Only Connect

We’re hardest on those we love. I adore Timehop. You give it access to your checkin, photo and status streams, and it rounds up that data and sends you a daily email recapping what you were doing a year ago. I don’t like getting email, but I check the Timehop emails almost as soon as they come in.  It’s a dead simple nostalgia trip that’s very well done.  (And, just to drive the ol chestnut home that execution trumps idea, yes, you’ve seen this same thing with Ben Brown’s flickr hack and Photojojo’s Time Capsule.  Timehop just has more data to work with, a more seasoned user base available and is making a sustained run at it.)

So I was surprised yesterday to get an email notifying me that a few of my friends were following me on Timehop.  The deal I thought we had was simple:  I give you access to my data, you send me a personal blast of my past.  Now you’re involving my friends?  First off, that email includes data I don’t make publicly available.  Secondly, what does it even mean to share this experience? Are my friends supposed to be able to share in my nostalgia even if they weren’t involved somehow?   Weird.  And a change of the game I agreed to play which I’m only finding out about after the fact, once some of my friends are already perusing the data I’ve given Timehop.

On the bright side: this email made me click through to see the cool new things they are doing with the new version. It’s rounding up data from all previous years into one page, which makes for an intriguing time trip for those (like me) enchanted by memory.  They are also generating metadata, asking you to annotate/explain memories, choose favorites you can cull into a Pinteresty board to savor outside the daily stream.  The visual presentation is more striking.  It’s really good stuff, and an exciting evolution of something I’m already invested in.

Which brings us to the unfortunate & unexpected socialization of these objects I’ve entrusted to them for my own personal review.

*  It’s not cool to change the game without getting the players buy in.

I know, I know.  Facebook is brutal & bold in dismissing the user implications of its product changes.  They either trot out a non-apology apology and roll something back a bit, or they just press ahead, users schmusers.  They’ll change privacy policies, default objects to public, pull data in when you don’t expect it, make it difficult to get objects out of the system or sever contacts, do data representations that radically change the context of what you agreed to.  Just because they’ve gotten away with it doesn’t mean that we should take this approach.

Maybe the coming consumer facing web service crunch is going to have all sorts of startups pivoting like whirling dervishes and trying to repurpose social objects to have more surface area, connectivity, virality.  I’d argue that you have to bring users along for the ride.

* Permissions don’t cascade gracefully.  It’s complicated.

A long time ago, I gave a talk about all the data streams that were becoming available, how exciting it was going to be to remix and represent them, and just how little we understood about the implications of all that.  I would give the example of Jeff Veen innocently plugging a Basecamp RSS feed into Bloglines not realizing that he was publicly exposing sensitive project data.  If one of the primary architects of the participatory Web overlooked the implications of one connection point, what do we think will happen when regular folks start plugging into multiple data streams with various levels of privacy expectations?

A mess, that’s what.  And it’s gonna take a bit to sort out.  This post is meant to help us all sort it out, because data aggregation and personal knowledge is one of the things I’m most excited about.

Back to Timehop.  Here are the new permissions ideas they posted with this new round of work:

Yesterday, I asked exactly who could see my stuff, since it wasn’t clear to me.  Timehop founder Jonathan Wegener was right on the ball and answered that they showed ‘public’ content to followers, and they assumed that people who were my Facebook friends could become followers. A few problems here:  one, assuming the level of connection that I imply by making someone a Facebook contact, two, overriding the ability I have now to serve private things like Instagram photos and checkins at the item level to these other services, and three, defaulting my Timehop content to open when that was never the mental model I agreed to.

For me, Facebook is kind of a shell social graph, a place where I’ll allow superficial connections but never really give the good stuff. That’s reserved for private networks like Instagram, Path and Foursquare. Timehop oversteps its bounds by assuming that I’d want to let my Facebook settings cascade across these other services.  As I read this privacy grid, my Foursquare checkins shouldn’t be public. I’d expect any service to, at the very least, reproduce the privacy settings I already have in place if they ask to take my data.

Now, I know this is hard, and largely new territory.  About.me had the same problem in their early integrations, inadvertently making public some things that were marked private.  And, once notified, they fixed it.  I expect Timehop to do the same, but I point this stuff out because we should all be thinking it though.  And, once again, I’d like to remind everyone that FireEagle did some awesome work in the area of granular permissions, clear user communications, and timely reminders/re-opt in messaging as they tried to blend location streams for users.  I would love Tom or someone to write up some of those practices which are even more apt now.

* Don’t default to using my networks for your marketing. 

I understand why people who are struggling for traction do this, but it makes me bananas.  It’s in the same ballpark as defaulting data to public without making me painfully aware of all the implications.  I love the prompt to add more explanation to a previous tweet or image.  Very cool idea.  Totally uncool to default to publicly tweeting/timelining that annotation.  I was at dinner with my son last night and he’s all “I didn’t get your tweet about that thing that happened two years ago.”  My jaw dropped.  Then he tells me it was on Facebook, too. I felt like I’d been had, took, bamboozled, led astray.  Don’t make your users feel stupid.  Let them call the shots when you use their networks for your own gain.  (Jackson’s take on my inadvertent postings:  ”Maybe it just means that you’re getting so old that you are confused by the Internet.”)

So, Timehop, I love you.  Please think about some of these things.  I nuked my Memolane account because I couldn’t for the life of me parse what they were trying to make public and keep personal.  And I don’t like feeling like I don’t have control of my own personal thoughts, photos, appearances in time/space.

Update: Just got an email (about 30 min or so after posting) intro-ing Timehop Social. They do a nice job of setting it up and include a note about privacy. I think there are just some kinks, and maybe the email should be a precusor to *you* turning the social elements on.

[I’m playing around with Branch, and tried to start a thread on this.  Comment below or join that thread if you’d like.]

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