This Week in Facebook

Unauthorized usage of profile pictures in advertisements

Many have voiced concern over the past 2 weeks after a woman’s profile picture appeared while her husband was using Facebook in a Facebook advertisement saying “Hey Peter: Hot singles are waiting for you” (the woman’s first hand account). The advertising network that ran this ad has since been shut down, as it was in violation of Facebook’s terms of service. Additionally, Facebook has further tightened rules for Facebook platform advertising networks.

Nonetheless, Facebook’s terms of service allow it to use your name or image in its own advertisements.

Example Facebook ad using a user’s name

If you do not want your face or name appearing in ads, you can turn off this setting by logging into Facebook, going to https://register.facebook.com/privacy/?view=feeds&tab=ads, and selecting “no one.”

NYC Political Aide Resigns Over Facebook Comments

NY Times reports that a young political aide has been compelled to resign her post over her comments about the Gates arrest scandal. Long story short: be civil when communicating in public or semi-public forums online or face the consequences. That’s not to say you shouldn’t always be polite.

This Week in Twitter

Twitter has a new Homepage!

Twitter launched a new homepage on the 29th, with a strong emphasis on real-time search.

Key features:

• Prominent search field with call to “See what people are saying about…”
• Bars of popular topics broken down by “right now,” “today,” and “this week.”

Their new value proposition is “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” Much more to the point than the old “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: what are you doing?”

511NY Twitter Strategy

511NY has set up 21 different Twitter accounts for traffic and transit updates throughout New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Two New Twitter Guides

Twitter released Twitter 101 for Business and Neil Williams, head of corporate digital channels at the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills released a template Twitter strategy for Departments (PDF).

Both are excellent guides, and I’m happy to report that USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov are already executing many of the recommendations they contain.

GovTwit is Advertising on Google AdWords

I came across this ad for GovTwit this week.

This Week Elsewhere

Pew Finds Rapidly Growing Uptake of Online Video

Fully 62% of adult internet users have watched a video on these sites, up from just 33% who reported this in December 2006. Online video watching among young adults is near-universal; nine in ten (89%) internet users ages 18-29 now say they watch content on video sharing sites, and 36% do so on a typical day.

Read the full report.

NIH Staffers Trained in Wiki Editing

In an effort to ensure that its health information is as widely and easily accessible as possible, “NIH is encouraging its scientists and science writers to edit and even initiate Wikipedia articles in their fields.” To that end, NIH hosted a “Wikipedia Academy” in Bethesda on the 28th. About 100 NIH employees were trained in editing Wikipedia pages and encouraged to use their expertise contribute to existing articles and create new articles. More info on NIH’s Wikipedia Academy from the Washington Post.

WebContent.gov Recognized

Congrats to WebContent.gov for being listed among Government Computer News’s “Great .gov Web Sites” of 2009!

To Block or not to Block Social Media Sites

Much ado has been made from Robert Gibbs’s statement to C-SPAN that Twitter is blocked on many White House computers (video).

Mark Drapeau wrote a piece on O’Reilly Radar saying that the disparity of access to social media tools in the White House is an apt metaphor for the inconsistent social media policies across federal agencies and goes on to argue that government blocking of communication tools may frustrate employees and cause the government to “lose some of its most creative and talented young people.”

Matthew Burton has also chimed in on Personal Democracy Forum in response to US Strategic Command’s plans to “ban the entire military’s access to social networking Web sites.”

One Cloud to Rule them All?

Andrea DiMaio wonders if a single cloud infrastructure could serve the entire government beyond the storefront to be offered by GSA, citing a Nextgov article citing NASA’s Nebula platform as a possible candidate. He doubts it will happen any time soon.

Conference 2.0 Blues

A staffer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology has struck a chord with the govt 2.0 blogosphere with her GovLoop blog post called Mixed Feelings About OGI Conference. A few salient points:

All web 2.0 conferences are all starting to look exactly the same. Many speakers come from agencies that are boldly using social media in a new and exciting ways, and many more “believers,” who are not allowed to use those same technologies, come to hear about it. But the status quo remains the same.

…

We need specifics: case studies, business case stratregies that succeeded to support any/all of these tools, etc.