Whenever anyone is scrutinized at high resolution, it seems, all their flaws are revealed. Take, for instance the recent story of the lawsuit plantif who claimed his car accident injuries were so bad that it was dramatically diminishing his lifestyle. An in-court examination of his Facebook page revealed current photos of the very activities (pool playing in his case) that he claimed were lost to him due to whiplash from the accidents.

This story is repeated time and again… I was recently asked to take down some pictures I’d posted on Facebook. The images themselves, while reasonably tame, were taken at a birthday party and consequently generated unwelcome questions and comments for the guest of honour by some co-workers. There are still more stories about lost job opportunities as potential employers find unflattering posts and pics of prospects through routine Googling. In one case of which I have personal knowledge, a job applicant negotiating a salary unknowingly lost thousands of dollars in yearly income when a manager read of the prospective employee’s enthusiasm for the job opportunity… On the applicant’s personal blog, no less.

This high resolution look at our second selves, the images and thoughts expressed of our ‘private’ lives are increasingly being publicized, logged, catalogued and recorded for our digital posterity (blog, by the way, is short for ‘Web log’).

This publicity of our other lives has had an unintended consequence… It is shifting and blurring our sense of what is deemed appropriate behavior. As a rather macro example, the past two and current sitting Presidents of the United States have all been shown to have engaged in some form of drug use, from a President that ‘didn’t inhale‘ a joint, to a President that very much inhaled cocaine, to the current President who reportedly continues to engage in one of today’s most heinous taboos: smoking cigarettes.

The high resolution images of who we are, while at times unflattering, seems to be making us more tolerant of our individual flaws and blemishes as society’s taboos are revealed as more and more common facts of today’s lifestyles.

With a single snap of a web-connected celphone camera, society’s closet-bound skeletons – and we’re all said to have them – are shown the light of day, and we’re being forced to reconcile them against our own, equally exposed pasts under the harsh, indiscriminate lens of today’s pervasive paparazzi.

There’s been a lot made of the Facebook TOS update that came out a few days ago, specifically the exclusion of a line that had assured users that all content they’d posted to their profile would be deleted if they chose to cancel their account with the service. The idea is that if I leave Facebook, all my personal information would be deleted forever, and to the service, it would be as though I’d never existed. This TOS change has new been retracted, and, one would assume, any technical changes have been rolled back.

What’s at issue is that comments on photos and statuses, messages, links and even “Likes” that are ascribed to other profiles would then be deleted, and those – while trivial – are still “User Generated Content” (strictly speaking) with all the rights and affordances that entails. Indeed, that’s been what Facebook is claiming is the reason for the omission of the line that grants them the right to hang on to those materials, but I think there’s something else going on…

User-Generated Content must be “Future Proof” in order to have continuing value to the medium that carries it. In the past few months, YouTube has added a HD option to many videos. I’ve noticed a marked improvement in the video shown on my iPhone, and I’m told that those watching YouTube on AppleTV have seen similar improvements. This is all due to the fact that YouTube has retained the ‘original’ video files that were uploaded by users, even going back to the first ones. Thus, when they made the partnership with Apple (for example), they could re-encode all the videos as assets in a format iPhones and Apple TV’s could handle (i.e. not flash).

FlickR does the same thing, and one would presume that MySpace and Facebook are doing the same with all the content that is contributed into their systems.

Here’s the question: If I link to a video to share it with my friends (who presumably enjoy it) and they share it with their friends (assuming the privacy setting is appropriate), and I delete my account, shouldn’t that link to the video survive? It’s essentially ‘content’ that I’ve generated, even though I may not be the author of the original content, it’s link and the associated context I place it in, plus any comments I’ve made on it are effectively my content.

Facebook’s next big challenge will be how to distribute all this user-generated content into new devices and applications. Already, I can’t watch Facebook videos on my iPhone or someone else’s blackberry, and moreover, accessing any of the existing social networking features through the set-top devices (Walled gardens like XBOX360, PS3, AppleTV, Tivo, etc) is impossible.

Being able to access social networks through off-web devices is a fundamental and critical strategic consideration if social networks are to continue to have relevance in the next 5000 days of the Internet, and in order to do that, ensuring content can survive into each of these other mediums in perpetuity is a critical legal hurdle.

“A lot of our exposure to services and products is now going to be socially mediated. It’s going to be very hard to create a centralized broadcasting message about a brand or product… That’s where mass interpersonal persuasion comes in. Through the newsfeed and my social network, interesting stuff now comes to me; I don’t have to go searching for it.”

Fast Company then (rightly) asks if this will flow into the Long Tail philosophies that are popular right now. Fogg’s response is fundamentally correct, although perhaps not how he means it:

“As a brand, you can worry about all these micro niches and micro markets and the long tail, but I think at the end of the day you’re not going to have enough resources to do that. You have to focus on creating a spectacular product or service, and your market will find you.”

Whoa, wait a second… did I just read that in the future (according to Fogg), marketers are going to be out of a job? That if you build it (really, really well) they will come? Fortunately, not exactly:

“You don’t have to pre-define your market right out of the gate. As long as you watch what’s going on, you can adjust and go with what’s working.”

Phew. For a minute there, I saw long lines of well-manicured homeless folks trying to explain why the street is now REALLY where it’s at.

The really interesting piece to Fogg’s argument is that Facebook, or rather social networking in a broader sense, is going to democratize marketing. Thing is, I know a lot of young people for whom Facebook is yesterday’s news, and they are looking for a place that they can call their own (the early appeal of Facebook). Facebook has responded with “lists,” or the ability to create mini virtual Facebooks so you can keep your friends separate from uh, your parents. It’s too soon to tell if this is going to play out, but I suspect it won’t.

Here’s the thing. People (the necessary component to the social networking eco-sphere), don’t change that fast. Fogg is describing a wholesale shift from push to pull marketing. Anybody else remember Pointcast? How about lesser-known Backweb & Marimba (check out this 1999 Forbes article for some good irony).

At the end of the day, Google ads get closer to what Fogg is describing… While I agree that SaaS (Software as a Service) and grid computing are changing the landscape, and that products are, by their nature becoming iterative (think iPod, salesforce.com, and the still-in-beta GMail), I think that’s a far cry from the marketing paradigm shifting so dramatically. Besides, the concept of engagement is just catching on…

Why Facebook Is Even Bigger than You Think | Fast Company

In any disaster, one of the first things that people look for — not just journalists, but readers too — is the eyewitness account, the first-person description, the man on the scene. Whenever something like the earthquake happens, thousands of editors and producers at newspapers, radio programs and TV networks clog the phones trying to reach someone, anyone, who can provide a personal account: they call homes, schools, stores, friends, distant relatives. What was it like? Where were you when it happened? What happened next?

Twitter is able to supply all of those things — and it’s also self-directed. People can post messages about whatever they wish, rather than answering only the questions that a producer asks them. In the study I wrote about recently that looked at Twitter and Facebook and Wikipedia as disaster reporting tools, one of the comments about the California fires was that the media focused on celebrities and how they were affected, but Twitter and other sources gave a more complete version of events and how they were affecting everyone. Paul Kedrosky calls it the democratization of headline news.

Link to full blog post