Marginal Utility

by Tom Bozzo

• I got my introduction to Facebook's Beacon "feature" by surprise — I saw an update in my feed to the effect that I'd purchased [shoes for the boy] from [shoe-selling site]. "Oh, really?" I thought. The Beacon technology apparently lets Suzanne's online shopping feed to my Facebook profile.
• In one sense, that's not bad for [shoe-selling site] since Suzanne is a lot cooler than I am.
• However, online advertising that works on the principle of, "Hey, that cool Jimbo Jones smokes Laramie Jrs., maybe I should too!" jumps the online advertising shark. Suzanne just thinks it's freaky.
• Part of what makes it acceptable for the Googleborg to read my (home) email is that it isn't very intelligent and doesn't broadcast the results of its distillations to my entire contacts list.
• Meanwhile, Facebook's advertising seems otherwise to be badly under-targeted. Ads asking whether I'm sick of the dating scene are missing a key piece of information in my profile (i.e., "married"). Ditto the "Make $1000/day from home!!1!" ads.
  
• Fortunately, a bunch of my best blog pals are already on, since otherwise some combination of the Facebook-Fogey Taper and Peak Facebook are conspiring to keep the number of people on the site I actually know (or knew) very low. The rate of new registrations is detectable for groups as large as my college graduating class (~3,500) but not for my high school class (~120).
• Making up for the latter deficiency using Teh Google yielded some amusing news not in the alumni newsletter. One former friend sued his law school in part over the amount of text he was able to type in computer-based timed exams. Could the expected value of the remedy be worth the cost of sending the signal?!
  
• It also seems a little fogeyish that Scrabulous is coming across as the killer Facebook app.
• Adding friends who are pseudonymous in blog-world in an environment where use of real names is the norm (if an irregularly enforced norm) provides some new vistas of compromise of personally-identifying information. The question du jour is, what's the etiquette for adding pseudonymous bloggers who are, in some sense, blog-pals but who aren't "out" and whose identities you triangulate from other connections?

Labels: Bigger Places Than This on the Intertubes, social networks

by Ken Houghton

So the Court of Public Opinion is swayed more by "a legally ill-advised and personally vicious phone call" than by the preponderance of evidence?

But wonder no more about privileged treatment for athletes; the next time someone at ESPN preaches about its evil, feel free to point out this:

The ironic consequence of Geoghegan's action was that it gave LeMond's statements greater impact. Without it, LeMond's other testimony would have boiled down to an ambiguous he-said, he-said about his original chat with Landis last August.


Landis called LeMond to chew him out for making publicly critical statements after Landis' positive drug test was confirmed. LeMond's recounting of that dialogue, while intriguing, hardly constituted a smoking gun.


"I would hope and encourage you to come clean," LeMond said he told Landis.


"What good would that do," LeMond said Landis replied. "If I did, it would destroy a lot of my friends and hurt a lot of people."

The potential problem with that testimony, as spoke-heads know, is that its essence so closely resembles a similar conversation LeMond said he had with Lance Armstrong after the Texan won his third Tour de France in 2001.


How believable is it that LeMond had the ability to induce veiled admissions from both of the other American Tour winners, when a battery of lawyers and investigators and journalists have failed at the same task for the past eight years?

Right. Because athletes tell fellow athletes the same things they say to journalists, and only that. And journalists always reveal everything true they are told.

UPDATE: See Nate Fowler's perspective here, especially:

The more I raced and the more I followed professional cycling, the more I began to become aware of the dark side of American cycling and the deep personality conflicts that existed. The mainstream media has never covered that side of the story, but like the family next door that appears to be perfectly normal until the day it all falls apart in a huge dazzling public display of whackiness...

Labels: bicycle racing, Journamalism, social networks