A buddy scans old pictures of you and a girl (friend) into his computer, then uploads them to Flickr and tags them with you name. Your current wife sees them and does the math back 22 years to find out that they were taken at the same time you were dating her. Trust issues can have a long half-life.

A working mother sees a Wall post on her daughters Facebook account about a young man she is smitten with. So the mother jumps into the discussion on this young man and razzes the daughter about being careful whom she chases. Three of the daughter’s friends then post an expletive filled rant about how much they hate the guy. Since the mother joined the conversation, the entire ugly discussion now shows up on her wall for all her clients to see.

In my case, my 27 year-old daughter runs her Facebook account as if only her friends have the ability to read it. So when our 12 year-old daughter reads it, we have the dreaded cross group bleed over problem. The older daughter believes she has the right to upload any photo, and use any language that is appropriate with her friends. This happens to be inappropriate for our younger daughter.

Of course there are lots of other stories where someone at work finds a nugget of information from an employees personal postings that can turn into a serious issue. For example, a person that told their boss they were taking the afternoon off to go to the doctor then posts pictures that afternoon of their trip to the amusement park. The boss happens to look at the page, and is not impressed.

This bleed over problem is difficult to control. Sure, people can make all their communications private, but that defeats the purpose of having a place where people can find you, learn about you and engage with you. Most business people would love to have some kind of automated way to separate their professional and personal lives so the two would never bleed over. The best we can do in some cases is dedicate a whole application to business relationships (LinkedIn) and reserve another for personal (Facebook) but this is easier said than done because in both cases someone from the other group may prefer to connect with the opposite structure.

For business people the solution is often to go straight shoptalk online and never engage in personal discussions. For young people, the answer is becoming that they will not use Facebook if there is a chance their parents, teachers, or Sunday school leaders will be able to see how they talk to friends. One thing is for sure, we either have to find a way to cure the bleed over issue, or we have to start accepting that various groups have different levels of formality or language.

The other possibility is that people (even young people) get a sense that everything they say, every picture they post, every video they star in, can be seen by millions – for a long time, and use more discretion.

The ultimate solution I would like to see is that everyone exhibits upstanding character. If no one had anything to hide because everything that came out of their computer was healthy, we would never have to fear bleed over. I hope we get there one day soon…

Scott Klososky
Scott@klososky.com

As always, let’s take a high level view of what they are doing… Over the last 15 years, we have developed a number of tools that have caught on as mainstream capabilities. Email, text messaging, ranking, Twitter (microblogging) and discussion groups are just a few examples. As stand alone capabilities, these are all providing value to a large audience. The next step in the evolution is to combine all of these capabilities with applications like spreadsheets, word processors, and presentation tools. Think Microsoft Office with lots of social media built in. This appears to be what Google Wave is all about. They want to provide the application platform that truly enables collaboration between anyone on the internet – at the next level. Someone will get this accomplished so we might as well keep an eye on Google because they certainly sell their products at the right price – often free. I even saw one writer today that asked the question, “is Google Wave a Twitter Killer?)

Which brings me to Twitter… One has to ask why Twitter tool off when it is in some ways, just glorified instant messaging. Be that as it may, Twitter has grabbed the worlds fancy and is now in the dramatic climb that Facebook has been in for a couple of years. So I ask myself, is what Twitter is providing anything that will not just be mimicked by many others? Certainly Google will buy, or seek to mitigate Twitter. So will Microsoft, Yahoo, and a host of others. After all, the technology behind the concept is simple. I suppose that Twitter is at a crossroads where people will either just adopt their engine as a standard, or seek to build their own and improve on it. One thing is for sure, the growth rates on Twitter are amazing. The fact that they are talking about doing a TV show is wild, and USA Today have a front page spread showing how they used Twitter to ask questions of business leaders.

Predictions can be fun in that you eventually learn if you are right or wrong. So here is my prediction… Twitter will get acquired one day soon, and regardless who buys them, at least 3 other competitors will come out with technology that does the same thing. The only advantage Twitter will have is an ecosystem of applications that have been developed around it, and a few thousand people that have lots of followers they do not want to lose. In other words, Twitter will follow the path of Netscape as a browser…

I came across this article on TechCrunch and wanted to share it. They did a great job with the explanation of Google Wave Trackers, robots that hunt the Internet for information and offer you views as it happens. Below is the first paragraph and a link to the whole article.

Google Wave may be a big deal for Google, but it’s an even bigger deal for Microsoft. It forces Redmond to step up at the very time it would rather run silent and deep. Correct that: those owners of the crown jewels who’ve guided the aircraft carrier for decades would rather ignore the impact of these two brothers and a product manager who moved Down Under to build what may well be Google’s realtime core.

The Manhattan Project at TechCrunch
by Steve Gillmor on June 1, 2009

Scott Klososky
scott@klososky.com