Does Facebook's Privacy Policy Presage a New Era of Virtual Civil Rights?

(Sitegeist is written by David Hitt, Chief Creative Officer at Splat Productions, a Philadelphia based interactive design and multimedia studio...)

I had yet another either wacky or, maybe, prophetic revelation this morning. I was reading a post on "Augie Ray's Blog For Interactive Marketing Professionals" which details the flap that recent suggested privacy changes on Facebook are creating within the Facebook user community. Essentially, Facebook is floating the idea by its users that would authorize Facebook to share user profile information with other websites, but only when FB users are signed in and browsing the internet. So, in other words, if I happen to log into Facebook and, while I'm using it simultaneously log into another website, FB might share information it has on file for me with that other site, so they can offer me a "more customized" experience.

Reaction to Facebook's idea has been swift and pretty universally negative. Turns out that there are lots of folks out there that are resentful that, now that Facebook has created a desirable online environment for them and collected a lot of (valuable) demographic information, they might actually want to sell that information and make some cashola.

All of this has gotten me thinking about much larger political and cultural issues. This dilemma Facebook finds itself in is fed by the obvious yearning by many for some sort of "universal" public space on the internet. These desires, currently, are at odds with the legitimate commercial interests of that space's creator.

Facebook, it seems, is finally realizing one of the earliest promises of the early dot.com era. They've created a single forum on the Internet where virtually everyone and their grandmother hangs out. (I knew this universality was real when I get a friend invite from my nearly 80 year old Mom two weeks ago...) Their success, though, might prove to be their undoing.

The problem with individuals or companies creating a wildly successful, "game changing" paradigm for the way we live our lives is that sometimes folks start thinking that it's their right to indulge in that new paradigm, absent the commercial aspirations of its creators.

I guess what I'm driving at is: suppose we begin to take the idea of a universal "virtual world" as not a privilege but an actual right? So much of our lives now revolve around our worlds online. I spend my day checking email, Tweeting, writing a blog and checking out CNN.com. At night I play an online multiplayer game for a couple of hours, which is basically like spending my evening in a Virtual World. My experience is more the norm than the exception these days.

So, much in the way that we, as a society, decided that there needed to be public spaces, marketplaces, parks, etc, in the actual world, might we not decide that such places online are also universal rights that everyone should be afforded?

I dunno, maybe it's a wacky thought...

Get ready for the Tweet Martini Lunch!

Hey all --

Next week we're rolling out our homage to the way Old School Advertising used to be done -- with closed doors, some puffy stogies and a couple of Martinis to lubricate the dealmaking...

Here's how it works:

Every Friday we'll be posting a trivia question or contest to our fan page on Facebook. (We'll also be tweeting from Daaveey...) Questions will be posted sometime between noon and 1 p.m. each week. Questions and contests will range in content. The winner of each week's contest will be the first responder to either post the answer on our fan wall, at Sitegeist, or send a direct message to my twitter account at Daaveey. Winners will receive a $25 gift certificate (which oughtta buy you about three martinis!) from either a Philadelphia restaurant or, if the winner is not local, we'll send you a certificate to the national chain of your choice.

Current or past employees or their relatives are not eligible for the contest and winners must sit the bench for six months before they can compete again.

So, roll up your sleeves, square away your paste-ups and join us for a Power Lunch!

A Little Unsolicited Advice to Facebook

So I had an epiphany of sorts today... As I was walking to the gym, I was coming to grips with a challenge that's been troubling me in business for the last few months. Basically, our company, like many of our clients, is attempting to develop a comprehensive approach to integrating social media with our business blog and website maintenance. The strategy pretty much exists in my mind...

On the one hand we are about to roll out our new website, which we've built from a Wordpress platform which supports not only blogging but makes the site search-engine-ready. We created a business fan page on Facebook and I'm regularly updating it. Finally, I've been tweeting for months now and, yesterday, was at last able to get my Twitter app (Tweetdeck) to feed directly into our Facebook fan page.

This morning, on my way to the gym, I began banging myself over the head over my lack of blog-writing discipline, when a thought occured to me. Facebook should build a blogging platform
directly within the application. Here's why this would be a good idea:

1. Businesses, as well as individuals, are already using FB everyday to both market, position and interact with their clients. Blogs are, of course, both a personal and professional means of reaching out and engaging clients or friends.
2. Social media interactions, it seems to me, fall into three distinct content ranges currently. The first, most transient and sparest in range are the micro-blogging platforms such as Twitter or SMS. The second would be mostly anecdotal or conversational interaction -- longer than what SMS or Twitter allows but often spontaneous and unscripted in nature. This would be the sort of interaction which make up the bulk of communication on Facebook currently. The last piece in the Social Media puzzle is blogging, which represents longer-format communication which, often, is more premeditated and planned. Facebook already has a lock on the second "content level" and is the unchallenged place where this sort of communication takes place. With the easy integration of Twitter feeds into Facebook, it also makes integrating microblog content into fan or personal pages a breeze. If Facebook is interested in getting more businesses to advertise and interact on their platform, which it clearly is, why not go the final mile and build in a blogging platform?

This sure would make my life a lot easier, as I could use FB as a pretty complete portal to the outside world for my business. Customers could still visit www.splatworld.tv when they need detailed information about Splat Productions but, by and large, our FB presence alone would give a pretty complete overview of who we are and what we do. This seems like such an obvious observation on my part that, surely, someone out there must be
working on this...