First, a lot of people were buying and selling. 580 million shares of Facebook changed hands (meaning, the same share was moved multiple times). Compare that to Apple, which moved 26 million on the same day. In other words, a lot of people were getting in just to see what would happen. This accounts for Facebook’s initial rise in price, followed by a decline that settled the price just above its initial amount. People were buying on the hype of the hype, because if they were buying on the hype alone (in other words, believing that the stock would soar in the coming weeks and months), then they would have held onto those shares.

Second, there was nothing but bad news about Facebook prior to the IPO. In one notable case, GM announced they were ending $10 million in ad business with the company and instead focusing their efforts on the free services that Facebook provides. Further, while privacy changes will soon lead Facebook to announce a Facebook third-party ad platform, this news didn’t get any mainstream coverage. It’s the one thing that could have beaten back fears that Facebook was losing revenue but Facebook was restricted from taking about the plans themselves and for this reason, there likely wasn’t enough evidence to go on for any mainstream media outlets.

Third, comparable stocks took a beating too, suggesting skepticism in investors about the tech sector. LinkedIn was down over 5%. Zynga was down over 13%. It wasn’t good news for Facebook competitors, either. Google was down over 3%. Yahoo was up, but that’s not a good metric given the roller coaster that Yahoo has been on recently. It’s clear that Facebook’s performance was not great but far from terrible. If there is skepticism from investors, then Facebook still managed to rise above it and perform better than comparable companies.

The real problem at the heart of Facebook stock is that investors don’t have much data to go on. They’ve seen Facebook go on an incredible rise in popularity and power. They see a company with 900 million users (and adding more users every day). It’s also one of the rare times that an investor can make a substantial buy in a company that impacts her daily life. This connection suggests Facebook will receive more attention than other companies. But if investors keep buying on the hype of the hype, how long can it possibly continue? Facebook is about to drop from the news, at least drop from favorable coverage. Get ready for even more scrutiny of the company, their policies, and earnings. With no hyped hype, who will still want to buy? Get ready for a full week of trading resulting in no significant rise in Facebook’s price.

1. The time-logging aspects are not compatible with the goal of staying focused on just one task. My goal when starting to use the pomodoro technique was simple: I wanted to increase the amount of time during the day that I was making active progress on my to-do list. Prior, I would focus on work that I was motivated to do (or was easy to do) for a lengthy period of time, followed by feeling burnt out at the end of the day. Further, I would spend a lot of the day dealing with little issues as they came in, rather than focusing on one particular task. The technique helped change this. Now (for the most part), I set my mind on a specific task and work on that.

But that kind of singular focus isn’t possible when I do have to complete those little tasks (e.g., respond to an email, schedule a participant for a research study, update a spreadsheet). And because the pomodoro technique is designed to be used for increasing focus on a singular task, in its pure form, it isn’t useful for tracking my work on small things. The solution is to bend the rules and allow for one pomodoro to represent a period of focus on work generally, rather than a specific task. So, if I have a variety of small things to do, I can still start the timer and work on them for 25 minutes. This results in both increased productivity (because I try to push out distractions during this time) and better time-logging (because I now note that, yes indeed, I was focused during the last half hour).

2. Meetings are awfully hard to fit with the pomodoro technique because the meeting likely won’t pause every 25 minutes nor will the focus be on one task. (There are, of course, exceptions to this, but most meetings aren’t pomodoro friendly.) Just like having to do little tasks, the purest form of pomodoro doesn’t allow for accurate time-logging for meetings.

The solution I follow is again to relax consideration of what a pomodoro means. Meetings can be counted as pomodoros, but that change comes at increased cost to logging. If a meeting goes for 45 minutes, I will still just log it as one pomodoro. A meeting would have to go for an hour or more to be counted as two. Why the distinction? I penalize myself because meetings, in their nature, are inefficient. I don’t want to give myself credit for focus that I didn’t have. The change in time-logging also means that I am pushed to reduce the number of meetings I have or to increase their productivity.

3. With these changes, it is really hard to stop a “mixed” category of pomodoro from being the most common for the week. First, to clarify, I keep track of my pomodoros for each day (to identify days that are more productive than others) and categorize them by project (for example, “research papers” or “dissertation”). I have a “mixed” category for work that goes across multiple projects. I might start by responding to some emails, then update a spreadsheet, and finally, finish reading an article. But all those little things mean that “mixed” is the busiest category almost every week. That’s a lot of lost data about what I was accomplishing, and it makes categories that are filled with a lot more little tasks decidedly underrepresented.

The benefit of this type of logging, however, is that it gives me a specific goal to work toward in planning my work: to wit, reduce the number of mixed pomodoros. I have worked toward this in the past two weeks by shutting off my email during my pomodoros and trying to tackle little things at the beginning and end of the day.

4. Pomodoros make for a great game, but that game can derail the purity of the technique. The best part about keeping track of pomodoros is trying to beat previous records for pomodoros in a week and pomodoros in a day. My current week record is 60 and day record is 17. This game aspect keeps me focused on finding times of the day to be productive. For example, I might save some small, mostly mindless tasks for a pomodoro while watching TV in the evening.

But it also means that I am driven to reduce the pure focused nature of pomodoros. I want to count productive time that may not have been particularly focused. For example, at a natural stopping point for some writing, I might get up and fill my water bottle, even while my pomodoro timer runs. Or someone might stop by my office to chat, and I let the timer keep running. Yes, chatting with a colleague could be considered productive time; after all, social activities go on my to-do list, and this kind of relational maintenance is important in any job. But if I didn’t see pomodoros as a game, I’d probably scrap that pomodoro and restart with new focus once the person left. Instead, I’ll continue the chat and then log the pomodoro as “mixed.”

Is the pomodoro technique right for you? If your work is largely structured by an external factor or is largely repetitive, then the answer is no. For example, if you work at a bakery and your job is to make the dough and then shape the loaves, then the pomodoro technique won’t really help you focus. Perhaps be grateful. The nature of your work is such that motivational techniques aren’t needed.

But if your work is largely structured on your own, then yes! That is, if you are the person who generally determines when you get work done, with prioritizing from others, then this technique can help you sit down and focus. Because it has built-in break periods, the technique can also remind you to get up and stretch, drink some water, and other healthy habits. Because of the game aspect, you can also feel driven toward achieving more. The technique isn’t perfect, partly because singular focus on one task isn’t always possible for the work that must be done. But it’s one of the better productivity techniques I’ve ever used. So, stop reading this blog post and give your own pomodoro a try now. You won’t regret it.

It’s all clear when you look at changes to Facebook’s privacy policy. As documented by TechCrunch, the new policy clarifies that Facebook can use your data for the purposes of serving ads on third-party websites. This is the last remaining piece needed to turn Facebook from a fun, little social networking website that happened to get to 900 million members (and growing) into an actual tech company with real profits that investors can’t ignore.

Users need to prepare themselves for this change and, if not comfortable with it, get ready to quit. When I quit Facebook back in June 2010, it was not a decision that I took lightly. I considered the value of the website, especially all the connections to acquaintances that I would lose. But I also considered the value of my privacy and the principles that I implicitly supported by remaining a member. Did Facebook have details on me that would have made for better ads? They had some, but not a lot, partly because I never used the “like” feature that will surely be used to target ads to interested parties. But that’s not the case for other people, and by remaining a member and active user, I was giving support for policies that I thought were wrong.

My friend Ken has noted that an easy way to spoil data-mining plans like Facebook’s is to provide false information. I whole-heartedly endorse this idea, but it alone won’t defeat Facebook’s plans. That’s because Facebook has knowledge of your entire social network, and if your friends provide accurate information, then those friends can be used in creating ads for you. An ad can say, “6 of your friends like Coca Cola. Why don’t you?” and use friends’ pictures right in the ad. Heck, maybe Facebook will roll out brand recognition in photos along with facial recognition. Now the ad for Coke can come complete with a photo of your friends drinking some. Suddenly the branding on products doesn’t seem so innocent if it can be used for advertisements for which any Facebook user gives their permission just by signing up for the service.

The only way to defeat Facebook’s new plan is to quit the service. If Facebook rolls out ads on third-party websites, then all the information you have shared with friends is suddenly fair game for use in marketing. How much would you charge to have a company come into your home and use your life as the focus of an ad campaign? Given that this is worth something to the company, I hope it would be a substantial amount (and hope even more that you would refuse). Every user of Facebook will shortly be in the position to make this decision. Facebook is no longer using your data to show you ads that may be applicable to you when you visit Facebook. Soon it will use your life and the lives of your friends as part of a massive new ad platform designed to be used on all websites. The difference is staggering.

Most users will remain, of course, a pattern we’ve seen repeatedly in the past. But the question stands: if not now, then when? The answer has a lot to do with ways in which Facebook will misstep. It will start with the rollout of this platform. It will be covered confusedly by the mainstream press and with deep skepticism by the tech press. Investors will love it, and users will be unsure. A movement to quit will start, and Congress will hold hearings. Facebook will make minor concessions, including perhaps a way to opt out. But with investor expectations on the line, this won’t be a quickly canceled program like the ill-conceived Beacon. It will come to full fruition, and the pattern of individuals leaving Facebook will be contingent upon how many people saw what was going to happen and quit because of it. If the momentum is toward decline, then the trend will continue and Facebook will end up a shell of its former self. If there is no momentum, then we will enter into yet another uncharted era in which we surrender privacy for a fun website, as if we owe Facebook something because they provide a website that we like. Users owe Facebook nothing, and the website has changed its privacy policy so much in favor of expansive data ownership that the website many users signed up for is now radically different. And so, I’ll ask again: if not now, then when?

The challenge inherent in this bridging, however, is that organizational communication research is driven by one fundamental assumption: In business, individuals and organizations are driven by efficiency as a way to increase profits. This assumption is largely a normative one; that is, we can state it most accurately by noting that this drive should be present. Fair or not, this particular assumption is hugely useful because it removes a large source of variance in communication channel use before it can be considered. Instead, the research can focus on what best practices are and what happens when those best practices are followed or violated. Research demonstrating that best practices are not followed can be dismissed as simple error variance; the fact that companies don’t perform at maximum efficiency is an issue for other researchers, not for the study of communication.

This helpful assumption, however, is not so clearly present in interpersonal communication. Efficiency is not what drives interpersonal communication, and claims that it should be are difficult to support. Instead, relationship goals could be argued to drive interpersonal communication, but these goals are particularly complicated. Sometimes, our goals are to grow closer to someone. But other times, we wish to antagonize or ignore as a way to make the relationship more distant. This complexity results in a dizzying array of goals that we must consider to successfully understand the processes that drive communication channel selection.

One way that this issue is dealt with is to focus on “relational maintenance behaviors,” things we do to keep up with the people who matter to us. This solves the problem of goals because it dismisses a whole host of relationships. By focusing only on those people who are meaningful to us, we can now make normative claims about relationships: people engaged in relational maintenance are driven to stay close and grow closer to others.

This seems like a much safer presumption, but here’s the problem: Though the claim may be true of almost everyone (most everyone has a desire to be close to people), the skills that surround this goal are much more varied, and the understanding of these processes is much more complex than the assumptions in organizational communication research. In other words, we all want to maintain our relationships but we often aren’t very good at it. This could be dismissed as error variance, except for the fact that our maintenance behaviors fluctuate widely between relationship types and even within types and within particular relationships themselves. We can go from keeping up close contact and deep friendship with a roommate to speaking to that person just once or twice a year within a matter of months.

If we see this pattern from the outside, we might conclude that the relationship had gone from seeking closeness to seeking distance. This conclusion is likely wrong; instead it is just the nature of relationships: Proximity matters. But how can we use this observation to understand relational maintenance behaviors? Is it fair to assume we are driven to be close to people, if the people we seek can be so hugely influenced by convenience?

This all suggests the need to disregard information about communication networks and instead focus on general tendencies of individuals; for example, we can ask individuals generally about their efforts to maintain relationships, rather than asking both them and their current friends to report on behaviors. Unfortunately, this type of research does not solve the problems I’ve outlined; it simply ignores them and settles for a much simpler research agenda. Simple isn’t necessarily bad and there may be significant differences between individuals (for example, individuals who report skillful use of communication channels report more close relationships or relationships of a higher quality than individuals with less skillful use), but it does present a problem in using conclusions from organizational research in the study of interpersonal communication. As for how I will deal with this issue… alas, this blog post was not able to solve the problem.

Is this the benefit of being the highest grossing retail space in the world? Apple makes more money in its stores per square foot than any other company in the world. Apple makes more than twice as much per square foot as the second retailer on the list, Tiffany’s. This means that Apple can provide superlative service to its customers without fear of loss. Indeed, some of Apple’s largess may be responsible for those profits. You can bet Lauren and I will be back when it comes time to make bigger purchases.

Or is this just the Apple philosophy in retail? Apple aims to provide the best quality product even if it costs more. Flip that around and you see a company dedicated to providing customers the best shopping experience even if it costs the company a little in revenue. There’s no second-rate Apple products; even if you don’t care about the product’s features, there is still no denying its quality. And this commitment is reflected equally in Apple’s stores.

Think about how you imagine shopping to have been like in high end department stores back in the 1950s and 1960s. Shoppers got individual attention and service for many desires. An episode of Mad Men even shows complimentary cleaning of a soiled dress. Who knows if this is how high end shopping really was, but Apple Stores come closest to my vision of the time. A free replacement iPod case because the case of another company proved defective? That’s high end retail for everyone.

Or perhaps the feature will cause more harm than good for Facebook. In my original post about the idea, I speculated on different types of messages that users might want friends to see. For example, a person is hosting a party and wants her friends to know about it. She might choose to keep a message describing the party at the top of her friends’ feeds on the day of the party to help encourage more of them to come. Similarly, to announce big news, like an engagement, birth of a child, graduation, etc., users might pay to make sure more people are made aware. These are perfectly harmless uses that people might appreciate: Users appreciate the ability to promote a message, and their friends appreciate seeing that important news more easily.

Outside of my fantasy dreamworld, though, just who is going to use this feature? One commenter on the TechCrunch article linked above, Bill Jula, describes a perfect nightmare scenario: the use of this feature to advertise multi-level marketing (i.e., pyramid) schemes to friends. In other words, this feature can easily be exploited by every budding entrepreneur lured in by the promise of “unlimited potential” to turn their “friends” into potential clients. And ultimately, all those exploiting the system will both reduce the value of the system for their “friends” and will get plenty of people to unfriend them.

Already, marketing companies care about things like how many Facebook friends you have. I hear this all the time from students seeking work in advertising, marketing, and PR. Websites like Klout seek to quantify just how influential you are online. If Facebook rolls out this feature, the “potential” reach of any one person can turn into actual reach. When companies hire someone for, say, a summer marketing internship, you can bet they will expect their new interns to start using the “highlight” feature to start pitching to their friends.

Because of this very likely possibility, the moneymaking feature isn’t anything different from regular, in-feed advertising, except that it is cloaked under a layer of credibility, given that the messages come directly from a friend. This makes the feature irresistible to advertisers. The next step will be for Facebook to allow advertisers to independently highlight someone’s message. That means a person can write about getting coffee at Starbucks and Starbucks can take that message, “highlight” it, and turn the person into a walking advertisement. This already happens with “sponsored stories,” and leads to nightmarish results.

As the line between advertising and content blurs, companies need to be wary of the effect it will have on users. But with a $100 billion valuation on the line, what choice does Facebook have?

But even with my avowed anti-texting stance, Lauren and I occasionally use Apple’s iMessages app to exchange messages from her iPod Touch to my iPad. It’s a fun way to shoot little messages back and forth during the day. When doing this earlier in the week, I noticed my productivity was getting derailed. The 10 seconds it took me to read and respond to her message translated into much longer time spent getting back into the article I was reading. But responding to her was way more fun than doing work. In other words, this texting back and forth had all the hallmarks of a bad habit.

Is that what texting has become for the hundreds of millions of text message users worldwide? A bad habit that they ought to break? The key issues here are twofold. First, is texting a habit? The answer for heavy text users is probably yes. The act of checking one’s phone to see if a message has arrived is something done non-consciously and automatically. Typing out a reply, too, becomes a default response to a new message.

Second, is texting bad? This answer requires more nuance because, inherently, texting is neither bad nor good. But texting can cause outcomes that are bad. In my case, texting was distracting me from work and making it hard to maintain focus. This resulted in lower productivity. (Of course, in other cases, texting may be good, bringing two people closer together through their exchange of information, for example.)

And thus, under certain circumstances, texting can resemble a bad habit. But can the habit be easily broken? The trouble here is that, unlike some habits (say, not exercising or eating junk food), the habit is one that affects two people. A person who texts habitually responds more willingly and frequently to texts from others and may also more frequently initiate text message exchanges. This pattern of behavior, if changed, affects more than the texter with the bad habit; it also affects all those people with whom the texter has maintained contact through texting. Without this particular channel, those relationships may change, possibly for the worse.

What’s to be done about the distraction caused by excess texting? Changing the behavior isn’t enough. Certainly, rules like “turn off your phone when working” are well and good for stopping one person from texting. But the ways to break a bad habit don’t solve the problem completely in this case because the bad habit is rooted in relational communication patterns, not in the individual’s own choices. I wish I was writing this post to offer a solution, but I have none. All I have is this advice: stop texting in ways that are potentially problematic. It’s the only way to stop texting from becoming a bad habit.

Here’s Pinterest’s logo:

And here’s Path’s logo:

Their letter “P”s are nearly identical. Lawsuits have been launched over less. Notoriously brand-protective Apple sued Woolworth’s over their logo in 2009. The companies are not at all competitors, but Apple argued that Woolworth’s logo would diminish Apple’s brand.

It’s easy to argue that Apple’s lawsuits over such issues are unwarranted. But in the cast of Pinterest and Path, their core business interests are at stake. Both companies are dependent upon people choosing to share content with the service. Without shared content, neither service offers any value to users. A world of empty online bulletin boards or a stream of friend activity that is empty makes for some pretty miserable user experiences.

To facilitate sharing, both companies are motivated to get websites to install tools that make it easy to share, say, a news article on their service. That means each company needs a small logo (like those above) that consumers know represents one particular service. They need to know that clicking the little P will “pin” something to their Pinterest board or share something on Path.

So what will happen? Will Pinterest sue Path for the use of that catchy P? Given that Pinterest has the most chance to actually make money (Path seems very likely to fail), they should hire a good team of lawyers and release the big guns. Better to take care of this before Path gains any traction rather than wait for a showdown against a more popular website.

In this case, I don’t mean suggesting that the event is “exclusive!” and “one day only!”. These appeals might increase students’ sense of scarcity and raise their desire to attend. Instead, I mean an appeal that frames Mifflin as an event for upperclassmen, not freshmen; and for UW-Madison students, not outsiders. It’s like when people got mad that Facebook opened itself up to the public at large; people felt their exclusive club was getting overrun. (Let’s not take that Facebook example too far, and let’s hope that Mifflin doesn’t grow to an event with 900 million people at it.)

The appeal could go something like this. Mifflin is unpopular with campus and city officials. They will try to do whatever they can to get it shut down: increased police presence, more arrests, crackdowns for students who set foot off private property with alcohol, increased scrutiny for students who are cited at the event, and other things that turn Mifflin from a fun party to a police state. But who is really causing the trouble? It’s not the upperclassmen who know how to drink alcohol and not act like idiots. It’s not UW-Madison students who know how to have a good time and not wreck things for everyone else.

The reason Mifflin is under attack is because stupid freshmen show up, go house to house (uninvited), get drunk on whatever they can find, act like idiots, and end up arrested, having their stomachs pumped, or both. Combine that with out-of-towners wielding knives and stabbing people, or sexually assaulting people in house basements, and it’s clear why city and campus officials don’t see Mifflin as an event they want to promote.

Why are UW-Madison students letting these idiots (freshmen, violent visitors, etc.) into their party? Does the party get better when you open the door and let anyone drink for free? In most cases, the answer is absolutely not. Mifflin is not and should not be a place for idiots to score free booze. It is and should continue to be a way for upperclassmen to relax as the semester ends. The only way to keep things as they should be is to make sure idiots aren’t allowed. So, residents of Mifflin, band together to keep the idiots out. This way, Mifflin can be a great event that is not constantly under threat.

This appeal won’t end the Mifflin Street Block Party, but it may help encourage residents of Mifflin to pay more attention to just who is coming in and out of their houses. Over time, this may reduce the appeal of Mifflin for those people who don’t belong. Of course, it could backfire and be widely mocked, but what’s the harm in that? No attempts that the city or campus have made thus far have worked. It’s time to try something new.

Will Facebook keep adding members until everyone on the globe has at least one Facebook account? The answer is obviously no, but Facebook still has lots of growth potential overseas. One large untapped market is China, where social networking websites like Facebook are forbidden without some clever workarounds. To expand into this market, however, Facebook will likely need to make some concessions to Chinese government internet police who are driven to spy on citizens and their doings online.

Facebook also faces challenges in overseas markets from already established social networking websites. In order to crack into some markets more fully, Facebook may need to make strategic purchases. An influx in cash from its IPO will help make this possible, but such purchases may not increase profits. This brings us to the next area of growth.

Will both revenue and profits keep growing? The problem with spending large amounts of money on services that are not profitable is that neither revenue nor profit increases with the purchase. That makes Facebook’s purchase of photo app Instagram look like a $1 billion write-off. More acquisitions are likely to follow the same pattern because purchasing small start-up tech companies usually means taking on more potentiality than actuality. Given that Facebook has had immense trouble turning itself profitable, it has no track record that would suggest an ability to make acquired companies into winners.

Facebook also keeps expanding its number of employees, a massive cost in a business that spends money on only three things: people, servers, and acquisitions. If Facebook wants to cut costs, it’s first easiest to stop buying other companies; but Facebook may believe that this will stymie growth. Servers are necessary for business, so other than looking for cost-cutting mechanisms (e.g., running more energy efficiently), there are no ways to increase profits through cuts here. That leaves only one option, but so far Facebook doesn’t seem interested in reducing or holding steady its employee numbers.

More revenue is possible, most definitely. This interesting article from CNet suggests that advertisers are frustrated with the lack of attention Facebook provides to its customers (and, yes, the advertisers are the customers; the users are the product). On the surface, this appears like bad news: Facebook can’t even get its core business right! But in reality, it suggests an easy way to increase revenue: give more services and attention to advertisers. I’ve used Facebook ads to advertise a research project, and there is much room for improvement.

What will happen with Facebook’s IPO? Will people buy on the hype or buy on the actual? For a company like Apple, traditionally, investors have sold on the hype and then bought once the product is delivered. But even after Apple announced another record breaking quarter, further establishing itself as the world’s most valuable company (based on the value of its stock), Apple has dropped precipitously in the past week. Investors seem unwilling to believe that all this good news can continue for the company. Will the same fate befall Facebook? LinkedIn, the professional networking website, has had a wild ride since going public, but its value has risen steadily since a trough in January of this year. This suggests investors will quickly buy Facebook stock, sending its value up. Will the company grow to match investor expectations? I look forward to addressing this in future posts.