I’m back a little earlier than expected. Oh well. At least I gave myself an out yesterday. Now that I took the pressure off myself to post everyday, I’m inspired. Last night a brainstorm was unleashed for blog ideas. Go figure. Now, I just need time to implement them.

This morning I found out that my department won a grassroots innovation award in the technology category at an undisclosed conference in the very near future. Some of you know that (my place of employment) and (CRM software provider) developed the (________) application for Facebook. It’s incredibly innovative and the first successful app to be used for advocacy.

Is it possible to brag anymore vaguely?

Anyways, Woot! for all of us. A lot of hard work went into developing it. It was an honor to be part of the effort.

It’s nice to get accolades. Working in an industry that so few people understand is hard. Even fewer people appreciate the best practices. Go us!

According to hitwise, social networking numbers are going up as online porn numbers are declining. I doubt it’s because of morality. Most likely, we’re just more narcissistic and spend our days trying to keep our names in everyone else’s newsfeed. It’s a shift from one online addiction to another.

Is this good? The Bible-thumping, right-winger in me is happy to see decreased interest in porn, but addiction is addiction. Just like the church doesn’t address gluttony, are we going to ignore addictions to the web, even PG ones like Facebook? A few have mentioned its negatives, and I must admit that they have a point.

So technically, this is old news. Work must be keeping me busy. I missed an opportunity to blog about Facebook last week!

Gavin Newsom Case Study: Facebook for PR, branding and Press Releases A case study with examples of everything Facebook alluded to yesterday.

Rohit Bargava: The Future of PR Means Dumping the Inferiority Complex
Sigh. If we want to get this massive chip off the shoulders of the profession, why don’t we start in the classroom. It doesn’t help when the next generation enters the workforce cynical and paranoid.

Google acquires Jaiku. Is November 5 the Facebook/Google showdown? All the tech giants weigh in, including Brian Solis on how lifestreams are relevant to communication.

Junior Takes a Bride
This is a few days old, but I can’t help it. I’m not a fan of Harold Ford, Jr. but marrying anyone who works for Carolina Herrera adds a much-needed layer of class to the rather trashy Ford family. Will they live in Memphis? Can someone like her survive in Tennessee? Will she supply couture for Ford family appearances in court? Just imagine a gubernatorial campaign with a real fashionista in the Volunteer State! Can’t you see her wearing a classic Carolina evening gown to the Grand Ole Opry? Oh, the blogging would be so much fun!

Facebook took a page from Google’s book and hosted a political summit today.

Will Facebook increase their DC presence like Google? Competition is great. Especially competition that involves free food and breaks from the office. If they keep doing these things, I hope that Facebook changes their presentation. Between the progressive events that I attend for work, and conservative ones for the sake of my sanity, I’ve seen the Google presentation about four times.

The turnout for the event was surprising. There was a huge line to register and find a seat. While waiting, I noticed that almost everyone was under 30. According to Facebook, 56% of the users are over 25, yet every campaign and congressional office sent younger staffers.

I’m happy to hear that changes will be made to integrate groups into the newsfeed. As much as I love Facebook, they keep adding things rather than improving some of the basic functions. They’re finally lifting the ban on messaging more than 1,000 people and working on allowing candidates to send messages to all of their supporters.

They still won’t allow groups to create profiles and are quite adamant about it! This hurts causes and advocacy groups more than anyone else. It’s frustrating to have so many wonderful tools at our disposal, but Facebook only allows political campaigns to fully use them. Nonprofits are getting more engaged in politics and launching full-scale battles over legislation and races. If Facebook wants to further the democratic process and encourage conversations, they need to get over this decision and create some type of profile for groups. The Cause application is great, and my employer was one of the first ones to sign up. However, it’s still an app and very limited in what you can do with it.

I also love how Facebook’s answer to everything is “build an application.” I don’t know if they’re really lazy or empowering their users to have a greater say in the development of the social utility.

Some of their stats are amazing.

• 200,000 people join every day and the site doubles with active users every six months.
• People spend and average of 22 minutes a day on Facebook.
• By the end of 2007, 75% of active users will be out of college.
• 41% of active users are likely to vote for a candidate if they could learn more about he or she on Facebook.

Voters want a more personable candidate. Facebook helps. All of those odd factoids that people love knowing about candidates should be on profiles. Groups are also a great opportunity to build on those microcampaigns that target key populations (i.e. women). If groups become more integrated with the newsfeed, they could be a much more powerful tool. Before Facebook went global, they were useful for organizing and spreading news. Now they’re too big and are really only good for propaganda and making statements. Just including updates in the feeds might make them useful again.

More at TechPresident

Earlier this week, I wanted to write about Facebook’s new Google index and didn’t get a chance. Then I heard about the Danah Boyd/Scoble discussion. Since I can’t go more than a week without posting about my favorite social utility, here goes.

I’m with Boyd here. Facebook and Myspace are constantly compared, but the two operate from completely different philosophies. Facebook was started so that college students at Harvard could meet each other–meaning you were likely to friend people you already had a greater chance of meeting. MySpace was designed as a way for musicians could promote their work. The basis of MySpace is self-promotion while Facebook helped your social life. Two completely different things.

I whole-heartedly joined Facebook because of the privacy settings. I loved that I could only friend people from my university. It was small and not intrusive. Then it went global. Then we got mini-feeds that kept tabs on everything your friends did. Then Facebook opened up to everyone without an edu address. It was only a matter of time until your profile could be opened to search engines.

I understand both arguments for and against the walled garden. As a professional communicator, I spend a lot of time trying to figure out a way to use the data on Facebook profiles. There’s so much targeted information. It’s a gold mine for marketers.

Then I approach it as a user. I’ve written about my struggle to accept Facebook as a professional tool extensively here. It started out as a way for me to stay in touch with my college friends and gradually morphed into a professional networking tool. Perhaps it’s because I’m in a city, but people are now using Facebook profiles as business cards. It’s hard to direct people to your Facebook profile when college friends are posting old sorority pictures and tagging you (Nothing scandalous. Just pictures that I’d prefer to die on someone’s old hardrive). I’ve had discussions with friends back home, and the progression of Facebook hasn’t nearly reached the level of penetration that Facebook has in DC. For example, yesterday I was at Ebenezer’s, my favorite DC coffeehouse. As I walked around, I couldn’t help but notice almost every person using a laptop in the busy shop was surfing Facebook. If you aren’t on Facebook in DC, you simply don’t exist. If you’re not in an urban area, Facebook is soley recreational.

Privacy is also a concern. I’m not the only woman out there who’s been Facebook stalked and had very scary people following my blog. Perhaps I’ve watched too many Lifetime movies, but there’s a dangerous side of the web. This is a discussion that I’ve had with my female blogging friends, so I’m not alone in being wary of complete transparency. I applaud Facebook for warning me ahead of time about the change, so that I could alter the settings on my profile. However, as Boyd points out, how many people are going to take the time to do that? There have already been too many crimes committed from information on MySpace profiles. How long until there’s the first Facebook murder? Judging by the information in my mini-feed, not many people adjust their privacy settings or use the limited profile.

Usually, I’m cheering on the transparency factor in web communicaton, but how far is it going to go? The wall between personal and professional lives has already been torn down. This is happening so quickly that I sometimes wonder if the 2.0 bubble will burst, and we’ll see a backlash of returning to complete privacy and an anonymous web.

There’s also a debate about the cool factor of Facebook to the college crowd. Since Facebook went around the early adopter pattern with college students using it before techies, there’s an interesting breakdown. The luster has worn off for most college students and recent grads while the tech crowd is still mesmerized by this flashy toy. Thus the question–will Facebook continue to grow?

I theorize that it will. Facebook is still an ingenious set up. We’re in the early days of successful social networking, and I believe it will parallel the Internet in the late nineties. Remember when you signed on AOL and were excited to get two or three e-mails? E-mail was a novelty that quickly entrenched it’s way into our lives. Now, e-mail is a burden that people try to escape. Facebook and it’s offspring will likely work their way into society in a similar pattern. Younger users may not be as excited about Facebook as they were a few years ago, but the utility has become a part of their everyday lives.

If you read one blog today, click on Brian Solis. He nails it with his post on the sociology of social media.

Technology enables us to communicate, but the tools change constantly. People don’t change. People are relationship-based and communicate through networks in their lives. 

For the first time, the web allows us to mimic the way that people communicate in the real world. However, we spend more time studying the tools rather than the methods behind the tools.

From an academic perspective, most studies focus on the effect of a particular medium on people, especially with television. We aren’t focusing on how people communicate, but how they internalize the message that the medium forces on them through broadcast methods.

We’re always wondering what the next big thing is. What happens when the Facebook phenomenon ends? Will Twitter hit the mainstream? Is e-mail dead? If we understand the conversation and are participating, the tools are secondary. If true two-way communication exists, the right technology tools will be there. It’s all about that conversation:

Today, conversations are markets and markets are conversations. And the forums for these conversation cultivate an tight, unswerving and mostly unforgiving community and culture. Participation requires observation in order to understand the the sociological landscape and the dynamics that define each community. They are after all, populated by people, not audiences.

Read it.

Everyone is jumping on the social networking bandwagon, and Hugh Hefner never seems to miss a good party.

Playboy is getting into the social networking craze with PlayboyU.com, a new attempt to market to the student body in the language it is most comfortable with. It’s free to join, but enrollment is by invite only and limited to college students with .edu email address. Not unlike Facebook, it is all about letting your friends know how much of a party animal you are, allowing users to upload photos, videos and messages visible to only those within your group. Playboy says it will keep nudity off the site but not necessarily scantily clad women and will do its best to bar non-student campus personnel from joining. Social networking platform Ning, co-founded by Netscape’s Marc Andreessen, is powering PlayboyU.  (source: Cynopis).

I’m sure people will sign on just for the articles.

Are the targeted social networking sites going to work in the long-run? We have McCain Space, MyBarackObama, Nintendo Mii, LinkedIn, MySpace and now a proposed intelligence network. Are these going to survive?

Facebook works because you can draw from other networks. Instead of recreating the wheel, you can combine two, three or four other platforms. It’s far easier to draw from another pool of users than recruit your own. Unless it’s highly targeted and seperate like the intelligence world, it will be hard to maintain traffic. Once the social networking trend dies down and the next big thing comes along, will these sites stay active?