Frankly, Snapchat seems a little crazy to me, and I can’t see much point in it other than making it easier for young people to send provocative selfies to each other. The founder who was offered a few billion for it should have taken the cash and run.

But then a friend said that her daughter routinely sends photos of her new baby via Snapchat — just day to day happenings that don’t seem worth recording for posterity.

From the alway-interesting Farhad Manjoo in today’s WSJ, Do We Want an Erasable Internet?:

Yet, even if it fails, Snapchat will have been one of the most fascinating services to hit the Internet in years. To me, the app’s exploding popularity suggests that society is yearning for a new way to think about data. Snapchat is one of the first mainstream services to show us that our photos and texts don’t need to stick around forever: that erasing all the digital effluvia generated by our phones and computers can be just as popular a concept as saving it.

If the Snapchat model takes off—if other sites and services began to promote the idea of erasability as a competitive feature—the Internet would look very different from the Internet of today. It would be a more private network, one without the constant worry of every ill-considered picture or thought being held up for ridicule by the whole world, forever. But it also might be a less useful Internet, a network on which you couldn’t look up an old photo every time you felt nostalgic, or where computers wouldn’t always feed you suggestions based on your history, since your history wouldn’t be complete.

With its timelines, galleries, and seemingly limitless online storage, Facebook has created a model of the internet as archive. Everything we do will be saved forever.

Tumblr, which is also popular among the young, allows endless sharing/”reblogging” of photos and other posts — the sharing can continue even if the original uploader deletes the post.

But the Snapchat model is closer to phone calls of old (at least before the NSA!). Back then, conversations happened over the wires, and the words were never immortalized.

Manjoo’s piece is well worth a read.

Of course, all of those aren’t really friends of mine.

But I do have some sort of personal connection to a surprising number of people on that list. I’m middle-aged and have lived in several different cities as an adult. I’ve known a lot of people over the years and have developed diverse interests. I have been teaching for over 20 years and have hundreds of former students among my Facebook friends.

And being a columnist makes me sort of a public figure, and I use my personal Facebook page as a public platform for the most part. Pretty much all of my posts to my timeline are public these days, which means the privacy is set so that they’re visible to Facebook users who aren’t already my friends.

But if people have friended me because they are interested in my public commentary, why have so few of those people accepted my invitation to “like” the Facebook page for this blog? As of this writing, the Savannah Unplugged Facebook page has 1,617 “likes”, but only 965 of those are from friends of mine.

Sure, there are lots of people — maybe a few hundred — who would have a reason to be connected to me on Facebook but who care nothing about this blog. I’m connected to some for specific reasons that have nothing to do with my writing. Some who don’t live in Savannah clearly have no interest in a blog like this one.

But what about the rest of those people, including the ones who friended me because I’m a columnist but aren’t following this blog, which is an extension in many ways of those columns?

I recently also launched, after a few years of frustration that no one else was doing what I envisioned, the Savannah-based music blog hissing lawns. I haven’t invited my entire Facebook friends list to like the hissing lawns Facebook page, but some who I know are interested in the local music scene have not connected with the page, despite an invitation and despite occasional reminders via my personal page.

Yes, some people don’t notice those invitations to like pages, even though they show up as individual notifications.

And I guess some people see it as a bother and imposition to expand their network of contacts.

But many of those people don’t seem to understand the power of the “social” in social media.

If a friend of yours is launching a new business, product, or service, that person is investing time, effort, and often money. Why wouldn’t a friend want to support that effort? Why wouldn’t someone genuinely interested in the page’s content not take the time to “like” it?

One simple “like” can show up in friends’ news feeds and lead others who don’t know the creator to like the page.

An accumulation of fans dramatically increases the odds that new posts will generate significant traffic and appear in other news feeds. Interactions with posts — again, simple “likes” — will draw even more attention.

I know from running these two blogs that increased Facebook activity leads directly to more page views. The only revenue from my blogs is from Google Adsense, but that small amount of revenue is directly proportional to traffic.

It seems obvious that Facebook pages representing for-profit product sales or services will also see more revenue if fans interact with them more.

As a columnist and blogger, I should add that the number of Facebook likes can matter in other ways. When I’m writing about a band or a business, I routinely check out the Facebook presence. If a band has been around forever and has relatively few likes, that says something about their ambition and their interaction with their fans.

Ditto for businesses. Some clearly don’t need Facebook to thrive, and some use other forms of social media more effectively. Still, the number of likes matters. Again, it’s commonsense that the number of likes is directly proportional to the sales generated through Facebook.

And of course, as a Facebook user, you can like a page and then ask that it not even show up in your feed from then on. You can support a friend or a worthy cause or a promising business just by taking a second to click like — and then you don’t even have to do anything else.

I don’t click like on every single request that I get, by the way. If it’s a page or product that I know nothing about and can’t imagine ever patronizing, I often ignore the request.

But if an actual friend is launching some sort of new venture, I’ll support it in a heartbeat. It’s puzzling that so many people, including some who are pretty good friends of mine, don’t see the reasons for being similarly supportive.

And if you’re afraid of exposing your profile publicly by liking pages on Facebook, then you probably shouldn’t be using Facebook at all.

From the piece:

The fact that so many journalists are on Twitter has made Twitter incredibly professionally valuable to journalists. Tweeting your articles ensures they’re seen — and discussed, and retweeted — within a community that includes not just your friends and peers, but the people who might hire you someday. (Costa, for instance, will be coming to The Washington Post in January!) That’s much less true on Facebook. It’s readers, not colleagues, who dominate Facebook.

That’s created something of a collective-action problem in the media sphere. It makes sense for each individual journalist’s career to put the bulk of their social media effort into Twitter rather than Facebook. But it makes sense for journalism outlets to have their writers putting the bulk of their social media effort into Facebook rather than Twitter.

As I’ve used Twitter more and more after the last few years, I’ve found it to be invaluable for following breaking news and for discovering items of specific interest about a wide range of topics — items I never would have discovered through other media. (Click here to see my Twitter profile.)

I don’t tweet all that much, however — on average just slightly more than three tweets per day I guess. I’d say over half of my tweets are just the sharing of links to posts here on this blog.

However, even though I have over 1600 Twitter followers, I get far more hits on this site from posts to my Savannah Unplugged Facebook page, which has just under 1600 fans, and from other shares via Facebook.

Take a look at referrals to this site over the past 30 days:

So that’s about 80 referrals per day from Facebook, about 60 from search engines, and about 12 from Twitter.

I do have an account on Pinterest, but I put little time or effort into — I haven’t updated it in months. But, in the big scheme of things, Pinterest is now generating even more referrals than Twitter, according to the latest data from Shareaholic.

So journalists might love Twitter because of the stories they find and the ways in which they can brand themselves, but Facebook is the real driver of web traffic.

Businesses — including bands, nonprofits, and other organizations — make all sorts of poor choices in their use of Facebook, but probably the worst are related to the use of friend/personal accounts instead of business pages.

The situation might be getting a little better these days as more users become savvier in their use of social media, but it’s still a pervasive problem.

And the longer businesses take in making the transition, the deeper the hole they will have for themselves.

As the manager of the Facebook page for this blog (please “like” Savannah Unplugged on Facebook), I’ve long had the ability to know just how many people have seen individual posts. That feature is obviously not available to personal users.

Yesterday, my account also began giving me all sorts of interesting data — the kind of information that could be absolutely critical if my blog were one of my key income sources.

I’m going to include a few screencaps here of what this new information looks like.

Be warned: if you’re paranoid about privacy because it never occurred to you that companies are tracking things like this, you might be in for a shock. I suspect most of my readers are aware, however, that there is all sorts of identifying information out there in cyberspace. Nothing that Facebook is now providing betrays the privacy of any individual user.

That said, I’ll share a few of the new features that page managers can see under “insights”. Click for larger versions.

I can now see what time of day the followers of Savannah Unplugged are online:

I was somewhat astonished by this. Savannah Unplugged has 1,421 likes at this moment. Between 9 a.m. and 10 p.m., over 500 of those fans are on Facebook for at least a moment in every single hour. I know that I frequently leave a Facebook window open anytime I’m at my desk at home or at Armstrong, but I am surprised by just how pervasive the use of the service is.

I can now see how many fans see and interact with various types of posts. Obviously, photo posts are the most interacted with:

And look at this next screencap. I can even see not only how many fans saw individual posts but how many clicked on them. Since I’m hoping readers will go from Facebook to my blog, this data provides considerable information. The one post here with 0 reach was a comment on an existing blog post — obviously that comment appeared in no one’s news feeds. You’ll see that relatively few Facebook users clicked on any of these posts, but the percentage varies widely, from less than 5 percent to more than 10 percent.

All this info is in addition to the types of information I’ve been getting already, like the age and gender of those who follow Savannah Unplugged:

As you can see, women make up 46 percent of all Facebook users, but 53 percent of Savannah Unplugged followers are women. I have virtually the same number of followers in three age demographics: 25-34, 35-44, and 45-54. But my blog is dramatically underperforming among young people relative to their presence on Facebook. The opposite is true among older users.

I don’t know what — if anything — I’ll end up doing with this additional information. But, as I noted above, my livelihood doesn’t rely on the number of hits I get on Savannah Unplugged on Facebook or here on the site itself.

And let me end with a bit of a pitch. If there are blogs like mine that you enjoy, you should “like” them on Facebook and try to interact with them there occasionally. Interacting in any way with individual posts can dramatically increase their reach.

And if there are businesses or other entities that you’d like to support, you should take similar steps.

I have over 3,100 contacts on my personal page, many of whom friended me because I write public columns in the newspaper. But only 900 of those contacts have liked my blog, which is also a public forum where I post information and opinions like those found in my columns.

Maybe the age of those systems is contributing to the new search system’s abject failures here on day one.

If I do just one search — even just a simple search to get to a friend’s profile — I’m not able to do a second search without entirely reloading the Home page.

And if I’ve reloaded and click in the search bar, here’s the dropdown menu that appears:

If I click on “Movies My Friends Like” (surely that must be worth viewing, right?), I get a list topped by the 48 Hour Film Project Savannah (which is not a movie), CBGB the Movie (which only a handful of my friends have even seen since distribution is still months away), and Savannah the Movie (ditto).

And here’s the problem with Facebook’s prioritization in search of things that we have “liked”: often users “like” things that they don’t necessarily like. Yes, I want to keep caught up on new developments regarding CBGB, but I haven’t even seen the film; I want to follow the page, but I have NO idea if I actually like the movie.

From that lame list of Movies My Friends Like, when I try to type something else into the search bar, Facebook won’t even let me change it.

Once I’m back out to a clean search box, I can type in something like “Restaurants in Savannah that [insert friend’s name] likes”.

But that’s just more of a muddle. The list of results is a mishmash that includes places that this particular friend might have “liked” but are hardly her favorite spots. The second page of the results includes SubDogs (which is closed), Abe’s (which is not a restaurant), and Live Wire Music Hall (which is closed and which is not a restaurant).

How will any of this information prove truly useful?

I will be curious to hear others’ experiences with the new search function. Its debut on my screen has just made Facebook even more cumbersome.

It’s fascinating stuff.

Teens are continuing to use Facebook in extremely large numbers. About 81 percent of all teens use at least one social media platform; 94 percent of all teen social media users have Facebook accounts.

But teens are less satisfied than they were with Facebook — for reasons noted in this post title — and they are increasingly compartmentalizing their social media choices.

The report gives no data for the prevalence of Snapchat use, but notes that it is growing fast with a high degree of user satisfaction. Note in the chart at the bottom the relative weakness of Pinterest and Google Plus. Given my own positive experiences with Instagram, I suspect the use of it will continue to rise, especially since it seems likely that more and more teens will have high-quality smart phones in the future.

Fewer teens are using Tumblr than I expected, which makes Yahoo’s recent $1.1 billion purchase of the site more problematic on the one hand, but on the other hand there’s ample room for revenue growth. I wrote about some of those issues in a recent post.

The data and details are so sprawling and interesting that I’m just going to use a series of block quotes for the rest of this post:

• Teens are sharing more information about themselves on social media sites than they did in the past. For the five different types of personal information that we measured in both 2006 and 2012, each is significantly more likely to be shared by teen social media users in our most recent survey.
• Teen Twitter use has grown significantly: 24% of online teens use Twitter, up from 16% in 2011.
• The typical (median) teen Facebook user has 300 friends, while the typical teen Twitter user has 79 followers.
• Focus group discussions with teens show that they have waning enthusiasm for Facebook, disliking the increasing adult presence, people sharing excessively, and stressful “drama,” but they keep using it because participation is an important part of overall teenage socializing.
• 60% of teen Facebook users keep their profiles private, and most report high levels of confidence in their ability to manage their settings.
• Teens take other steps to shape their reputation, manage their networks, and mask information they donâ€t want others to know; 74% of teen social media users have deleted people from their network or friends list.
• Teen social media users do not express a high level of concern about third-party access to their data; just 9% say they are “very” concerned.
• On Facebook, increasing network size goes hand in hand with network variety, information sharing, and personal information management.
• In broad measures of online experience, teens are considerably more likely to report positive experiences than negative ones. For instance, 52% of online teens say they have had an experience online that made them feel good about themselves.

Teens donâ€t think of their Facebook use in terms of information sharing, friending or privacy: for them, what is most important about Facebook is how it is a major center of teenage social interactions, both with the positives of friendship and social support and the negatives of drama and social expectations. Thinking about social media use in terms of reputation management is closer to the teen experience.

Twitter draws a far smaller crowd than Facebook for teens, but its use is rising. One in four online teens uses Twitter in some way. While overall use of social networking sites among teens has hovered around 80%, Twitter grew in popularity; 24% of online teens use Twitter, up from 16% in 2011 and 8% the first time we asked this question in late 2009.

African-American teens are substantially more likely to report using Twitter when compared with white youth.

Those teens who used sites like Twitter and Instagram reported feeling like they could better express themselves on these platforms, where they felt freed from the social expectations and constraints of Facebook. Some teens may migrate their activity and attention to other sites to escape the drama and pressures they find on Facebook, although most still remain active on Facebook as well.

Most teens express a high level of confidence in managing their Facebook privacy settings. […] only 5% of teen Facebook users say they limit what their parents can see.

Teen social media users do not express a high level of concern about third-party access to their data; just 9% say they are “very” concerned.

Female (age 16): “And so now I am basically dividing things up. Instagram is mostly for pictures. Twitter is mostly for just saying what you are thinking. Facebook is both of them combined so you have to give a little bit of each. But yes, so Instagram, I posted more pictures on Instagram than on Facebook. Twitter is more natural.”
Female (age 15): “I have a Facebook, a Tumblr, and Twitter. I donâ€t use Facebook or Twitter much. I rather use Tumblr to look for interesting stories. I like Tumblr because I donâ€t have to present a specific or false image of myself and I donâ€t have to interact with people I donâ€t necessarily want to talk to.”

But as just a personal consumer of friends’ posts, I’m already frustrated by how much scrolling I have to do to get past the clutter. In making the design less cluttered, Facebook might be ensuring even more scrolling. I also don’t like the references in Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks about trying to make Facebook into even more of a news dispersal site.

From the Washington Post’s Facebook to change news feed to a ‘personalized newspaperâ€:

Facebook announced that it is changing the format of its news feed to offer its billion users the ultimate “personalized newspaper,” with a minimalist design that places a central focus on users†pictures, maps and video posts.

Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg said in a press conference Thursday that the news feed should be more than just a single stream of content, and will provide a mix of wider world events as well as personal updates from friends and families.

“This is about getting Facebook out of the way as much as possible,” said Chris Cox, Facebookâ€s vice president of product.

Facebookâ€s decision to focus the news feed on showcasing larger pictures and videos is a reflection of the kind of content users post to the site,. Zuckerberg said.

Here’s a screencap from Facebook:

The new look will apparently be rolled out gradually.

New technologies have spawned many avenues for civic engagement, but the relatively old fashioned medium of radio seems to hold a lot of promise in a relatively small community like Savannah. It’s easy to imagine — but no doubt hard to implement — a volunteer-driven low power station that provides in-depth discussion of local issues, spotlights local groups and individuals, and pays special attention to the local cultural scene, especially music. If that station also had a fairly robust web presence, we could bring see that become a new civic space.

On his blog Groundswell, Josh Stearns — Journalism and Public Media Campaign Director at Free Press — asked some really good questions in a recent post: Building a Civic Layer On Top of the Social Web. An excerpt:

In Clay Shirkyâ€s book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, he documents how the Internet has help people accomplish amazing things by leveraging the power of new networks and connections. “We are living in the middle of a remarkable increase in our ability to share, to cooperate with one another, and to take collective action,” he writes, “all outside the framework of traditional institutions and organizations.”

However, most of the examples of social and political change that have been amplified or catalyzed via social media are episodic, not lasting (which isnâ€t to discount their importance). This is in part the nature of social media. The same velocity that makes social media campaigns and memes so powerful, also makes them, for the most part, short-lived or best suited to making immediate change.

As we spend more and more of our time and energy on social networks – recent stats suggest that almost 20% of all time online is spent on social networks with the average person spending 7 hours on Facebook a month – I wonder how we can build a more consistent civic layer over the new digital public square. […]

If these privately controlled networks are becoming our de-facto digital public square, how can we build more horizontal civic layers that bridge these vertical silos? Or, asked another way, how can we leverage the power of commercial networks to help solve the “wicked problems” facing our communities?

I’d highlight here the distinction between public and private control, between the commercial and the noncommercial, between for-profit and non-profit. Think of the differences between in an American shopping mall — which actively and passively regulates choices and expression — and an old-fashioned open-air marketplace in a traditional town center.

Stearns links to a few interesting sites, including MIT Media Lab, which focuses on “Civic Media”: How to create technical and social systems to allow communities to share, understand, and act on civic information.

I don’t really have any clear answers here, but there are obvious dangers in Facebook — a for-profit corporation with astonishing reach that’s also under incredible pressure to add users and sell ads — being our dominant public space on the web.

That’s not to suggest that we shouldn’t utilize Facebook’s capabilities to connect people, but we need other platforms for communication — ones that allow for vigorous public discussion while also somehow keeping in check the kind of derisive rhetoric so prevalent in online communication.