It will come as no surprise to my regular readers that I sometimes exhibit inappropriate responses in social situations. For example, when I hear about a tragedy, and there is something remotely funny about the event, that’s the part that gets my attention. If a guy dressed in a bunny outfit kills a forest ranger, I can’t focus on the tragedy part. In that sort of situation, I would probably let out an involuntary snort before noticing no one else is laughing. I’d try to play it off as a cough, but no one would buy it.
My biggest social problem, by far, is a habit of revealing my opinion with my first reaction, before I realize I should be keeping that opinion to myself. Some husbands, when asked a question by their wives, use the time-honored “What do YOU think, dear?” But wives don’t like that approach. It seems condescending. Worse yet, it does not leave you vulnerable to having the wrong opinion, so it has a killjoy element.
Last night, by accident, I discovered The Ultimate Response to topics in which you don’t yet know the right response. It happened when I was simultaneously brushing my teeth, and yawning, and responding to my wife. It came out something like this: “Ooo-aah-mumble-agh.”
My wife stopped, and looked at me, and said, “What does that reaction mean?”
Bingo. I had accidentally discovered a response that has neither a positive nor a negative connotation. For the rest of the evening, I used it for all of my responses, to great effect.
Shelly: “Do you want to watch 30 Rock?”
Me: “Ooo-aah-mumble-agh.”
Shelly: “I’d like to watch it.”
Me: “Hey, me too!”
Feel free to try my new noise at home, or in the office. You might have to practice until it has no trace of negative or positive vibe. Be careful not to go up in pitch toward the end, because that can be construed as optimism.
You’re welcome.
De
from: http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/
Monday, December 31, 2007
blog.facebook.com
About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We've made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we've made even more with how we've handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I'd like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.
When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn't get in people's way as they browsed the web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared. We were excited about Beacon because we believe a lot of information people want to share isn't on Facebook, and if we found the right balance, Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends.
But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn't have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better.
Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don't want to use it.
This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we're releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don't want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won't store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.
On behalf of everyone working at Facebook, I want to thank you for your feedback on Beacon over the past several weeks and hope that this new privacy control addresses any remaining issues we've heard about from you.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Mark
from:http://blog.facebook.com/
When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn't get in people's way as they browsed the web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared. We were excited about Beacon because we believe a lot of information people want to share isn't on Facebook, and if we found the right balance, Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends.
But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn't have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I'm not proud of the way we've handled this situation and I know we can do better.
Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don't want to use it.
This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we're releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don't want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won't store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.
On behalf of everyone working at Facebook, I want to thank you for your feedback on Beacon over the past several weeks and hope that this new privacy control addresses any remaining issues we've heard about from you.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
Mark
from:http://blog.facebook.com/
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
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