Over the past few days, members of the Facebook community, which has 175 million total users, have been outraged about changes the Facebook team snuck into the privacy policy. Members of the online community interpreted these policy changes to mean that Facebook now had the right to use anything anyone uploaded to their servers—including private pictures—for any reason, forever.

This morning, Facebook agreed to pull back the changes, which is a major victory for members of all online communities. Most communities are run with the understanding that users either accept the Ts & Cs or they shouldn’t sign up. But the Facebook community has found a way to harness it’s power—utilizing the Facebook platform as the main form of communication with the world and the company itself.

While watching CNN and eating Cheerios this morning, I saw an interview with Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer. He said the company wasn’t trying to do anything like what they are accused of, and that the whole thing is a misunderstanding. Still, Facebook has reverted back to its old terms of service, and the CPO said they will consider making future changes based on what community members want.

Facebooks even started a new group called “Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities”. The group description begins:

This group is for people to give input on Facebook’s terms of use. These terms are meant to serve as the governing document for how the service is used by people around the world.

As of 10:15am ET today, the group already has f 33,588 members, and that number rose from 31,000 in less than 15 minutes. The big themes of the posts are that Facebook should notify its members when there are privacy changes, and that people object to the previous changes.

It’ll be interesting to see if the community will actually gain the power to influence future privacy policies. Really fascinating stuff.

All of us who design web pages are constantly making educated guesses about where our users’ eyes travel on the page. We give visual cues with design elements to try to lure people’s eyes to certain areas of the screen. Ideally we’d all run our pages through a round of thorough user testing, complete with eye tracking, before publishing anything, but that’s often not realistic.

Last week Google released results from a recent eye tracking study. If we can’t do the studies ourselves, at least we can follow other studies and glean ideas for the best approach.

According to Google’s blog:

Our User Experience Research team has found that people evaluate the search results page so quickly that they make most of their decisions unconsciously. To help us get some insight into this split-second decision-making process, we use eye-tracking equipment in our usability labs. This lets us see how our study participants scan the search results page, and is the next best thing to actually being able to read their minds.

The most interesting finding to me is that people tend to scan results in order, mostly ignoring visual cues. I had always believed the “golden triangle” rule that says users scan the top left of search results, as the image on the left below shows. But I always assumed that this rule broke down when non-textual elements were present.

Continue Reading “Google Eye-Tracking Shows “Golden Triangle” Rule Holds Up Even With Images”

As our economic outlook is still a bit uncertain, encourage your company to try the following to help reduce spending in the first half of 2009 while keeping its employees in tact:

1. Minimize Office Costs

There are many things you can do to reduce phone bills and save on electricity such as

• Using Skype or another VOIP product for long distance calling
• Make sure it’s “lights out” by a certain time of night to save on electricity bills
• Negotiation phone, DSL, electricity and other utility and other office vendor bill rates, or switch
• Print only when you have to and start to share documents electronically

While much of the above may be minimal, if you can get a large percent of your workforce doing the above savings will be seen.

2. Stay At Home Base More

At a minimum invest in a good virtual meeting product like WebEx or GoToMeeting (or a free alternative Califlower), where you can hold virtual meetings and web casts versus traveling to meet with someone.  While we know face to face meetings are valuable, saving $1000+ on multiple travel trips may be more important right now to survive the next year.  You can do things like virtual white boarding and sharing documents to work through to dos together.

3. Have Extra Office Space?

Rent it out to a team looking to save costs this year too!

4. Reduce Agency/3rd Party Service Provider Fees

Need that marketing agency at $15000/month, or are you better off hiring someone by project?  What about tech recruiters – can you use tools like LinkedIn, Jobster or Facebook instead to hire new team members?

5. Outsource Jobs That Are Not Core To Your Business

Do you really need a staff of HR, IT Support, Lawyers and Accountants to help you run your business?  Outsourcing companies in these areas are specialized to serve these needs economically for any type of business.

While the above tips may seem obvious to you, the key isn’t 1-2 people or department doing the above, it’s the whole company.  Internal communications should go out encouraging the above behavior such that it is rewarded when times are better again – for example, movie tickets or gift certificates you may be able to get donated for the biggest cost cutter.

While catching up on some industry reading over the weekend, the usual “Top 10 X for Y” normally peak a bit of interest.  This weekend included a report from PayScale, the “Ten Careers in Demand for 2009” – of course that really peaked my interest.

The usual medical jobs (nurses and technicians), along with some new ones like career counseling or public relations professionals who can handle crisis communications, software developers were also noted to be in the top 10.  But with one caveat – software developers who can stay on top of change with the rapid pace we are going through for technology convergence and new device deployments around the world.

So how do you not just accept change as part of your career, but embrace it with everything you do?  Here are some tips to stay ahead and keep a job in these fast pace times.

1. Stay On Top Of Industry Research

Stay in tune with new channels for communications, and the particular industry vertical you serve – be it manufacturing, retail, energy or something else.  There are many ways to get information now, from the heavy hitting research firms (with heavy hitting prices – ask your company if they have a subscription you can tap into) of Gartner and Forrester, to online data sources like CNET, to individuals who have a passion for blogging on tech, like GigaOm and Guy Kawasaki.  (and of course the Webgrrls blog!)

Make it a habit to stay on top of different writers and points of views either by scheduling a daily catch up on your calendar in the morning or evening, or, focus on catching up on the weekend.

2. Write

Volunteer to write white papers for your company, for a reputable provider of content online or your own blog.  This will force you to continue to do your homework while getting your name out there for being knowledgeable on the next cutting edge widget.

3. Your Process to Develop Software

How “agile” is your software development process?  You don’t have to adopt full blown agile approaches like scrum, but you can modify parts of your process to be more open to change as you learn more about the goals and objectives of a project you are working on.  While you may kick off a project today that is due in a year, you may find along the way that there are 4 more devices that are coming out you need to support, and 2 being sunset.  So make sure you can, at a minimum, adjust for changes along the way.

How are you planning to embrace change in 2009?