Case in point: Here’s a screenshot of a link that one of my Facebook friends shared, which I tried to click on:

shared link

Click to enlarge.

When I tried to click that link, here’s what I got:

yahoo FB app request

Click to enlarge

No, I don’t want to install that stupid app. But this request gave me no option to just follow the link — neither in this window, or when I hit “cancel.”

#sharing #fail

I just went under account settings -> privacy and worked my way through the list. Under “apps and websites,” I saw several dozen sites and apps listed that could connect to my Facebook account. Most of them I never use or didn’t even recognize. So I went through deleting Facebook access to all but about 6 services I currently use in conjunction with Facebook.

One of these services was Scribd.com — which I sometimes use to post documents that I want to be shareable and embeddable.

I figured that these Facebook connections with sites and apps mainly enabled easy sharing from those sites to Facebook. But apparently I figured wrong.

After I finished this exercise on Facebook, I had an e-mail from Scribd.com saying that my account there had been deleted.

Huh?

Granted, they gave me an easy option to “restore” my Scribd.com account — which basically meant creating a new username and password. I did that, it seems to work.

But…

I checked, and this process broke existing embeds of my Scribd.com documents.

That’s right: I now have to go back and redo in a few different blogs all the embeds of my Scribd.com documents that I’d previously created.

And that’s just wrong.

I’m assuming that I probably made the mistake of using my Facebook login to create my Scribd.com account in the first place. Which goes to show how problematic it is to rely on Facebook to create an account, or log in to an account, anywhere else. I don’t actually recall whether I first created my Scribd.com account with my Facebook login, I’ve had my Scribd account for years. But it’s possible I did that. Lesson learned.

Scribd.com, I hope you fix this issue. I didn’t see this coming, and I’m annoyed.

My review: Google+ a clean, intuitive mobile experience so far

Clearly Google+ is going head-to-head against Facebook, and I think it has a decent chance of winning in the long run, especially if it includes good mobile integration of core Google services like calendar, Gmail, and docs.

But what about Facebook?…

I’ve praised Facebook in the past for not forgetting that most of the world, including most people here in the US, do not use smartphones. They have a very lean mobile web app, and they also bought Snaptu (a leading purveyor of feature phone apps).

But then, Google makes Android, and some good lower-cost Android phones are starting to hit the market. Also, I tried out the Google+ web app using Opera Mini, the browser that Qualcomm says will come standard with all feature phones using its BrewMP platform (which in the US is most feature phones) sometime in the coming month. That web app ran just fine on Opera Mini — which means lots of feature phone users would be able to make good use of Google+

So what, then, does Facebook do? On Google+, my media colleague Lynne d Johnson just found out Facebook is launching their own branded phone the HTC Status — complete with a physical Facebook button, and other integration. It’ll be coming out on AT&T. AND it’s an Android phone

Curiouser and curiouser….

Why? I prefer diversity. I’m a fairly casual Facebook user, but I do use it as a way to connect with people, organizations, and communities for whom Facebook is really the best way to keep up with them. This includes many community groups, people whose social/professional circles really don’t overlap with mine otherwise, and even people/orgs with whom I disagree.

This is because, as I’ve written before (and so has Ethan Zuckerman), I think too much homophily is a problem — not just online, but in life.

But so far, Facebook seems to want to give me no choice but homophily — at least, they won’t respect my preference on an ongoing basis.

Here’s what I mean, based on what Vadim Lavrusik of Facebook told me this morning….

To recap, when you log into Facebook, the main feature on the home page is the News Feed — a running column of recent status updates and other items/activities from the people, pages, and groups you’ve chosen to connect with on Facebook. Items appear in reverse chronological order, with the newest on top.

There are two settings for your Facebook News Feed:

• Top News, which shows only items from the FB connections with whom you interact most. (I personally find this title slightly misleading.)
• Most Recent, which display all recent items from all your Facebook connections.

“Top News” currently is the default setting for all Facebook users. An individual user can select “Most Recent” as an option. If you just do this by clicking “Most Recent,” that view will remain temporarily (maybe just until you refresh the page, close the browser tab, or log out, I’m not sure which — but it does revert pretty quickly).

As I showed yesterday in this video tutorial, Facebook appears to offer a way to make this News Feed choice more persistent, by changing what appears to be some kind of account setting.

But appearances can be deceiving.

Today, I turned on my computer, and eventually brought up Facebook. I was surprised to find that, despite changing the setting I showed in my tutorial, my news feed had reverted to “Top News.”

Effectively, I can tell Facebook, “show me the diversity I’ve deliberately cultivated here” — but their response is, “OK, for just a little while, but we don’t seriously think that’s what you really want so we’ll switch you back later when you’re not looking.”

I reached out via Twitter to the person who handles Facebook outreach to journalists, Vadim Lavrusik. He shed a little light on the situation — although, frankly, not a very good light. Admittedly, We both pushed each other’s buttons a bit — but I bea him no personal or ongoing ill will.

THE BOTTOM LINE, FOR NOW:

Currently there is no way for a Facebook user to set a persistent preference to see their full news feed (“Most Recent”). According to Lavrusik, Facebook is “considering making the selection sticky.”

Lavrusik claimed the “Most Recent” setting reverts when Facebook users log out. That was not my experience. Last night, before I went to bed, I closed my browser tab with Facebook and let my laptop go to sleep. I did not log out of Facebook or clear my browser cache. This morning, my Facebook News Feed had reverted to “Top News.”

I will update this story as it progresses.

Full background and my exchange with Lavrusik so far:

I use Facebook strictly as a casual way to communicate with people I know. I’m not a heavy Facebook user because their interface sucks, and it keeps on sucking. But there’s one thing about Facebook that was really bugging me, and I finally just figured out how to fix it.

The Problem: The default setting for your Facebook news feed (list of recent updates) is “Top News” — which is somewhat misleadingly named, since it’s really only updates from the friends and pages that Facebook’s algorithm, in its infinite and inscrutable wisdom, believes you interact with the most.

In order to see in your news feed updates from ALL the people and pages you’ve chosen to connect with on Facebook, you need to select the “most recent” option. Totally unintuitive, but that’s par for the course with the Facebook interface.

BUT: In order to routinely see updates from all your Facebook friends and pages, you must change that default setting. Facebook doesn’t make this easy — again, par for the course for Facebook.

I figured out how to do it. Below is my quick video tutorial.

WATCH VIDEO TUTORIAL: Facebook News Feed settings

…You’d think that with all the money they’re making, Facebook could afford to hire some good UI designers and do some usability testing! I think I might mail them a copy of Don’t Make Me Think (old by internet standards, but the principles are timeless).

INDEX: Your blog / Rules of engagement / Twitter / Facebook / Other social media / Scribd and Slideshare

(Note: This toolkit is a work in progress. I invite comments and suggestions. I’m trying to keep it simple — just a few key tools and tips to get people started with basic online engagement.)

1. Home base: Your blog

Links make the web go round, so first things first: You’ll need an easily findable home base on the web that people can link to. This is the most important way to gain search visibility and improve your search ranking.

Your home base should be entirely under your control, easy for search engines to index and understand what’s new, and easy for you to update.

This means you need a blog. If you don’t already have one, I recommend you sign up for a free blog at WordPress.com, and then pay the extra $17/year to register a domain name and “map” (apply) it to your blog.

Getting your own domain name right from the start helps substantially. In the long run you’ll get better search engine visibility, faster, compared to using a subdomain from a service like myblog.blogspot.com. Also, if you end up not liking your blog host (WordPress.com, in this case), you can move your blog elsewhere without breaking inbound links. (That’s not necessarily easy or trouble free, but it’s important to have that option)

You can also use a custom domain with a blog on Tumblr, another popular free blogging platform — but the process is a just little bit more technical.

You don’t need to post often to your blog. But anytime you have something to say that’s more than a tweet or two in length, consider posting it to your blog and then linking to that from social media. This encourages people not just to engage with you, but to share links to your blog — which helps improve your search visibility.

If you already have your own blog, and it’s not under your own domain, don’t panic. If you’ve had that blog for more than a couple of years, and it’s been at least occasionally active, just keep it and use it more frequently. That usually helps more than starting over with a new blog from scratch.

Allow moderated comments. If you publish a blog, it’s a good idea to allow people to comment on your posts. This demonstrates you’re open to discourse. However, do use a comment spam filter like Akismet (which comes with WordPress.com blogs). And if you’re writing about a controversial or sensitive topic, use the WordPress comment moderation feature. To encourage conversation, set up e-mail notifications so you’ll know when you get a comment, and then review and approve/deny them quickly.

You don’t have to take abuse or approve off-topic ramblings, but being willing to engage politely with people who disagree with you is one of the best ways to boost your credibility and visibility.

Make it easy to post to your blog. Install and configure the WordPress Press this bookmarklet in your web browser toolbar. (Other blogging platforms usually have similar posting bookmarklets.) This allows you to blog something you see on the web, and add some commentary, just by pushing one button. Whenever you make something fast and easy, you’re likely to do it more often.

2. General rules of engagement

Whenever you’re interacting with people online — whether in public discussion or private/semiprivate conversation, use these guidelines:

1. Create a useful profile for every service you join. People will want to know who you are before they engage with you. Clarify who you are, what you do or what roles you play, and where you work or other important organizational affiliations. Post at least one picture. It’s helpful to try to use the same, or a similar, username or handle across as many services as possible. But if you use a handle, I recommend also giving your real name to aid credibility.
2. Listen first — a lot! It’s always easier, and more effective. to join a conversation than start one. Also, listening forces you to question your assumptions about what other people think or want.
3. When you do post, respond to or amplify others more than you speak up, self promote, or advocate. Prove that you’re listening, and that you care what others say, and they’ll return the favor. This is basically socially appropriate ingratiation. To see it in action, Aaron Williams just did it here! And hey, so did I, just now
4. Always be helpful, useful, interesting, and supportive — or at the very least, be civil and not creepy. Adding context, clarifying, or clearing up misconceptions (politely, without scolding) with links to supporting material (on your blog or elsewhere) is a great approach to public engagement.
5. Use your blog first. If you have something important to say, or an important question to ask or issue/concern to raise, say it on your blog first and then link to it via social media. This gets you maximum visibility and gets around some of the limitations of services like Twitter or Facebook.
6. Be careful with humor. People are touchy and it’s easy to seem sarcastic online. If you offend someone by accident, apologize, even if you think they’re being thin-skinned.
7. Disagreement and criticism are good — as long as it’s civil. They are opportunities to learn, explore, and extend your reach beyond your existing circle. Engage with your critics, and be humble (but not self-denigrating). You don’t have to agree with them to treat them with respect.
8. Don’t be a jerk. Resist the temptation to defend yourself, argue with people, or demean/ridicule/bait others. That behavior not only discourages positive engagement; it attracts trolls.
9. Do not feed the trolls. There will always be trolls. Just ignore them. If they’re overly aggressive or persistent, then block/unfriend them. But do not respond to them or engage them.

3. Use Twitter

Once you grasp the rules of online engagement, it’s time to put them to use. Twitter is a good place to start.

If you haven’t done so already, sign up for Twitter. I recommend just using one account so you present a coherent and nuanced identity, which is inherently more credible and engaging. If you try to be all professional all the time on Twitter, that tends to discourage engagement. And maintaining multiple Twitter accounts can get really confusing.

Who to follow? Follow the people you want to engage on Twitter, see what they’re talking about and who they’re engaging with on topics that interest you. Don’t just automatically follow everyone you know, or anyone who follows you. That quickly makes Twitter seem too chaotic and less useful.

Another way to find good people to follow is to search Twitter for relevant keywords or hashtags (keywords that start with “#”, a Twitter convention that makes it easier to follow topics or events rather than people).

If you’re highly focused on discussion of certain topics or events, I recommend using a column-based Twitter application such as Tweetdeckor Hootsuite so that you can more easily filter the firehose of incoming tweets into more understandable streams.

What to tweet. I recommend that 2/3 of your tweets should be either responses to other people’s tweets, or retweets of tweets you find especially useful or engaging. The people you’re responding to or retweeting will see that (Twitter makes that obvious). If you’re being helpful, useful, supportive, complimentary — or at least polite, fun, or interesting — they’ll probably think well of you and may follow you.

If you’re tweeting regularly about a topic, look for relevant current hashtags that people are using and include them in your tweets. This will expand your community, making you visible to people who aren’t yet directly following you.

Monitor your replies and direct messages. When someone tries to address you directly, respond as quickly as possible.

4. Use Facebook

While Twitter is useful for reaching almost any group of people about any topic, Facebook is sometimes useful and sometimes not. It depends on who you’re trying to reach, whether those people tend to hang out on Facebook, and what they tend to use Facebook for. But Facebook is so popular that it’s important to learn how to use it, in case you need it.

In my experience, Facebook is generally not the best venue for high-level conversations among specialists, such as utility engineers discussing power grid management strategies. But it might be a very good place to engage a consumer-level audience in a discussion about energy efficiency, or renewable power, or the smart grid.

I recommend that you search Facebook for groups and pages that would seem to attract the kind of people you wish to engage. Join the discussions there — but only stay with the groups that seem most relevant or useful.

Use your Facebook wall to post things that you think might interest the people you’re trying to engage — and occasionally tag items with the names of specific Facebook friends if you’re pretty sure they’d be interested.

Separate accounts? If, after you learn how to use Facebook, you decide you should seriously use it to engage people for professional or issue-related purposes, it’s a good idea to set up a separate Facebook account for that. (The people you friend on Facebook to interest in protecting your watershed probably would get annoyed by your photos of your kitchen renovation — although your actual friends might really like those photos.). This gets a little complicated, because Facebook accounts are about people, not organizations.

However, if you aren’t using Facebook much for professional/issue-related outreach or advocacy, you can probably get by well enough with using your personal Facebook account. If you’re not sure, just use your personal account to learn and experiment.

Facebook apps, pages, groups, and events. Facebook offers lots of ways to connect with people. In general, it’s a good idea to use your personal account to experiment with using things like pages and groups that other people have already set up, before you try it yourself. And in general, don’t try to create something new when an existing effort is already going strong. Just try to be a constructive, visible part of what people are already doing.

4. E-mail lists, forums, and other social media

People talk in all kinds of ways online besides Twitter and Facebook. In general, figure out where the people you need to engage already are, and go there. E-mail lists and forums are still very popular, especially on niche topics. Sometimes you might need to get permission from the group leader to join.

Depending on your goals, strengths, and who you need to reach, other kinds of social media such as Flickr (photos), YouTube (videos), SoundCloud (audio), etc. can also be useful.

Social bookmarking services such as Delicious and Diigo can help you engage for some communities, on some topics. They generally aren’t a venue for direct discussion, for the most part, but they’re valuable for sharing links to information and resources. If you’re already using one of these tools as a “backup brain,” why not get some more mileage out of that effort? Generally you can set up groups, lists, and other modes of sharing on these services.

Sometimes communities form around tags or other features of social bookmarking services. For example, lots of smart, influential technologists follow the nonprofit technology (NPtech) tag on Delicious.

5. Scribd and Slideshare

Scribd and Slideshare are especially useful services for publishing or sharing documents or presentations.

Both allow you to post the full document and create a YouTube-style embeddable player, which you (or others) can then add to blog posts, event invitations, or other online media. These players also include a “download” button.

Make sure you’re only publishing content that you own the rights to, is not subject to copyright, or that you have permission from the copyright holder to post.

The advantage of using these services to host documents is that they allow you to easily bundle substantial content into a blog post, so people don’t have to follow a link somewhere to get it. Also, if you annotate or highlight a document, you can post a version of the document with those additions.

So for instance, if you’re a chemist and you have the right to publish your latest journal article about mercury pollution in rivers, you could annotate the pdf of that article to highlight points that would be important to non-experts, and explain what they mean in plain language.

But also, these services get very good search visibility in their own right. So when you post documents to these sites, make sure each document includes a link back to the relevant post on your blog (or at least to your blog’s home page) so people who discover you there can connect to you via your online home base.

…These are just a few very basic tools to start your online engagement strategy. There are plenty more, but based on my extensive experience these are the best places to start. Learn how to use these tools — and how to use them together — to cultivate the kind of online engagement you seek.

IF YOU’RE REALLY SERIOUS ABOUT ACTIVISM or advocacy of any kind, I highly recommend Deanna Zandt’s recent book Share This: How you will change the world with social networking. I bow to her greatness

It was Memorial Day, I decided to go for a long bike ride to see the beach at Alameda. I needed the exercise, and the weather was perfect. I was enjoying myself greatly — but as I was biking back along Crown Beach in Alameda, I saw police, firefighters, and onlookers gathered. I asked what was happening, and they told me that a man was stranded offshore. A firefighter pointed out into the water, and I could see a head bobbing above the waves, about 150 feet out.

“It’s shallow out there, he’s standing,” said the firefighter. And indeed, the man didn’t seem to be struggling. But he wasn’t waving or shouting for help, either.

More onlookers gathered, and I snapped some pictures. I couldn’t get a good photo of the man in the water, but I photographed the gathering crowd, and tweeted it both on @agahran and @oaklandlocal, a local news/community site where I’m a senior editor.

alameda rescue1

Rescue workers, locals, watch drowning man, Crown Beach, Alameda, CA

I heard locals talking, and asked them if they knew the man. “He was depressed, off his meds, lost his job,” said one neighbor. “He just walked out into the water with all his clothes on. He’s trying to kill himself.”

In that moment, I froze. I couldn’t be a journalist just then. It felt too personal.

Crowd gathers as man drowns, Crown Beach, Alameda, CA

alameda crowd 2

alameda drowning

You can't see him, but the drowning man was about here offshore, Crown Beach, Alameda.

About a year ago, a good friend from Boulder, who’d grown distant, took his own life. Max was a few years younger than me, a doting father, an artist, sociable and often grinning.

But a few years ago, his life fell apart, I’m not sure why. It happened when my own life was in major transition, and I was feeling the stress of that change. While I never considered suicide, I could relate to feeling overwhelmed and rootless.

I’ve been haunted by Max’s death — and really spooked by suicide ever since.

Back on the beach, a kiteboarder zipped out to the drowning man and circled him several times, coming back to report to emergency personnel on the beach. It seemed like it was taking a long time to mount a rescue so close to shore

So yesterday I rationalized: “This isn’t Oakland. I’m off duty. I don’t need to cover this. I don’t want to cover this. I’ve tweeted my pictures, that’s enough for now.”

So I left. I biked across to Bay Farm Island, where I saw an orange emergency helicopter fly in across the water, hover over the man’s location, then leave. And I continued my bike ride, and went home, trying to shake the spooked feeling.

Last night I got a call from the Bay Area ABC station, KGO7, asking for permission to use my photos in their story about the incident. I said yes, as long as their web story linked to Oakland Local. Here is the KGO story. (Getting them to add that link took some further prodding, but they did it — legacy news orgs often overlook/downplay local news startups, and I get tired of that.)

Reading and watching KGO’s story, I realized how I’d messed up yesterday. They got the story right: Why were so many emergency personnel there on the beach, just watching a man drown 150 feet away?

I was grappling with my own complex connection to suicide. When I considered what I’d cover, if I did cover it, I could only envision a typical story focused on the guy who was killing himself. I didn’t want to do that — I’d have felt like that would be gratuitously pimping out his misery. It was yet another reason to turn away.

But KGO got the story right, the story my own pictures told: Where was the rescue?

As it turned out, Alameda police and firefighters are not currently certified to mount a land-based water rescue. They had to cut back on that training due to budget problems. To attempt such a rescue without certification apparently meant the city could get sued. So they just stood there and watched.

Which is horrible. And I should have asked about that.

According to KGO:

The Alameda Fire Department says budget constraints are preventing it from recertifying its firefighters in land-based water rescues. Without it, the city would be open to liability.

“Well, if I was off duty I would know what I would do, but I think you’re asking me my on-duty response and I would have to stay within our policies and procedures because that’s what’s required by our department to do,” Alameda Fire Div. Chief Ricci Zombeck said when asked by ABC7 if he would enter the water to save a drowning child.

Alameda firefighters could not even go into the water to get the body, so they waited until a woman in her 20s volunteered to bring the body back to the beach.

On duty, off duty.

I’d told myself this incident was out of my journalistic jurisdiction, and I was not on the clock for Oakland Local right then. All a rationalization because I was having an emotional response that made me feel helpless, depressed, out of place.

Meanwhile, those Alameda cops and firefighters were on duty — but said that status was precisely why they couldn’t act.

We all failed that day, And Ray Zack, 53, of Alameda, drowned while we stood by.

Meanwhile, in Colorado, my good friends Randy and Kit Cassingham told of a rescue that did happen. Everyone was on duty. But knowing Randy and Kit, if they were off duty, it wouldn’t have mattered. They would have rescued the teenager who fell off a cliff during a post-graduation party in a remote rural mountain area.

I’m not sure what to do with this. But I know now, really know, that a journalist can’t ever truly be off-duty. Certainly not for life-or-death events. I could not have save this Alameda stranger, any more than I could have saved my friend Max. But I should have asked more questions, and not given in to how I was feeling. I don’t blame the Alameda emergency responders for their inaction, but that situation had a dreadful wrongness about it.

I’m trying to figure out what to do with this. Suggestions are welcome, please comment below.

UPDATE: This sad event gave me an idea for the upcoming Code for Oakland event I’m helping to organize. What if emergency response agencies/dispatch could coordinate with qualified local volunteers in all kinds of emergencies? Like, say, people with Red Cross lifeguard certification? Stay tuned…

So I was happy to see this news today:

YouTube Founders Buy Delicious; First Step To Taking On Google?

…Of course, I’ve moved on. Diigo is now my new backup brain. I’ll keep an eye on how Delicious evolves, but it would take a hell of an upgrade to tempt me to switch back.

I only played a small role in this project — the vast majority of the work was done by Susan Mernit and Kwan Booth – my Oakland Local cofounders and partners in the House of Local media consulting group.

Yesterday, Susan, Kwan & I participated in a one-hour live chat hosted by J-Lab about this learning module. You can replay the complete transcript. We got really great interaction on this. J-Lab told us that this live chat attracted far more readers and participants than its other live chats. It was fun, and I’m glad it was a success!

See: How to gain influence on Twitter? Focus

Get this: They got Twitter to release to them a dataset of tweets from nearly 55 million accounts that were in use as of August 2009. That’s nearly 1.7 billion tweets, interconnected by almost 1.9 billion “social links” — which I think means @replies or retweets.

From this, they figured out some things about how influence works on Twitter. Basically, if you’re not already a celebrity or a major news organization or aggregator, then the key to gaining influence through Twitter is to focus on one or a couple of topics.

Also, the report has a good discussion of why popularity does not necessarily equal influence, especially on Twitter.

The research team is releasing its anonymized dataset. I bet other people will have a lot of fun running other analyses of this dataset.