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05 July

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A Visual Representation of Facebook Privacy Problems

Posted by Dawn Baird, Partner in social media,social networking

Guest Blog Post by Property Pal. You would have to have been living under a rock recently not to have noticed the furore over Facebook privacy issues. They have certainly got something of a huge reputation management problem on their hands at the minute.

We’ve taken a quick look at some of the visualisation tools available on the web and had a look to see if their potentially shark jumping moment can be pinpointed.

Blogpulse

Blogpulse monitors social mentions across the blogosphere, by examining terms inside blog posts. This particular graphing visual shows ‘facebook privacy’ becoming more of an issue mid April to present, with more and more mentions. At its peak the term existed in 0.12% of blog posts tracked across the blogosphere.

Delicious

Delicious provides visual analysis of the number of bookmarks being bookmarked by users across the web at any one time. In this particular graph the snapshot has been zoomed out to current. In total across the Delicious network there have been 54760 bookmarks tagged “facebook” + “privacy”, showing the concern of web users in general. The graph also illustrates the jump in the number of bookmarks in the past. January 2010 showed 1386 saves with these two tags. March 2010 has exploded with 2472 bookmarks – a 78% increase in the number of bookmarks.

This graph from delicious shows the trend for people tagging Facebook alternative Diaspora, indicating a negative response to the internet giant’s current policies.

Google Trends

Google Trends at a top level shows that around December 2009, a number of stories broke out about Facebook’s privacy. Online rights organisation Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) labeled aspects of Facebook’s privacy change “downright ugly”.

Drilling down further into a month on month data set, we can see news reference volume making a gradual linear increase.

Google News Trends

Following the roll out of Google’s new interface, Google news archive search graphically shows stories that have been launched on the topic of Facebook privacy. The peak in this case shows that most stories were generated in December. However, it is worth noting that the blogosphere is not included in this dataset – only the larger multi-author publishers and newspapers. This represents much more mainstream media and their impact.

Digg Trends

Digg Trends show that the most stories on Facebook privacy (and promoted) have been during this month.

Further diving into the data shows that this month, there has been about 15 more stories than the average promoted and Dugg.

The data for stories that weren’t promoted is just as interesting – for the number of stories submitted, regardless of whether they have been dugg or buried, there has been a 335% increase.

Twitter Trends

Trendistic monitors tweets across the Twittersphere, and as the other visualisations have show thus far, there is definitely still a correlation with data from elsewhere along the graph. Notice December’s mentions nowhere near the peak for May. Another Twitter meme tracker reports over 4 thousand links in the past week alone pertaining to the privacy issues.

Overall we can see from some of these meme trackers that the stories are continuing to percolate through online communities and social networks.

Some thought leaders such as Tim O’Reilly have figured that privacy being open may actually be a better scenario for the web. Gary V thinks we’ve taken our eye off the ball, with Facebook continuing to evolve, adapt and change over time to satisfy its users. Lest we forget ‘beacon’.

Facebook is attempting to put out the fires, but it will certainly be interesting to see how things progress from here on in and how they handle this obvious growing online concern. What do you think? Will it become an issue?

About PropertyPal

Today’s guest blog comes from Paul Anthony, who works as Internet Marketing Manager for Northern Ireland’s largest property website, PropertyPal.com. His role within the company includes managing all search engine optimisation, search engine marketing and social media activity.

PropertyPal.com is Northern Ireland’s number 1 property website, displaying details of more homes for sale and rent than any other website. It has around 95% of all properties for sale and rent, and at any time stocks over 40,000 properties to buy or rent. Including at time of writing approximately 5,000 houses for sale in Belfast, and 1,770 houses for rent in Belfast

It is independently owned and has more properties to rent in Belfast than any other Northern Ireland website since January 2010.