Facebook and Twitter: Who Owns What

January 30, 2009

If a Facebook or Twitter fails, what happens? What a silly question. According to Jeremy Liew, Facebook is “pretty comfortable” about where the company is “right now”. You can find this statement and quite a bit of useful commentary in the article “Warning: Dependence on Facebook, Twitter Could Be Hazardous to Your Business” here. For me the most important comment in the write up by Mark Glaser was:

If you are planning on using either Twitter or Facebook as a marketing platform for yourself or your business, be sure to read the Terms of Service carefully. That’s what Facebook’s Larry Yu advised when I talked to him. “The important thing for people to do is to review the Terms of Service,” he said. “A lot of people don’t do that. They don’t have experience with it, and we encourage people to do it…There are also terms for application developers. As people decide to develop on the platform, they have to be comfortable with those terms.”

This addled goose is wary of social networks. Some trophy generation denizens believe that they don’t exist unless providing information on these publishing platforms. The trophy kids want to “hook up” and keep their “friends” informed about their activities and where abouts. When one of the trophy kids becomes a person of interest to law enforcement, those social postings are going to be somewhat useful to certain authorities. I wonder if the trophy kids realize that some information which is innocuous at the time it becomes available might provide insights to a more informed thinker. Run a query for profiling and see what you think of that discipline. Finally, there’s a nifty tool called the Analyst’s Notebook. If you are not familiar with it, run a Google query for that puppy. From my point of view the information “in” social systems is fascinating. Technology is an interesting construct. The consequences of technology can be even more interesting. Think search, content processing, link analysis, clustering, and other useful methods crunching on those social data. Yum, yum.

Stephen Arnold, January 31, 2009

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under Business strategy, Database, EDiscovery, News, Search, Social, Technology, Text analytics, Text processing

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.