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Trade unions get social not working
THE INTERNATIONAL trade union movement, through its LabourStart site, has created its own Facebook clone for use by trade unionists around the World. In a recent article we described how anyone who wanted to could now effortlessly start up their own Facebook-alike social network thanks to the availability of ready-to-use scripts and web applications.
The social network site created by and for trade unions is dubbed UnionBook.org, and the people of LabourStart describe it as "a space controlled by activists for activists."
According to the site's creators its main selling point over FB is its better privacy and non-commercial interests: "Unlike other social networks such as MySpace, FaceBook and Bebo, UnionBook is advertising-free, respects your privacy and is specifically designed to serve the trade union movement."
Trade Unionists Rejoice!.
John Wood admits that it doesn't aim to compete with FaceBook, and admits their own limitations. "It doesn't have R&D megabucks, and doesn't have 65 million active members. Unionists will always need to plug in with the commercial networks to talk to members and potential members."
It also claims that they don't want to become Facebook, either: "As a commercial enterprise, FaceBook also exists primarily to make money... we have no intention of competing with that" says Eric Lee, editor at LabourStart.
They do not discourage the use of Facebook, they actually admit that the two sites serve a different purpose. "If you have a Facebook account, by all means keep it. Use Facebook for the fun things you already may use it for – such as posting videos of your cat. But when you want to do your union stuff on-line, we're working hard to ensure that UnionBook will be the best place for you to do it" he concludes.
At the time of writing the site had 1034 registered users and growing. This isn't the first time that a market segment has created its own little private playground instead of submitting all its data to a for-profit corporation with the obvious data mining and loss-of-privacy implications.
The organisers of the new Facebook copycat for trade unionists have even set up a group on the real Facebook to promote their new site. The group can be found over here.
When it comes to protecting privacy, some are more creative than others. A Shane T. told recently in a popular economics mailing list: "Lie to them. On Facebook, I am 76 years old. To avoid confusing your friends and family, simply make every lie private, between you and Facebook" to which another replied in approval "yes, and I am a 90 year old Coptic Christian from Trinidad and Tobago who works in advertising and has a Master's in Medieval Literature, and who voted for the Natural Law Party, as far as Facebook is concerned."
We can see now why some want to run their own Facebook style social network site. µ
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How will it earn it's costs? Will it be free for the first 2-3 years then start charging a membership fee, like most unions? Unions do a lot of good, but they are also an attractive place for gerrymandering and dodgy deals.
The main spur behind this was a number of union activists and campaigns being kicked out on networks like Facebook and YouTube.
The mega-networks are trying to manage millions of active users with only a handful of customer service staff. Their limited time is taken up hunting paedophiles and phishers, so they largely leave the moderation to robots (the average revenue per user is so low, it's cheaper to lose a dozen users than to spend 15 minutes on deciding a case). Vexatious legal threats from companies (even where the argument is entirely bogus) are also great at getting campaigns on commercial networks switched off.
This puts many power users or campaign/business users (not just unions) in a tricky position. When you suddenly find you need to mount a campaign, you're friending like crazy and sending out lots of messages, and to Facebook's robots, you look like you've suddenly turned spammer, and you get frozen or kicked out when you need the network most. Ironically the more work you put in and the more you rely on your network, the more at risk you find yourself.
As you identify, this is one more attempt by a niche group to make the most of the power of some of these networking tools, but on a more sensitive footing, and for very focused aims. Most people thankfully don't live their whole lives as activists, and have a lot of other interests that they'll still need to use the big networks for - We certainly won't be giving up our Facebook cat (wildcat?) galleries just yet!
@interested_party - So far as I know, the site is planned to stay free for activists who want to make use of it, the same way all the other web services run by the volunteer group LabourStart.org have been for over 10 years now (a mix of voluntary contributions and making a little go a long way with Open Source).