As I sat and watched Mike Arrington of TechCrunch interview Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook, I heard them discuss the future of privacy.  It seems that Zuckerberg is evangelizing the death of the doctrine of privacy.  With Facebook being the largest social network out there, that is a pretty scary notion given the fact that we all are signing up and turning our social life over to the Internet.  I wonder what privacy will look like in the next few years?  In fact it seems to be changing at a rapid pace and evolving with every new application.

I recently helped present a series at my son’s school on “Cyber Safety”.  In addition, local law enforcement also presented on the dangers of the world of social networks and what our children are doing online and the predators that are out there and their methods.  It was very sobering to figure that there are that many people out there trying to harm our kids via the Internet and social networks.  An yet, we are all flocking to these networks as our new playgrounds and the place to be and all from the safety, or so it may seem, of our own homes.

I am particularly interested in geo-location or geo-tracking applications that are becoming more and more popular.  Twitter themselves have opened up location based Tweets so that people can determine your whereabouts as you click away at 140 characters.  These software applications are so new that they have yet to become mainstream uses for evil but it can only be a matter of time until we begin to hear of predators using them and suddenly you will hear of their evil deeds on the prime time news.

Is privacy going away?  Is our notion that we are protected by privacy laws and common sense enough?  Have you read the terms of service of each and every software application that you are using today?  Perhaps you have agreed to give up your rights to a private life by participating in that latest cool place to hang out on the Internet?  In 2009 I deemed it “The Year of Listening” as that was the new marketing mantra.  If that were the case, we should probably listen to what I am now calling “The Year of Privacy.”  It could turn out that our privacy will then turn into the “Year of Living Dangerously.”

photo via Alan Cleaver_2000

I was going through my feeds last night and funneling all of my reads as I tend to do in the evenings and sharing some of what I found to be interesting to my community through Twitter.  This is becoming more and more of a habit with me as I tend to pour through a lot of data.  What I think might be of interest to my followers I share.  I am generous that way.  Actually it is part of my overall plan to let the blogosphere and other platforms know that I exist—I network therefore I am.  I see a t-shirt in the makings here.

As I approached the 11:00 pm hour I noticed that my Tweetdeck was acting up.  I am the type that wants everything just to work.  I don’t care about the Internet service and other stuff I want it to work when I hit the power button.  The same thing goes for Twitter.  When I hit send and let everyone what is happening, I want it to work.  When it doesn’t I just chalk it up to another fail whale.  That is until today when I found out that Twitter was hacked.  Not  hacked by a 13 year old kid in his parents basement but by the “Iranian Cyber Army”.  Excuse me?  I was just watching a Leo Laporte show about Cyber Warefare and making fun of it actually on Twitter, but now I read that headline on TechCrunch.  You can see the rest of the coverage on Techmeme.

Twitter is starting to lose my trust.  Is this what we are going to expect out of Twitter’s future?  There has been numerous Phishing problems with Twitter and there are many other incidents just this year of them getting hacked and Google documents being obtained.  I am losing trust for Twitter quickly.  I hope they will learn from the recent attack and work on making adjustments.  Do you trust Twitter?  I’m not sure I would give them my user and password for…. Ooops!  [Runs to change password again]  I am clearly not trusting the Twitter world at present.

I was sitting and watching the festivities today as President Barack Obama, our 44th President is sworn into office, and couldn’t help but notice that they were discussing the fact that the White House website was changed over to the new administration at 12:03 p.m. EST. They indicated that the menu for the luncheon was the number 1 visited page on the site, then I noticed that TechCrunch reported on the website and discussed the White House blog. We have made it to the White House!

As I prepare to head off to Chicago on Thursday to attend another event for Blog World Expo, I wonder about the changes (the key word that got him elected) that will take place and how social media will begin to seep into the mainstream more and more as our new President implements more in the digital world. I for one am looking forward to it. i will be talking about the new changes and the new President Obama on my radio show tonight so come and join me at 5:00 PST and 8:00 EST.

[Photo via TechCrunch]

As I was growing up in rural Colorado, we had plenty of opportunities to see magpies in their environment. They were usually standing over the latest roadkill. Basically they are scavengers. They get fed from nothing they have done on their own but finding the opportunity. I draw that picture to my own mind and drawing the metaphor of the name and bird over to thinking about the latest company and their attempt to monetize from the efforts of others. I am speaking from the recent launch of a advertising site that is asking people to use their Twitter stream for advertising purposes. I am speaking of Magpie. I had a chance to hear of this from my friend Lucretia Pruitt (@geekmommy) on Twitter itself.

I spoke about the idea of a third party monetizing Twitter earlier today. I think that Twitter needs to get on board with a private beta or an alpha or a something. I know they have been wrestling with this like most others on how they take something and make money at it. They throw ads on it and sit back and hope the sales guys can turn a profit. I’m not in the boardroom of Twitter and this is probably already a part of their behind the scenes workings. At least I hope so given their latest offer of $500 Million from Facebook. To turn down an amount like that you have to have your reasons. I know they say Facebook is overvalued but that is another blog post completely.

Frankly they may do well to have Magpie or another third party prove the ability to make it work and then just take some of the money they have and buy it up. I’m sure that they would not have a problem to make that happen unless of course the price tag of the company was too high and in that respect they merely block the company from the API and not allow them to use twitter for that purpose. The terms of service clearly allows for them to do what they feel is best for Twitter:

We reserve the right to alter these Terms of Use at any time.

Magpie spends the time the effort and energy to monetize the system, gets everyone used to the fact that Twitter now shows up with ads in the streams, or in the background and companies bring the ads and back the money truck up to the Twitter dock.
I have seen and read about the idea that the people on Twitter are calling the Magpie service the PayPerPost (Ted Murphy’s company that used bloggers and their blog content for advertising, now known as IZEA) of Twitter. People forget that PayPerPost was not real popular with the blogging elite or the purists, yet the investors and VC types have been writing checks to the group on a regular basis. I can foresee the same thing happening for the folks at Magpie. They are beginning to get some traction and according to TechCrunch people that use their service are bound to make some decent money.

[photo via Neil Phillips]