Your profile has broken rules of use

choongyong.koh July 8th, 2008

Was surfing the web this morning and came across this New Paper article Your profile has broken rules of use.  So it is confirmed that the change in Reach Singapore’s Facebook presence was prompted by my earlier post.

Just would like to say this is good because it closes a loop:

  • Government does something wrong (although not a big crime in this case, but still something that is not right)
  • Someone points out (acts as a check)
  • Government takes action based on evaluation of feedback
  • The right thing is done

This might be a small thing, but it truly reflects that kind of Singapore I would like to live in.  Some comments in my earlier blog postings accuse me of nit-picking on small things.  However, if we don’t even feedback and check on the small things, what happens when something really big goes wrong?  There is definitely a need for checks and balances in our system, from the smallest thing like a Facebook profile, to the “big things” like government policies.

There was others who says I am criticizing from a moral high ground instead of feeding back to Reach on this.  I say this is what the Internet is about: someone says something, if it is complete nonsense, it will be forgotten and left to rot on its on; if it makes sense, someone else will pick it up and more people will read about it.  In this case, I am grateful that someone thought my original posting was worthy enough and recommended it to Tomorrow.sg (although a few days after I first posted it), and the editors of Tomorrow.sg decided to publish it, and from there the attention grew.  Eventually enough people got to know about this, and eventually the right people made the corrections.

Isn’t this a wonderful closure of loop that many would like to see in so many of our other suggestions in day-to-day life?

Definitely, the Internet is not an arena where ‘more heat than light is generated’.

Reach Singapore, Facebook and privacy

choongyong.koh July 1st, 2008

I blogged about Reach Singapore’s Facebook profile a few days ago.  Today, it was picked up by tomorrow.sg and I saw quite a number of visitors to my blog.  There is also a small debate at tomorrow.sg about this.

There was a blog that accused me of being rigid and quoted a number of other organisations with Facebook presence, like UNICEF Youth Voice.  Someone responded that the blogger too did not understand, that there is a difference between a User Account (which Reach Singapore’s was), Facebook Groups and Facebook Pages.  Rightfully said, because the violation I mentioned was with the use of a User Account to represent an organisation.  None of the other quoted groups/organisations used a User Account.

Going back to Facebook again to check out Reach Singapore’s profile, I realised that the User Reach Singapore also created a Reach Singapore Facebook Group today.  I was thinking to myself, at least they are pretty fast in responding to feedback, even when the feedback originated from elsewhere on the net.

However, when I refreshed the Reach Singapore User Account profile, I was confused.  The name of the profile was no longer “Reach Singapore”.  It has now become “Ho Chee Har”.

Now there is a small problem here.  What this means is, if you are one of the 300+ people who added “Reach Singapore” as a “friend”, you suddenly have someone you don’t know in your friends’ list.  If you chose the default settings when adding friends, your personal information in Facebook that you shared with your friends will now be available to Ho Chee Har.

This is a small problem because you can always remove Ho Chee Har from your friend’s list.  But it goes back to my original premise: if the platform was understood and the correct tools (Page or Group) were used in the first place, no such problem would have occurred in the first place.