Murdoch, Google+ and Facebook News - you ain't seen nothing yet...

I assume everyone has been watching the unravelling of News International with some fascination, and all the little birds we know (and Rebekah Brooks) are telling us there is still more stuff to come....

However, the real long term question is this: how did power corrupt the organisation? On what planet do youh ave to live to have a world view that thinks hacking the phones of dead children is OK.

Befehl ist befehl, as they said at Nuremburg*

But that is not it - the real reason is "because they could", it was inevitable that in the pressure for results,to perform,to climb the greasy pole,that one person would go for this option - and so long as they don't get caught, the corporate game theory says they keep on winning (and even if they do get caught, the payoff for hacking may still be better than the punishment - we shall see)

I was reflecting on this with news today that Facebook is"becoming a News Organisation", and in a hard competition with Google+ (Forbes):

Facebook has a war on its hands, and Mark Zuckerberg knows it. Practically overnight, Google+ has gone from a rumor to a thriving community with over 10 million members. With some 700 million members of its own, Facebook is thinking less and less about how to grow that number and more about how to get current users to live more of their lives within its virtual walls. One answer it has come up with: asking a select number of news outlets to produce “Facebook editions” — basically, app versions of themselves that can be read and consumed right there on Facebook.

Add to that the article that there is a war on social network counting going on....Search Engine Land

Whether on purpose or not, Google and Twitter are having a little back-and-forth this week about the size of their social networks — or, maybe more accurately, about the activity levels on their social networks.

Google+ has X amount of users and the +1 button gets served Y times per day. Twitter delivers N tweets every day and saw P new signups just yesterday. It’s all quite reminiscent of the early/mid 2000s, when all of major search engines made a sport out of bragging over the number of pages they’d indexed

My take on Facebook's corporate culture is that they are not exactly angels, and Google long ago stopped "doing no evil". Twitter is still an unknown quanity.

But the user data they have access to makes the stuff that News International could get from mobile phone hacking look like a cupcake party confessions session.

And as the competitive pressures intensify, there will probably be the same corporate game theory emerging..... so even if everyone there today are saints,the corporate sleazeball would still triumph - one hopes that these companes put practices in to prevent it, or even better (and probably necessarily) US and UK regulators look at the NI event as a wake up call to put measures in place to prevent social network user data hacking.

Or else we will be saying "we told you so" in a few years time....

*Give us a break - Broadstuff is 4 years in and we only now invoke Godwin's Law .