Rockville Central is Moving. Join Us!
Feb 23, 2011 7:00 - 62 Comments
We are excited to let you know of a new development here at Rockville Central.
Since we began in June 2007 (here’s our first post), we have always stressed the community aspect. We aim to be an open, fair, and civil space in which to share views about what’s going on in Rockville. That means this site has always been about you, the participant. That focus has spurred very gratifying growth and we have remained in the top five local blogs in Maryland for a number of years.
However, traffic and readership has never been the most important measure of success for us. We are far, far more interested in knowing things like:
- How many people entered public life who had not participated before?
- How deep and robust were comment exchanges on key articles?
- How many people were sending article contributions and adding their voices?
- What other community web sites were getting started?
These measures, too, have been very gratifying as all of them have come true. Especially that last point. As new friends like Patch have gotten started and the Gazette and even the City of Rockville itself have implemented features we pioneered, and as current friends like Rockville Living have continued to grow, we are excited that the online community in and around Rockville is on its way to being vibrant and alive. The community is well served by this ecosystem of news, opinion and information.
Now, it is time for us to move to the next chapter in the life of Rockville Central.
Some time ago, we initiated Rockville Central’s Facebook page, and this has grown to become its own robust space for comments and participation. What’s more, in examining our traffic logs, it is the most important source (after Google) of traffic to the rockvillecentral.com site.
We believe that this suggests that Facebook is where people, by and large, have decided to go for their first-stop online community activities. Which begs the question: Why have a separate site, and try to drag people away from Facebook? Why not go where they are?
For entities and organizations that are trying to turn a profit, or have other institutional or organizational reasons to have a separate identity, it can make sense to have a separate web space. But Rockville Central is different and, as we thought hard about it, we realized we could find no compelling reason that Rockville Central needs to exist as a separate rockvillecentral.com site.
And so, as of March 1, all new Rockville Central content will be found solely on our Rockville Central Facebook page. We hope you will join us there. Everything you have come to know and love about our articles will also exist in Facebook. You can comment, share, and interact — all with more ease and in one place. We’ll no longer have conversations in two different locations.
One thing that will change is that we will do less duplicative reporting. For a city its size, Rockville is well-covered, journalistically. We don’t need to duplicate the efforts of our friends. (How many recaps of the Mayor and Council meetings can you read, really?) We will focus instead on trying to build community and providing content and services that are different and not currently offered by others.
We don’t know necessarily what that will look like, but we are excited to see it emerge!
This is a bold step for us, and, to our knowledge, there are no other Facebook-only hyperlocal community hubs such as ours. It is our next step in trying to blaze a trail.
The existing rockvillecentral.com will continue to exist, and all current content will remain. Old links will still work. But, after February 28, there will be no new posts on that site, and all commenting will be closed. We invite you, instead, to post on our Facebook page.
Thank you for your loyal readership all these years, and we hope you will continue along with us as we embark on this next phase of our life.
We’ll see you over on Facebook.
Your friends,
Cindy Cotte Griffiths
Editor
Brad Rourke
Founder and Publisher
Best of luck, Brad and Cindy. There’s some really sound thinking behind this, and I can’t wait to see how it goes. I think it may be an inspiring decision.
Thanks Daniel, for the good wishes!
Bummer. I was just thinking about how little I like the “competing” blogs v. yours. I know a bunch of people who avoid FB at all costs.
What does this mean for your TBD.com partnership?
We’re still enthusiastic partners. Now, we are their first “Facebook-only” partner. It is possible others may follow suit!
I really like your site. I subscribe to it via my RSS feed reader. I do not have a facebook account. And have no interest in getting one. I will miss this website when it migrates solely to facebook.
Marina, You don’t have to have a Facebook account to continue to read. Our page will be public so anyone can see it. However, you will need a profile to leave comments. I understand you enjoy the RSS feed and that is a little tricker to replicate without Facebook.
As a loyal reader of Rockville Central for several years, I must say this decision appalls me. Facebook is the garbage dump of the internet, and Rockville Central really deserves to stand separate from it. I also think putting your entire infrastructure in the hands of a third-party service already well known for its growing privacy concerns and ever-changing terms of service is a bad move.
Rockville Central will be making this move without me and certainly many other readers as well.
Wow, this is an interesting decision. I think overall you may lose readers who dislike Facebook. And in a few years when Facebook is no longer the #1 site on the web (remember MySpace?) I hope you don’t regret the decision. Good luck!
Hey Brad and Cindy,
Perhaps you should poll your readers
(“Engage. Better.”)
Actually, Piotr, this move *is* based on data — Facebook is the second most important source of traffic after Google, 45% of our readers are *daily* Facebook users (another 23.4% use it a few times per week), and the number of “likes” on the Rockville Central FB page has gone up since this announcement. Yes, it is change for some people and some even dislike the move. We expected that! We are sorry to disappoint, but that’s OK.
(For those who are wondering about the “Engage. Better.” comment, that is the tagline of my business, which appears at the bottom of my emails. It does not have anything to do with Rockville Central beyond the fact that I sometimes transact RC business using my own email.)
Thanks,
Brad
Thanks Brad,
I was not suggesting that you do not have a basis for your decision.
However, I renew my suggestion for a poll. What’s the harm… …that you may not like the resutls?
Piotr
This decision is puzzling to me, though I do understand that TBD has now pulled out of regional webpages and that operating a webpage or blog takes time and resources.
I don’t know of any organization, business, or other entity that has abandoned its Web presence and migrated to Facebook. To me, the purposes and formats are entirely different.
Most organizations use FB as a teaser to draw you to their full Website, or to watch a TV show, buy a product, etc. Their updates are fleetingly interactive and engaging. Most posts I see from pages I have “fanned” are not worthy of, or invite, comment and reflection.
Speaking of TBD … ouch.
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/citydesk/2011/02/23/tbds-night-of-the-long-knives/
http://www.bizjournals.com/washington/news/2011/02/23/most-tbdcom-jobs-being-eliminated.html
Theresa, thanks for the note. That’s exactly our point. Most orgs use FB as a teaser, but why? It is because they have a need to have an institutional presence. We don’t! Our purpose is to foster community, and to do so from an online standpoint. So, we decided to go where the people are. It is outside-of-the-box on purpose.
I liken it to the move some philanthropic foundations have begun doing. Instead of deciding to exist in perpetuity, they are spending their endowments down completely. The idea is that once you decide you “need to exist,” you begin to make decisions based on self-preservation. In the case of Rockville Central, it is easy to make decisions based on what we think might drive traffic rather than what might further community (not saying we do that, but the temptation is there). We think this will have a beneficial effect on our chief goal — which is to foster community (not be a news source).
Brad,
Hmmmm… you’ve conducted reader polls before. Why not this time?
Piotr, you raise a good point. I’ll answer it over on Facebook, since we are moving that way: http://www.facebook.com/notes/rockville-central/rockville-central-to-move-100-to-facebook/10150096085350829
There’s a big difference between “liking” RC on Facebook, and actually writing a comment of any depth on the website. Frankly, I’ve seen very few comments on the FB RC page that actually discussed anything beyond a one- or two-sentence bit of fluff.
I’m sure that it’s unpleasant to host this website when you’ve got contentious and vicious attacks flying back and forth, especially when you “want everyone to play nice”. But that’s what genuine dialogue is, especially in this day and age (unfortunately).
I suspect that the upcoming local political races will be a lot different than the last one, without a common venue in which to express opinions. Since the Gazette prints only a handful of letters, and those are restricted to a couple of hundred words each, that makes it an even lonelier prospect.
Ultimately, it’s crazy irony that we have a “level playing field” like Facebook on which we can all express ourselves, but the fact that it’s so fragmented means that very few people are actually communicating. Oh well, I’ll just go back to posting photos of my quilts and my ratatouille.
Having been online since 1992, I’ve seen the forums go from FidoNet to UseNet to the web to aggregator sites to MySpace, and I am confident that something completely new will come along by the end of 2013 to blow Facebook out of the water.
I have no plans to post on Facebook (I loved Betty White’s line about Facebook on Saturday Night Live). I have started to post occassional comments on Rockville Patch. It seems like the reasonable place to go for those who are looking for a blog format.
Thanks Brad and Cindy for many years of fun blogging!
Sorry to see you go. I read your articles through my reader so it looks like I will be cutoff.
Good news! You’ll be able to subscribe via RSS to our Notes here: http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notes.php?id=11270373798&viewer=0&key=c034072652&format=rss20
You don’t need to be signed into Facebook to read them, or even have a Facebook account.
It looks like this will be a tough transition for many of us. Thanks for all you’ve done… and will continue to do!
Our years of blogging are not over. We are changing platforms. You can blog from Blogger, WordPress, Drupal, etc. and I’ve tried all of these. No one that we know of is blogging with Facebook as a platform. Now we will give it a try! I’m excited by the possibilities especially with smart phones. We hope many more will join in the conversation, particularly those who have not been active around Rockville in the past. This is a new frontier and it still holds all the best of what we have been doing. People can choose not to participate - that’s their decision. I’m not the kind of person who disregards and writes off possibilities without trying.
I am disappointed that you plan to move to Facebook. I am not a member of Facebook and I do not have any intention of becoming one.
It is nice that I can read posts via RSS, but if I cannot post comments, then I will be less inclined to read the posts.
Good luck to you.
Here’s another way to look at it.
Remember when eBay first started? People did not know exactly what to make of it. Then, eventually, businesses began to spring up that *only existed* on eBay. This is kind of like that — we are looking at Facebook as a true platform (which is what it is) as opposed to a separate application. Given the adoption rates of Facebook throughout the United States, we feel confident that FB is not a flash in the pan and is unlikely to go the way of the CB radio.
That said, we understand some people won’t like the move.
David, we have appreciated all your comments and hope you will change your mind.
To me, Facebook to some extent has become my main feed for information. Yes I have a ton of other feeds in different forms but I also appreciate knowing what friends and family think is important. I can’t get that anywhere else. People use these online tools in many different ways. Other sites require accounts for making comments. You could look at Facebook as just another feed.
[...] One site’s solution: Take the “site” out of “news site.” Starting March 1, Rockville Central, a community news outlet for the DC suburb of Rockville, Maryland, will move its operation to…its Facebook page. Entirely to its Facebook page. [...]
Cindy said — You could look at Facebook as just another feed.
Right, and isn’t that the opposite of what you said you wanted it to be? You want more dialogue. I think this will cause you to lose that. I am not sure why it’s necessary to have an either-or. I view FB as break from work, sometimes a a time-waster, not a place I come to contemplate events and developments.
The new kid on the block isn’t Facebook. It’s Tumblr. So say the young folks!
Brad is practicing what he preaches. A poll is not necessary Piotr, it’s his (and Cindy’s blog), not a government entity, that publishes a poll and then dismisses what the people think.
I’ll miss this. It’s like losing an old friend. I had Facebook, for a while, but it didn’t seem helpful to me. It also seemed like so many people writing about minor aspects of their lives, like, “I played Scrabble, tonight, with my family, and we had fun.,” which seemed very self-centered,; ego-centric, in a boring way, and uninteresting. So, I de-activated my Facebook account, until today, when you wrote that you were going to Facebook. But, now, I think I’ve changed my mind back, again, and am going to de-activate it again. George Clooney said social networking, on Facebook, to him, was like getting his annual prostrate exam. Maybe he has a point.
@Theresa I said Facebook could be a feed because people were saying they wanted a feed. Everyone can make Facebook what they want it to be. I think we have been very clear about how we hope the new platform will bring even more and vibrant sharing.
I am on Tumblr too!
@Bill Of course, I agree with you that Brad and Cindy can do whatever they want with their blog and I wish them well. On the other hand, the outpouring of support here for the notion to continue this platform speaks for itself.
Given the large number of comments above, you are right, at this point a poll is no longer needed; an informal one has already emerged in this comment trail, but the future of this blog has, apparently, already been decided.
Brad and Cindy created a Rockville institution that is loved, so those of us who enjoyed it, and are not interested in its future guise, will mourn its loss. That’s all.
Thank you all for caring so deeply. We still think our reasoning is sound. We can remember a number of moves we’ve made at Rockville Central over the years that were initially met with concern. They mostly turned out fine.
Why, even starting the blog itself turned out to be controversial. I can remember phone calls early on with people who called me to find out what my “agenda” was.
See you over on Facebook, those who want to come along.
http://www.facebook.com/RockvilleCentral
Sorry to see you go. I do not nor will I ever use Facebook for any reason or any purpose. Facebook is a security and privacy nightmare and since I am an information security professional, I prefer never to associate myself with a site that takes my online health as seriously as a five year old deals with a cold. Neither covers their noses when they sneeze and I will not stand for it. It’s bad enough to share an elevator with a 5 year old whose parents didn’t teach them proper etiquette,, I am not going to enable Facebook by doing the same.
So good luck, Rockville Central. When you go you officially lost this reader!
[...] First, the wince. Cotte Griffiths announced that she and her business partner, Brad Rourke, were pulling the plug on their Rockville (Md) Central news website. After three and a half years in publication, both had grown tired of juggling content creation and advertising sales, she told me. Furthermore, competition from Patch, another indie website, the local print publication and the municipal government’s site made their reporting redundant, Rourke blogged. [...]
Sorry, I can’t help but chuckle - OK, laugh hard enough that I have to wipe coffee from my keyboard - at the idea of a poll from the Councilman…
That said, I would miss the input of those who would prefer to avoid Facebook. While I’m there daily, I understand that many many others are not and would not like to lose their thoughts and opinions as well. There also is the question of moderating comments; here comments are read and moderated before posting, but not sure there is a way to do that on FB without just deleting comments that wouldn’t follow the guidelines - and that’s just as much comment maintenance as here, isn’t it?
I’ll give it a try, since I already get the feed there, but my own personal preference is this standalone site.
Hi Deb, thanks for the note. On comments, we have the same moderating abilities on FB as we do here (well, we could actually EDIT comments here but we don’t — we either let them through or decline). What we have found (and believe will hold true) is that, because FB ties much more to people’s overall life, they moderate themselves a bit more than they do when commenting on a specific blog. So we are not anticipating the same issues, or at least not at the same intensity.
But, we are ready to be proven wrong. An experiment!
You cannot withhold someone’s comment on FB and then post it after it’s approved, as you do now on RC. Anyone who’s a “friend” can post whatever they want, and you can delete it after it appears. Are you going to have some capability beyond this?
Sorry, I may have misspoke re comments on FB. I don’t think we will have special capabilities.
When we started Rockville Central, we did not moderate comments before they were posted. On occasion we had to delete comments, so we would be returning to this system. But I must say, I have high hopes we will not have to resort to doing so.
When I was speaking with the journalist who interviewed me from the Nieman Lab yesterday, she said they had found that people were much more civil on Facebook than in other places. We talked about how people have much more of a “face” on Facebook. Your picture appears. You are interacting with friends and family. We are curious to see what happens and have almost four years of experience to compare!
Another important thing to remember is that with one click, administrators can delete fans from their Facebook page and also ban them permanently. Perhaps this is why people behave better.
Congratulations Brad and Cindy on your newest venture (adventure?). I think it’s great to keep moving forward and explore new ways to create community. You have both worked so hard on Rockville Central and I have not doubt you will continue to create interesting content and stimulate thoughtful discussion. I love it that someone from Rockville is blazing new trails in the media world!
See you on Facebook!
I really enjoyed reading the blog. I hate the Facebook idea and will not follow you there. I am so disappointed, and will miss a part of my daily routine.
Loved Rockville Central but hate Facebook and I’m never going there. Bummer. Good luck. The Gazette and Rockville patch will have to do.
[...] Brad Rourke added in a blog post to announce the move: For a city its size, Rockville is well-covered, journalistically. We don’t [...]
You guys just can’t keep still. Thank goodness. I’m glad you’re exploring new platforms to engage the community. The technology keeps evolving and you’re taking us along with you. If Facebook can provoke a revolution in Egypt, just think what it might do in Rockville. I’ll look for you in your new home!
It’s not been my experience that people contribute the same on FB as on this site. Many comments are either more off-the-wall and end up deleted by the hosts or aren’t posted at all since FB is indeed so public.
I think RC will survive, but I think it will change a LOT more than was anticipated, and I’m not sure all for the better. I think we will lose many voices that would have felt comfortable here where it was mostly just Rockville readership and the odd wanderer, but not in big old impersonal Facebook-land. I’ll be there, hoping for the more optimistic outcome, but will miss those voices not comfortable joining on FB. :-\
Is this URL being reserved just in case?
Deb, all the current content will remain at RockvilleCentral.com and we will retain the domain. There just will be no new content there, and comments will be closed on the site.
Our hope is that Rockville Central will not be your run of the mill Facebook page and will generate good engagement. We are going to give it enough time to really give it a shot.
Thanks for the nice note, Max!
Oh, Brad and Cindy, how can you do this? You finally taught me to use the internet a little bit to the point that I actually looked at Rockville Central almost every day and now I have to start all over again. Rockville Central with all the rants I chose to ignore and all the issues you addressed was such a wonderful part of Rockvilles’ democratic environment. Thank you for all the time and effort you invested. You both make “Citizen” have meaning.
[...] the idea even further, one small US local news site has opted to be entirely Facebook based. “There are always two different conversations going [...]
In my early post, I was caught up, in my feelings of loss and sadness, about you moving to Facebook, and I didn’t thank you for all the good you have done for the community and all of the help you have given me. I wrote that it was like losing a long-time, good friend.
You said that one of your goals was to get more people interested and involved in the community; you certainly have helped me do that.
I am indebted to you, valued your help, support, and your friendships. Even though I won’t be going with you, I wish you the very best, in this cutting-edge endeavor, and your courage, in trying your new venture. I think it will also be less cumbersome, for you, and some do not realize that you do this without any pay, at all.
Even though I won’t be going with you, after much thought, and waffling back and forth, as I was on Facebook, then went back, briefly, when you announced you were moving there. Unlike you, I didn’t find its new platform easier to use but to the contrary. But that is not the reason for me not going, and that is not the point.
You are bright, energetic, thoughtful, community-minded people. I admire you for those qualities and many others. Thank you, again, for all you have done, on this blog, and I wish you the very best, with your cutting-edge endeavor.
Ruth and John, thank you for your very kind words. Your support has always meant so much to us and we do not disappoint you lightly.
While we know that for now Facebook is not necessarily for everybody, we think if you give us a shot you may be surprised at how much more useful Rockville Central can become.
Sounds intriguing. How will this affect your revenue? I don’t think Facebook shares ad revenue with owners of pages, but you do get this from your current website.
Hi Dan, thanks for the question. Our current ad revenue is something we are foregoing with this move. (Which is not to say we will not develop other revenue models . . . but we don’t know what they are yet.) Our ad revenue, like many blog sites, is not a major factor in whether we continue or not.
We’re not concerned about revenue. In fact, we’re returning money to our advertisers to make this move. Producing income was never a priority for us but when TBD approached us to be part of their network and share in revenue, we gave it a try.
We have been extremely grateful to our advertisers. All of them contacted us after we announced we would accept advertising. We can’t thank them enough. We thought having some income would offset the expenses associated with Rockville Central which has always been a volunteer effort. We also liked the idea of getting the word out to everyone about these wonderful community partners.
We will not receive any revenue from Facebook and have no plans to raise revenue in any other way. When I was interviewed about the move, I mentioned a few times that we had no plans to make money — but I could imagine other revenue streams for news sites. I’ve heard presentations from sites which depend on such things as conferences and workshops to make their income instead of advertising. I believe a Facebook news site could be monetized - but again - we don’t have any plans to do so (even if I am an event planner)!
(Just so you know, Cindy and I are in sync on this revenue question. I was being cagey with how I addressed revenue in my comment above just to not set too-firm limits. Cindy and I are in agreement that the purpose of RC is not revenue and we have no plans to pursue it.)
[...] our Rockville Central Facebook page. We hope you will join us there,” wrote Brad Rourke in a blog post. “Everything you have come to know and love about our articles will also exist in Facebook. [...]
Brad and Cindy, I too appreciate the news and exchange of views that you have provided through Rockville Central .
Sadly I don’t agree with your statements about all the same things being available on Facebook. On Rockville Central news and views have been available without putting personal information security at risk. Sorry, but I’m with those who have already said more articulately that that is not a tradeoff worth making.
Caryl,
Could you explain why you think Facebook is a security risk? I’ve had a certified IT professional tell me that he sees no security threat from Facebook.
You don’t need an account to appreciate the exchange of news and opinion on Rockville Central’s Page:
https://www.facebook.com/RockvilleCentral
Yes, if you want to participate and post information to our wall and leave comments, you would need a Facebook account. To set up a Facebook account you only need to give a First Name, Last Name, email, and birthday. I don’t see that as a security risk.
A Journal in Illinois had an editorial this week with all the facts wrong about our move to Facebook. I wanted to respond. In order to leave a comment you had to leave your full name, address, telephone number and email. When I tried to leave out any of the information, I wasn’t allowed to register and couldn’t respond. The Facebook requirements were nothing in comparison. Personally I don’t have very much information on my Facebook profile and I don’t even have my birthday visible.
Cindy, with all due respect you are not the type of person that would think about what is wrong with Facebook. You are someone with a more respectful background whose mind does not work in those ways. While this is an admirable trait, it is not the trait that could appropriately assess the risks of using Facebook. I do this for a living, so let me explain what’s wrong with Facebook.
Facebook knows everything about you and, even though they have privacy settings, does sell that information to advertisers. They have come up with ways to aggregate your data that makes it easy for advertisers and others to find out things about you that you may not want publicly disclosed. Although those advertisers are supposed to follow Facebook’s policies on the usage of private data, there have been abuses and Facebook has been reluctant to close those loopholes. One of those abuses are the games, like the popular Farmville, that takes your private information from Facebook, the company aggregates them, and sells the information to third parties.
Although Facebook has tried to increase the privacy, most of the attempts have failed in one form or another. So they keep trying and keep failing to put into place the privacy that is needed.
There is no verification of accounts. Someone can make up an account pretending to be you and create a profile that says more than you will ever want published or create false information. These types of accounts have been used to harass people, extort money, and has been used for cyber bullying. There was the case of the mother cyber bullying a teen rival of her daughter. The rival later committed suicide. The mother was convicted of involuntary manslaughter. Recently, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg was being stalked using his own website and had to take out a restraining order on that person.
Facebook and other data mining was used against Justice Antonin Scalia. Students at Fordham Law School taking a class on information privacy law created a dossier about Justice Scalia after he wrote a majority opinion against the privacy rights some think are necessary. The dossier was presented to Justice Scalia at a conference. He was not happy.
There is an ongoing “discussion” in Canada by their equivalent of our Attorney General and Facebook over Canada’s Youth Criminal Justice Act. In Canada, it is illegal to release the names of minors who were murdered and those accused until indictments are handed down. Facebook is used to create “tribute pages” that allow for this violation of the law. Although Facebook has agreed to delete these pages on request, there is a question of international treaties in law enforcement potentially being violated. In the mean time, this type of violation and other violations of laws of other countries do have the potential of forcing a shutdown. Did you know that in some countries like Canada and Germany, Holocaust denial is illegal? Germany has not been pleased with Facebook for allowing this stuff on their site-or minimally, allowing it to propagate into Germany.
The European Union continues to investigate Facebook for violations of the EU’s privacy laws. The key difference between the way the privacy laws work in the EU versus the US is that the European model is for the user to opt-in. In the US, the primary model is to opt-out. The EU has threatened lawsuits against Facebook and reports claim that they may file a suite in the World Court at The Hague this year.
You said that in order to register you need to enter First Name, Last Name, email, and birthday. The birthday is the key piece of information. Once I find that, I find your address online (pick a white pages service) and start searching for any piece of information. Have you used your credit card online? There are ways to search the Internet for those sites that do not properly handle credit card numbers that I can use to find your credit card number. I can also find the CVV2 code. Once I have your birthdate and credit card number, I can go to any of a number nefarious services to read your credit report and get any other information I need to create a person to steal your identity.
And if you want to delete an account, you can do so. But Facebook still has traces of you in their system. Because of the way they created the system, you cannot be fully erased from Facebook. This leaves breadcrumbs of information that can be associated with you that can be used against you.
Just visiting the site can also be problematic. Facebook makes heavy use of cookies that can still track you and any third-party site that uses Facebook for advertising or anything else can track you. One of the biggest concerns is something call Local Shared Objects (LSO) that is used by Adobe’s Flash. LSOs are cookie-like files that can store an unlimited about of information where cookies are limited in size. LSOs cannot be deleted when you delete cookies and, unless you use special programs as opposed to the tool on Adobe’s website, LSOs may not be completely deleted from your system. Reading and writing of LSOs are not restricted. Any Flash-based site that can create an LSO can read any LSO. Simply put, if you click on an ad made with Adobe Flash on one site, another site can find out by looking for the LSO. Facebook tools that use Adobe Flash also store information in LSOs that are universally read.
I could go further and scare you off the web, but that is not my purpose here. I wanted to show you that there are real concerns about using Facebook. For the record, I am an information security professional-I do security and privacy for a living for the federal government. As part of my work I have participated in studies for government agencies to show them the danger of social networks, specifically Facebook. I have created research accounts and proceeded to show the agencies how to do some of these things. I am constantly amazed at the information people store on Facebook and the potential for someone to violate their privacy. Studies that my company has done has kept Facebook out of most government agencies to the point that they are blocking the site at the firewall!
Facebook is used as a launching point for thousands of privacy violation a day. Many are benign. Others have real implications for problems. I know there is an underground world that knows this and will use whatever information they can gather. Facebook is one of their starting points (I do ongoing research into what the illegal hackers are doing). Based on my knowledge of Facebook and what some are doing with it, I will never have a profile on the site, regardless of how minimal it is, nor will I ever visit a page on Facebook. To borrow a term: It’s unsafe at any speed!
I appreciate everything Brad and Cindy have done with Rockville Central. I am sad to lose a community-focused source like this. Yes, it will remain on Facebook, but there is too much on Facebook already. I read stuff there everyday, but rarely use it as a place to focus and gather information on a particular topic. For this reason, I doubt that I will use Facebook for following Rockville Central the same way. Will you continue to send latest content emails for the items you post on Facebook? If so, that may draw me in there.
Also, I take some umbrage with the idea that your reporting on the Mayor and Council meetings were “repetitive”. They were uniquely and well-written summaries from the perspective of a resident, as opposed to the perspective of a newspaper reporter who may not be as familiar or invested with the community. At any rate, I suppose if you’re going to stop reporting on events with the town government I won’t likely read RC anymore. I guess I’ll have to seek out the sources that you think you’ve been repeating, then.
Good luck to you both!
Thank you Doug. We appreciate the kind words about our coverage. Brad has been able to successfully format our Daily Stories email to include all of the information we will be sharing on our Facebook page, so expect the emails to continue.
Mr. Barman, Thank you for taking the time to provide your comment. I spend a great deal of time informing my friends and family in much the same manner.
Throughout the years, I have read and studied every incident and issue you mention extensively and stand by what I have stated.
Much of what you describe is not limited to Facebook but rather these are concerns across the internet. In fact, with such worldwide daily scrutiny of Facebook, I think we know exactly what occurs with it, while we may not have the complete story regarding other websites. The underground world is up to no good every day and doesn’t limit itself to Facebook. As you state, you don’t want to scare people away from using the internet. However people need to keep informed. Many, many sites use cookies. You can save guard your system. Laws may change to keep up with many of these issues. People will continue to post their opinions and beliefs across many websites and any person can read them when they have the freedom to do so.
As I stated, I don’t have much personal information on Facebook. I also don’t play games and limit the use of applications on Facebook. You are warned before you use a game or application that they will have access to your data. If you proceed, you do so with full knowledge of what will occur. People who choose to do so, even my IT professional friend, feel the benefits outweigh disclosing the information. In my case, they don’t get much and none of it is of use to someone trying to steal my identity. As I’ve stated all along, Facebook is what you make it. I keep my account safe.
Sadly cyberbullying is a concern in many, many forms. Again, a problem which exists across the internet on social networking sites and not just related to Facebook. For me, I’ve dealt with it in a comment on a post and in emails spread across the City, but not on Facebook. I’m completely aware that the possibility exists and you can report abusive profiles.
Friends have told me Facebook is blocked at work but these instances are not completely related to security issues. Hopefully they will be able to keep up with their phones and at home.
For those willing to head out into Facebook for our adventure, thank you for coming along. We’ve already see more interaction and continue to look forward to building community in a new way.