Some recent research using Facebook’s social graph has shown that the world’s largest social network has actually made the world about 20% smaller, socially.

Some highlights from the study.

• There are more than 800 million active Facebook users, 50% of which log on daily.
• The median Facebook user has about 100 friends.
• If that number feels low, check out this 1991 study “Why your friends have more friends than you“
• Stanley Milgram performed a study in the 1960s showing an average of 5.2 “hops” between any two people on the planet, hence “six degrees of separation.”
• While the worldwide population in 1960 was just over 3 billion, today it now 7 billion. Logic would tell you that we would have more hops between more than 2x the amount of people on the planet.
• Faecbook partnered with a university in Milan, Italy to develop an algorithm which measured the seperation between any two Facebook users. (800+ million worldwide)
• The distance between hops on Facebook in 2008 was 5 degrees of separation. But now it is 4. And within people in the same country? 3 degrees of separation.
• This research has revealed that your Facebook social circle is at once both global and local. (84% of people’s friends reside in the same country.)
• Source

What does this mean for you?

• Mostly, it’s just really cool and has no real impact on your day-to-day life.
• You’ve got to be more careful than ever about talking smack about someone online. Because one of your friends now has a friend who knows that person.
• Your Facebook status is 3-4 shares away from reaching every person in your country. And 5-6 Facebook shares from any one person in the world.
• As these online networks continue to interconnect our world, it also reveals a greater and greater desire within each of us to form more localized offline connections. (Support groups, farmers markets, small networks of personal friends, etc.)
• In general, the larger a persons social network the less likely they are to keep their thoughts/opinions out of the public arena. I think we will see an increase in “private spaces” in social media to foster the open discussion we all so greatly enjoy.
• Thomas Friedman’s 2005 book, “The World is Flat” was spot on. Fewer degrees of seperation gives more and more power to people with less and less means. This is contributing to a rise in the entrepreneur and socially activated class.

We used to say you could tell a person’s priorities by looking at his checkbook. I’d submit to you that today you can tell a person’s priorities by how he uses his phone.

If your phone could talk… what would it say about you?

• Who is he talking to?
• Who is he texting?
• How is he talking about people?
• How does he talk about people via text?
• What is he looking at when no one else is looking?
• When is he using his phone?
• Does his phone fill his hand more than the hand of the one he loves?

Here’s what I know about technology. One day your phone will tell on you. One day everything you’ve posted on Facebook may become public. One day everything you’ve ever Googled may be public. E-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g.

One day… it will all tell the whole story of you. Every key stroke on that device could one day be exposed. Every text message, direct message, email, and Facebook message could one day become public.

I believe your smart phone is amoral. It’s can be used for noble or ignoble purposes. My hope is that as I use my phone,  (and technology like it) I use them as instruments of Good News in how I conduct my personal, family, and business affairs.

The story your phone tells is up to you.

There are a lot of jerks out there empowered by the internet.

Why is that?

Affinity grouping vs. Geographical grouping

Whereas, in the past, your social network was largely defined by geography, in the internet age your social network is self-selected. This is a double edged sword.

Let’s say there is a guy on my block who likes to listen to Southern Rock, drink Southern Comfort, and dance on his front porch to Dolly Parton classics while yelling at passing cars, “Jap Crap!” And on the other end of the block is a woman who puts a leash on her 2 cats and 1 iguana and takes them for a walk around the block around dinner time. Every community has people like this. The iguana lady, the red neck, and a whole bunch of people in the polite middle who kind of roll their eyes at them.

It used to be that the people on the fringes really had a quiet voice in the crowd. They’d espouse their views and everyone would politely nod. When family came to visit from out-of-town we’d point out the lady walking her iguana and cats to stare. And that social pressure kept the extremes just a little bit more palatable and innocent.

Today, each of those oddities on my block can find other odd ducks on the internet. And chances are that finding other people like them will embolden them. So, instead of that person knowing they are on the fringe and kind of keeping it socially acceptable, now that they know 1-2 other people out there who like to rock out to Dolly Parton and yell at Toyota’s… they feel like they can be a little more loud and proud about it. The same goes for the cat and iguana lady. She found another woman in Florida who has 2 iguanas and 6 cats that she walks, so she figures she can, too!

In their minds, all of a sudden, lots of people walk iguanas so that makes it OK. And those Dolly for President shirts are selling like hotcakes somewhere, just not here.

That’s why there are more jerks out there. They found each other and started a Facebook group.

I blame the internet. Who do you blame?

I look at every bio for each new follower on Twitter and friend request on Facebook. And let me tell you, there’s some pretty important stuff missing and some pretty unimportant stuff that is taking up space.

Hint: Clean up your bio. People look at it.

5 Things you don’t have to tell me in your bio

1. That you love Jesus (Show me, don’t tell me.)
2. That you are married to your best friend, that she is smoking hot, or whatever. (Is that how you talk about all women in your life?)
3. Your age. (I don’t care.)
4. Anything about your children. (I’m happy you are a parent, but not really relevant at this point in our relationship.)
5. A quote. (I’m glad you like C.S. Lewis, but is that all you want me to know about you?)

5 Things that you should be in your bio on Twitter or Facebook

1. Your name. (Doesn’t have to be first name, last name. But if you aren’t in the witness protection program, it might as well be.)
2. Where you live. (Not the street address, just where in the world are you?)
3. What you do. (Occupation, employer, etc.)
4. What you are about. (Keep is simple)
5. Something fun. (Why would I want to follow someone who is boring?)

Who do I follow on Twitter?

I don’t have a hard and fast rule. I used to follow everyone who followed me. But that got annoying real fast. Then I followed everyone who @replied me. But that got messy, too.  In general, if a bio looks interesting and might add something, I’ll add you. But I’m also pretty ruthless about unfollowing people who are annoying.

Who do I follow on Facebook?

If you look like a real person, I’ll accept your friend request. If I am suspicious that you might be a spammer from Africa or India, I’ll check the “limited profile” button.

One thing I do, and it’s mostly for my own sanity, is that I keep my entire friend list in two categories. “Friends” and “People I haven’t met.” I don’t want anyone to really think I know 1400 people.

This cracked me up. I was never into Myspace the way I am into Facebook. But it goes to show you that one day Facebook will be the ex-girlfriend we lament about.

Most youth workers have developed a Facebook apologetic. That is to say, they know how to respond and argue for Facebook usage to engage with and interact with their students.

One component of Facebook, which causes heart palpitations for adults, is that it is a place of dissidence and venting. And the motivating reason that adults see their blood pressure elevated about these activities is that they are either the object of said dissidence/venting or they are asked to clean up the mess created online.

As a result, some parents and other caring adults use that as a case for Facebook being banned. (Which, as human nature dictates, just means adolescents find another place to carry out dissidence and venting. It is just taken off of the adult radar and disappears into adolescent-world. But you can safely imagine a William Wallace-like response, “You can take our Facebook, but you can never have our phones!“)

Allow me to introduce to you a story from The Atlantic, which puts this into context:

Expert analysts of the country couldn’t tell if Ben Ali would remain in power for a few more weeks or a decade. It did not feel inevitable that Ben Ali would be deposed. People had protested in the streets before. Revolution had been in the air. It wasn’t clear that this time would be different.

There has been a lot of debate about whether Twitter helped unleash the massive changes that led Ben Ali to leave office on January 14, but Facebook appears to have played a more important role in spreading dissent.

Imagine you are Ben Ali. You are the unpopular leader of Tunisia. You are an oppressor of freedoms. And you hear rumors that you may be deposed of your power.

In youth ministry language– the youth pastor hears that his students are bad mouthing him on Facebook. And they’ve engaged with enough adults in the church that you might get fired.

So what does Ben Ali do? He had long ago banned YouTube and other video sharing sites… but all of a sudden he discovers that hundreds of thousands of Tunisians are flocking to Facebook, networking, and sharing videos which document the terrors of his rule.

While clashes with security forces took place in the streets, Rim, who asked we not use her last name, was in her bed in her apartment in Tunis. Like the blogger cliché, Rim sat in her pajamas sharing videos. In her hands, small protests that reached 50 people could suddenly reach another 50, who would share it with another 50. The idea that it might be time for the regime to change spread from city to city faster than street protests and even middle class places got involved.

“There were rumors that Facebook or electricity was going to be shut down,” Rim IM’d me from Tunis. “Or both.”

Did you get that? It was either shut down the electricity or shut down Facebook. But Ben Ali’s plan was more devious.

After more than ten days of intensive investigation and study, Facebook’s security team realized something very, very bad was going on. The country’s Internet service providers were running a malicious piece of code that was recording users’ login information when they went to sites like Facebook.

By January 5, it was clear that an entire country’s worth of passwords were in the process of being stolen right in the midst of the greatest political upheaval in two decades. Sullivan and his team decided they needed a country-level solution — and fast.

Instead of just shutting down Facebook, Ben Ali had ordered that the very tool being used to create dissidence be used as a tool of the government to capture personal information.

Facebook, the company with access to 800 million users personal information, had to make a moral decision. Was it going to get involved in support of a dictators withholding the reigns of power from the people of Tunisia by doing nothing? Or was it going to spur on political revolution by protecting their core values?

They chose the latter. And, as we know now, their was a change in leadership in Tunisia.

At Facebook, Sullivan’s team decided to take an apolitical approach to the problem. This was simply a hack that required a technical response. “At its core, from our standpoint, it’s a security issue around passwords and making sure that we protect the integrity of passwords and accounts,” he said. “It was very much a black and white security issue and less of a political issue.”

The software was basically a country-level keystroke logger, with the passwords presumably being fed from the ISPs to the Ben Ali regime. As a user, you just logged into some part of the cloud, Facebook or your email, say, and it snatched up that information. If you stayed persistently logged in, you were safe. It was those who logged out and came back that were open to the attack.

Read the rest at The Atlantic

What does this have to do with youth ministry?

I don’t know. Nothing and everything at the same time.

I think a lot of adults feel teenage angst more than teenagers do. Deep down we believe that it is our role to save teenagers from themselves by putting up boundaries and barriers. At the same time we acknowledge that they carry the hope of the world forward in living out the Gospel in ways and to levels that our generation has failed.

Instead of focusing our attention on somehow asking our students to be saved from the world, perhaps we need to focus on teaching them how to take over the world and lead it in a way which acts on their Jesus-influenced convictions?

I don’t care what color your bra is.

And I really don’t care who your favorite cartoon character was as a kid. Nor do I care about a twibbon.

And yet these meme‘s make their way through social media sites over and over again as if they made a lick of difference. “You just have to do this, it’ll raise awareness about ____.”

Don’t kid yourself. Changing your avatar or posting a one word Facebook profile status update isn’t changing the world or raising awareness. It’s just clutter.

Passive activism never works.

You want to change things? You want to be an activist?

Activism is by nature… active.

Speak out. Act out. Write out. Video out. Stand out. Get out. Stand out. Jump out.

There is a whole world full of worthy causes to activate people about. And God may be calling you to be that voice for that cause. So do it.

But don’t fall into the trap of passive activism. Be bold, loud, proud, a pain in the neck, a thorn in their flesh, a force to be reckoned with. Stick it to the man. Get kicked out of school. Live in a tree. Whatever it takes.

Just don’t ask people to change their avatar. Ask them to give money. Go to the place you are trying to make a difference and make a video to activate resources and your friends. Ask them to join you actively in a movement.

If you ask people to do something passive for your cause they will do something passive for your cause.

What is it?

Facebook describes it this way:

Places is a Facebook feature that allows you to see where your friends are and share your location in the real world. When you use Places, you’ll be able to see if any of your friends are currently checked in nearby and connect with them easily. You can check into nearby Places to tell your friends where you are, tag your friends in the Places you visit, and view comments your friends have made about the Places you visit. Use Places to experience connecting with people on Facebook in a completely new way. link

In other words, its a bigger and instantly more popular version of Fourquare, Gowalla, and Yelp. With 97 million American teenagers owning a mobile phone, this has the potential to be huge.

Facebook has a very well done FAQ are for Places, I’d recommend checking it out and educating yourself.

How to Adjust Privacy Settings

For most people, your default settings are going to be fine. By default, you can use a mobile device to tell your friends where you are at. Additionally, by default you are allowing Facebook to point you to other people who are checked in at the same place.

For people into social networking, this is fine. I actually like that if I check-in at Starbucks I can know who else is there because I might actually like to have a conversation with them. It doesn’t creep me out that I could check-in at Ikea and 20 other people in Ikea who aren’t my friends could know I’m there.

But a good majority of people don’t use Facebook for social networking. They use it for existing friend connections. In other words, while Facebook is designed to help you expand your network by meeting new people, there are tons of people who want to “protect their privacy” and not network with anyone outside of people they know if real life.

That’s a personal choice and Facebook allows for that. (Even though its outside of the original design of Facebook, they’ve made concessions.)

Now, let’s adjust those settings!

Step one: Go to the Privacy Settings tab in your account settings. Here’s the link. This is an overview of all of your general settings.

Step two: Click on “Customize Settings.”

Step three: Scroll down to “Places I Check In To” and click “Customize.” This will bring up a box where you can select exactly who you want to see where you check in at. If you just want to play with it to get used to it, but don’t want other people to see it, change it to “Only Me.” Changing it to “Only Me” is as private as it gets if you want to check in places. You’ll notice you can also block specific people from seeing where you check in at. Think about who you want to block specifically and list them there. When you are done click “Save Setting” and you are done with this step.

Step four: Enable or disable the “Here Now” feature. If this whole thing creeps you out, I’d suggest disabling this setting. But also keep in mind that if you want any of the cool freebies that retailers/restaurants may come up with for checking it, you’ll need to keep this enabled. (I’ve gotten plenty of free stuff by checking in via Yelp and even Twitter.)

Step five: Scroll down to “Friends can check me in to Places.” This is probably the feature that will get the most people in trouble and will make people the most angry. Say you sit down for lunch at work with a co-worker. You check in and you tag that person as being with you. Now, if you didn’t have that persons permission, all of their friends know that they have checked in at a place because that check in posts to their wall. Also, if they haven’t adjusted their settings in step four, now anyone on Facebook at that location can know they are there. On the other hand, if you feel good about your selections on step three than this is no big deal.

Done. You can go back to your profile, having adjusted your Places privacy settings to your liking.

What does Adam recommend?

Bear in mind that I’m a pretty open person. But I still value some levels of privacy, particularly because I’m a husband and father. Truth is, I don’t even anticipate using this feature unless I’m somewhere cool and want to brag that I am there.

Here’s my selections for the steps above:

Step three: I’ve selected “friends only.” I do wish I could select by groups of people. Because I have a friend group labeled “People I Haven’t Met Yet” and I’d prefer that they couldn’t see my location. But until Facebook fixes that, I’m going with “friends only.“ UPDATE: If you have a friend group you’d like to exclude from your check-ins, you can just type them in the field “Hide this from these people:” Here’s what it looks like on my privacy settings page.  I’d recommend NOT choosing “friends of friends” because that basically opens up your location to anyone in the world.

Step four: I’m a big fan of getting free stuff. So I’m keeping this enabled because it doesn’t bug me and I’ve enjoyed many a free meal. There will soon be lots of iPhone applications that call to this so I want to see where it goes.

Step five: I feel pretty good about step three. And I also feel pretty good about the places I go and the people I go to them with. So I’m going to keep this enabled for now. Let me tell you though, if someone false checks me in somewhere shady and we’re going to talk. This little feature is going to land a whole heap of people in a whole heap of mess. So, if you aren’t sure about all of your friends, I’d recommend disabling this one.

Some Places Etiquette

1. Never, ever, EVER check-in at home. I want to hit people in the shins with a hammer when I see that. Not only are you broadcasting to people where you live, complete with Google Maps directions, you are also telling people that you are home… and when you check-in someplace else, you are tell them YOU AREN’T HOME! Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.
2. Only check-in at public places. Just like it’s dumb to check-in at your house, it’s really rude to check in at your friends houses. Checking in at a private residence is rude, even if the person says they don’t care. Just don’t do it.
3. Always ask before checking in your friends. It’s just polite. Maybe they don’t want their friends knowing they had a latte while at work? Just ask.
4. Check-in sparingly. I know it feels like a game. And games are meant to be won, right? But if you check-in to places 20 times a day you look really, really lonely. My rule is that I only want to check-in places that I think are cool. Sea World? Cool. The local gas station? Not cool. Since I like tiny, family-run businesses… I’m going to check-in at a lot of those because I know it helps them out. I think mom and pops are cool.
5. Be weary of promotions. With 500 million users and integration into Google Maps retailers are going to go nuts trying to get you to check-in. (As a Google Adwords user, let me tell you… Google is going after us to do promotions!) Don’t be surprised to see deals popping up everywhere. A check-in deal is fine to me. But if I have to tag a bunch of people or write a specific status update to save $5… that’s too far. Don’t subject your friends to that.
6. Never check-in anywhere after 10:00 PM. Remember when mom said that nothing good happens after 10 PM? If you are out with your friends, it is just better to not check-in. Nothing good is going to come of it.
7. Remember: Everything you post online is public! All check-ins, all that GPS data, all those tags, all those status updates… they are ultimately public information. You parents can see it. Your boss can see it. The college admissions office can see it. Your significant other can see it. Your future mates can see it. Your children will be able to see it. Even if you’ve made all of your settings private, that data all ultimately belongs to Facebook and they can do with it whatever they want. (And it could always get stolen from them!) If you don’t want those people to see it… don’t post it.

I’m an engagement preacher. No other stat matters in social media quite as much as engagement. Likes, Retweets, Trackbacks, Comments. These are the things that show that your content isn’t just getting read– it’s getting shared.

Here are five ways each of my blog posts is engaged with.

1. Comments (On the blog itself, on Facebook, and on Twitter)
2. Facebook like and shares (I have a limited reach. But through my reach I have unlimited viral capabilities.)
3. Twitter links and retweets (Did someone like you post enough to post on their Twitter account? Did anyone retweet the link?)
4. Private discussion (I get a lot of e-mails, Twitter direct messages, and Facebook messages with each blog post. I even tally the number of times people see me in person and mention something I’ve written. That’s all engagement.)
5. Blog excerpts (Getting a paragraph pulled from a post and having it create content for another blogger/online magazine is awesome engagement. It’s like an annotated recommendation.)

What are ways you engage with your audience?

Photo by Will Lion via Flickr (creative commons)

Lately there has been a lot of angst about internet privacy. This came to a head when Facebook changed some privacy settings which angered some users who believed that they had a right to privacy with stuff they shared on the site. Some folks ever started a movement called QuitFacebookDay.com over it.

As a person who does internet development, a long time blogger, and someone who “gets the internet,” I just wanted to give you a reality check.

You don’t have privacy, anywhere. If you think you do– you have never read those little contracts you sign, user agreements that you click “yes” to in order to use sites or software, nor read a single privacy policy on nearly every commercial website on the planet.

I don’t want to scare you, but here is a snapshot of the data “we the internet people” collect from you every single day. We don’t do much with this… but we collect this information:

• Every time you Google something, Google logs that. They know what you search, what you clicked on– Google is, by far, the largest repository of user data anywhere.
• Every time you make a phone call, your cell phone company knows who you called, where you called from, and how long you talked.
• If you have a GPS enabled smart phone, your cell phone company knows your exact location any time its turned on whether you are actively using it or not.
• Your IP and MAC addresses are logged by every website you’ve ever visited. The sites servers know how many times you’ve been there, how long you stayed, and what you looked at. Even free Google Analytics tools can show any website owner this information.
• Everything you post on Twitter or Facebook (or WordPress or Blogger) belongs to them, not you. Since it is their property they can do whatever they want with it. Every message, every picture, everything you like, everything you direct message.
• Any time you purchase something from an online retailer, they collect even more information. They know that other stuff about your browsing history, plus they know what you buy, how often you buy, your shipping and billing address, what category of stuff you like to look at, on and on. The only part of the transaction that they can’t really do anything with is your credit card number.
• If you store documents online, an administrator could access that information, if they wanted or needed to.

If you don’t see https: (the “s” means that the area of the site is certified as secure by someone like VeriSign. Of course, certified and verified as such are two different things.) in the address bar, you shouldn’t have any perception of privacy.

Whatever you do online is somehow public

What is interesting to me about the privacy concerns is that the stuff that people are worried about– is typically happening in real life! Don’t want future employers to see you dancing on a table while intoxicated? Sheesh, don’t blame Facebook for that, blame your drunk self! Don’t want one group of people to know something about you? Don’t talk about it on Twitter!

The irony of the privacy concerns is that people have willingly agreed to the terms of service and have willingly posted content to websites that they now don’t want put in the public.

It makes me gigle. No one ever told you this was private, you just thought it was.

There is no such thing as “internet privacy.”

It’s about ethics

As a web developer, you need to know how much value that 99% of website owners put on this data. If a sites privacy policy says they won’t share that information– 99% of organizations won’t. Their reputation is on the line. And there are plenty of watchdogs and lawyers all to happy to create legal grief for those who violate their privacy policies.

Companies may (and most do) use it for their own purposes as outlined in the privacy policy. The funny part is that collecting and learning from this information makes you love most sites instead of loathe them. Most people like it that iTunes or Amazon.com “gets to know their preferences” and make recommendations to you. Statistics show you are much more likely to click on, and buy from, advertisers who target their ads to your preferences. If you are called to appear in court, you’d be happy to know that your cell phone can provide an alibi.

The opposite of compartmentalism

When I was a high school student, youth pastors preached about the ills of compartmentalism all the time. The irony is that todays privacy-free society has those same people crying for just a little compartmentalization!

Fair Warning

My recommendation is not to flee. It’s to live an honest and transparent life. If you live in a way where you have nothing to hide than your level of privacy is rather innocuous.

But the opposite is also true, as well. If you are going places you ought not go or doing things you know are naughty… you are just building up the evidence against yourself. Somewhere someone already knows. And everything you are doing leaves a breadcrumb to your future embarrassment.