You know the best way to get the public to respect your brand? Have a respectable brand. Offer a great, innovative product and make responsible, ethical business decisions. Lead the pack! Evolve! Don’t send hundreds of temp workers to the gulf to put on a show for the President. Hire those workers to actually work! Don’t dump toxic dispersant into the ocean just so the surface looks better. Collect the oil and get it out of the water! Don’t tell your employees that they can’t wear respirators while they work because it makes for a bad picture. Take a picture of those employees working safely to fix the problem. Lastly, don’t keep the press and the people trying to help you away from the disaster, open it up so people can see it and help fix it. This isn’t just your disaster, this is a human tragedy. Allow us to mourn so that we can stop being angry.

via Street Giant – Leroy Stick: the man behind @BPGlobalPR. Wouldn’t change a word of this article.

To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options. Facebook says it wants to offer precise controls for sharing on the Internet.

via Facebook Privacy: A Bewildering Tangle of Options – NYTimes.com.

Facebook excels at providing you with tons of information on your friends and letting you keep in touch with them very easily. It lets you have a social dialogue with someone who you may never see, but you can find out their favorite movies, music, where they live, challenge them to a game of Scrabble and so much more.

Facebook's News Feed

That’s a close and personal friendship taken to the online world, Twitter is much the opposite. You don’t really have a lot of information on the person, instead you get a stream of thoughts (140 characters at a time) that let you see what the person is thinking at a bunch of different times.

Twitter Stream

Facebook is uniquely useful to me at providing connections to my real life friends and family. Letting me tell them how I am doing, and find out what they are out to, passively putting information onto Facebook. I can follow people and get to know them closer and keep friendships that in the past would have just died due to the difficulty of communication.

I use Twitter for a vastly different purpose, to follow a large group of people, who most may not even know me but whose thoughts I am interested in hearing. People who express some ideas or information that I want to hear more of, or even those who just create great art. I can follow along not just them creating new ideas and art, but see when they go out to eat or what they think of a new movie. It’s a very weird world where I find out before the papers are even allowed to publish the reviews what the first people watching a movie think.

That’s what communication will look like tomorrow and I intend to be on the cutting edge and learning as much as I can.

Follow me on Twitter.

Flickr photos courtesy of: pseudoplacebo and premasagar

I was having a conversation with a friend yesterday about this phenomena. The idea that soon you will be able to follow everyone passively with everything that they do online and what happens at that point. First though what needs to happen for this to occur is for all information of what you do online needs to be aggregated, easily and effectively.

This is happening with sites like FriendFeed that take your activities at sites and then displays them for people to see. However the limitation with sites like this is that you will never be able to encompass every single site that a person visits or interacts with.

Leaving a comment on a blog is a perfect example. In most cases the comment that you leave on a site, stays on that site and isn’t associated with you except by you signing the comment as your own. But no where can I go to see all the comments that you left around the web. Disqus, a blog commenting plugin that I use, does aggregate comments across blogs, but there will never be a time that all blogs will have this sort of thing installed, it simply won’t happen. So everything that you do at every site needs to be aggregated.

When that happens, which who knows if it is even possible, it will simply be astounding at the amount of information people will have on each other. Myself you could find out where I am, who I am with, my mood, all kinds of different things simply by analyzing this information. There is a cool site www.tweetstats.com that analyzes your posts to Twitter and pulls out all kinds of information.

Some of the coolest for myself to look at is my Aggregate Hourly Tweets, or how many posts I have in each hour of the day. The weird thing is that I have none basically between the hours of 2 and 6am, so I’m asleep. Also I almost always have a tweet out by 7am except on Sunday which runs to around 9am. However Sunday morning I am still up till around 4 or 5 am. So I’m sleeping somewhere around 4 hours a night every night, even on the weekends, I just shift my sleeping time a few hours.

Or if my sleeping habits aren’t interesting what about what I talk about the most (in no particular order): “work, apartment, bed, facebook, homework”. Somehow for not sleeping all that much I sure do talk about my bed an awful lot. That tells you what my big focuses are in life, and the things that I find the most interesting. Far more interesting and telling seeing what I talk about rather than just what I list in some social networks profile under interests.

It’s not that I don’t have a sense of privacy, I’m actually a very private person, but this is esentially low value information. Why should I care if someone knows that I am going to bed, or working on homework, or out on a date? If they are a friend of mine, I want them to know that sort of information and they may wish to know what I am doing. If they aren’t a friend where is the harm?

Soon it’s not just going be those of us on the cutting edge of technology and early adopters who will be stalkable on the web. Soon we all will be, because soon we will live on the web. Devices such as the iPhone with the ability to have the internet literally in your pocket will be common place. At that point you are going to literally be on the internet easily 12 or more hours a day. You entertainment, shopping, research, communication all will occur through the internet, simply because it’s there. And then sooner then you think you will be stalkable just as much as I am today.

• Reducing the number of websites/social networks that I have
• Moving away from Facebook and more to FriendFeed
• Loving and Using Ping.fm heavily

So what exactly am I doing with each of these? I have through this week steadily been reducing the number of social networks that I have tied myself into either because I no longer use them or really never used them. This is two-fold, first to consolidate my online presence and second to optimize my online presence. I am first trying to get rid of extra social networks that aren’t adding any value to me. There is simply no point to having a profile at a place that I never visit. It’s a waste for the company and for me. This goes into the second goal of optimizing my online presence. What I mean by this is that I am trying to make my online presence more effective and easier to maintain. It was a real pain when I switched from a hosted blog to my own website recently trying to go around and find all the places my name was associated with the old website and switching it around to the new address. Several years ago I switched from a Hotmail e-mail account to my current Gmail e-mail account and it took over 6 months before I had all of my then sites switched over. It’s not easy changing data, it isn’t just updating my friends and family with the changes. Nowadays I have about ten or so places I would have to change information on if I just started dating and wanted my online profiles to reflect that.

This was simply becoming too much work especially for sites that I was seeing limited or no value out of keeping up to date. Towards that end I have and will be continuing to delete any accounts that I have on websites that aren’t adding value to me or to my online presence.

The next big thing that I did this week was moving away from Facebook and towards FriendFeed. Robert Scoble also has started to do this as he mentioned on both his blog and via Twitter. Unlike Scoble I am not falling away from Facebook, but then he has a long time ago hit the cap of 5,000 Facebook friends and uses Facebook in a vastly different manner than I do. Scoble uses it to keep up with his audience, I use it to keep in touch with all my close and distant physical friends. Facebook allows me to for instance to not have to worry if someone changed their e-mail address or phone number. I can just look it up there and presto I have the correct information and more. This is a more accurate use of Facebook I believe than what I was using Facebook for awhile.

I used to use Facebook as a way to aggregate my online life into one place and Facebook isn’t really designed with that in mind. Instead Facebook is more like my personal contact page online that includes all of my friends and such that a blog or OpenID site doesn’t and won’t for at least some time. I don’t see Facebook dying away anytime soon nor do I think that Facebook is starting to lose it’s luster. I genuinely believe Facebook will be around for quite some time and will be an important player in the social web.

However I still wanted a way to aggregate my online life into someplace that if people wanted to they could see everything that I was doing online. FriendFeed has been providing that opportunity and I’m really liking it. FriendFeed basically takes all of your usernames to the different sites that you have profiles at, such as Flickr, YouTube, Amazon, Digg, Del.icio.us, your personal Blog, pretty much anything gets thrown into there. So everytime you favorite a video on YouTube, add something to your Amazon wishlist, add a photo to Flickr, it gets listed in your timeline. The front page of FriendFeed is modeled off the News Feed from Facebook. Then FriendFeed adds some nice little extras, such as commenting or liking an item that someone posts. Also if the item is a twitter post, you can directly reply on FriendFeed to Twitter. Talk about integration, it’s awesome.

The last thing that I have been doing is using Ping.fm. Ping.fm basically lets me post a status update to both Facebook, Pownce, and Twitter all at once. Nothing complicated about it, just nice and easy. The major reason I switched to using Ping.fm is that when I had Twitter importing my status updates to Facebook, there would be times when I didn’t always want something to cross from Twitter into Facebook. Ping.fm lets me post that which I find important to multiple sites at once and yet at the same time I can just as easily post something at a single site.

Lessons from this week in surfing the internet:

1. Integrating Multiple Sites/Social Networks is hard
2. Integrating Multiple Sites/Social Networks is important
3. Maintaining a unified online presence works wonders for my Google Ranking
4. Maintaining a unified online presence makes it easier to present myself as someone qualified in the technology industry and following current trends
5. Sometimes just because a site can do something doesn’t mean it should do something
6. Maintaining a healthy relationships with people who don’t live online is a tricky balance between providing too much information for them and too little information for those who do live online and desire more information
7. Many sites make the sign up easy but the deletion is darn near impossible
8. It really bites trying to change one or two things on all the multiple web sites that I know basically live on

I would love to hear what other people see as more important, having a lots of places where you can be found (joining every social network on the planet even if you never return) or just several really big sites (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc.).

This is a huge step forward in my opinion and one that I have been waiting for Facebook to take. The simple reason is that as open and public as I make my life some things don’t always need to be broadcast to everybody on the planet. Easy example, does my boss need to know what music I listen to or what my religious or even sexual preference is? Depending on how comfortable I am with my boss and co-workers I may not want them knowing that sort of information. Thus all I have to do is place those co-workers into a group, call it “Business”, and set up privacy controls for that group.

Okay, so what happens when a co-worker becomes a closer friend, well you can place one person into multiple groups. This person then has the most lenient privacy controls directed at them according to their group placing. That sounds really complex but it actually isn’t. I have a friend John, John started out in the “Business” group, but we have hung out several times and I would consider him now a close friend, so I place John in my “Close Friends” group. John will be able to see whatever a “Business” and a “Close Friend” can see.

The groups also allow you to message that whole group all at once. So for instance you want to tell all your close friends, that you have a new phone number. Message all members of “Close Friends” and bam, everyone knows you changed your phone number. This is much simpler than just about every other personal e-mail system on the planet in terms of this sort of mass e-mail. No having to remember who exactly you want to contact just select the group of people who you do wish to contact and write the message.

Privacy is still the real killer of social networks, the coolness factor of being involved in something special isn’t as important as the ability to present an image that the rest of the world doesn’t know about. When that ability goes away and your supposed private image displayed online becomes something that the general public can access, people leave. As public as I make my life I make sure that everything that goes online that I post or my friends post about me is something that I would be comfortable claiming as my own. There are many things that I don’t talk about online because I don’t feel comfortable with the rest of the world talking about it. That is one reason why this blog tries to be more intellectual as opposed to personal. This one change easily makes Facebook something that I now feel comfortable having all of my contacts listed inside of Facebook.

I am really excited about this change, and I hope it means that Facebook will actually be here to stay for some time.