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The AP says it's true.

MIDLOTHIAN, Va. (AP) -- On a screen at the front of a classroom, Gene Fishel flashed an online social-networking profile of "hotlilflgirl," which said she was 15, enjoys being around boys and wants to meet new people.

The next image revealed the real "hotlilflgirl" -- a mug shot of a 31-year-old man who was convicted of sexually abusing 11 children he met online and was sentenced to 45 years in prison.

"Not little, not fly and not a girl," said Fishel, a Virginia assistant attorney general. He warned his audience about the dangers of sharing personal information on the Internet and agreeing to meet Web acquaintances in person.

Fishel's presentation at James River High School recently was one of many being held this school year in the state, the first to mandate that public schools offer Internet safety classes for all grade levels.

I'm not saying it's a bad idea (it's a great idea) but can we do without the scaremongering? Sean Aune at Mashable sums it up, but I've got reservations. He says:

The Virginia program is attempting to safeguard the children by educating the students as well as the parents. To the children, they are trying to explain never to meet anyone you meet solely online, as well as trying to remember that anything you post today could come back to haunt you years from now when applying to a university or a job. For the parents, they are trying to explain that they should install filtering software as well keeping computers in common areas of the home so they can monitor their child's activities while online.

So, they're telling kids that anyone on the 'net will hurt them if they don't meet them online, even if it's via a social network based around their own community or interests (user groups, meetups, etc)?  I can understand the whole "audit trail" thing but I think the focus should be on how to be a responsible contributor, not a fearful lurker. Parents keeping an eye on the little ones is never a bad idea.

While I've never been a major fan of the concept of "school as parent" in teaching children what they should really be learning at home, this is one time where it is quite possible the school would know more than a parent. Nonetheless, as the oldest member of the Mashable staff, I am happy to say that education officials are at least trying to school parents on the need to pay greater attention to their technological responsibilities when it comes to their children. The most effective defense will generally be for parents to get involved in their child's activities, whether they be online or off.

I'm sorry, but you missed a point that this effort is being (at least in this case) led by a law enforcement official, an Attorney General. NOT a trained teacher. 

If education officials want to teach online safety and responsibility (the two go hand in hand, I think) than TEACHERS need to be trained. This isn't a law enforcement problem.

Further, can't schools train teachers to point out the bad by emphasizing the positive applications of social networking and related technologies? If the message is fear, it will fail. Weapons grade fail.  

Lawyers should be in courts, not classrooms.

I'm pretty sure this is a joke...

 

...but these days you never know.

Campaigns, like many things, are about supply and demand. There is one candidate, and the candidate goes where the demand (and hopefully the votes) are.

Social Networking sites have been a force for this campaign. Howard Dean's campaign was boosted by the rise of MeetUp groups, and since 2004, Facebook has tried to make themselves a player in the Political arena.

However, joining a "One Million Strong for Barack" doesn't really mean much when it's a Facebook-wide group.

Eventful Politics takes the level of online support for a candidate and channels it into a demand: show up here. One of the heaviest users of this service has been Barack Obama, who has actually made campaign stops based on Eventful demand numbers. 

On Tuesday, I spoke with Tim Breidigan, VP of Business Development at Eventful on how they are really changing the game of how online support can translate into real life boots on the ground.

 

 

I somehow managed to click over to this waste of bandwidth describing a panel at "The Future of Web Apps" where a bunch of Web 2.0 execs sat at a table and talked about how cool they were and delivered a eulogy for e-mail.

"E-mail has died away for a group of users. For the younger generation, they don't use e-mail," he said, talking about the young Web users who have started to abandon e-mail for Facebook messaging and mobile texting. "They see it as this noisy spam-filled thing that annoys them every day...they see it as how you talk to the university, how you talk to the bank."

Not to be rude, but if you see e-mail as only a way to talk to a university or bank, you obviously have never held a real job before. With filters, e-mail is far more useful than any single "Web 2.0" application. I can use more than 144 characters. I can send attachments. I don't have to deal with "Pirate or Zombie" invitations every time I check my messages, because those messages that I need appear on my BlackBerry.

I noticed the other day that the ConnectU v. Facebook lawsuit is going still going forward. While on one hand I've spent considerable time in this space criticizing Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook's record of privacy idiocy, this lawsuit makes all that look like novice mistakes by a coder who doesn't know much about law or politics (probably true).

6. On November 25, 2003, Tyler and I met with Zuckerberg in Harvard's Kirkland dining hall during an off-peak hour.  The dining hall was almost entirely empty, and we sat in a private corner out of audible range. During that meeting, we discussed the harvardconnection.com website andour plans for it - further elaborating on what we had asked  Victor to discuss with Mark - including our plan to make the site an advertising platform and a revenue generator and to expand the site to colleges and universities beyond Harvard. 

8. We asked Zuckerberg, as one of the four Harvard Connection team members, to (1) complete all coding and technical aspects of the Harvard Connection website for an immediate December 2003 launch; (2) participate in the management and control of the project; (3) suggest features for the web site; (4) help launch the site; (5) handle the technical requirements of the site; and (6) operate the site withus.  Zuckerberg enthusiasticallyagreed to do these things.  We agreed that Tyler, Divya and myself would handle all promotion, marketing, advertising sales, press and media relations, and business strategy for the site.  Zuckerberg said that he would handle the technical side of the project, and that he expected to be able to make good progress towards completion of the site over the Thanksgiving break. 

So, Zuckerberg, according to Winklevoss, would build the entire website, manage the website, suggest features (which he would have to implement), help the site go live, and then maintain and keep the site operational. In return, the other three would get to be the public face of the project, receive the media attention, and control pretty much everything except the down-and-dirty coding. 

...During this meeting, I also suggested and offered to 

make him the focal point of an article in the Harvard Crimsonabout the website's launch, in an effort to improve his public image after the Facemash debacle in early November, for which he had received much negative coverage in the Harvard Crimson, and was called in front of the Harvard Administrative Board amid student outcry.   I stressed how this could be very positive 

for his reputation, and make him a hero on campus. Zuckerberg suggested contacting his friends who worked at the Harvard Crimsonto help obtain coverage for the site.  He never indicated that he would no longer participate in the managementand control of the project, or stop coding the website.   Because exam period was beginning, we agreed to touch base in early February to continue work on the website. 

15.Zuckerberg never told the Founders that he stopped working on the Harvard 

Connection website before he launched thefacebook.com website. 

2. In early 2004, after Mark Zuckerberg stole the founders' ideas and code and started thefacebook.com, I helped to finance and start the company which is today known as ConnectU, Inc. ("ConnectU"). ConnectU hired a company called iMarc to write code for the site connectu.com...

(FYI, this article is obviously, fictional. It is a first in a series of depictions of "worst-case scenarios" that can and will befall new media companies that ignore Washington at their peril. Make sure to read the whole thing. Got a problem? That's why I have comments).

The Washington Times-Post-Tribune, June 4th, 2009

WASHINGTON, DC - 25 year old Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the popular "social networking" site Facebook sat stone-faced in the ornate room surrounded by angry men his father's age and older, most of whom he had never heard of or seen until he received a subpoena two weeks ago. He is not alone. Behind him sit a team of lawyers hired hastily to defend him and his company against criminal negligence charges, lawsuits, and a whole host of legal and regulatory battles.

On this humid morning, the gavel was held by Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), Chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. Not long ago, the very chair Zuckerberg sat in had been occupied by a much bigger star who was brought to earth by these mere mortal Congressmen. Baseball legend Roger Clemens, who Zuckerberg had seen pitch at Fenway Park during his time as a student at Harvard, had sat and absorbed round after round of scathing criticism from Committee members who excorieated him over his alleged use of Human Growth Hormone and other performance enhancing drugs, while Clemens could only stammer and give contradictory answers when Members confronted him with records of his previous sworn statements.

Zuckerberg has a busy week. Besides Waxman's Committee, he is scheduled to appear before the Federal Trade Commission about Facebook allegedly selling user data in violation of their privacy policies and Federal law. Later this week, he'll sit in front of the legendary war hero Daniel Inouye (D-HI) when the Senate Commerce Committee plans to grill him about his privacy practices and his targeted advertsing program powered by Microsoft, which is an investor in Facebook. Down the hall in the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing room, Zuckerberg will answer to Ranking Member Arlen Specter (R-PA). Right now, both Waxman and Specter want to know why Facebook didn't do more to keep their "high school" site safer when his site famously "opened up" in 2007, taking Facebok from a directory of college students and some corporate employees to becoming a worldwide network which intended to compete with News Corporation's MySpace. In fact, at the table across the isle from him is Chris DeWolfe, Zuckerberg's counterpart at MySpace. DeWolfe had weathered this storm before and was now in Washington not as a cautionary tale, but as an expert in opening social networks while protecting users from criminals of all sorts.

These men have reason to ask some questions. In May of 2009, three 15 year old girls from the same town in the suburbs of Philadelphia were abducted without warning, their bodies later found raped, beaten and drowned in the Schukyll River. The girls didn't know each other, but they did know one man, a recent college graduate who trained on Philadelphia's Boathouse Row, where all three girls spent time every summer at 3 separate boat clubs, but all took private sculling lessons from the suspect. The "killer" connection? They were all his "friend" on Facebook.

Zuckerberg became more and more nervous, biting his lip and turning around to whisper to the team of lawyers behind him whole Waxman calmly had DeWolfe describe the steps MySpace had taken over the years after a rash of hghly publicised incidents where child abductions and other crimes had been perpetuated using his site. DeWolfe explained that while they couldn't control everything that went on, they had an entire staff devoted to investigating complaints, and even regularly cross-checked names of users against "registered sex offender" lists. MySpace's CEO noted that his company had been "under a microscope for years." DeWolfe added,

"We realized we were a target and  put considerable resources into making our site as safe as we possibly could, even when we as technology experts thought that what we were doing was unneccesary or impractical. We wanted to show that not only did we care about who was using our site, but that we also were willing to go the extra mile to satisfy the concerns of people who might not understand what we do, or what our users, including their children do with our service, and we certainly didn't want anyone using what we thought was a great tool for such horrible purposes. We even worked with Microsoft, Apple, Google, and the Mozilla foundation to develop "parental controls" for MySpace which integrated into users' web browsers, so parents could restrict what their computers could do on the site."

DeWolfe took another shot at Zuckerberg, adding that "we knew some users might not like the changes, but we felt we had a responsibility to the people who ue our site to make sure that users of all ages, parents, children, and really anyone could feel safe about being part of our community."

Zuckerberg certainly had a lot to answer for, and could not say he did not see this coming. In late 2007, Facebook was forced by a revolt among their own userbase to restrict their "beacon" feature, which let people's "friends" know when they bought things at online retailers like Amazon, or booked plane tickets online. Before that, they backtracked after introducing an overhaul of their site including the "news feed" feature, which prompted a user "uprising" that received widespread press attention, and led Zuckerberg to personally apologize to the site's membership.

(click Read More below)

I see that already the much imitated, never duplicated Robert Scoble has a very flattering write-up of a very informative meeting we had last night in downtown SF. I was going to wait to see what he has to say about it, and he's definitely got a complete lock-down of what I think on the subject.

If this is the first time you're hitting the site, here's the deal: so much of what goes on in Silicon Valley is totally dependent on the goodwill and lack of oversight of a 535 old men and women in a town several thousand miles away who, given a reason to get on their soapbox, could cut the entire industry (which is a driving force behind the U.S.'s economy) down at its knees.

As I told Robert, the tech industry just doesn't care about Washington until they're being screamed at by a bunch of old men in an ornate room and they see their Venture Capital or Market Cap go through the floor. And when the old men start looking at you funny, bad things happen.

I'm going to be posting in the next several days a series of fictional "case studies" on companies that have done wrong, could be doing wrong, and how they could do right and either dig themselves out of the hole they're in, or keep themselves from putting the shovel in the ground in the first place. You'll also see my plan for how the little guys and the big guys can stop trying to kill each other just long enough to keep the old white guys off their backs. It's never happened before, but that's because as Robert puts it,

"Because we don't care."

You should care, and I think by the time this is all over, you will.

So I don't need to tell you there's some good stuff on the way, so please watch this space. I'm heading back to the east coast within the next few hours and then I'll be able to better keep up on what's going on in DC as it happens instead of from a 3 hour time lag.

Hopefully I can catch a webcast of the FCC's do-nothing meeting on Monday and report from there, as well as get some other cool stuff out onto the tubes for your discussion.

Disagree? Shout loudly. I encourage it.

See you from back in DC.

Ok, so yesterday I (even before Drudge!) found out about the New York judge who decided that "Friending" someone on MySpace was a violation of an Order of Protection.

Because I'm such a darn nice guy, I'll quote the judge again, because I do think his ruling makes sense from the point of view of a guy who sits on a bench, hears cases, and reads law books.

"Those friends thou hast and their adoption tried, Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel," the judge wrote, adding: "But not when an order of protection prohibits someone from communicating with another."

"While it is true," he also wrote, "that the person who receives the 'friend request' could simply deny the request to become 'friends,' that request was still a contact and 'no contact' was allowed by the order of the protection."

I am so very excited to go to SXSW Interactive next month. One of the reasons is that a keynote is being given by Mark Zuckerberg, the "boy genius" behind Facebook. I've written before about why I think people overvalue Zuckerberg and underestimate the massive exposure his company has to all sorts of Governmental actions, hearings, investigations, and whatnot. I've said it before and I'll say it again. Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook in 2008 is Bill Gates and Microsoft circa 1998.

Both MarkZ and BillG share a major mistake: as their companies attracted more attention through various PR gaffes, they didn't make earnest efforts to get their stories out in Washington. They figured the product was enough.

Facebook has already suffered through the disaster of a user revolt after the News Feed some time ago, the MoveOn.org inspired retooling of Beacon, and even worse, the recent NYT article about Facebook keeping your data "forever" after you try and delete your account, Do they have any real professionals telling their side and speaking the right language? No. They hire smart people, but they're California Smart, not DC Smart. So far, they've been lucky that no cute white girls have gone missing after using Facebook.

Microsoft had a great streak. They launched Windows 95 and got the whole world excited about computing. Then came the Browser Wars, during which they actually destroyed an entire company in the space of a few short years and reduced their two competitors in Operating System technology to obscurity through anticompetitive practices, and eventually got antitrust actions against them in the U.S. and the EU, one of which was ended by the Florida recount since the original judge was thrown off the case and the Bush DOJ settled for pretty much nothing. The EU one is ongoing and MS keeps losing appeals.

How did that happen? Well, despite news reports, consumer complaints, and all sorts of bad press, Microsoft had virtually no Washington presence for the longest time. Now they have one of the best lobbying operations in DC, as well as many in state capitals (see the ongoing ODF controversies in Massachusetts, etc).

Facebook (at this writing) has zero registered outside lobbyists, and their Washington presence is limited to a guy whose job it is to get political candidates to put their pages on there. Yet, they're constantly the subject of bad press. They faced a user revolt when they introduced the "news feed" feature last year. Recently, their Beacon feature was forced to be modified after MoveOn.org got a petition together, and the New York Times reported only days ago on how hard it is to get them to get rid of your data after you delete your account.

Zuckerberg, their "boy genius" CEO is profiled in the press as your typical start-up guy living on a mattress despite his estimate net worth of several billion since the company is privately held, and according to his own words during an awkward, stilted 60 Minutes appearance, will probably remain private at least 2008. While more "charismatic" (I use the term loosely) than BillG (who many have speculated suffers from a mild form of Asperger's Syndrome), they both share the trait of being completely tone-deaf when it comes to the way us "beltway insiders" look at technology companies we see as either violating the law, or just acting irresponsibly when there isn't a law to break.

Legislation, like nature, abhors a vacuum. If there is a perceived problem (think "predators on MySpace") than Congress, or the FCC, or the FTC, or whoever thinks they should do something, will do it, without thought to the unintended consequences that their action will trigger. Take child pornography laws, for instance. Everyone agrees that child porn is harmful, and abuse of children is abhorrent and reprehensible. On the other hand, these same laws force prosecutors to charge teenagers who forward drunk cellphone camera pictures around the internet under the same statutes that they prosecute those who hoard videos and photos documenting child abuse.

Of course, many "legislative initiatives" are fueled by media driven hysteria, which leads to bad hearings, (see Josh Green's take on the Roger Clemens hearings) driven by the sole desire to humiliate those who the Congress have done wrong, which in the worst instances can lead to the reactionary writing of bad laws sold with good PR, which of course invoke the law of unintended consequences.

Back to the New York judge and the unprecedented (but not unreasonable, which is simply my personal opinion as I Am Not A Lawyer) case of "Friending" as violating an Order of Protection.  In the press, the general public, and in technical circles, people love to talk about the differences between Facebook and MySpace, but mostly in terms of things like demographics, social network organization, openness to development and user interface. They're forgetting something.

MySpace has already been brought on bended knees before the authorities to avoid regulation. They've adopted policy after policy (however useless), issued press release after press release, and had their News Corporation execs appear with all sorts of law enforcement types who crowed gleefully as MySpace "purged itself of registered sex offenders," as if you could really do that.

Facebook, like its' interface, is clean. It has been spared the wild hysterics of local television news. It has not been featured on "To Catch a Predator" and it is not part of a major media conglomerate which like Roger Clemens, lawmakers would love to publicly humiliate. While they are still private, and while the boyish, not-quite-Rupert-Murdochian Zuckerberg is still the face of the company, they still have a chance to head off being known as the next  boogeyman.  They're a Google, not a Microsoft. People still believe they're a good company, with a smart young kid running things who makes innocent mistakes. They can have a goal of connecting communities and bringing people together, and they can have a great motto like Google's "Don't be evil."

There are other cautionary tales. YouTube  didn't think to partner with any content providers, or do anything to make themselves look like a useful and beneficial service for the general public as it gained popularity, and instead it got hit with a  gigantic lawsuit over Copyright Infringement as soon as it got bought by Google. A few letters to Big Media, and a good PR blitz with say, videos of missing children or putting short Public Service Announcements before random popular videos, and they could have saved themselves a ton of grief by casting themselves as the "good guys" instead of the "cool kids."

They should remember, however, that even Google was slammed by the late, great Congressman Tom Lantos just a year before his tragic death for contributing to censorship and vicariously aiding human rights abuses in China. Lantos, who survived the brutality of the Nazi Holocaust, had this to say to the group of executives from Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft:

"Your abhorrent actions in China are a disgrace...I simply don't understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night."

The trick to avoiding the "gotcha" game in Washington is to get your story out before the other guy, and to always make sure you have a record of 100 good things to counter every bad thing. If you're a social networking startup, you're in danger. Join a coalition. Get your own efforts started. Think of ways to use your technology to partner with existing groups to do good. Think Red Cross, Salvation Army, National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. Hire someone who knows how to get the right people in and around Congress to know about the good things you are doing. There's even a Family Online Safety Initiative. Why haven't you joined it?
 

Do these kinds of things now before the sharks start to circle. Make them a real part of your business plan. You should want to be a "safe" online business as much as you'd want to be a "green business." You want the news cycles on your side, so there is no temptation for the media to make mountains of molehills, and even if some emmy-starved reporter wants to be the next Chris Hansen and finds some nutjob using your service for an isolated misdeed in some tangential way that he can exploit, even if of all the social networks on all the tubes on all the internets, some reporter saw some psycho walk into yours, the people in charge can realize that the one bad apple doesn't mean they have to chop down the tree.

Hey New Media, I'm talking to you! How about you talk to me.

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