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This week Facebook was no joke for a Cindy Lincoln in Florida. She claims it saved her life. Read this news story about how folding laundry led to a fall, which led to a broken femur, which led to Facebook to the rescue. (I think maybe the real lesson here is it’s always a great idea to carry a cell phone with you when you’re home alone.)
The growing pervasiveness of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter and the ubiquity of digital cameras and photo/video sharing sites like YouTube have combined to create a new trend called “publicness.”
Publicness, simply put, means all our lives are now open to the world and pretty much everything we do can potentially become public at a moment’s notice. Brian Stelter of the New York Times writes this week about the Internet now becoming “the place where anonymity dies.”
One upside of publicness is the identification of ne’er-do-wells, as recently seen when post-Stanley-Cup looters in Vancouver were identified by photos tagged on Facebook. Not to mention the Twitter-based debacle of former Representative Anthony D. Weiner!
The obvious downside is the erosion of privacy. Facebook’s announced plans to use facial recognition to automatically identify people in photographs met with public outcry recently. And, if someone posts a video of you on a bad day as you’ve just lost your temper with the grocery store cashier, it could live forever online and perhaps even jeopardize your future ability to be confirmed as a Supreme Court Justice.
Last week I wrote here about wanting to have a camera in my brain that’s controlled by my eyes. While that’s just a future fantasy, eye-tracking technology is real.
From moving a computer cursor with your eyes instead of a mouse, to changing the temperature inside your car, eye-tracking technology is already making life easier, and helping physically challenged people more easily interact with machines. Some stores today use it to learn what customers most frequently look at. Online advertisers use it to track what’s most appealing in a Web ad. We even use it at Verizon as part of usability testing for new services, in other words, determining how easily and effectively customers can engage in a service like FiOS TV.
What would you like to control just by using your eyes?
Have a great weekend, everyone.
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Bill Kula
Director -- Media Relations
Bill oversees the Verizon telecom customer experience, consumer bundles, DSL, e-commerce and small business. He helps customers learn about efficient ways to manage their Verizon services.
Maitreyi Krishnaswamy
Director - Product Management
Maitreyi is responsible for Verizon's entertainment products. Check out @VerizonFiOS on Twitter, for insight, thoughts & news about FiOS TV.
Alberto Canal
Alberto is in the public relations group. He loves to share tech, sustainability, feel-good, and random news of interest. A happy FiOS quad play customer, he likes to use his family as guinea pigs.
Deidre Hart
Manager -- Media Relations
Deidre is a member of the consumer PR team and loves to talk everything FiOS and everything football. She’s also a happy Triple Play customer.
Phil Santoro
Phil has been extolling the virtues of FiOS ever since he had his Triple Play installed and can’t image how he ever managed without it. He writes about developing technologies that enable him to fuel his addiction to movies and sports whenever he wants, no matter where he is.
Caroline Wilson
Caroline manages the Verizon FiOS Google+ page, capturing the latest in entertainment, technology, sports and everything in between. She loves using social media and the written word to extend the FiOS conversation.
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