Alternatives to Facebook -- what are the options?

Maybe you've just had enough. Perhaps your profile's been hacked, or you can't sort out the byzantine privacy settings options, maybe one of your "friends" mentioned a sex organ in status their update, (Once was enough to get me to "unfriend" you...) Or maybe you just long for something different.

Well dear reader, before FB Quitting Day May 31, 2010, here are some of your choices. Old and new soc nets (social networks) for your review.

Diaspora - the latest new, new thing. It's the sweetheart start-up developed by four charmingly geekalicious young lads from NYU and crowd funded by Kickstarter. It's not actually a social network yet. But they're working on writing the code to make it an open source alternative. They aren't the first ones out there per this link I found. (However to be honest, the Linux, Apache, MySql and Php talk starts to get a bit too techy for me and my brain melts just a little. Anyone care to enlighten me?)

Friendster - 'Memba them? I first heard of them in 1994 and even then it was a little late to be an early adopter.

Then there's Whspr, another recent entry into the soc-net-o-sphere which I mentioned in last week's Noo Yeek column.

Posterous - is a blog/soc-net hybrid you can see mine here. I know it's a bit light on the content, I'm just trying it out.

Ning is an option that I have used for an alumni network or maybe Orkut, a soc-net that is integrated into your Google-verse.

And another exile from soc-net Hipster-ville that might get a resurrection from the Facebook "diaspora" (oh those boys are clever name choosers!) is MySpace which seemed to loose steam and members once it was purchased by Rupert Murdoch.

I doubt people will leave LinkedIn or stop using Twitter due to privacy concerns since those are more readily controlled in terms of whom they broadcast to and yes, while Twitter isn't quite a social networking site, (really microblogging) it is a soc-net tool.

The meta narrative is privacy online. What is is, who controls it, how is it filtered and layered? Clearly the cows have long since left the barn, so it's really verbum sap sat. Everything you post on FB (or the internet) becomes part of the whole. They know a lot about you, because you give it to them, everyday. As one of my Facebook status updates read this week, "all your Face are belong to us".


Thank you Hank Grebe and Mediaspin.com for such a great image.

What if work were fun?

This is something I think about often. In my previous jobs I had fun at work when I accomplished things that were difficult. I had fun when I rallied my crew together to make things happen, or when we were all just a little punchy on a Friday afternoon as we prepared for the week ahead. I had fun when I got to bring my dog in and she helped out by greeting everyone who came into my office with a tail wag. But this is not the norm. People just don't have fun at work.

Why not? How cool would it be to work in a place that lets you bring your well-behaved pooch to the office? Or feeds you lunch in a great cafeteria for free? Where you can have a treadmill desk or a take a spin class in the afternoons? A place to plug in your electric vehicle? On site daycare and preschool? A "quiet room" where you can just unplug for a few minutes? Yes, there is a small percentage of businesses that have cultivated a sense of fun in the work environment, usually in the name of team building and creative thinking due to some kind of expensive corporate consultancy coming in to boost productivity. It's rare that the fun concept is an everyday part of business culture. I'm not talking the recreational eating, once a month birthday cakewrecks in the break room that are served up to us as "fun". I'm talking about your job being one of the joys in a fulfilled life where your office is a place in which you and your colleagues do your best work ever. Every day.

I am betting that this is coming. I believe that more workplaces will add fun to their corporate culture. It's a way to draw in and retain good employees. People will be happier at work, therefore healthier and more productive, more creative and dedicated to the company's mission. Not just picking up a paycheck.

Employees are coming into the business world now who are digital natives. They are media literate, content savvy and are fully conversational in the new media technologies. Multi-modal discourse is the norm for them as is a sense of playfulness in the workplace. They are the people I want to work with.

Why is it important? Because as Douglas Rushkoff said at SXSW this year, it's program or be programmed. We need to be digitally literate if we are going to be relevant. We have to be able to know how to read and view the texts that are presented to us. Foundations and corporations are putting up hundreds of millions of dollars into creating curricula for education to teach this new media literacy which is needed now for our participatory culture in the workplace of fun.

This clip gives a really good explanation of what media literacy is all about:



Wishing you fun in your workplace, Happy Friday!

TV is Dead, Long Live the New TV

Maybe you hadn't noticed, but gee there's a lot of television programming on the interweb now. Between YouTube and Hulu I never watch conventional television anymore. When our area recently converted to digital TV, we lost our ABC feed completely. Normally this would not have even registered, but since we'd invited friends over for watching the Oscars, it was crucial. We switched back to analogue just for the evening. We used to have Direct TV but ditched it about a year ago when it was evident that we had better things to do. Why pay $75/month for nothing? So as a backup we got the digital converter box. We've barely used it.

Harry Shearer's Le Show this week talked about the DTV conversion and it got me thinking about how my own viewing habits have changed completely in just 2 years. Before, I watched more DVD's or on-demand cable than TV. When I moved, I ditched cable in the process and watched even less television. I listened to the presidential debates on NPR or watched live on CNN on my laptop. I watched the Inaugural in a room full of strangers at a MoveOn.org event in my neighborhood via video projection. The last time we had the TV on at home was for the Oscars.

Now when I hear about shows from my friends, I figure I can catch them online or on DVD from Netflix when I want to see them. The idea of rushing home to see a TV show, or even carving regular time into my life for watching TV seems crazy to me now, though we've all done it in the past. Remember "movies of the week"? Television was an "event". I supposed I've saved money by not having a Tivo device. Why would I need one now anyway when the Internet IS my Tivo?

I'm making a list of things I want to see on my new TV: old shows I never saw or missed somehow (thirtysomething, 21 Jump Street) shows I've lost touch with but want to catch up to (The Tudors). I like that I can choose to see what I want, when I want. And frankly I'd like to be able to search for programming in a Google-like search engine, maybe coupled with IMDB, so I can find all the 21 Jump Street episodes I never saw Johnny Depp in. Or any number of those BBC costumers of classic literature with great character actors in them who are big stars now (Hugh Laurie). I know they're out there somewhere.

In conversation with a friend the other day we were discussing marketing and television. It suddenly dawned on me that there now exists an infinite number of "channels" available for viewing - that anyone with a webcam and Itunes can become a TV programmer. Perhaps there will be websites like blip.fm which will allow me to veejay my own channel lineup. Efforts to market our creative content will have to reach out to those channels with the most viewers or those who have the viewers that will best spark to our product. Conventional TV is dead. We are the new TV.

Thanks to Kevin Steele's Flickr photostream for the photograph of the TV and recycling bins.

Filmmaker Forum at the DGA

This weekend as a member of the Producer's Lab I was able to attend the Filmmaker Forum put on by FIND at the DGA. It began with a screening of the film The Brothers Bloom on Friday evening which was nicely shot by Steve Yedin, had great production design by Jim Clay but it just didn't grab me. I couldn't decide if it were a caper film or a romance -- but both Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz are gorgeous to look at. It's worth seeing, just not sure if I would have paid to see it in a theatre. On Saturday morning we had Ted Hope's keynote speech and in my opinion this sort of set the tone for the weekend.

We heard from the producers of Bottle Shock and Humboldt County about the ways they had chosen to self-distribute or at least be more involved in the distribution of their films.

Probably the most exciting panel I attended however was the one entitled: New Tools for Audience Building moderated by Lance Weiler of the Workbook Project and presented by Micki Krimmel and Alex Johnson all 3 very enthusiastic folks with whom I just wanted to hang out and spend more time with. It was in the DGA 3 screening room which wasn't wired for internet and also didn't have enough seats so we were in the aisles and relegated to watching only some static powerpoint pages on the screen. Micki told me later at lunch the next time she does one of these she will specifically ask for a wireless connection. Good idea. I kept trying to look stuff up on my Iphone but the DGA is somewhat of a black hole for a net connection over a mobile phone.

I have to run off to a meeting, so I have to cut this short. More later.

What's next?

Things seem very slow in town work-wise. Makes getting on a pilot look like a cake-walk. The TV shows seem to be staffed with everyone but PA's. I'm waiting to hear on a few features, but in the meantime the bills keep coming, so pragmatically speaking it looks like temping is in my imminent future.

Of course, there are the strike rumblings, but I don't think that it will actually happen. In 2001 we had the defacto strike simply because the threat was enough to panic the studios into stockpiling scripts. This trickled down and really hurt us wage slaves. I know I was out of work for a time as a result.

It may yet happen again, unless it has begun already. Or is it just part of the bell curve of the changing face of media? In 2001 the promise of TV on the internet had failed, now 6 years later we have YouTube and the Director's Guild is signing deals for internet broadcast webisodes.

Look at the Fall line-ups, so little scripted material in network TV. More reality and very few half hour comedies. More spin offs of hour long franchises. In my opinion, cable continues to stand out as the superior product generator. Maybe that's what's happening? It's been two camps, cable versus network -- each trying to eat the other. Only now there's the internet and it's gnawing at them both.

Will the internet eat the networks? Will cable eat the internet? Will the internet eat everyone and the phone companies too? And where does that leave us? The content creators and workers - those of us who actually do the things that get the stuff out there? If everyone can create content, where does that take us?