> "While geeks might take privacy risks, your mom doesn't and she gets pissed off with every privacy update".
Is it me or is this exactly backwards? Geeks are the biggest privacy freaks around, but I don't think most moms on Facebook give it a second thought.
Geeks post hysterical blog posts about every privacy update, your mom doesn't even notice - the "new terms of service" dialog stays undismissed and unread at the top of her Facebook page for months.
It's not completely backwards: both ways are gross generalizations. For one thing, my mom won't join Facebook because "the privacy toggles are confusing," whereas many of my geek friends won't enable 2-step authentication or even https (on both Google and Facebook) because "meh, why bother."
But that's not what "your mom" is about. We use the "your mom" persona when we want to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who interacts with technology in a ridiculously different way than we do. Also, it's endearingly masculinist.
So. Your mom might be fooled into oversharing by accident. She also might be too scared to ever share anything, because she doesn't know how to control privacy settings. Both situations are bad for your mom, and Facebook has plenty of both (like I said, my actual mom being an instance of the second).
This way, your mom just taught us that the usability of Facebook in regards to privacy is downright horrible. I have no idea how your mom (or mine for that matter) will react to Google+, and quite frankly, I think this will be a very controversial issue until real moms start toying with it.
I think a "geek" and a "non geek" view privacy differently
a geek is concerned with their privacy in regards to how a company uses their data, they want it stored in a secure way, deleted when they tell them to etc.
a non technical person is concerned with privacy in regards to who else can run across their data, they want to know that content they intend to be private isn't accessible to the general public.
This may have been mentioned elsewhere, but this is the first I've seen it phrased like this:
Circles lets your mom expand her universe - In Facebook, your mom tends to limit her universe to friends since... well... Facebook defined connections to others with the term. Google+ doesn't define your mom's relationships - your mom does.
The naming of the relationship is a really neat point. Even if you're not your mom and use Facebook to connect with colleagues or acquaintances or investors, they're still weighed down by the baggage of the word 'friend.' Whether or not Facebook has the ability to share with separate groups of people, they're all called the same thing. There's a mental tax here when you have to convert: friends from school, friends from the bar, friends from work, wait, no, colleagues from work.
Similarly, Twitter has no labels of importance: you're following someone's tweets, but there's no implied relationship. Lists are one way to add semantic meaning, but you don't use them with the same regularity as your main timeline.
Features aside, Google+ strikes a neat balance here with just the ability to label your relationships. No mental tax (unlike Facebook), plus meaningful information (unlike Twitter).
I think you are spot on, and while it seems ridiculous to even me, the "friend" association really bugs me on Facebook. I realize it is just a label on a website, but the implication of adding someone to my Facebook friends list seems to be that I have some relationship with them that I absolutely do not. Thus, coworkers aren't my friends on Facebook, but I have no problems adding them on Google+.
That, combined with the immediate emphasis on limiting who is shared with from the very start makes Google+ a lot less stressful to use. Sure, it is a minor thing, but still pretty important.
My parents both like the idea of it greatly and complain about FarmVille all of the time. My dad got signed up and signed in and posted to me within 10 minutes of me inviting him.
Can we cool it with the stupid sexism already? It's absurdly arrogant for Greg Knieriemen to think he knows anything about my mom. I know several moms who are quite a bit more technically competent than "enterprise tech evangelists" are, including one who wrote an operating system for the SDS 940.
Hear, hear! My mom single-handedly started her own local ISP back in the mid-90s, days of Mosaic. I was the lucky teenager with a T1 in the basement...You know how you have a swimming pool and people would stop by as they were 'in the neighborhood' and their bathing suits are conveniently under their clothes? People would stop by and just happen to have a Jaz disk (remember those?!?) in their purses. Yes, their purses! Ladies like to download giant files through a big pipe, too, and were doing plenty of it in the 90s.
She still runs her own network and servers and is known to curse politely about DNS, among her other 15 jobs in tech (she's a consultant, she works too much).
But I shouldn't have to mention any of this, that a woman excels technically and makes her living with computers is not exceptional, it's not a surprise, and she's not an anomaly (although, my Mom is exceptional, of course!).
Why is it that most of us work closely with women of all ages in a technical capacity every day in the real world, and yet we keep writing stuff like, "So easy your Mom could do it?" It's like we somehow forget how we've spent 3500 hours of our lives.
We could possibly say, instead, "Why your Grandma and Grandpa might like Google+," but that may not apply, either. My Grandma's been on Facebook for ages; she was a big AIM user, too, back in the late '90s, early '00s. But one thing is true - I'll play around with Google+, but I likely won't spend a lot of time on it until my Grandma's on it... :)
I don't consider that sexism at all. It's a common term and everybody know's the meaning of it. It's not implying that women are less technically competent than their male counterparts, it's simply a term that's now used to define simplicity.
It reminds me of the South Park episode that circled around the word "fag". While it originally was a derogatory term used towards homosexuals, thats generally no longer the way it's used. I know myself, and many many others that occasionally drop the "fag" word and don't mean it as a negative connotation towards a homosexual. The same can be said for "so simple your mom could use it". The sex of the subject has very very little to do with the message being portrayed.
I personally think, if anything, people need to start being less sensitive to this type of stuff.
There is no attribute that mothers have in common other than being female.
> It reminds me of the South Park episode that circled around the word "fag".
It reminds me of when I moved to South Dakota, and I learned that negotiating for a lower price was called "jewing you down". Doesn't mean the people had anti-Semitic beliefs; they just used a vicious ethnic slur in their everyday speech because they were used to it.
> and don't mean it as a negative connotation towards a homosexual.
Son, I reckon before you start using them big five-dollar words you oughtta learn what they mean.
12 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 30.4 ms ] threadIs it me or is this exactly backwards? Geeks are the biggest privacy freaks around, but I don't think most moms on Facebook give it a second thought.
Geeks post hysterical blog posts about every privacy update, your mom doesn't even notice - the "new terms of service" dialog stays undismissed and unread at the top of her Facebook page for months.
But that's not what "your mom" is about. We use the "your mom" persona when we want to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who interacts with technology in a ridiculously different way than we do. Also, it's endearingly masculinist.
So. Your mom might be fooled into oversharing by accident. She also might be too scared to ever share anything, because she doesn't know how to control privacy settings. Both situations are bad for your mom, and Facebook has plenty of both (like I said, my actual mom being an instance of the second).
This way, your mom just taught us that the usability of Facebook in regards to privacy is downright horrible. I have no idea how your mom (or mine for that matter) will react to Google+, and quite frankly, I think this will be a very controversial issue until real moms start toying with it.
a geek is concerned with their privacy in regards to how a company uses their data, they want it stored in a secure way, deleted when they tell them to etc.
a non technical person is concerned with privacy in regards to who else can run across their data, they want to know that content they intend to be private isn't accessible to the general public.
Circles lets your mom expand her universe - In Facebook, your mom tends to limit her universe to friends since... well... Facebook defined connections to others with the term. Google+ doesn't define your mom's relationships - your mom does.
The naming of the relationship is a really neat point. Even if you're not your mom and use Facebook to connect with colleagues or acquaintances or investors, they're still weighed down by the baggage of the word 'friend.' Whether or not Facebook has the ability to share with separate groups of people, they're all called the same thing. There's a mental tax here when you have to convert: friends from school, friends from the bar, friends from work, wait, no, colleagues from work.
Similarly, Twitter has no labels of importance: you're following someone's tweets, but there's no implied relationship. Lists are one way to add semantic meaning, but you don't use them with the same regularity as your main timeline.
Features aside, Google+ strikes a neat balance here with just the ability to label your relationships. No mental tax (unlike Facebook), plus meaningful information (unlike Twitter).
That, combined with the immediate emphasis on limiting who is shared with from the very start makes Google+ a lot less stressful to use. Sure, it is a minor thing, but still pretty important.
She still runs her own network and servers and is known to curse politely about DNS, among her other 15 jobs in tech (she's a consultant, she works too much).
But I shouldn't have to mention any of this, that a woman excels technically and makes her living with computers is not exceptional, it's not a surprise, and she's not an anomaly (although, my Mom is exceptional, of course!).
Why is it that most of us work closely with women of all ages in a technical capacity every day in the real world, and yet we keep writing stuff like, "So easy your Mom could do it?" It's like we somehow forget how we've spent 3500 hours of our lives.
We could possibly say, instead, "Why your Grandma and Grandpa might like Google+," but that may not apply, either. My Grandma's been on Facebook for ages; she was a big AIM user, too, back in the late '90s, early '00s. But one thing is true - I'll play around with Google+, but I likely won't spend a lot of time on it until my Grandma's on it... :)
It reminds me of the South Park episode that circled around the word "fag". While it originally was a derogatory term used towards homosexuals, thats generally no longer the way it's used. I know myself, and many many others that occasionally drop the "fag" word and don't mean it as a negative connotation towards a homosexual. The same can be said for "so simple your mom could use it". The sex of the subject has very very little to do with the message being portrayed.
I personally think, if anything, people need to start being less sensitive to this type of stuff.
There is no attribute that mothers have in common other than being female.
> It reminds me of the South Park episode that circled around the word "fag".
It reminds me of when I moved to South Dakota, and I learned that negotiating for a lower price was called "jewing you down". Doesn't mean the people had anti-Semitic beliefs; they just used a vicious ethnic slur in their everyday speech because they were used to it.
> and don't mean it as a negative connotation towards a homosexual.
Son, I reckon before you start using them big five-dollar words you oughtta learn what they mean.
Facebook is SD and Google+ is HD.
It's a nicer experience viewing albums, and in general it's easier to find things.
Set your grandma up with a circle of her grandkids, so every-time a new picture of them is uploaded, she can see it.
I can see it working nicely. Remember, this is still a beta.
That's the brilliance of GPlus