Did you know you might be legally liable if you slam your landlord on Twitter? Even if you think he or she is a slumlord?

CTV Southwestern Ontario, Canada, this evening televised a piece on “Cyber Libel” that looked at online defamation and the liability social media users might unwittingly incur. I was interviewed for the segment, and appear briefly near the end, with some nice shots of this blog and a piece I wrote, titled Social Media Isn’t Conversation, It’s Publication, on the subject. The idea for that post came out of a conversation I had with Nadia Matos, the CTV reporter, a couple of weeks ago. Check it out, interesting stuff.

Tags: social media law, CTV, cyber libel, Nadia Matos

Changes announced today to Facebook’s privacy agreement suggest the company is about to flip the switch and add location-based capabilities to the social network. Some think this might mean the end for standalone location-based services like Foursquare and Brightkite. I don’t think so.

“Experts” have recently placed Foursquare valuations in the $50M to $70M range. I think this is low, and I also think it is too soon for Foursquare to sell. (More on 4sq in a moment.)

Brightkite, an early leader in location-based apps, is trailing Foursquare, Gowalla and others in terms of user excitement and online coverage, and recently introduced Check.in, the Friendfeed of check-in apps that lets you check-in once to update all of your location-based services.

And Yelp is an interesting player in this market, boasting a huge user base (huge by Foursquare standards) that it brought into the location-based world with an iPhone app earlier this year. The Yelp iPhone app alone had around 1.25 million users back in January, compared to around 500,000 today on Foursquare*. Yelp, for reasons I don’t want to get into right now, remains a dark horse in this race.

So will all of these players run from the fray when Facebook throws down its 400 million-user glove? I don’t think so.

There comes a time in the life of every hot software product’s life (whether a Web 2.0 company or a shrink-wrapped software product) when its legacy of features and its sheer complexity, momentum and size, keep it from being as creative and cutting edge as it once was.

Witness Google, with Google Buzz, which has generated some interest but doesn’t really seem poised to destroy Twitter. Or Microsoft Word, which added HTML capability years ago but will never be used by serious Web developers. Once an entity gets enough momentum, it will always be what it has become.

Facebook will remain burdened with all of the things Facebook is famous for, like Farmville, Mafia Wars, and miles-wide-of-the-mark contextual advertising. (Aren’t you glad they still offer a “Poke” feature?) And there’s something nice about simple, uncluttered, standalone apps, particularly in a mobile environment. Part of Foursquare’s appeal is that it does one thing really well.

I guess Facebook could clone Foursquare’s badges and point system, but then it would be Foursquare screen scraped into Facebook. If Facebook can develop some unique capabilities or strategic alliances to enhance user check-ins, maybe they’ll steal some users from Foursquare, but right now Foursquare is generating buzz, and, more important, signing deals with Zagat, Starbucks, Warner Brothers and others, an indisputable validation of the appeal and potential for the service. (Then again, if Foursquare is an acquisition target, these deals would make the company more appealing to whoever is going to absorb them.)

This is definitely the year of location-based social media, and a lot of interesting things are going to happen in the next nine months. Wagers anyone?

* I couldn’t find current stats on Yelp’s iPhone app user base, hence the discombobulated comparison

Tags: location based services, facebook privacy, foursquare, brightkite, gowalla, check.in, check-in

The Million Follower Fallacy: Audience Size Doesn’t Prove Influence on Twitter, on Read Write Web, cites a recent survey that found “Twitter follower count is somewhat of a meaningless metric when it comes to determining influence.” I was excited that finally someone realized that these numerical measures were totally unrelated to influence. My excitement was short lived, however, as I read:

“They then went on to measure various statistics about these accounts, including audience size, retweet influence and mention influence. The conclusion? Those with the largest number of followers may be ‘popular’ Twitterers, but that’s not necessarily related to their influence. High follower counts don’t always mean someone is being retweeted or mentioned in any meaningful ways.”

“Retweet influence”? “Mention influence”? I have yet to see any of these things linked directly to real influence. The primary definition of influence is “the capacity or power of persons or things to be a compelling force on or produce effects on the actions, behavior, opinions, etc., of others.” It’s difficult to show that a 140-character item flying by in a Twitter stream or RSS feed has, by this definition, any influence whatsoever, and if one doesn’t, one million 140-character items don’t either.

The ability to measure a path from any marketing or advertising effort to a successful endpoint is extremely difficult, and has plagued professional online marketers for over a decade. The tools and expert analysis required to do this correctly are out of the reach of most individuals and small companies.

That’s why people use web metrics instead. Because its’ too hard to measure the things that matter. How high can I get on a Google search? How much traffic can I get to my blog or web site? How many people played my video or downloaded my free game?

These are “soft” metrics.  And it’s disingenuous to call any of these things “influence.” They are raw web metrics, and in many cases, hard to authenticate. (There are multiple types of RT for example. Which ones are “better”? Do you count them all?)

They are useful, but they are removed from your business goals, which might be things like grow revenue, add new subscribers, sell into new markets. But how do you tie these objectives, and gauge your success in achieving them, by counting tweets? I’m not sure you can.

The idea that social media allows us to engage in online conversations is getting people into all kinds of trouble, because what we’re doing when we click “Tweet” on Twitter or “Share” on Facebook isn’t conversation — it’s publication.

Imagine you’re chatting with a real friend in a real cafe. The following might be true of your conversation:

1. It is just between the two of you, and not meant for others. If you’re not cautious, a couple of people might overhear.
2. There’s no permanent record of your conversation.
3. Your body language, eye movement and facial expressions can convey extra dimensions of meaning.
4. Except under a few special circumstances, there are no regulations requiring prior approval of the words you speak, and no potential for legal liability after you speak.

None of this applies to the so-called online conversation:

1. Anything you publish online could potentially be visible to millions of people. Twitter, for example, still has a thing called “the public timeline” where all tweets are reproduced and can be found by search engines and services that aggregate tweets. If you haven’t set your Facebook privacy settings properly, your status updates will be visible to everyone. (It’s unclear what everyone means. It could mean everyone on the web, which would mean 1.7 billion people, or everyone on Facebook, in which case it would only be 500 million people.) Anyone who is monitoring your social network activities (trust me, someone is doing this) only needs to take a screen shot to have a permanent record of something long after you’ve tried to cover your online footsteps.
2. If you publish a tweet via Twitter, even if you delete it, some search engines maintain cache, a kind of memory, and will retain the information contained in the tweet. The same is true of information on other networks that you think you deleted. It could live on for years. There are sites like TwapperKeeper that archive tweets.
3. There is no nuance or context at all for messages online, apart from the occasional smiley face or LOL.
4. What you “say” online is increasingly subject to the regulations and laws that pertain to published, not spoken, words. If you worked at Nokia and told your friend in the cafe that a certain competitive mobile phone sucked, you would not be in legal jeopardy. If you did the same thing online, you might be construed as a representative of Nokia, and the FTC might not approve of your competitive practice.

I was chatting with Nadia Matos of CTV Southwestern Ontario, and I mentioned one of my favorite Marshall McLuhan quotations, “Publication is self-invasion of privacy.” We threw this idea around a little and together came up with the idea that online communications are a form of publication, not conversation, and a failure to understand this distinction can be troublesome.

Problems arise when we behave in so-called online conversations as if we are in real conversations. We say things without considering whether we want them permanently recorded in an online archive available to nearly 2 billion people. We tweet an offhand remark to a friend, in a simulation of a one-to-one conversation, which happens to be visible to 500 million people. Our most casual remarks are recorded for future employers, business competitors, customers, clients, potential litigants, political adversaries and others.

That’s because we’re publishing, not conversing. No need to worry about the surreptitious encroachment of Big Brother in this world. You may already have invited him in the front door.

This morning I was a reluctant participant in third grade show-and-tell. Usually the kids bring books about dinosaurs, or vacation souvenirs, but my daughter took advantage of a little known provision that allows the children to bring people. I felt a little like a snow globe, or maybe a sock monkey, on display.

We ended up having a great conversation about online privacy, which was made all the more interesting by the students relating their experiences firsthand.

My daughter proudly introduced me to the class by saying, “my dad wrote a book about work.” I explained it was about social media (not a gripping topic for most nine-year-olds). Most of the kids knew about Facebook and YouTube. A few were familiar with Twitter.

In order to start up a conversation about privacy, I explained Foursquare, and how people “check in” at Starbucks, the movies, work, etc., but how parents should not check in at home, or at their children’s school, karate studio, friend’s house or any other location that divulged the schedule and location of their kids.

This opened a really interesting discussion about privacy, and the data collected by sites like Webkinz, Nick Jr., Poptropica, etc. One after the other, half a dozen students shared experiences with being online and being asked to provide their name, e-mail address, zip code, city, and in some cases, address. I emphasized that this information was nobody’s business and should never be shared with strangers, whether on the computer or off.

These are eight- and nine-year-olds. Who is asking them for this information, and why? Online marketers are asking, because the youth market is huge. According to a report on NBC’s Today Show last August, “Tweens (children 9-11) represent $43 billion in spending power”! It’s no surprise marketers want our children’s information.

There are some protections for children, though they are limited in effectiveness. The Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), effective April, 2000, outlines privacy requirements for websites that collect information from children under the age of thirteen, and mandates “verifiable parental consent” that must be verified by a confirmation e-mail or other means.

In practice, children can usually sign up for almost any site. They have to enter a parent’s e-mail address for verification (like I want my e-mail address given out), but even then, they can often use the site in some capacity without the verification.

And do online marketers really think a statement like “You must be 13 years old to use this site” keeps underage users out? No. In fact they hope it doesn’t.

The “answer” to the child privacy issue can only be found at home. Parents must educate their children and place technological controls in place, such as browser or desktop based privacy controls, and not allowing children unmonitored access to computers (including phones with browsers.)

Marketers looking to capture a slice of that $43 billion pie are just one source of attacks on the privacy of our children. Too much sharing on the Internet can also leave children vulnerable to sexual predators. It’s a scary world out there. As parents, we are the only ones who can adequately protect our children.

Tags: children, online privacy, COPPA