    One of her friends from her Harvard days told Vogue that the brainy, beautiful, charming, stylish, happily married 43-year-old mother of two, one of the world’s richest self-made women, has an “infectious insistence.” (She would have to, having founded Harvard’s aerobics program in the ’80s, wearing blue eye shadow and leg warmers.)

    Now that she has domesticated the Facebook frat house, Sandberg wants to be “the pompom girl for feminism,” as she calls it. She has a grandiose plan to become the PowerPoint Pied Piper in Prada ankle boots reigniting the women’s revolution — Betty Friedan for the digital age. She wants women to stop limiting and sabotaging themselves.

    The petite corporate star is larger than life, and a normal book tour for “Lean In,” which she describes as “sort of a feminist manifesto” mixed with career advice, just won’t do.

    “I always thought I would run a social movement,” she said in “Makers,” an AOL/PBS documentary on feminist history.

    Sandberg may have caught the fever to change the world from Mark Zuckerberg, or come by it genetically. She writes that her mother, at age 11, responded to a rabbi’s sermon on tikkun olam, the Jewish concept of repairing the world, by “grabbing a tin can and knocking on doors to support civil rights workers in the South.”

    The charmed Sandberg is no Queen Bee. Unlike some other women who reach the top, she does not pull up the ladder, or jungle gym, as she prefers to think of it, behind her. Many women found it inspiring when she said in “Makers” that she left work at 5:30 to go home to her kids, even while they acknowledged that you might have to be Sheryl Sandberg to get away with that.

    Sandberg, who worked at the Treasury Department for her mentor, Larry Summers, and at Google before going to Facebook, started a group called the Women of Silicon Valley to listen to celebrity speakers and swap stories.

    She knows there is slow evolution or even erosion in women’s progress in some areas, and that many younger women don’t want to be called feminists. Professional women often take their husbands’ last names these days without a thought.

    Her book is chockablock with good tips and insights, if a bit discouraging at times. She urges women in salary negotiations to smile frequently and use the word “we” instead of “I.” And she encourages employers and women to talk upfront about plans for children, which employers may fear is lawsuit fodder.

    She seems to think she can remedy social paradigms with a new kind of club — a combo gabfest, Oprah session and corporate pep talk. (Where’s the yoga?)

    Sandberg has been recruiting corporations to join her Lean In Foundation, which will create the Lean In Community and Lean In Circles, which are, as The Times’s Jodi Kantor wrote, like “consciousness-raising groups of yore.” The circles will entail 8 to 12 peers who will meet monthly and use “education modules” to learn the skills to pursue equality. (Like how Rosa Parks used bus modules.) The debut assignment is a video on how to command more authority by altering how you speak and sit.

    Women are encouraged to send in stories about leaning in, but no sad sacks allowed: “Share a positive ending about what you learned from the experience,” says the instructional material for Lean In Circles. And no truants: “Don’t invite flakes.”

    That leaves me leaning out.

    Sandberg has already gotten some flak from women who think that her attitude is too elitist and that she is too prone to blame women for failing to get ahead. (Not everyone has Larry Page and Sergey Brin volunteering to baby-sit, and Zuckerberg offering a shoulder to cry on.) Noting that her Facebook page for “Lean In” looks more like an ego wall with “deep thoughts,” critics argue that her unique perch as a mogul with the world’s best husband to boot makes her tone-deaf to the problems average women face as they struggle to make ends meet in a rough economy, while taking care of kids, aging parents and housework.

    Sandberg describes taking her kids to a business conference last year and realizing en route that her daughter had head lice. But the good news was that she was on the private eBay jet.

    Sandberg may mean well, and she may be setting up a run for national office. But she doesn’t understand the difference between a social movement and a social network marketing campaign. Just because digital technology makes connecting possible doesn’t mean you’re actually reaching people.

    People come to a social movement from the bottom up, not the top down. Sandberg has co-opted the vocabulary and romance of a social movement not to sell a cause, but herself.

    She says she’s using marketing for the purpose of social idealism. But she’s actually using social idealism for the purpose of marketing.

     

    Copyright. 2013. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

     

  • Will you still add me, will you still tag me, when I’m 64?When Will You Stop Using Facebook

    Will you still add me, will you still tag me, when I’m 64?

    facebook like full.png

    Birgerking/Flickr

    Adults are typically grateful that social media didn’t exist when they were teenagers — that their Facebook photos and status messages date to their college years at the earliest, not their first years of high school or middle school. Would you retroactively give your 13-year-old self the power to permanently put anything he or she wanted on the Web? I’d sooner incapacitate him with arcade-prize finger traps, the unexpectedly hazardous technology of my youth.

    What I’d never pondered, until a friend questioned me about it last weekend, is when I’ll stop using Facebook. Assuming it endures as a company, will there be an age at which most people abandon it? Right now, I’m a light user who mostly exploits the platform to share links to my articles. 

    Some people in my “stream” do the same. We’ll all follow the crowd.

    As I reflect on the way most of my friends from high school and college have used Facebook in the past and how they use it today, I’d say that their activity is more often than not tied to life changes. A new “relationship status.” A new job. A move to a new city. A wedding proposal, followed by photographs from the bachelorette party, the wedding, and the honeymoon. A pregnancy, followed by photos of the baby, her first steps, her second birthday, her last day of school, and her spot on the bronze medal podium after placing third in a state college swim meet.

    People want to share these developments. And their friends and acquaintances don’t want to miss out on happy news, or gossip, or vicarious presence at an event, or even mini-scandal or unexpected tragedy. So they keep coming back to Facebook, many times a day, to disseminate news and to receive it, and to decide whether their own life is proceeding at an acceptable pace. But what happens when the pace of “newsworthy” change slows down? When the career is established, the marriage is either stable or long over, the kids are grown, and seeing friends means dinner and a streamed movie rather than late nights drinking with camera phones out? Does Facebook start to feel depressing, like drawing on your dorm room white board during Thanksgiving break, or as if it has lost its purpose, like People magazine after Princess Diana?

    In Joan Didion’s essay on coming of age in New York City, she wrote:

    I remember once, one cold bright December evening in New York, suggesting a friend who complained of having been around too long that he come with me to a party where there would be, I assured him with the bright resourcefulness of twenty-three, “new faces.” He laughed literally until he choked, and I had to roll down the taxi window and hit him on the back. “New faces,” he said finally, “don’t tell me about new faces.” It seemed that the last time he had gone to a party where he had been promised “new faces,” there had been fifteen people in the room, and he had already slept with five of the women and owed money to all but two of the men. I laughed with him, but the first snow had just begun to fall and the big Christmas trees glittered yellow and white as far as I could see up Park Avenue and I had a new dress and it would be a long while before I would come to understand the particular moral of the story.

    Years later, she was still attending the same parties, “all parties, bad parties,” and only looking back was she able to appreciate her mistake: “You will have perceived by now that I was not one to profit by the experience of others, that it was a very long time indeed before I stopped believing in new faces and began to understand… that it is distinctly possible to stay too long at the Fair.” 

    Imagine 7 years spent living in a college dorm, or 15 years spent attending the parties you went to in your twenties. Now imagine yourself perusing a Facebook stream daily for a full 25 years.  

    Doesn’t that just feel like too long? 

    I wonder how many of you will agree. It’s impossible to say right now. The popularity of Facebook among older people today doesn’t really tell us much. Like everyone already grown up when social media came along, they experienced the addicting novelty of remaking long-lost, far-flung connections while in between tasks at work or waiting for the onions to caramelize. People who grew up with social media all along will experience it differently in middle age. 

    A colleague with whom I spoke about this topic guessed that the middle-aged will stick around as users for nostalgic reasons, their accounts, full of archived photographs, serving the same function as old high school yearbooks. Perhaps so. But how often do you look at your high school yearbook? In that scenario, Facebook pays to store ever more data that is seldom accessed. 

    Older folks might also stick around to lurk on the pages of their grown children, especially when grandchildren arrive. But Facebook will always be vulnerable to other companies fulfilling discrete social media niches, like photo-sharing with members of the immediate family. They’re an “all-purpose sharing” site, with all of the attendant advantages and drawbacks. 

    Are my future children going to see the presence of my wife and I on Facebook as a drawback to doing their young-adult social media sharing on the platform? I suspect so. Of course, much of what I’ve written is premised on Facebook itself remaining static, which isn’t going to happen. But the thought experiment helps us think through the challenges the company is facing. There are surely people within its hierarchy asking themselves these very same questions: 

    Is there a tension between keeping older users and attracting younger users?

    Which demographic do we care about most?

    How do we retain users for the long haul?

    Will we try to charge people one day for storing all their decades old photos? 

    How hard will we make it for our users to export their histories?

    It’ll be interesting to see how they answer those questions, and how the people of my generation respond. 

     
     
     2013 Copyright. The Atlantic Magazine. All Rights Reserved

  • Facebook: Why some “likes” are worth more than others

    By Tom Chatfield.
     
     

    Facebook: The new power of like

    (Copyright: Getty Images)

    After the social media giant announced its much-anticipated search function, Tom Chatfield wonders whether all its users are created equal, or has it become easy to game the system for personal profit?

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    IN BBC NEWS:

    Facebook, Apple - and the psychology of markets

    Facebook, Apple and the markets

    Look at what’s happened on the stock market to two of the best known names in technology over the last three months. The wild gyrations in their value will do nothing to convince sceptics that there is anything rational about stock markets.

    When Facebook announced its much-anticipated Graph Search earlier this week, there were two questions underpinning most commentators’ responses: will this make a lot of money, and can it beat Google at its own game?

    So far as the first question is concerned, the stock market response – an initial dip of around three per cent – suggested caution verging on disappointment. On the second front, however, there has been greater optimism, not least because Facebook seems to have invented a whole new game of its own: the world’s first truly social search function.

    As Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg explained at the launch event, while search engines like Google are all about links, Graph Search is about answers: “Web search is designed to take any open-ended query and give you links that might have answers… Graph Search is designed to take a precise query and give you an answer, not give you links that might provide the answer”.

    These answers, moreover, will be entirely drawn from your individual “social graph” of friends. Type in a complex query – “people I know in New York who like video games”, or “friends who enjoy both modernist novels and hot chocolate” – and a sortable list pops up based on people who have “liked” these topics. You can search where your friends have been, what they’ve done, what they’re interested in, and how they rated all of these experiences.

    The system remains in beta, but advertisers, recruiters and brands are already salivating at the opportunities. So too, no doubt, are users hoping to meet attractive friends of friends, now all they have to do is type in search terms like “people who like Star Wars and are single” – photos being another major part of Graph Search. It’s big news for businesses and individuals alike, not to mention lovelorn geeks.

    Beyond this, though, Facebook’s decision to turn its data into an unprecedented playing field for social discovery also says something significant about the future of the internet, and its ever-closer integration with daily life.

    Once upon a time, most people used online services from behind at least a thin veil of anonymity. Search and discovery were impersonal: driven by the measurement of global trends and the aggregated analysis of millions of users’ actions.

    Arguably the biggest oversight in the history of companies like Google was their underestimation of people’s desire to personalise this experience. Using search engines to discover accurate results was all very well – but a still greater hunger existed for information defined not by its ranking, but by who it came from. Even the arbitrary mutterings of someone we know or admire (even if it is a Z-list celebrity) are more interesting to most of us, most of the time, than mere knowledge.

    As Elise Ackerman put it in her analysis of Graph Search for Forbes, “some ‘likes’ are worth more than others”. Not all users are created equal, and the more that anonymity is replaced by the encroaching real world of fame, friends, status and followers, the more this inequality becomes an embedded part of the daily business of digital living.

    Playing for perks

    None of which should be much of a surprise to those accustomed tocelebrities like Snoop Dogg or Kim Kardashian hawking products to their millions of Twitter followers. What began with these fortunate few, however, is a pattern that increasingly applies to us all.

    Inequality isn’t just about social status, of course. As more and more of the world comes online across a greater variety of devices, we inexorably face a more unequal global internet: different speeds, different restrictions, different services and rights. By putting network effects at the heart of not only social interactions, but also information discovery and dissemination, Facebook is feeding this unevenness – and helping us all, along the way, to work our particular assets for all they’re worth.

     

    It’s easy to see how this system can be gamed. Visited a restaurant and enjoyed the experience? Write a favourable review for money off next time. Haven’t visited a restaurant, but have lots of friends and followers? Earn cash in hand for claiming that you visited and loved every minute.

    Social networks are not, in this sense, a levelling force so much as a vast magnifying glass applied to human nature, accentuating that which is already there – contacts, celebrity, exclusivity, excitement and attractiveness included.

    None of which is to suggest Facebook’s Graph Search is destined for triumph, or that it’s only about fame and freebies. What it is, however, is a sign of a digital culture increasingly rooted in real lives and locations; or at least in certain clickable, measurable aspects of them. Playing the system brings its perks – and opting out means missing out in real as much as virtual terms.

    In the end, Facebook just wants to make us happy: to help us get more of what we want, when we want it, from whom we want. It doesn’t matter whether the details involve fine dining, exclusive fragrances, ski trips, or special offers at Burger King – it still means recruiting each one of us as part-time publicists, broadcasters, reviewers and self-promoters.

    The catch, as Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski argued back in November 2011, is what incentives this particular vision places on our relationships. “We have a name for the kind of person who collects a detailed, permanent dossier on everyone they interact with, with the intent of using it to manipulate others for personal advantage,” he noted. “We call that person a sociopath.”

    Ceglowski’s words are a warning rather than a prophecy, but they’re also something we need to take seriously. In the age of an increasingly unequal internet, where relationships and endorsements alike are saleable commodities, the rewards for tapping into our inner sociopaths have rarely been more tempting. Win or lose, however, some games are never worth playing.

    Do you agree with Tom? If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on Future, head over to our Facebook page or message us on Twitter.

     

    BBC © 2013 The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read more.

  • The Typical Twitter User

    This Week On Twitter: The Typical Twitter Usre, Twitter As A Business Tool And Social Marketing 101

    By Shea Bennett on September 9, 2012 10:00 AM

    Need a little weekend reading? We’ve compiled our top ten Twitter stories of the week, which includes the latest statistics about the typical Twitter user, how Twitter is the top social network amongst Fortune 500 companies, what social consumers want from brands (but what they’re actually getting from marketers), how Twitter is helping students and a visual that asks if we’re sharing too much online.

    Here are our top 10 Twitter stories of the week.

    1. The Typical Twitter User Is A 37 Year Old Female [STATS]

    The population might be aging, but not on Twitter: according to the latest statistics, Twitter users are, on average, two years younger than they were in 2010.

    2. 73% Of Fortune 500s Have An Active Twitter Account [STATS]

    In an effort to understand how the top companies in America use social media, the University of Massachusetts has conducted an annual survey of the digital presence of the Fortune 500. And this year, Twitter is the most popular social network among the titans of industry, beating out Facebook, blogging and Pinterest.

    3. What Social Consumers Want From Brands (And What They Actually Get From Marketers) [INFOGRAPHIC]

    Did you know that while more than three-quarters (76 percent) of marketers feel that they know what their consumers want, only about one-third (34 percent) have actually asked? This divide, coined as the perception gap by industry analyst Brian Solis, naturally presents a problem for brands looking to maximize user engagement and conversion rates on platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. For optimum results, marketers need to put their egos to one side and reach out directly to their audience – or suffer the consequences.

    4. How Twitter Is Helping Students Graduate With Technology [INFOGRAPHIC]

    Did you know that 84 percent of schools have used Twitter to send up-to-date announcements to students? Moreover, studies have shown that students who use Twitter in the classroom achieve a higher GPA by an average of 0.5 points, and professors are now far more likely to allow laptops in the classroom than they are calculators – 98 percent of classrooms now have internet access, and 91 percent of college faculty engage in social media as part of their course work.

    5. Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest – Are You Sharing Too Much Online? [INFOGRAPHIC]

    Are you sharing too much online? Social media has empowered users to connect with friends and family, demand better products and customer service from brands and change the world, but as we become more comfortable with these tools we are exponentially relaxing any initial concerns we might have had with security. Namely, as platforms such as Twitter and Facebook become an everyday part of our lives, sharing otherwise private information about ourselves to these channels becomes the norm which, in some cases, can be hazardous. It pays to remember that with social media you’re always on camera, and anything you say or do can – and, unfortunately, often will – be used against you.

    6. 92% Of U.S. Companies Have Used Social Networks For Recruitment [INFOGRAPHIC]

    Social media has revolutionized the business world and has quickly established itself as the primary source of recruitment for companies worldwide, and with good reason – it’s cost-effective, fast and scalable, allowing organizations of all shapes and sizes to source potential hires and easily profile their characters. Indeed, 92 percent of U.S. companies have used social networks to find new talent, and almost three-quarters (73 percent) of those surveyed have made successful hires through these channels.

    7. Last Tweet From Car Crash Victim Is About Tweeting While Driving

    We all know that texting while driving kills – yet drivers, especially young drivers, do it all the time. And now we have a story of five young men dead in a one-car crash and a couple of tweets from one of the victims, a passenger, bragging about drinking and tweeting while driving.

    8. Forget Embedding Tweets, Now You Can Embed An Entire Timeline

    Are you a fan of embedding tweets in posts? If so, you’ll LOVE Twitter’s new offering because it allows you to embed an entire timeline, never mind just a tweet. If you don’t know how to embed tweets (or what that even means), check out this post where we explain what embedding is and how to do it before continuing on.

    9. Wedding Vows Exchanged On Twitter. Seriously, This Happened

    In what is quite possibly the most ridiculous (and obviously, effective) PR stunt when it comes to Twitter, to date, a couple in Turkey used Twitter to exchange wedding vows. No, they were not stationed far away from each other for work or country or some other necessity. And they were not exchanging vows remotely to combat some last-minute snafu. They were sitting right next to each other in the church. Yes, bang your head against your desk and read on.

    10. HootSuite Acquires Seesmic

    HootSuite, the social media management system, has acquired Seesmic, who were innovators in mobile, desktop and web applications for social media, for an undisclosed amount. Seesmic chief executive Loic Le Meur had to lay off half of his staff back in March, and this buyout from HootSuite is partially a talent acquisition for the remaining roster. Users of Seesmic software will be slowly ported over to HootSuite, who say that this buyout will “further reinforce HootSuite’s position in the upper left quadrant of the Twitter Partner graph”.

    Did you know we have a newsletter? Sign-up to receive a daily digest of all things Twitter, sent straight to your inbox. Click here to sign up for the AllTwitter Newsletter.

     

  • Facebook Meets Brick-and-Mortar Politics

    Jun 11, ’12 2:00 PM
    for everyone
    Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

    Supporters of Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood at a campaign stop in Menoufia, Egypt, on Wednesday.

     

     

    Josh Haner/The New York Times

    Thomas L. Friedman

     

     

    June 9, 2012
     

    Facebook Meets Brick-and-Mortar Politics

    By 

    Istanbul

    I HAD just finished a panel discussion on Turkey and the Arab Spring at a regional conference here, and, as I was leaving, a young Egyptian woman approached me. “Mr. Friedman, could I ask you a question? Who should I vote for?”

    I thought: “Why is she asking me about Obama and Romney?” No, no, she explained. It was her Egyptian election next week that she was asking about. Should she vote for Mohamed Morsi, the candidate of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, or Ahmed Shafiq, a retired general who served as Hosni Mubarak’s last prime minister and was running as a secular law-and-order candidate? My heart went out to her. As Egyptian democracy activists say: It’s like having to choose between two diseases. How sad that 18 months after a democratic revolution, Egyptians have been left with a choice between a candidate anchored in 1952, when Egypt’s military seized power, and a candidate anchored in 622, when the Prophet Muhammad gave birth to Islam.

    What happened to the “Facebook Revolution”?

    Actually, Facebook is having a bad week — in the stock market and the ideas market. As a liberal Egyptian friend observed, “Facebook really helped people to communicate, but not to collaborate.” No doubt Facebook helped a certain educated class of Egyptians to spread the word about the Tahrir Revolution. Ditto Twitter. But, at the end of the day, politics always comes down to two very old things: leadership and the ability to get stuff done. And when it came to those, both the Egyptian Army and the Muslim Brotherhood, two old “brick and mortar” movements, were much more adept than the Facebook generation of secular progressives and moderate Islamists — whose candidates together won more votes than Morsi and Shafik combined in the first round of voting but failed to make the runoff because they divided their votes among competing candidates who would not align.

    To be sure, Facebook, Twitter and blogging are truly revolutionary tools of communication and expression that have brought so many new and compelling voices to light. At their best, they’re changing the nature of political communication and news. But, at their worst, they can become addictive substitutes for real action. How often have you heard lately: “Oh, I tweeted about that.” Or “I posted that on my Facebook page.” Really? In most cases, that’s about as impactful as firing a mortar into the Milky Way galaxy. Unless you get out of Facebook and into someone’s face, you really have not acted. And, as Syria’s vicious regime is also reminding us: “bang-bang” beats “tweet-tweet” every day of the week.

    Commenting on Egypt’s incredibly brave Facebook generation rebels, the political scientist Frank Fukuyama recently wrote: “They could organize protests and demonstrations, and act with often reckless courage to challenge the old regime. But they could not go on to rally around a single candidate, and then engage in the slow, dull, grinding work of organizing a political party that could contest an election, district by district. … Facebook, it seems, produces a sharp, blinding flash in the pan, but it does not generate enough heat over an extended period to warm the house.”

    Let’s be fair. The Tahrir youths were up against two well-entrenched patronage networks. They had little time to build grass-roots networks in a country as big as Egypt. That said, though, they could learn about leadership and the importance of getting things done by studying Turkey’s Islamist Justice and Development Party, known as A.K.P. It has been ruling here since 2002, winning three consecutive elections.

    What even the A.K.P.’s biggest critics will acknowledge is that it has transformed Turkey in a decade into an economic powerhouse with a growth rate second only to China. And it did so by unlocking its people’s energy — with good economic management and reformed universal health care, by removing obstacles and creating incentives for business and foreign investment, and by building new airports, rail lines, roads, tunnels, bridges, wireless networks and sewers all across the country. A Turkish journalist who detests the A.K.P. confessed to me that she wished the party had won her municipal elections, because she knew it would have improved the neighborhood.

    But here’s the problem: The A.K.P.’s impressively effective prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has not only been effective at building bridges but also in eliminating any independent judiciary in Turkey and in intimidating the Turkish press so that there are no more checks and balances here. With the economic decline of the European Union, the aborting of Turkey’s efforts to become an E.U. member and the need for America to have Turkey as an ally in managing Iraq, Iran and Syria, there are also no external checks on the A.K.P.’s rising authoritarianism. (Erdogan announced out of the blue last week that he intended to pass a law severely restricting abortions.)

    So many conversations I had with Turks here ended with me being told: “Just don’t quote me. He can be very vindictive.” It’s like China.

    This isn’t good. If Erdogan’s “Sultanization” of Turkey continues unchecked, it will soil his truly significant record and surely end up damaging Turkish democracy. It will also be bad for the region because whoever wins the election in Egypt, when looking for a model to follow, will see the E.U. in shambles, the Obama team giving Erdogan a free pass and Turkey thriving under a system that says: Give your people growth and you can gradually curb democratic institutions and impose more religion as you like.

     

    Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

  • Meet Anikka Fragodt, Facebook’s ‘Rock’

     
     
    BY KATIE J.M. BAKER
     

    MAY 25, 2012 12:15 PM

    13,734 22


     

    Meet Anikka Fragodt, Facebook’s ‘Rock’

    There’s been a lot of talk lately about the lack of high-powered women at Facebook, but there’s one indispensable lady at the company who few people know exists at all: Anikka Fragodt, Mark Zuckerburg’s executive assistant. And if you’ve ever worked in a busy office, you know that an executive assistant is no joke, particularly not at a major company like Facebook. Often, executive assistants are the ones who are actually holding everything together.

    According to her LinkedIn profile, Fagodt has over 20 years of assistant experience; after graduating from Notre Dame, she worked for companies like Siebel Systems, Netscape Communications Corp, and Doctors Health, Inc. before joining Facebook in 2006. Her past and former co-workers seriously gush about her work ethic and professional skills, calling her “a rock that multi-tasks like a dynamo but she can always be counted on to be there when you need her.” One Facebook employee said she’s “highly knowledgeable, professional and helpful. She’s a great person to work with.” Forthright, too: “If you’re looking to get my response to something, you can find me much faster on Facebook. I rarely check LinkedIn,” she says on her page. Naturally.

    What can we tell from Fagodt’s Facebook profile? Not much — it’s sparse (we can’t even see if she’s friends with Mark) but she’s a big fan of Donna Summer and Biggie, as well as more traditional psychologists and philosophers — she has quotes from Nietzsche, Smith, Solon and Jourard under her “About Me” section. She’s religious, too: “I’m a very blessed person and I am thankful to God for His mercy,” she says.

    Her personality shines more on Quora, where she’s answered 14 questions, such as, “How many hours a week does Mark Zuckerberg work?” She wrote back: “Honest answer? He works as many hours as it takes to get done what needs to get done.”

    We’re into her subtle wit, too: when answering a question about the best car services in the Bay Area, she says not to take one that gets you to the airport 2 hours early, since “that can be boring.” She’s clearly a patient woman as well, because she answered a question about whether Cyndi Lauper or Ashton Kutcher is currently more well-known in America. (Uh, sadly, duh.)

    In another Quora post, she detailed all of the qualities an executive assistant should have:

    Responsibilities
    • Assist in accomplishment of Company and departmental objectives
    • Review, update and manage schedule for assigned manager – confirm
attendees and manage the agenda and logistics of all weekly and monthly
global meetings, including but not limited, to customer and partner
meetings
    • Ensure the timely preparation and delivery of all briefing information for all meetings
    • Communicate routinely to manager’s direct reports policies and
processes to ensure compliance with Company guidelines and procedures
    • Communicate daily with internal and external customers, prospects,
partners, and vendors while exhibiting the highest degree of
professionalism, courtesy and diplomacy
    • Ensure and maintain confidentiality of all appropriate communications and documentation
    • Respond to and screen all incoming calls or electronic communication and distributed to appropriate persons
    • Prioritize and assign all incoming written and oral communications, when necessary, to appropriate person(s) for response
    • Organize and manage all travel arrangements
    • Process expense reports
    • Manage the reduction of expenses wherever possible
    • Extensive knowledge of event and conference planning
    • Partner with facilities to ensure that we have adequate room for
growth, help drive required moves that will minimize disruption and
keep employees happy and productive
    Requirements
    • Excellent
communication skills – proven ability to communicate with executives,
peers, the public, and others via all means of communication including
telephone, email, written correspondence and in person
    • Excellent organizational skills with high attention to detail
    • Good planning and prioritization skills
    • Excellent computer skills – fluency in all Microsoft applications, especially Word and Outlook
    • Ability to handle difficult situations and people
    • Proactive and self-motivated with an ability to take direction
    • Strong work ethic
    • Willingness to participate at all levels of the business
    • Five years of experience
    • High school diploma

    And that’s just an outline. “You’ll want to be sure the individual is a Jack/Jane-of-all-trades and understands the job description is a suggested list of things to accomplish but that there’s a whole lot more,” she advised. “Most of the time, a career admin is someone who will do whatever it takes to get the job done as long as it’s moral and not illegal.” Sound advice for life beyond the office, too.

    Meet The Woman Who Manages Mark Zuckerberg’s Life [BI]

    Image via Fragodt’s Facebook.

     

    Copyright. 2012.@jezebel.com All Rights Reserved


  • Facebook Builds Network of Friends in Washington

    Representative Bob Goodlatte, left, with Joel Kaplan, center, and Roddy Lindsay, both of Facebook, at a conference last year to teach lawmakers methods for using the site for their work.

     

    May 18, 2012
     

    Facebook Builds Network of Friends in Washington

    By 

    SAN FRANCISCO — For nearly five years, Facebook has quietly and deftly befriended the nation’s top lawmakers by giving them a little tech support.

    In a typical session behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, Facebook staff members have walked them through how best to use the site: what kinds of pictures to post on their profiles, how to distinguish between valuable constituents and the random gadfly, how to write compelling messages. Members of Congress have asked: How do I get more Facebook followers?

    The answers have come from familiar faces: former political aides from both Republican and Democratic quarters, now employed by Facebook. Patrick Bell, an aide to Representative Cathy McMorris Rodgers, Republican from Washington, recalled a meeting last fall where a onetime Republican aide, Katie Harbath, counseled a room full of Republican lawmakers on how to use the site to communicate with voters. “We had a Republican from Facebook talking to Republicans. They love that,” he said.

    Facebook, whose long-awaited Nasdaq debut on Friday left it with a market value of nearly $105 billion, does much more in Washington than this kind of in-person hand-holding. It has hired a stable of seasoned, well-connected insiders from both parties, stepped up its lobbying and set up a political action committee. Its lobbying budget — $1.35 million in 2011 and $650,000 so far this year, according to figures from the Center for Responsive Politics — still pales in comparison to major companies in more established industries, like military and pharmaceuticals. But Facebook stands out for having staked out a Washington strategy so early in its history.

    This engagement with lawmakers is likely to matter much more to Facebook in coming months, as the company confronts the need to turn the data provided by its 901 million users into faster, greater returns for its new, hungry shareholders.

    It is likely to do so mostly through targeted advertising, so any legislation that restricts how it collects and uses data will be potentially damaging — and now that Facebook is a public company, potentially infuriating to investors.

    The training sessions, at least, seem to have been highly effective so far. A majority of lawmakers have embraced Facebook as a way to reach voters.

    “It’s smart advocacy 101,” said Rey Ramsey, chief executive of TechNet, an industry group that includes Facebook and other Internet companies. “It starts with giving people an education. Then you start explaining more of your business model. What you ultimately want is for a legislator to understand the consequences of their actions.”

    According to privacy advocates who follow Facebook’s lobbying efforts, the company will want to stave off legislation that could limit the use of location data from mobile devices, for instance, or restrict what information can be shared with advertisers. The company could be especially damaged by more aggressive scrutiny from the Federal Trade Commission, which has already subjected Facebook to a costly 20-year audit of its data use policies.

    Facebook cites government policy as a risk factor to prospective shareholders. “Many of these laws and regulations are subject to change and uncertain interpretation and could harm our business,” it states in its offering document with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

    A Democratic aide in the Senate, who did not want to be named because he was not authorized to speak to reporters, said Facebook realized it needed to engage with lawmakers to protect its business. “It reflects an increased awareness that what the people’s representatives in Washington think matters, as opposed to a sole focus on what their user base thinks, or a sole focus on innovation without explanation.”

    Critics have questioned whether an embrace of Facebook as an increasingly vital political tool would make lawmakers go soft on the company on issues like privacy.

    “That’s clearly something they do to curry favor with members of Congress,” said Bill Allison, editorial director at the Sunlight Foundation, a nonpartisan group that advocates for greater government transparency. “Clearly Facebook has something members of Congress want. They are taking advantage of a product they have to get closer to members of Congress.”

    Representative Mary Bono Mack, a California Republican who oversees a subcommittee responsible for online privacy, dismissed that criticism, arguing instead that familiarity breeds a deeper understanding of consumer privacy issues. Ms. Bono Mack has 5,000 friends on her personal Facebook page, she said, and uses it to post things ranging from pictures of her dog to legislation proposed on the Hill.

    “If anything, having an understanding of it, I have a keen awareness of the issues, I have a keen awareness of my own privacy,” she said, adding that she planned to watch whether Facebook’s approach to privacy would change as it faced extra pressures to make money. “Now that they are a public company, there will be an opportunity to watch what happens.”

    Joel Kaplan, vice president for United States public policy at Facebook, said in an e-mail that the company’s efforts in Washington “reflect our commitment to explaining how our service works, the actions we take to protect the more than 900 million people who use our service, the importance of preserving an open Internet and the value of innovation to our economy.”

    That Facebook is a global business, with more than half of its users outside the United States, complicates matters. The European Commission, based in Brussels, has already proposed new rules that would constrain how Internet companies use personal information. They would allow consumers to transport their data from one site to another and ask Web site owners to delete their personal data forever — provisions that several Internet companies, including Facebook, have described as burdensome. And there would be hefty fines for noncompliance.

    “The fight will eventually be in Washington and Brussels about what they’ll be allowed to do,” said David Eastman, chief executive for North America for the advertising agency JWT and its worldwide digital director. Facebook, in many ways, has profited from the experience of the technology companies that came before it. Microsoft eschewed Washington until it got in trouble over antitrust matters; Google set up a Washington office after going public in 2004.

    Facebook established a foothold in Washington in 2007, first by hiring a young political aide, Adam Conner, to work out of his apartment, and then by plucking several well-known Washington insiders. It invested early in educating lawmakers on the advantages of using its site. Lately it has been encouraging them to humanize their pages by posting photos of personal milestones. Several, including House Speaker John A. Boehner, have uploaded childhood photos.

    Representative McMorris Rodgers, Republican of Washington, credited the company with ensuring that 85 percent of House Republicans had Facebook pages. “A key driver of that growth is Facebook’s D.C. team, which has been eager to explain how their platform works and quick to suggest innovative ways for members to stay more connected to the constituents we represent,” the congresswoman said.

    Facebook has hired well-connected political aides with access to top leaders in both parties. They include Mr. Kaplan, who was a White House deputy chief of staff under President George W. Bush; Marne Levine, a former Obama administration economic adviser; and Erin M. Egan, one of the capital’s most influential privacy lawyers.

    Even beyond Washington, Facebook is peppered with politicos. President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff, Erskine Bowles, sits on its board. A former Clinton press secretary, Joe Lockhart, is part of its communications team. Facebook’s chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg, served under President Clinton, too, as a chief of staff to Treasury Secretary Lawrence H. Summers. And its general counsel, Ted Ulyot, was chief of staff in the Justice Department under President Bush.

    This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

    Correction: May 19, 2012

     

    An earlier version of a picture caption with this article misidentified Bob Goodlatte and Joel Kaplan.

     

  • A Circle of Tech: Collect Payout, Do a Start-Up

    FACEBOOK LEGACIES Matt Cohler, left, employee No. 7 at Facebook, is now a partner at Benchmark Capital. Adam D’Angelo, a former chief technology officer at Facebook, is  a founder of Quora. Ruchi Sanghvi was Facebook’s first female engineer and helped start Cove.

    May 9, 2012 A Circle of Tech: Collect Payout, Do a Start-Up By 

    MENLO PARK, Calif. — Matt Cohler was employee No. 7 at Facebook. Adam D’Angelo joined his high school friend Mark Zuckerberg’s quirky little start-up in 2004 — and became its chief technology officer. Ruchi Sanghvi was the first woman on its engineering team.

    All have left Facebook. None are retiring. With lucrative shares and a web of valuable industry contacts, they have left to either create their own companies, or bankroll their friends.

    With Facebook’s public offering in mid-May, more will probably join their ranks in what could be one of Facebook’s lasting legacies — a new generation of tech tycoons looking to create or invest in, well, the next Facebook.

    “The history of Silicon Valley has always been one generation of companies gives birth to great companies that follow,” said Mr. Cohler, who, at 35, is now a partner at Benchmark Capital, and an investor in several start-ups created by his old friends from Facebook. “People who learned at one set of companies often go on to start new companies on their own.”

    “The very best companies, like Facebook,” he continued, “end up being places where people who come there really learn to build things.”

    This is the story line of Silicon Valley, from Apple to Netscape to PayPal and now, to Facebook. Every public offering creates a new circle of tech magnates with money to invest. This one, though, with a jaw-dropping $100 billion valuation, will create a far richer fraternity.

    Its members will be, by and large, young men, mostly white and Asian who, if nothing else, understand the value of social networks. And they have the money. Some early executives at Facebook have already sold their shares on the private market and have millions of dollars at their disposal.

    Mr. Cohler, for example, is at the center of a complex web of business and social connections stemming from Facebook.

    In 2002, barely two years out of Yale, he was at a party where he met Reid Hoffman, a former PayPal executive who was part of a slightly older social circle. The two men “hit it off,” as Mr. Cohler recalled on the online question-and-answer platform, Quora (which was co-founded by Mr. D’Angelo). He became Mr. Hoffman’s protégé, assisting him with his entrepreneurial investments, and following him to his new start-up, LinkedIn.

    Then, Mr. Cohler joined a company that Mr. Hoffman and several other ex-PayPal executives were backing: Facebook.

    Mr. Cohler stayed at Facebook from 2005 to 2008, as it went from being a college site to a mainstream social network. One of his responsibilities was to recruit the best talent he could find, including from other companies.

    Mr. Cohler left the company to retool himself into a venture capitalist. He has since been valuable to his old friends from Facebook.

    Through his venture firm, Mr. Cohler has raised money for several companies founded by Facebook alumni, including Quora, created in 2010 by Mr. D’Angelo and another early Facebook engineer, Charlie Cheever. Other companies include Asana, which provides software for work management and was created in 2009 by Dustin Moskovitz, a Facebook co-founder; and Peixe Urbano, a Brazilian commerce Web site conceived by Julio Vasconcellos, who managed Facebook’s Brazil office in São Paulo.

    Mr. Cohler has put his own money into Path, a photo-sharing application formed in 2010 by yet another former Facebook colleague, Dave Morin. Path is also bankrolled by one of Facebook’s venture backers: Greylock Partners, where Mr. Hoffman is a partner.

    And he has invested in Instagram, which was scooped up by Facebook itself for a spectacular $1 billion. “Thrilled to see two companies near and dear to my heart joining forces!” Mr. Cohlerposted on Twitter after the acquisition.

    Instagram clearly was a good bet; it is impossible to say whether any of the other investments Mr. Cohler or other Facebookers are making will catch fire or whether the start-ups they found will last. Certainly, there is so much money in the Valley today that start-ups have room to grow without even a notion of turning a profit.

    Ms. Sanghvi, one of the company’s first 20 employees, married a fellow Facebook engineer, Aditya Agarwal. Mr. Zuckerberg attended their wedding in Goa, India.

    With her husband and a third engineer from Facebook, Ms. Sanghvi, now 30, formed in 2010 a technology infrastructure company, Cove. It was recently acquired by the San Francisco-based Dropbox, whose founders she knew socially.

    The Facebook network is vital to her, she said. Mr. D’Angelo has become a sounding board for Cove. She has invested her own money in her friend Mr. Morin’s company, Path.

    “It’s extremely useful to have that network, not just for tangible things like funding and talent but also emotional support,” she said. “Just having those friends has been incredibly important.”

    As Bill Tai, a partner at Charles River Ventures and a veteran investor, put it, “The social fabric of Silicon Valley is a dense set of overlapping spider webs, meaning everyone is connected.” Mr. Tai predicted that the Facebook I.P.O. would be influential throughout the Valley. “A little tingle on one of the webs, and a lot of people will feel it.”

    Mr. Cohler, by all indications, has been especially deft at working his connections. In 2007, when he was looking for talented engineers for Facebook, he called a young Stanford Ph.D whom he knew, somewhat distantly, named Benjamin Ling, who was then working at Google. The two men met for lunch in the Google cafeteria. By the end of lunch, Mr. Cohler had persuaded Mr. Ling to decamp to Facebook. He worked on the Facebook platform for two years, returned to Google for another few, and then leveraged his millions and his connections to become an angel investor, one who backs small start-ups.

    Entrepreneurs approach him because they know him from either Google or Facebook. He puts $25,000 to $250,000 into start-ups he fancies and prefers to go into projects with friends. Often his most valuable contribution, Mr. Ling said, was not money, but in helping friends recruit coveted engineers. That is what he did for his friend Mr. D’Angelo at Quora.

    Mr. Ling, who is now chief operating officer at a social network, Badoo, compared the Valley’s tech world with a tribe in a more traditional society. “You help each other, through recruiting, through fund-raising, through business development deals,” he said.

    In the genealogy of social networks in the Valley, the most famous network effect came from the small coterie known as the PayPal Mafia. One of PayPal’s founders, Peter Thiel, was, along with Mr. Hoffman, one of the earliest investors in Facebook. Another co-founder, Elon Musk, went on to build high-end electric cars, under the name Tesla.

    Two others, Russell Simmons and Jeremy Stoppelman, created the consumer review site, Yelp in 2004, which was bankrolled in part by Benchmark, the firm where Mr. Cohler is a partner. Yelp returned the favor, when it went public this year; it is now worth $1.2 billion. Mr. Ling and Mr. Stoppelman are friends. They sometimes invest together.

    For a glimpse of what may happen after Facebook goes public, consider the millionaires created by Google’s public offering in 2005. Overnight, these young men, most in their 20s and 30s, made so much money from Google shares that they never had to work again.

    Aydin Senkut was 36 years old when Google went public. After splurging on a monthlong European holiday with his parents, he bought a house in Atherton, Calif., and a Lamborghini. He had a lot of money left. So he began investing in his friends’ business endeavors. He kicked in what he described as about 10 percent of his net worth to a dozen start-ups. One of them, Aardvark, a social search engine, was bought by Google in 2010.

    Mr. Senkut said he expected many more ex-Facebookers to grow angel wings after the public offering — and perhaps dabble in some far-out ideas with no immediate way to make money. “Now that you have a windfall, why not take a big risk?” he said.

    Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved

  • ‘What Were You Thinking?’ For Couples, New Source of Online Friction

     

    Robert Wright for The New York Times

    Jarrett Moran, 23, and Nozlee Samadzadeh, 24, share an apartment in Williamsburg, Brooklyn as well as a Tumblr account called Needs More Salt.

     

     

    Andrew Sacks for The New York Times

    After Ernest Whiting posted a photo of his partner, Rebecca Gray, on Facebook, he gave her the right to photo approval.

     

    April 25, 2012
     

    ‘What Were You Thinking?’ For Couples, New Source of Online Friction

    By 

    The more than 43,000 Twitter followers of Rosanne Cash, the singer and daughter of Johnny Cash, have come to expect her tart commentary on married life with her husband, John Leventhal, a Grammy-winning musician.

    She chided him for performing at a concert in jeans he had worn three days in a row. Another day, she posted that he had cajoled her to help organize his “stuff.” But Mr. Leventhal, known as Mr. L to Ms. Cash’s followers, apparently is not a fan of her enthusiasm for sharing online.

    Ms. Cash said in an interview that another time she wrote about her husband taking a nap. When he showed up at the studio, the sound engineer was puzzled, since he had just read Ms. Cash’s post online. “I thought you were taking a nap,” the engineer said to him.

    “John called me and he was really annoyed,” she recalled. “He said, ‘Don’t tell people I’m taking a nap!’ ”

    Relationships are hard enough. But the rise of social media — where sharing private moments is encouraged, and provocative and confessional postings can help build a following — has created a new source of friction for couples: what is fair game for sharing with the world?

    If one half of a couple is not interested in broadcasting the details of a botched dinner or romantic weekend, Facebook postings or tweets can create irritation, embarrassment, miscommunication and bruised egos.

    After a few relationship-testing episodes, some spouses have started insisting that their partners ask for approval before posting comments and photographs that include them. Couples also are talking through rules as early as the first date (a kind of social media prenup) about what is O.K. to share. Even tweeting about something as seemingly innocent as a house repair can become a lesson in boundary-setting.

    “There is a standard negotiation that takes place in lots of relationships, but now there are multiple audiences watching,” said Lee Rainie, the director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project, which explores technology and human behavior. “There will be awkward moments, even more so if that negotiation is played out in public.”

    Interviews with more than a dozen couples suggest that disagreements over how much to share are common.

    Rebecca Gray, a doctoral student at Michigan State in East Lansing, lives with her boyfriend, Ernest Whiting. Last May, Mr. Whiting took a photograph of her face — eyes closed, mouth open wide — slathered in a beauty mask of volcanic mud she bought in Costa Rica.

    In August, Ms. Gray was at work and received a notification from Facebook that said she had been tagged in a photo. When she looked at it, she found that Mr. Whiting had retrieved the photo from her computer and posted it on his Facebook account. “My jaw dropped,” she said. “I tried to remove it, but I could only untag.”

    She e-mailed and sent a text to Mr. Whiting, demanding he take it down. By then, friends and acquaintances had seen it. “It was showing up in my newsfeed,” Ms. Gray said. “People said: ‘What is this? It is hilarious!’ ” As a last resort, she logged into his account and removed the photo herself. When Mr. Whiting got home that night, Ms. Gray was waiting. “I said: ‘You have lost the privilege of using my computer. What were you thinking?’ ” Ms. Gray recalled.

    Mr. Whiting, for his part, said he was just having fun.

    “I suppose if I thought about it in context, I wouldn’t have done it,” he said. And he is unlikely to do it again. “She asked for photo approval, and I said yes,” he added sheepishly.

    Some couples seek to preserve intimacy by establishing rules early on. Jen Dunlap, who lives in Brooklyn, took a trip to Turks and Caicos in May 2009 with her new boyfriend, Chris Sullivan, an actor and musician. Before they left, she said, Mr. Sullivan asked her not to post photos on Flickr of the couple kissing. “I feel like people don’t want to see it,” Mr. Sullivan said.

    But even couples steeped in social media are grappling with the new layer of relationship etiquette. Nozlee Samadzadeh and Jarrett Moran have had active online social presences for years. In 2009, they set up a Tumblr account called Needs More Salt where they post photographs and comment on meals they cook. Ms. Samadzadeh said she once upset Mr. Moran when she joked that he was hapless in the kitchen.

    To avoid further conflict, the couple agreed to review each other’s comments before posting. It was a wise move. Recently, Ms. Samadzadeh said that she almost posted a comment on Needs More Salt expressing annoyance at having to make supper because Mr. Moran was home late. Mr. Moran, though, did not know he was supposed to cook and asked her to rewrite the post. “I don’t want to be embarrassed,” Mr. Moran said.

    More often, one partner is more eager to share than the other. Two years ago, Jenny Luu, a skin-care specialist from Washington, D.C., said that she asked her husband, Jason Hamacher, a musician and photographer, to stop posting on Facebook when he was away on business. (She didn’t want strangers to know she was home alone.)

    The couple also owns a 100-year-old home in a historic neighborhood. Two months ago, Ms. Luu bristled when her husband wrote on Facebook about a second round of repairs to their roof.

    For three years Mr. Hamacher had posted comments and photographs about their home renovation. The accumulation of comments made Ms. Luu uneasy, worried that their friends would think they were bragging. “I don’t want people thinking we have so much money, that we are loaded,” Ms. Luu said. “I don’t want to make people uncomfortable.”

    For some spouses, though, the best defense is ignorance.

    George Stephanopoulos, the former Clinton White House staff member who is now an anchor of “Good Morning America,” said he was named “anchor most likely to be anxious about his wife’s tweets” at ABC News’ 50th-anniversary party in January. He is married to the comedian Alexandra Wentworth, who has more than 42,000 Twitter followers. “I have sort of a simple rule,” Mr. Stephanopoulos said, laughing. “Don’t ask, don’t read.”

    Ms. Wentworth usually refrains from posting jokes about politics on Twitter, although she said it was hard to resist during the New Hampshire Republican debate in January that Mr. Stephanopoulos helped moderate. “Honey, stop sexting me and pay attention to the debate!” she wrote.

    “I don’t think he saw it,” Ms. Wentworth said later. He hadn’t. (Mr. Stephanopoulos has more than 1.7 million Twitter followers; his posts are mostly work-related.) Nor had he read his wife’s off-color joke about a suspect stain on a certain candidate’s tie. When asked about it, he stopped laughing. “I’m so glad I didn’t know about that,” he said.

     

    Copyright. 2012. The New York Times Company. All Rights Reserved