I'm a sucker for Top 10 lists, so that's probably why these thoughts from Internet Evolution on how Web 2.0 sites are changing society caught my eye. Paragraph-long descriptions of all ten are available here.

1) New Buying Habits
iTunes is to eBay as Ellen is to Maury Povich.

2) Poor Man's TiVo
Forget to set the DVR? Click on YouTube, the world’s largest, virtual broadcast network, for American Idol caterwauling or Jon Stewart’s latest.

3) Infinitives We've Come to Love

To Skype, to RSS, to podcast, to blog, to Flickr, to GPS...

4) The E-Generation Gap
You “talk” to your teenager on each other's MySpace pages. “Private data” is only what you show 800 “friends.”

5) Attack Mode
We don’t just get spammed anymore – say hello to pharming, phishing, and vishing (voice-over-IP phishing).

6) Suddenly, Those Spring Break 2003 Photos Aren’t So Fun
Employers and recruiters use Google and popular social networking site searches as part of due diligence on prospective employees.

7) OMG!
Emoticons and IM shorthand have entered the popular vernacular, even popping up in high school English compositions.

8) Thingamajigs, Doohickeys on the Way
Wikis, widgets, applets, mashups, and dashboards have transformed desktops and GUIs.

9) That Huge $ucking $ound
Venture capital has flooded the market, fueling both clever and dubious entrepreneurs on a level not seen since the first Internet bubble of 2000. Now if some .com could somehow reverse oil’s big run-up…

10) Who Am I Today?
Create an avatar to get a Second Life. Use anonymity to flame opponents or razz friends. Online identities are a lot more fluid than they are in the real world.

Image: Social Technologies

The case of the “MySpace suicide" has finally found its way to the courts. (Quick recap: Neighbor-mother creates fake Myspace account to spy-on/harass neighbor girl who was once friends with her daughter. After tricking the 13 year-old neighbor into thinking she was in an online relationship with a boy, the neighbor lady ended the “romance” with series of hurtful emails, after which the 13 year-old killed herself.)

This case could be interesting for all sorts of precedents it might set. For example: where is cyberspace? According to the legal filings, it is physically co-located with the Internet server farms that support it. That raises other questions: if the perpetrators were in Missouri, but the alleged crime occurs and the charges are filed in California, where the server farm is located, how is the case affected? Does California have stricter or laxer laws regarding the charges? Stricter/laxer sentencing guidelines? Could the defendant appeal based on the fact she committed no crime in California?

As more daily interactions and transactions occur online and in virtual worlds, more questions about what is legal and what is not are being raised. How do you apply laws and bring justice to what we call World 0? And are crimes that take place only in virtual spaces still crimes? For instance, is creating online images depicting child-like avatars in sexual situations child pornography? No child is involved, but some governments say yes.

The charges brought in this case reflect the difficulty in applying real-world laws online: the defendant is charged with technicalities (conspiracy, unlawfully gaining access to a computer) in her misuse of MySpace in representing herself as someone else. And, as some have mentioned, the defendant herself seems guilty or nothing more than childish behavior, poor judgment, and cruelty. But looking at the issues this case raises, it could be an important step in developing online legal codes. I myself think some old-time justice is merited -- perhaps some time in the stockade or a public flogging?

Image: Bloomsberries (Flickr) 

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 "Facebook's new privacy controls will add an extra incentive for the many users who are now using ... LinkedIn for business contacts, Facebook for friends and school contacts, MySpace for everything else, to invest most of their time in one social networking site where they can fine-tune who sees what information," Social Technologies' analyst Kyle Spector said in an E-Commerce Times/ TechNewsWorld article by Erika Morphy on March 19.

If marketed correctly, he added, these controls could become a competitive advantage for Facebook.

"This move could certainly force other social networks to follow suit and make it potentially difficult for niche networks to compete with Facebook," he said.

Read the entire article.

I really noticed the potential for "old people" to invade what I thought should be my generation's domain of social networking this summer when my mom (prompted by a Newsweek piece on Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg) asked me if I use Facebook or MySpace. Without Newsweek, I doubt she'd even know what they were.

But the fact is a lot of adults are on Facebook and MySpace and increasingly want virtual contact with family members, creating some intergenerational clashes, as this MSNBC article discusses:

Nowhere are the technological turf wars more apparent than on social networking sites, such as MySpace and Facebook, which went from being student-oriented to allowing adults outside the college ranks to join.

Gary Rudman, a California-based youth market researcher, has heard the complaints. He regularly interviews young people who think it's ``creepy'' when an older person -- we're talking someone they know -- asks to join their social network as a ``friend.'' It means, among other things, that they can view each others' profiles and what they and their friends post.

``It would be like a 40-year-old attending the prom or a frat party,'' Rudman says. ``It just doesn't work.''

The social acceptability, or awkwardness, issue stems mostly from lack of clear etiquette guidelines on these sites (college students aren't immune: many people choose to "friend" everyone they've ever met). For instance, I didn't think it was awkward to friend my aunt after we discussed the different demographic appeal of Facebook and MySpace, but I would have thought it was really weird if she'd friended me out of the blue. I still try to limit our Facebook interaction to messaging, although she seems to be fairly active based on her profile and the number of wall posts.

It seems that navigating the frontiers of social networking will take some time and adjustment from both generations.  I may be Facebook friends with my aunt, who seems fairly adept online, but I won't be showing my mom how to set up a profile anytime soon.

Image: cambodia4kidsorg (Flickr) 

Image: FacebookSocial Technologies futurist Simeon Spearman was recently featured in an E-Commerce Times article, Privacy Flap Bedevils Facebook, by reporter Erika Morphy.

Spearman said the current controversy over Facebook’s Beacon ad program resulted from “the creepiness factor.”

Morphy wrote:

Facebook's Beacon was a service that provided no value to users and strictly catered to advertisers, [Spearman] told TechNewsWorld. "The service did not allow users to opt out as easily as it should have, and the creepiness factor of the service quickly emerged after its launch. Users would log in and see that their activities on sites outside of Facebook were being broadcast to their friends."

Despite the willingness of many social network users to display private information for everyone to see, they want to remain in control of that information--and they still value privacy in their online activities, the protests show.

Furthermore, other social networking sites are likely to take note as they and the larger industry continue to edge toward what is basically a paradigm shift in Web advertising .

"The failure of Facebook's service could make other social networking sites more cautious when using user data to devise new revenue strategies," Spearman said. "Facebook is currently valued at (US)$15 billion, but it could lose value as advertisers come to believe that the opportunities for hypertargeted ads are restricted by demands for greater privacy and responsibility in using information made available by users of these sites."