broadstuff

Once someone like McKinsey gets hold of Web 2.0, some would argue that is at the peak of its hype cycle - another way of looking at it though is that its entered the Darwninian process of culling the failed experiences and taking out of Web 2.0 the bits that are useful. That at least is the approach in this article in the McKinsey Quarterly, which sees Web 2.0 / Enterprise 2.0 software as just the next phase in business systems, from the ERP and CRM systems of the 1990's onwards - but with the difference that they come from a different starting point:

Earlier technologies often required expensive and lengthy technical implementations, as well as the realignment of formal business processes. With such memories still fresh, some executives naturally remain wary of Web 2.0. But the new tools are different. While they are inherently disruptive and often challenge an organization and its culture, they are not technically complex to implement. Rather, they are a relatively lightweight overlay to the existing infrastructure and do not necessarily require complex technology integration.

The biggest ROI they argue comes from what Clay Shirky, calls the “cognitive surplus” - underused human potential at companies - an immense resource and one that could be tapped by the Web 2.0 participatory tools. (In other words, how can your company grab the brain cycles you are currently giving voluntarily to other companies' projects )

In the article, they have 6 six critical factors that they believe determine the outcome of efforts to implement these technologies. I've expurgated them and commented below:

1. The transformation to a bottom-up culture needs help from the top.

Web 2.0 projects often are seen as grassroots experiments, and leaders sometimes believe the technologies will be adopted without management intervention—a “build it and they will come” philosophy. These business leaders are correct in thinking that participatory technologies are founded upon bottom-up involvement from frontline staffers and that this pattern is fundamentally different from the rollout of ERP systems, for example, where compliance with rules is mandatory. Successful participation, however, requires not only grassroots activity but also a different leadership approach: senior executives often become role models and lead through informal channels.

Comment - Its a truism from the days of the first rollouts of IT systems that without top management support, most systems tend to die out eventually as they are starved of resources and political support.

2. The best uses come from users—but they require help to scale.

In earlier IT campaigns, identifying and prioritizing the applications that would generate the greatest business value was relatively easy. These applications focused primarily on improving the effectiveness and efficiency of known business processes within functional silos (for example, supply-chain-management software to improve coordination across the network). By contrast, our research shows the applications that drive the most value through participatory technologies often aren’t those that management expects.

Comment - this is the corollary of point 1 in part - if management does get behind the efforts they are more likely to succeed. The other point made is that this whole area is still very early stage and what works - and doesn't - is still very unclear. McKinsey may want to look back to pre ERP days, to MRP, and before that to pre MRP systems - it was unclear then what worked, how it would work etc and took quite a few years to get the optimal approaches ironed out.

3. What’s in the workflow is what gets used.

Perhaps because of the novelty of Web 2.0 initiatives, they’re often considered separate from mainstream work. Earlier generations of technologies, by contrast, often explicitly replaced the tools employees used to accomplish tasks. Thus, using Web 2.0 and participating in online work communities often becomes just another “to do” on an already crowded list of tasks.

Participatory technologies have the highest chance of success when incorporated into a user’s daily workflow. The importance of this principle is sometimes masked by short-term success when technologies are unveiled with great fanfare; with the excitement of the launch, contributions seem to flourish. As normal daily workloads pile up, however, the energy and attention surrounding the rollout decline, as does participation.

Comment - absolutely - and what gets measured gets done. People use the stuff that solves the day by day problems and divert around that which doesn't. Any system that doesn't model the reality will be neglected. Web 2.0 systems, because thay are ground up, have the potential to be more rooted in real workflow.

4. Appeal to the participants’ egos and needs—not just their wallets.

Traditional management incentives aren’t particularly useful for encouraging participation. Earlier technology adoptions could be guided readily with techniques such as management by objectives, as well as standardized bonus pay or individual feedback. The failure of employees to use a mandated application would affect their performance metrics and reviews. These methods tend to fall short when applied to unlocking participation. In one failed attempt, a leading Web company set performance evaluation criteria that included the frequency of postings on the company’s newly launched wiki. While individuals were posting enough entries to meet the benchmarks, the contributions were generally of low quality. Similarly, a professional-services firm tried to use steady management pressure to get individuals to post on wikis. Participation increased when managers doled out frequent feedback but never reached self-sustaining levels.

Comment: Mandating user acceptance doesn't work - it was ever thus, but as they point out, applies in spades to systems that are driving their entire economic ROI from the user acceptance and participation they are supposed to facilitate. The million dollar question is how to do this, as systems that come "bottom up" are typically localised and hard to scale while they keep their local flavour.

5. The right solution comes from the right participants.

Targeting users who can create a critical mass for participation as well as add value is another key to success. With an ERP rollout, the process is straightforward: a company simply identifies the number of installations (or “seats”) it needs to buy for functions such as purchasing or finance and accounting. With participatory technologies, it’s far from obvious which individuals will be the best participants. Without the right base, efforts are often ineffective. A pharmaceutical company tried to generate new product ideas by tapping suggestions from visitors to its corporate Web site. It soon discovered that most of them had neither the skills nor the knowledge to make meaningful contributions, so the quality of the ideas was very low.

Comment: Absolutely, those people most involved with a subsystem are usually best placed to help its development along (but not always - sometimes one needs to break old workflows). But, it is fairly clear in most companies who will be on what sorts of participatory subnet from the workflow and responsibilities, but so long as the system allows communication between these subnets - so the "loose ties" and or informal networks can emerge onto the system, it will probably work. With respect to the Pharmaceutical company, you have to get the right users and empower them, as other companies have gained great benefit from user feedback.

6. Balance the top-down and self-management of risk.

A common reason for failed participation is discomfort with it, or even fear. In some cases, the lack of management control over the self-organizing nature and power of dissent is the issue. In others, it’s the potential repercussions of content—through blogs, social networks, and other venues—that is detrimental to the company. Numerous executives we interviewed said that participatory initiatives had been stalled by legal and HR concerns. These risks differ markedly from those of previous technology adoptions, where the chief downside was high costs and poor execution.

Comment: This is the crux of participatory media - it is harder to control , but not impossible, and the datamining possible makes it ultimately impossible to ignore. There are a legion of PR and Digital Marketing companies working on where the borders of control lie and where the "sweet spots" of this medium are. Its emergent, the tools are evolving and there will be errors made. So far a good rule of thumb seems to be that if one is trying to sell a spiel that is obviously false it will be found out sooner or later in this medium, as it is just far more transparent. The cynical will argue that the future will lie in "believable lies", the enthusiasts that it will be in "authentic communication". Behavioural economists, game theorists and marketeers will vote with the cynics, methinks - but don't expect them to say how they vote in public!

Took the offspring to the British Museum's "Babylon" exhibition - not a resounding success, most of it is as dry as Babylonian desert to kids who wanted to see more of the city's walls, wars, whores and so on. One thing they did latch on to was the Hanging Gardens - why were they built? The "official" explanation is that King Nebuchadnezzar built them for his wife who was pining for her mountainous homeland. Huh! sniffed No 1 (teenage) sprog, in a paraphrase of Monty Python "using public money just to amuse some royal babe is no system for building municipal infrastructure".

Ah, the naivete of youth - where do they get such scepticism from

This of course got me thinking about TED, and Dickson Despommier's talk about Vertical Gardens as solutions for our cities today (more on this here). Big takeaways from this idea is that:

- Vertical Gardens increase effective acreage and incoming solar radiation by going up and spreading out a bit
- They are extremely efficient consumers of scarce resources like water, and you can target minerals to the plants rather than sowing them onto stony and fertile soil
- You can operate them year round

That set me thinking anew - the Babylonians in all other respects seemed most rational. What if they actually did do it for sound municipal reasons. After all, another part of the exhibition was about its 3 concentric walls, massive gates, moat etc - and another showed the city enclosed was none too big. This was a city built for sieges, and in sieges you (i) get a lot of hungry mouths pouring in for protection and they (ii) will sit on what land you may use in the city to grow food normally, and (iii) by and large besiegers will cut your access to outside food off.

Or, imagine your loyal populace take a dislike to you and start revolting? The King owning the Means of Production of Food in desperate times, and having it safe in his citadel looks quite smart. If it amused the Queen, bonus! Given that the moat was the Euphrates, water was not a problem - or rather, if the besiegers dammed the river and drained the moat (as the Persians eventually did) then medium term food supply is not the most urgent problem.

So, was the first implementation of Vertical Farming some 2,500 years ago?. I googled Google to see if anyone else had my brainwave - turns out that no, I am -as far as Google is concerned anyway - the only person who has hypothesised that The Hanging Gardens of Babylon were not in fact built for a Queen (or her ransom) but were a very rational approach to creating and controlling food supply in an urban ecosystem. Feel free to award me an Honorary PhD in Archaeology at any time......

As to Internet Tech content - not much, but you can get your plants to talk to you via Twitter. The Babylonians probably used slaves, which, if current calculations about energy usage of avatars vs Brazilian peasants are anything to go by, were more clean-tech

From the Faceblog:

A couple of weeks ago, we revised our terms of use hoping to clarify some parts for our users. Over the past couple of days, we received a lot of questions and comments about the changes and what they mean for people and their information. Based on this feedback, we have decided to return to our previous terms of use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

Questions and Comments - thats putting it mildly!!!!

Anyway, the aim is now to hold a poll about proposed changes:

If you'd like to get involved in crafting our new terms, you can start posting your questions, comments and requests in the group we've created—Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities. I'm looking forward to reading your input.

I'd love to believe their intentions are honourable. However, like the bankers who broke the Banks, its clear that have forgotten nothing about their intentions and remembered nothing about the outcry to date:

Our next version will be a substantial revision from where we are now. It will reflect the principles I described yesterday around how people share and control their information, and it will be written clearly in language everyone can understand. Since this will be the governing document that we'll all live by, Facebook users will have a lot of input in crafting these terms.

Ah, so apparently I merely misunderstood the language in the TOS...silly me. WTF? I understood the language perfectly well, including the language that went missing! And Facebook, FYI none of the other social networks have these sort of Terms and Conditions.

By their deeds shall ye know them, and if ever there has been a company which has pushed the limits of privacy and identity violation, its Facebook.

Update - The Grauniad's Charles Arthur argues that the difference between online and offline worlds is that everything is more visible online. Thus, Facebook should just offer loyalty cards instead, after all no-one looks at the small print on those.

Last week Chinwag held an interesting session (see their summary here) on the future of online advertising in a recessionary world.

The panel consisted of Wayne Brown (Client Services Director, glue London), Catherine Demajo (Head of Marketing, Time Out Group), Damon Reeve (CEO / Co-founder, Unanimis), David McMurtrie (Head of Product Specialists, Doubleclick), Guy Phillipson (CEO, Internet Advertising Bureau UK) with Philip Buxton (Digital Strategy Consultant) taking the helm.

The IAB has a summary of some of the discussion over here, the following are the key points from it:

“Online disciplines are well placed in a recession,” said Phillipson. “Accountability is key. If the axe comes down and you’re thinking ‘Where can I spend money in an accountable way?’ search and online direct response is going to hoover up a lot of that”.

Wayne Brown, head of account management at glue London was in bullish mood, arguing that recession had opened up opportunities for his agency. “The early stages of recession have been very positive for us,” said Brown. “Big advertisers like Toyota for example have been forced to spend more money in digital.”

For Brown, measurability is the key to the future survival of the medium. “We’ll come out of this recession much stronger if we can match the high standards of creativity with targeting and tracking,” he argued.

David McMurtrie, head of product specialists at Doubleclick agreed that measurability would be a crucial factor in the months ahead as clients will inevitably look to focus on “tracking value”. As a result, argued McMurtie, “people are looking at optimisation, targeting and the like. These tools have been available for a long time but have not been so widely used until now.”

McMurtrie warned clients against short term budget slashing, arguing: “There are two types of business. One that will say ‘my business is screwed’ and slash budgets. The other will accept that they have slightly less to spend but will be more innovative. Who do you think will come out of this the strongest?”

From a client-side perspective, exploiting new found opportunities was a key theme of the discussion. Catherine Demajo, head of marketing at Time Out London, pointed out that recession had led to an increase in the financial importance of Time Out’s online brand in comparison with the offline title. “While online is not compensating for what’s lost offline, it’s growing,” said Demajo. “As a result we’re looking more and more at integrating our media.” The net result of this according to Demajo is that Time Out has been forced to “become more flexible, open and creative.”

For more flexible, read "pricing". The key take the ISB had was that measurability was the key differentiator for online Ad media.

Conference chair Philip Buxton wrote that in his view there would be two types of plays:

Digital – as the accountable ‘channel’ - will have been up in the second half of 2008 on the year before (my guess - and it really is a guess - is by between 15 and 20%) and even up by a [perhaps significantly] smaller amount compared with the first half. Its most accountable sub-channels – search – will claim even greater share, though growth will be slower. And the accountable versions of other channels – CPA display, for example – would fare better than their less accountable brethren – like CPM banners. Experimental budgets like mobile are likely to be cut or axed completely. Brilliantly, Wayne Brown, who oversees the Toyota account at glue, was also able to confirm that no one is buying cars.

So, what lies beneath?

The upshot was that advertisers are starting to fall into two camps:

1. The back-to-basics types that will hammer the numbers (and their DR suppliers) harder to reach tougher targets in tougher times. Their bosses have said to them: “You’re in online, get me out of this mess. You won’t get any more budget, but you will get more of what you had last year than everybody else.”

2. The innovators. Usually in marketing-led businesses, there are those that see the recession – and the potential desperation of innovative suppliers – as the time to buy and try new ideas to get what money they have working harder for them.

One of the problems that many advertisers and client sites will face is the sheer surplus of inventory, one WSJ writer, martin Peers, likening its inflation to the Zimbabwe dollar, in that:

Both are printing nearly-limitless amounts of their main currency, vastly diminishing its value and undermining their future. The currency, for Web sites, is their ad inventory. And while Zimbabwe, under different management, can change course, the same isn't true of the display-ad market. Web sites keep generating new content and extra pages on which ads can run.

That is why the sudden sharp weakness in online display advertising, which hit fourth-quarter revenue at companies ranging from Yahoo to Time Warner's AOL and New York Times Co., isn't just about a cyclical downturn caused by the recession.

What to believe, then? Julia Eilon of Chinwag summarised the data to date:

With stats seeming to being revised downwards every few months here is a recent snapshot of what's been happening and the predictions for 2009.

From company surveys:

• Q4 2008: 20% of firms reduced online ad spending while 14% increased. (UK, IPA)
• 2008: 80% of advertisers increased online ad spend, predict will also do in 2009. (Europe, European Interactive Advertising Association)
• 2009: 42% of UK marketers forecast their digital spend to increase. (UK, Marketing Week)

General industry predictions:

• Online ad spend: 20% up in 2008, 16% up in 2009. (global, Jefferies)
• Online ad spend: 18% up in 2009 for North America, 12% up in 2009 for Western Europe. (Zenith Optimedia)
• Online ad spend: 8.9% up in 2009. (US, eMarketer)
• Online ad spend: 4% up in 2009. (UK, Group M) (was lowered from 20% estimate)
• Online ad spend: 2.7% up in 2009. (US, Jack Myers) (was lowered from 13.5% estimate)
• Online ad spend: to fall sharply in 2009. (US, Fitch Ratings)

Specific formats:
• Video ad spend: 45% up in 2009. (US, eMarketer)
• Paid search: 14.9% up in 2009. (US, eMarketer)
• Display ad spend: 14% up in 2008, 7% up in 2009. (global, Jefferies)

Putting this all together leads me to the following hypotheses:

1. Online Advertising spend will continue to grow, albeit far more slowly in 2009. Offline will still decline as it always does in recessionary times, but companies will choose to spend some of the savings online.

2. There will be a flight to quality sites that can deliver large and/or defined audiences - much of the "inventory" will not carry Ads

3. There will be both the the "pull horns in" and "innovate our way out by going digital" plays.... with many companies dabbling in the latter.

4. The ROI for the latter group (especially those using Display Ads) will be a lot easier if there is good metrics and measurability.

5. The focus on targeting and relevance will increase

6. A "good-enough" to teh above may well prove to be just to "make Ads more fun"

For what its worth, I asked the panel whether they thought Mobile advertising would take off in 2009. The general view was that apart from DMS the answer is no, it is still to fragmented and there is friction throughout the supply chain. However, one interesting point was made, ie teh iPone gives a near-web experience so Web Advertising can work on it - and as a user base, iPhone users are self selected into a useful demographic - early adoption, above average income etc.

Looking at the brouhaha surrounding Facebook's latest TOS changes, I wondered if they contravened the EU laws on Data Protection. At first blush they probably do in a number of areas. I'm no lawyer, but what Facebook is trying to do and what European Data Protection Law is trying to achieve look like they are far from a meeting of minds. The key edict is 95/46 a which states (italics are mine where added):

Article 6(e) argues that data should not be kept longer than is necessary:

(e) kept in a form which permits identification of data subjects for no longer than is necessary for the purposes for which the data were collected or for which they are further processed. Member States shall lay down appropriate safeguards for personal data stored for longer periods for historical, statistical or scientific use.

Article 10 is pretty clear that the user has the right to access, change and understand what their data is being used for:

Member States shall provide that the controller or his representative must provide a data subject from whom data relating to himself are collected with at least the following information, except where he already has it:

(a) the identity of the controller and of his representative, if any;

(b) the purposes of the processing for which the data are intended;

(c) any further information such as:
— the recipients or categories of recipients of the data,
— whether replies to the questions are obligatory or voluntary, as well as the possible consequences of failure to reply,
— the existence of the right of access to and the right to rectify the data concerning him

in so far as such further information is necessary, having regard to the specific circumstances in which the data are collected, to guarantee
fair processing in respect of the data subject.

Article 14 gives the right to protest and have altered/removed data the user does not wish held:

Member States shall grant the data subject the right:

(a) at least in the cases referred to in Article 7 (e) and (f), to object at any time on compelling legitimate groundsrelating to hisparticular
situation to the processing of data relating to him, save where otherwise provided by national legislation. Where there is a justified
objection, the processing instigated by the controller may no longer involve those data;

(b) to object, on request and free of charge, to the processing of personal data relating to him which the controller anticipates being
processed for the purposes of direct marketing, or to be informed before personal data are disclosed for the first time to third parties
or used on their behalf for the purposes of direct marketing, and to be expressly offered the right to object free of charge to such
disclosures or uses.

Article 25 implies that a non EU country is not exempt:

1. The Member States shall provide that the transfer to a third country of personal data which are undergoing processing or are intended for processing after transfer may take place only if, without prejudice to compliance with the national provisions adopted pursuant to the other provisions of this Directive, the third country in question ensures an adequate level of protection.

2. The adequacy of the level of protection afforded by a third country shall be assessed in the light of all the circumstances
surrounding a data transfer operation or set of data transfer operations; particular consideration shall be given to the nature of the data, the purpose and duration of the proposed processing operation or operations, the country of origin and country of final destination, the rules
of law, both general and sectoral, in force in the third country in question and the professional rules and security measures which are
complied with in that country.

3. The Member States and the Commission shall inform each other of cases where they consider that a third country does not ensure an
adequate level of protection within the meaning of paragraph 2.

So, although not specifically addressing the Facebook case, it would seem that the intent is to stop Facebook style datamining and data on-selling, and holding onto data - especially if the data provider does not wish it.

Well, that's just a little canter through it, but it looks like the Facebook T&C (see below) and the EU law are at opposed in a number of key areas.

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

A few other goodies from the preamble, referencing the rights of citizens under the Treaty of the European Union:

Firstly, all citizens have a right to privacy

(2) ...data-processing systems are designed to serve man; whereas they must, whatever the nationality or residence of
natural persons, respect their fundamental rights and freedoms, notably the right to privacy, and contribute to economic and
social progress, trade expansion and the well-being of individuals;

Facebook being in the US does not mitigate their responsibility to EU citizens:

(20) ... the fact that the processing of data is carried out by a person established in a third country must not stand in the way of the protection of individuals provided for in this Directive; whereas in these cases, the processing should be governed by
the law of the Member State in which the means used are located, and there should be guarantees to ensure that the rights
and obligations provided for in this Directive are respected in practice;

Transmitting the data does not give Facebook the right of ownership (contradicts Zuckerberg's email example)

(47) Whereas where a message containing personal data is transmitted by means of a telecommunications or electronic mail
service, the sole purpose of which is the transmission of such messages, the controller in respect of the personal data contained
in the message will normally be considered to be the person from whom the message originates, rather than the person
offering the transmission services; whereas, nevertheless, those offering such services will normally be considered controllers in
respect of the processing of the additional personal data necessary for the operation of the service;

Interesting times ahead, methinks......

Update - Looks like a US organisation is preparing to file a complaint to the FTC.

This is getting good - two of my favourite websnark reporters, Paul Carr (Grauniad) and Andrew Orlowski (El Reg) having an email spat. They are both very sharp and web-sceptical so its interesting that they are divided about Twitter, of all things.

Very funny, bit naughty of Paul to publish a private conversation though.......still, one always assumes there is honour among thieves, but among journalists its never been a strong point

So, its Mobile World Congress time again, and the key question is "Will 2009 truly be The Year of the Mobile Web". Well, the BBC's Rory Cellan Jones first soundings are mixed:

Two years ago all the talk at the Mobile World Congress was of the imminent arrival of the Apple iPhone, and how it was going to change the industry. One year ago, all the talk was of Google's open-source Android operating system, and what a radical impact that might have. In each case, the big established players blew a collective raspberry at the thought that these upstarts would rock their world - so how much has changed?

However often it is pointed out that the iPhone has only a tiny fraction of world handset sales, a walk around the halls here provides plenty of evidence of its influence. Touchscreen phones are everywhere - and although early versions appeared pale imitations, some of them now look as good as the original, and have a lot more firepower.

He notes that some of these new devices are as iPhony as the come, but the killer non-app was always:

And it's on software that Apple has really made a big impact. Ever tried to get onto the web with an N95? I found it too much of a struggle to bother, with this or other phones, and the statistics show that it was only the arrival of the iPhone which encouraged many users to see their phones as surfing devices.

Would we have seen the launch of phone application stores by both Nokia and Microsoft today if Apple's Apps Store hadn't shown there was a latent demand for useful, wacky or even totally pointless things to do on your mobile?

Quite.

Our take from what we've read so far about the stuff at Barcelona - the mobile web industry is still awaiting the "Microsoft MS-DOS/IBM PC" play as it is still far too fragmented. Apple will carve out its unique value chain segment, and may still play the main part, but in the past they have always carved out a large minority segment and mined it profitably, leaving the mass market to others. Can Android step up - well so far there is but one device out there, though more are promised - not exactly "internet speed" though.

However, as was pointed out in a recent Chinwag Future of Advertising event, the iPhone still represents the only low friction end to end web-mobile ad platform going.

We highlighted the data scraping rights in Facebook's TOS last year - well, its now got worse. It now reads:

You hereby grant Facebook an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license (with the right to sublicense) to (a) use, copy, publish, stream, store, retain, publicly perform or display, transmit, scan, reformat, modify, edit, frame, translate, excerpt, adapt, create derivative works and distribute (through multiple tiers), any User Content you (i) Post on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof subject only to your privacy settings or (ii) enable a user to Post, including by offering a Share Link on your website and (b) to use your name, likeness and image for any purpose, including commercial or advertising, each of (a) and (b) on or in connection with the Facebook Service or the promotion thereof. You represent and warrant that you have all rights and permissions to grant the foregoing licenses.

But there used to be a bit about cancelling all that if you wanted to or left Facebook, they used to say:

You retain the copyright to your content. When you upload your content you grant us a license to use and display
your content.

and.....

You may remove your User Content from the Site at any time. If you choose to remove your User Content, the license granted above will automatically expire, however you acknowledge that the Company may retain archived copies of your User Content.

That's gone now - once you're gone your data lives on and on and on................... and we suspect if you've got anything feeding your site that too will keep going.

Now, we were thrown off Facebook about a year ago, and when I asked for confirmation that our data would be removed, confirmation had I none, so the de facto policy even before this was probably to keep their hands on it. But what this means is the stuff thet glean from you on that 25 things about you meme is theirs to use, and if you've been dumb enough to let them scrape where you've been and gone, it will persists long after you've exited the site.

Funnily enough, the debate is being waged by the New York Times as we write, when they argue:

Perhaps a more direct explanation is that data collection is part of what Cindy Cohn, the legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, calls “the surveillance business model.” That is, there is money to be made from knowing your customers well — with a depth unimaginable before Internet cookies allowed companies to track obsessively online behavior.

“We took whatever was done offline and put it on steroids,” she said, perhaps with the Rodriguez case in the back of her mind. “It requires compliance with the kind of promises that comes with this kind of data collection.”

The foundation argues that online service providers — social networks, search engines, blogs and the like — should voluntarily destroy what they collect, to avoid the kind of legal controversies the baseball players’ union is now facing. The union is being criticized for failing to act during what apparently was a brief window to destroy the 2003 urine samples before the federal prosecutors claimed them. “You don’t want to know that stuff,” she says, speaking of the ordinary blogger collecting data on every commenter. “You don’t want to get a subpoena. For ordinary Web sites it is a cost to collect all this data.”

The digital format makes it easy to cling to material that normally would be disposed of or would disintegrate. Storage is cheap and practically limitless. And Ms. Cohn says of the people who dominate the Internet, “the people who design software, in my experience, tend to be pack rats.”

Arguing for data removal is all very well, but judging by the fight that Google's been putting up to the European Commission these companies will be extremely reluctant, and even if ordered to do so it will probably be kept underhand, anyway without rigorous checking.

No, the best option in future will probably be to lie as much as possible on the social nets and to use data scrubbers and obfusticators when using services like Google. Sadly, the rank and file users seem not to care about privacy issues judging by their behaviour.

(Ironically enough, I picked up on all this via Twitter - which does not have the same privacy issues as Facebook)

Update - no, trust us says Facebook, Users Control the Data:

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person's sent messages box and the other in their friend's inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

In reality, we wouldn't share your information in a way you wouldn't want. The trust you place in us as a safe place to share information is the most important part of what makes Facebook work. Our goal is to build great products and to communicate clearly to help people share more information in this trusted environment.

In reality, they have taken away the previous legal protections users had, so one needs to look at what they are doing, not saying. In Game Theory one differentiates between strong and weak tells, a "strong tell" in this case would be a some form of commitment to back up the words. A weak tell, like a banker's apology, carries no such commitment...

We were discussing just the other day how the number of Linked In requests we were getting was rocketing...TechCrunch sees it too:

As layoffs continued to pound the economy in January, one beneficiary was job networking site LinkedIn. According to the latest January data from comScore, the LinkedIn’s U.S. unique visitors shot up 22 percent to 7.7 million, up from 6.3 million in December. Total minutes spent on the site doubled in January to 96.8 million, from 47.6 million in December.

In the UK it may also be still because its going up the adoption curve, but no doubt the current situation is also focussing minds.

Robin Wauters on TechCrunch notes that the "Web 2.0" hype is reducing (see graph above) and deduces this is equivalent to its death:

Judging by Google Trends, which shows how often a particular search term is entered relative to the total search volume across various regions of the world (and in various languages), the term started being used at the end of 2004 when Tim O’Reilly organized the first edition of the Web 2.0 Conference. Search queries for the term started picking up in the middle of 2005, when TechCrunch was started - with the tagline “Tracking Web 2.0″ by the way - and the number kept increasing until the end of 2007. After that, the trend is clearly downwards, falling back to the level it reached in early 2006 today. If the trend continues, there should only be a handful of people left who scour search engines for “Web 2.0″ by 2011.

However, those familiar with the Gartner Hype Curve will realise that this shows more that it has gone "off-hype" into the trough of despond, from which the useful stuff emerges after a darwinian culling of the chaff.

Another reason it will not die per se is that it was a useful "catch-all" phrase for a whole variety of technologies that emerged in 2002-4 across the online value chain - I recall trying to describe much of this new architecture in 2003 - 4 as a "broadband value chain" and even "digital logistics" - so Web 2.0 when it was coined was a very useful - and better sounding - term.