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  • The Facebook Vote

    Anne Kathrine Petterøe 15:48 on Friday, 17 April, 2009 | 1 | Reply
    Tags: , , vote

    The Facebook Site Governance Vote is up, so I thought it was about time I sum up the “Facebook experience” as I have come to call it.
    (if you don’t know what I am talking about you can read this)
    For more information on the vote, please read Mark Zuckerberg’s blog post.

    I have received many questions about why I think my group went viral and why it grew so rapidly, when there were at least two other groups that didn’t.
    One very important factor is that I was first. Secondly I had a big portion of luck.

    Furthermore, what I had that the other two group administrators didn’t have, was a huge network *outside* of Facebook that I could tap into.
    The two other groups were started by Facebook members, using Facebook only to promote their groups. This of course almost limits them to status updates and writing their friends personally. I, on the other hand, had my blog, twitter and Facebook as tools.
    Facebook is a walled garden, blogs and twitter aren’t.
    I would for instance search for FacebookToS on twitter and send a tweet to everyone who mentioned it encouraging them join my group. This allowed me to reach people whom I didn’t already know, and through the re-tweet mechanism they all forwarded it to their friends in their networks and so on. The social amplifier.

    Lastly, I had mainstream media.
    The case was picked up from the Norwegian newspapers already on the first day of the campaign. Norway has 1,5 million users on Facebook. On the second night of the campaign the US mainstream media jumped on the bandwagon and the group was mentioned in the morning news on CNN and later on the Situation Room.

    Some numbers.
    One of my Facebook links on twitter was clicked 1,346 times. I had two more but unfortunately don’t have any stats for these.
    Dennis Howlett who blogged about the incident here, here, here and here on 3 different blogs, had 23,000 page views on those posts.
    (thank you, Dennis!)
    I at the time had 742 followers on twitter, Dennis had 2,923.
    I had about 400 friends on Facebook.

    Facebook contacted me very early on, letting me know they were on the case, and have kept me in the loop ever since. And it has been a great experience to be part of the process.

    So what has actually been going on behind the doors?
    Facebook has read every post and discussion on the Bill of Rights / ToS groups, noted the users concerns and questions and tried to answer these with the new documents. I am not sure how much of this I can blog about, so I will just say that Facebook has really done a phenomenal job in making sure everyone’s interests are taken care of. (thank you Barry for the behind-the-scenes work)

    The vote ends on April 23, 2009 at 11:59am (PDT) and will be binding if 30% or more of all active users (an active user is someone who has logged in to the site in the past 30 days) vote. Which means somewhere around 70 million users need to vote.
    So far 55,179 users have casted their votes.

     

    Statement of Rights and Responsibilites
    Response to Comments from users and experts on the Proposed Statement of Rights and Responsibiliteis:
    http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=183535615300

    Statement of Rights and Responsibilities:
    http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=183538190300

    Facebook Principles
    Response to Comments from users and experts on the Proposed Facebook Principles:
    http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=183539710300

    Facebook Principles:
    http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=183540865300

    Current Terms:
    http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

    Facebook Site Governance Page:
    http://www.facebook.com/fbsitegovernance

     

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  • This Is Pretty Ironic

    Anne Kathrine Petterøe 01:14 on Tuesday, 24 February, 2009 | 4 | Reply
    Tags: ,

    This just made me laugh. I am now blocked from sending messages on Facebook due to what they call an “overuse of the feature”.
    Being admin on a 130,000+ member group means receiving loads of messages every day, and I have done my best to answer every single personally.
    I guess it was time for me to take a break or something..

    Blocked

    “Facebook has determined that you were sending messages at a rate that is likely to be abusive. Please note that these blocks can last anywhere from a few hours to a few days. Unfortunately, we cannot lift the block for you.

    When you are allowed to resume sending messages, keep in mind that it’s possible to run into a block based on how many messages you send and how fast you send them. It’s also possible to be blocked when either starting a new message thread or replying to a message. Lastly, deleting old messages will not allow you to send more messages. In the future, please proceed with caution to avoid hitting the limit again. Please be aware that further abuse of such features can result in your account being permanently disabled. ”

     

    • yojibee 10:32 on Tuesday, 24 February, 2009 Permalink

      I feel at least one blog post coming up..
      Facebook’s groups still have a long way to go before they can be used as such.

    • yojibee 10:31 on Tuesday, 24 February, 2009 Permalink

      The limit is 5000 messages, but I don’t know the time frame.
      When you administer a group with 130 000 members 5000 messages isn’t much.

    • Vincent H. 09:31 on Tuesday, 24 February, 2009 Permalink

      Maybe the deal is that too much Facebook may be considered as selfabuse? At least now you got an excuse to ignore some of the messages you recieve. What’s their limit anyway, do they say anything about that?

    • påljoakim 07:04 on Tuesday, 24 February, 2009 Permalink

      Been there, done that. I think I was allowed 10 consecutive messages before I got a warning, thus having to setup a web page in order to share 100 Spotify invites.

      Since you’re already in the game – maybe you should create the group “Group creators who want to send unlimited messages to group members”? ;)

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  • The Reply From Facebook

    Anne Kathrine Petterøe 10:13 on Wednesday, 18 February, 2009 | 2 | Reply
    Tags: ,

    Barry Schnitt, a Facebook spokesperson, posted a reply on the “People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)” group, which I think everyone should read.

    Hi everyone,

    First, I want to apologize for the delay in response. It’s been a long day with lots of interesting and constructive discussions. Second, I want to thank you for your questions and concerns. As Mark expressed in his blog post on Monday, it was never our intention to confuse people or make them uneasy about sharing on Facebook. I also want to be very clear that Facebook does not, nor have we ever, claimed ownership over people’s content. Your content belongs to you.

    We do need certain licenses in order to facilitate the sharing of your content through our service. That’s where the Terms of Use come in. The fact that you’ve raised the questions you have is proof that we haven’t done a good job explaining these licenses in the actual language of the document. In fact, as we were working to answer your questions, we realized the new version of the Terms might technically permit some of the hypothetical situations people have offered. I can assure you, however, that these hypotheticals aren’t ones we had in mind when writing the Terms, and that selling user information for profit or using it to advertise Facebook in some way was never part of our original intent. Assurances aren’t enough, though, and we plan to codify this in our revised Terms through simple language that defines Facebook’s rights much more specifically.

    In the meantime, we’ve decided to revert to the old Terms as we work to address this. Mark has explained this in more detail in another blog post (http://blog.facebook.com), and we’ve created a group where people can provide input (http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=69048030774). We hope you’ll join this group and post comments. We promise to use these comments to help construct a new Terms of Use that reflects the principles around how people share and control their information, and that’s written clearly in language everyone can understand.

    I hope you don’t think your participation in this discussion was a waste of time. Honestly, your questions were very helpful to us in arriving at what we believe is the right decision. Also, I think your questions will continue to be useful as we’re crafting a new Terms.

    Again, thanks for the fruitful discussion and a special thanks to Anne Kathrine and Julius for setting up this feedback forum. We hope you’ll all join our “Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities” group and continue discussing these issues there.

    Barry

     

    • Rick Jesse 12:16 on Wednesday, 18 February, 2009 Permalink

      Hi Barry,

      I’m very happy to see FB listening to us and taking our complaints seriously. I suspect that though you started out with the best of intentions then get the legal beagals in who use the hammer of legal mumbo jumbo when only tweak of a screwdriver is needed.

      I respect the fact that you have taken us on with this issue.

      Keep it up, we want to keep FB going.

      Regards,
      Rick

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  • Why I Started the Facebook TOS Group

    Anne Kathrine Petterøe 23:28 on Tuesday, 17 February, 2009 | 2 | Reply
    Tags: , ,

    Since I started “People Against the new Terms of Service (TOS)” group on Facebook two days ago I haven’t had time to sit down and write my take on why I started the group in the first place.

    I was on the train on my way to work yesterday when I saw this tweet from Valdis Krebs. I hadn’t read anything about any changes to the TOS up until then and was surprised to see they were changed weeks ago and without anyone noticing.
    I have had an ambivalent relationship with Facebook since I signed up (it’s complicated), and in the years I have been there they haven’t done much to make me trust their service or their judgments, so I felt I had to speak up this time.
    After some initial research (reading the old and new TOS for instance) I set up the group on Facebook about an hour later.

    Personally it wasn’t so much about getting Facebook to change their TOS (at least initially). If you read the old TOS you would have known that they always sucked and probably always will. Ideally they would add the two lines they removed again, edit the wording in some places, explain why they felt they needed to change the Terms of Service and how these changes would affect their users.

    For me it was much more a matter of Facebook AGAIN not communicating properly with their members. Is it too much to ask for a notification or an email stating that they have changed their TOS?
    Maybe also explain in details why they did it and what benefits the changes would have to their members? Does Facebook actually think every member read their blog? I still have friends (on Facebook) who haven’t heard of RSS feeds or still don’t read any blogs.

    So much of what has happened the last two days could have been avoided if they had told us directly what they were up to. Facebook has a track record of not informing their users of changes to the service. Makes me wonder if they learned anything at all from the Beacon episode a while back.

    What I am hoping to achieve is for Facebook to realize that talking to your members actually is a good thing and maybe even that the members start to become more aware of what, how and with whom they chose to share their content on the web.

    It is about time Facebook starts to regain some trust with their users. To the end user it doesn’t matter if Facebook is committed to OpenID or not, what matters is what happens to their pictures, links and everything else they choose to share with their friends.

    (Parts of this post was also posted as a comment on ZDNet.)


     

    • moya watson 21:18 on Thursday, 19 February, 2009 Permalink

      ditto the kudos on “talking to your members actually is a good thing.”
      well done. i’m honored to be connected to @yojibee.
      -m

    • Simon Scullion 00:00 on Wednesday, 18 February, 2009 Permalink

      Well done for setting up the group, worthwhile stand imho!

      I helped spread the word, not out of any belief that FB will do an about turn, but to raise awareness, and allow FB users to make informed decisions about what they feel comfortable doing with their content.

      That FB doesn’t understand “that talking to your members actually is a good thing” given the modern social web of which it has become somewhat a cornerstone, is kind of ironic though, don’t you think!?

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  • Pirate Bay On Trial

    Anne Kathrine Petterøe 10:22 on Monday, 16 February, 2009 | 1 | Reply
    Tags: , piratebay, trial

    The trial in Stockholm, Sweden against The Pirate Bay starts today.

    If you are using BitTorrent you should be following this!
    50% of all torrents are tracked by The Pirate Bay’s 8 servers, so some of us (me included) worries what will happen if they are forced to shut them down.
    You can read more on Torrentfreak.com here.

    Makes me wonder if people are aware that BitTorrent can be used to share files which are not necessarily violating any copyright laws?

    You can follow the trial on twitter with the hashtag #spectrial:
    http://search.twitter.com/search?q=%23spectrial.
    There is also a live audio feed from the trial on Bambuser.com (Swedish only).

     

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  • Certifications - I Did It

    Anne Kathrine Petterøe 10:02 on Friday, 6 February, 2009 | 4 | Reply

    More than two weeks after Dennis Howlett’s initial post on certifications on SDN “Should you be certified?” the debate is still rolling. Yesterday we saw two new posts, one from Dennis and another from Blag on the subject.

    I have come to realize that among the SAP Mentors, I am one of the few who actually is certified. (SAP NetWeaver ABAP Web AS 6.40 developement consultant or something like that)
    I am usually not someone who cares about certifications, I don’t even hold a university degree or any other higher education for that matter. The reason why I chose to get certified was the chance of getting a job.

    I went from web/graphic design to form design and from there on realized that learning ABAP probably wasn’t such a bad idea. With that I also knew if I chose to get certified I would most likely get a junior position at a company I really wanted to work for. The certification was not important for this company because it told them I knew something, but because it showed them that I really wanted to work with this.

    I looked around for a place to take a couple of courses and do the certification and ended up choosing a private (SAP partner) school in Cologne. They also offered much more than TAW10/12, making it into more of an education than only a certification.

    I sat through 4 months of the 6-month program, before I decided I’d had it. I have never in my life experiences something so sloppy and boring. One teacher sat with us for weeks and just read through the PDFs, not being able to answer any of our questions. We had another dude who couldn’t even pronounce things correctly and who was teaching courses he had never done or covered technologies he had never worked with himself.
    In all those 4 months we only had one teacher who actually knew what he was talking about and he only came in as a replacement for a week after we had thrown out one of the other (horrible) teachers. I ended up refusing to pay the whole fee and took the certification through my employer-to-come instead of through the institute.

    The certification itself wasn’t hard. I had tons of documents with the questions and answers, so I just locked myself in my room for 2 weeks and learned the right answers by heart, travelled to Walldorf, sat down for 2 hours, and except for a few surprise questions I hadn’t seen before, it was a piece of cake. (albeit a very expensive piece of cake)

    The problems with this as I see it are:
    - The quality of the courses, both when it comes to teachers and material is poor.
    - SAP needs to be much stricter when it comes to partner training institutes.
    - New certifications or at least change them more often. What is the point when all the answers can be downloaded off the internet?

    How much of what I learned have I used up until now?
    Maybe 10 %.
    Which just shows me that the certifications aren’t really relevant to the work we are doing.

    I agree with Léo Apotheker when he says SAP’s job is to certify and not to recommend people. But to encourage customers to only hire certified consultants is certainly not the way to go. At least not as long as the certifications are in it’s current state.


     

    • Monty Kalsi 22:39 on Wednesday, 11 February, 2009 Permalink

      Ann,

      I agree with your post here. During my career as an SAP consultant, I have seen excellent non-certified SAP consultants and at the same time poorly performing certified SAP consultants.

      The problem is that certifications alone do not guarantee that you will perform well. And most of the SAP certified institutes rely on folks who are good on instructions but don’t have the real life experience.

      Simply because folks with real good experience and understanding of SAP prefer to do consulting as opposed to training.

      Like Fays mentioned above it is the real life project experience and enrichment that creates a good consultant and value to the client. So the question then becomes how you tap the knowledge of an experienced consultant to enrich the learning of another.

      As I feel consultants can provide the best training and knowledge if it is easy enough to do and there is a financial incentive to do the same.

      It is for this reason, I started SpinAct to share and redistribute one’s knowledge in a productized way.

      See my earlier post on this:

      http://blog.spinact.com/knowledge_as_a_service/2008/11/users-rate-sap-consultants-and-partners-online.html

      Look forward to having you all on SpinAct as we build the Knowledge Marketplace of the future.

      http://www.spinact.com/account/signup

      Best,
      Monty

    • Fays 20:06 on Friday, 6 February, 2009 Permalink

      I have had a similar experience Anne.

      I took the SOA 200 training, which is rather conceptual, as it relates to Enterprise Architecture.

      For this course, we had two guys doing the training. One, which is a colleague, and he’s fine, he knows his job. For 2.5 days we’ve learned interesting stuff. And then we had another guy, from a partner consulting company.

      This guy had no damn idea about what he was talking about. At a point, he ended up showing us his own slides instead of the regular training content. It was a great waste. And the training was given within SAP.

      I wondered if it was me, as I had a rather good knowledge of the area, or did the other participants have the same feeling. I was conforted to have a similar feedback.

      SAP Training’s excuse: course is too recent, there are not enough people who master these things.

      The certification in itself assesses your capacity in assessing information learned and reusing it. But I think, what people might expect from a training is above what’s in the book and comes from the trainer’s experience. That’s the real enrichment that allows you to get sometimes better at doing a specific task, as you take advantage from this experience. But this is definitely not written in the certificate.

    • yojibee 16:19 on Friday, 6 February, 2009 Permalink

      Might be that it is not 100% fair.
      But I also don’t think it is 100% fair to ask someone to pay 7.000 Euros for a training and then don’t deliver. The quality of the education was so bad, I have really only been able to use around 10% of what I learned. Out of 15 in my class, only 4 ever got certified and I am the only one who works with SAP today.

      Of course SAP can’t take the whole blame for this, but they have certified this institute for these kinds of trainings.
      There is certainly room for some improvement here.

    • Frank Koehntopp 15:40 on Friday, 6 February, 2009 Permalink

      Not sure if that’s 100% fair – the certifications and trainings are created to suit a wide group of people.
      I passed the 2004 Netweaver Security Certification, and I’d say I have used at least 80% of what was in the underlying trainings (ADM940, ADM950, ADM960).
      There sure is a wide variety of courses and certifications, and not all will work for all kinds of people. Finding and taking the ones that do is the real challenge.
      And the only valid certification you can get is through customer feedback (also true for trainers, btw.).
      Unfortunately that is a lot harder to transport in a certificate…

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  • SAP and Openness at TechEd in Berlin

    Anne Kathrine Petterøe 18:26 on Tuesday, 28 October, 2008 | 3 | Reply
    Tags: , ,

    Even though this was my first time attending a TechEd (or any other SAP event for that matter), I decided to go against the “general advice” for first-time attendees, and chose not to make any plans or book sessions before I left. I went as a part of the ESME team, as a DemoJam speaker, as a blogger and as a Mentor. All of those combined didn’t leave me much time to hang around and be stunned, but instead left me feeling as if I had been in a wind tunnel for four days.

     

    The official TechEd theme this year was “Connect, Collaborate and Co-Innovate” and when I saw this, all I could think was that this must be the right TechEd for me.
    As part of the ESME team and as an SAP Mentor, I had already familiarized myself with these three words as SAP understands them during the last weeks and months leading up to the TechEd.

    The journey started on Sunday on the Cluetrain from Frankfurt to Berlin.
    This was the pre-pre day event, and as it turned out it set the conversation for the rest of the TechEd. For the first time I was participating in a discussion about openness and collaboration and what this means to SAP.
    (On a small side note: The ride was definitely worth the small de-tour via Frankfurt, and I will definitely join next year too!)

    This discussion continued on Community Day, where Darren Hague on short notice decided to do a session on “NetWeaver and open source”. During the next two days, the Mentors/bloggers had the opportunity to talk to Zia Yusuf and Hervé Couturier and in both these meetings the word “openness” was re-occuring.

    Unfortunately I wasn’t able to participate in the meeting with Zia Yusuf as I was tied up in DemoJam preparations, but from what Dennis Howlett writes, Zia was listening intensely instead of arguing.

     

    When I started working with SAP three years ago, I decided to only focus on new technology (ERP5.0 and up), as there already are enough consultants/programmers out there who cover older systems. During my initial trainings the NetWeaver platform was always pitched as an open technology platform, ideal for developing applications.

    “SAP NetWeaver: Integrated, open and inclusive”

    “SAP NetWeaver provides an open, flexible and adaptable platform that addresses the challenges of today’s IT infrastructures and tomorrow’s IT evolution.”

    It didn’t take long however, for me to realize that SAP’s picture of what the words open and inclusive mean are slightly different than how I was used to view those words.
    The only way one can develop applications on a NetWeaver platform today, is if you work in for a partner or a customer, who already have a license.

    “SAP NetWeaver is a web-based, open integration and application platform that serves as the foundation for enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA) and allows the integration and alignment of people, information, and business processes across business and technology boundaries. It utilizes open standards to enable integration with information and applications from almost any source or technology. SAP NetWeaver is the foundation of SAP Business Suite and SAP Business ByDesign, and also powers partner solutions and customer custom-built applications.”

    Now what do you do, when the project you are working on, isn’t from either a partner or a customer?

     

    This question first became a reality for me when I started working on the ESME project. ESME is a community-driven project and because most of those involved are passionate SAP’pers we wanted this solution to run on NetWeaver.
    Little did we know when we started exactly how difficult it would be to actually find an instance for it to run on. The first version actually ran on a Tomcat server.
    I have had many people asking me along the way, why we were making it so difficult for ourselves. Why wouldn’t we just use JBoss like “everyone” else?
    Usually, my answer would be “because we are stubborn and stupid”.
    The real reason however for going with SAP is that we have hopes things will change for the better.

     

    The Mentor meeting with Hervé Couturier (newly appointed Executive Vice-President Products) was really refreshing and one of my TechEd highlights.
    Here was an executive who started the meeting saying “why can’t we?” instead of “why should we?”. It felt very refreshing to be able to present our “openness and open source case” to someone who obviously understood the advantages of collaboration in the SAP ecosystem.

    According to the feedback we received from this meeting,
    “This meeting was a testimonial to the value the Mentors add to, and I want to thank you for your support. You were great!” the meeting was well received on the other side too.

    Now I just hope SAP delivers.

    One last note.
    This is the comment from Tom Raftery, which was made on the night before TechEd had even started.
    “SDN is supposed to be a community of developers. Why doesn’t it have a community-rated shared code library then? Or is that a naive question”.

    Yes indeed, why not?

     

    • yojibee 02:03 on Tuesday, 13 January, 2009 Permalink

      Sure, these are all small steps in the right direction.

      What I miss most of all is a license, which allows several people to collaborate on community projects.
      And when I talk about openness I am not only referring to the code, but also to NetWeaver as a platform. Unless you work for a partner, a customer or in one of the few countries with a subscription, you cannot access the platform as a developer.

      What if NetWeaver was made as accessible as WebLogic?
      And what if you would combine that with a code library and SVN?

    • Trond Stroemme 17:46 on Monday, 12 January, 2009 Permalink

      Even old, stubborn giants can move… albeit slowly. We’ve had the SneakPreviews 8formerly known as miniSAP) since version 4.6C, something that at least shows SAP’s willingness to allow developers a hands-on system for their own training benefits. Of course, the problem is that you’re not licensed to actually create any finalized products for resale. The new subscription option seems to provide this possibility, although still geographically limited for some obscure reasons.

      Secondly, with the advent of Saplink (also created mainly due to the vibrant SDN community) we now have the options of sharing and distributing code. Again, granted, not my (our your) employer’s code, which most employers have a legitimate intellectual right to under our contracts, but at least we have the tools and means for both developing and sharing “own” code, to an extent not seen until very recently within SAP.

      As an example, there’s already the widget library; what about extending the SDN downloads section with a public library of (ABAP) contributions from the members? Granted, it would take some extensive house-keeping, since the mere dynamic of SDN and it’s contributors could rapidly drown it in a flood of contributions, but I’m sure it’s at least doable?

      Looking at the amount of sample code already available (yet rather unstructured) in thousands of blogs and forum postings, I would imagine that such a library of relatively open-source SAP code, provided, tested and mutually enhanced by community members, could be just what many of us are looking for…?

    • Michael Koch 19:01 on Tuesday, 28 October, 2008 Permalink

      Very interesting point Tom (and you) make in your last paragraph. However I think there is a twofold answer:

      As far as SAP is concerned, there is a “code library” – the one that is accessible via SE80. Granted, it’s not community-rated and public (only to SAP customers), but there you go.

      For customers and partners (the Z* and Y* stuff) the answer looks slightly different. Here the answer to Tom’s question is “competitive advantage”. Why should businesses share custom applications and developments on a large scale with a community? These are applications that improve their business and can potentially give them leadership in their market.

      I am all for sharing knowledge to make future apps faster, more secure and speed up development process, but I don’t think a lot of my clients would like it if I shared (their) code with other developers on a public platform. At least not under the current regulations that are in place, like Non-Disclosure Agreements, for example. In my view, openness doesn’t work in ALL areas of enterprise apps. It has to be decided on a case-by-case basis.

      But the good thing I took away from Berlin was that there is definitely something happening – and changing !

      Kind regards,
      M

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  • Will browser window resizing ever stop?

    Anne Kathrine Petterøe 21:53 on Monday, 22 September, 2008 | 1 | Reply
    Tags: browser, resize, Web

    This just happened to me while surfing:

    Browser resizing

    Now, how on earth will I be able to see your website if you resize my window to that size??

    My list of websites I am not visiting because of this behavior is forever growing.
    My screen estate is carefully planned and I like my window sizes. Thank.you.very.much.

     

     

    • børge 07:09 on Thursday, 20 November, 2008 Permalink

      You know you can turn this off forever in Preferences -> Content -> Advanced (JavaScript)?

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