Jeffrey Mann

Social media policies are proving to be a minefield for companies and individuals learning to navigate the shoals of what is permissible, desirable or merely awkward. Digital channels multiply the opportunities for potential cIashes between what we think we are doing or saying as private individuals, and the reasonable interests of our employers or other institutions. This problem is often expressed as an unavoidable clash between who we are as employees and who we are as private individuals. 

Framing the question this way seems far too simple to me. The issue is not whether it is possible to separate the work persona from a personal persona, but rather how to manage the multitude of personas we inhabit. Every day we switch between dozens of roles: employee, manager, father, husband, Battlestar Galactica fan, college friend, dog owner… We are accustomed to dealing with these different contexts, switching between them and modifying how we behave and what we say.

I behave differently with a difficult vendor challenging an MQ position than with a vendor where I have a long relationship working on strategy (I’m not easier on the latter, but it is undeniably different). I would act differently towards a youth athletic team I coach than with friends from college. I try (not always successfully) to hold back on sarcastic, ironic comments unless I know the people really well. I know that I am not alone. Everyone makes these kinds of shifts every day. If we don’t, we can’t do our jobs or even live our lives effectively.

Social media increases the chances where this can go wrong, but it is important to remember that this not something completely new; we need to learn to apply what we already do IRL to these virtual channels.

A bit of perspective and common sense will also help. I find some of these stories where it has gone wrong deeply depressing. Why would someone drinking a glass of wine while on holiday be fired? Would a company fire someone for griping around the water cooler? If not, why is a discussion on Facebook that much different? In fact, that often makes a good test as to whether something is worth pursuing: If the equivalent behaviour happened in real life, without digital media involved, would there be a problem? That can be one way of inserting common sense into some needlessly tense situations.

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Category: IT Governance Personal policy privacy social media     Tags: common sense, compliance, social media policy, wine

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As social software becomes more popular and widely-adopted, it seems like everything is getting a social component. I recently tweeted some musings about what could be the next big social thing. My colleague Andy added a few more. I thought I would use this longer format to add some possibilities of what these Next Big things might be.  

• Social storage management: Where do you think this cluster should go?
• Social data center cooling: Is it hot in here, or what?
• Social format conversion: Is JPG trending higher than BMP?
• Social regression testing: Click that button again, I dare you.
• Social keyboards: A blog for four hands.
• Social app development. I thought you already built that?
• Social printer drivers: I prefer Bodoni
• Social WiFi routers: www.fon.com
• Social UPCs: BzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
• Social load balancing: Go without me; I have too much to do.
• Social browser caching: Who wants to see this again?
• Social network prioritization: No, I insist; after you.
• Social transaction processing: Not now; I’m busy.
• Social power plug: Does anyone have a Euro Powerbook cord I can borrow?
• Social telephone: Hey, there’s an idea!
• Social mousepad: <all right, I’m stumped. Who has an idea?>

Got any more? What do you think the least likely next big thing for social will be?

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Category: humor social media social software     Tags: #thenextsocial, humor, social media, social software

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For the last two years, I have done blog posts on what I call my anti-resolutions for the year. Many bloggers publish their predictions, personal resolutions and highlights around the end of the year. So I won’t. If lots of people do something, that usually is a good enough reason for me not do it.

Instead, I want to talk about my anti-resolutions for 2011.They are “anti” in a couple different ways. The main one is that these are not things that I intend to do, but are hopes and polite suggestions about other people. That is much easier, and an idea that seems to be catching on.This is also what analysts usually do; we rarely do stuff, but we comment a lot on what other people or organizations should do or have done.

Most of the resolutions are also “anti” because they describe something that I hope won’t happen rather than new things that should happen. I am generally not a negative person, but there’s a lot of undesirable activity going on out there. After reading this, please stop it. Thank you.

1. Stop saying things are dead.
   I thought that I dealt with this in a blog post last year, but it seems some people weren’t listening. Every week I read somewhere that Twitter is dead; Facebook is dead; Hyves is dead. Secrets are dead. About the only thing that can really be read from one of these pronouncements is that whatever is being discussed is most certainly not dead.

   Concepts in the social media space rarely ever die. They get less popular, fade from attention, morph into something else; but rarely die altogether. Even if they do, it is tedious to talk about how something that most people think is popular is actually dead. If it were really dead, then no one would be talking about it anymore, now would they? It’s as if bloggers get extra points for being the first to jump on the coffin. I find it unseemly, as well as boring.

2. Please don’t keep saying that microblogging is about telling everyone what you just ate.
   I see this over and over again, that Twitter is full of narcissists broadcasting what they ate for lunch. This particular dig is usually a pretty good indicator that whoever says it does not use Twitter very much.  

   I cannot recall the last time I read about what someone ate for lunch on Twitter. I am sure that it happens, but if that is all someone tweets about, then they would be boring and no one would follow them. That is one of the best things about Twitter when compared to real life: it is pretty easy to avoid the boring bits. I don’t see those tweets because I ignore the people that I find boring. You should too.

3. Stop assuming that everyone wants to use social media.
   I have read several books and seen many presentations that enthusiastically proclaim how there is a huge pent-up demand for social media, that everyone is just panting to share, comment, tag and link.

   It just ain’t so.

   The biggest issue I see enterprises struggling with is convincing people to use these new facilities. They expected that once the facilities were made available, all users would grab them and run with them. Instead, they find that most people never try it, and a few kick at the edges a few times before going back to what they were doing. That’s because what they were doing is what they call  “their jobs.” If it is not made clear how social media will make individuals’ lives and jobs easier and more pleasant, they won’t bother. Aside from the relative few who see this immediately, most people need a bit more guidance and cajoling. That’s the hard job in front of every social media proponent who wants to scale their projects beyond the pioneering Happy Few.

4. Stop assuming that social media will change everything.
   Too many social media proponents breathlessly state that nothing will be the same after the social media maelstrom passes over us; that the way we work, play, and interact will fundamentally change, that all of our processes and work patterns will be unrecognizable.

   Ho hum. Heard that before about so many things. Didn’t happen then, won’t happen now.

   Don’t get me wrong. I love how social media has changed how I work, and love talking about how it can improve processes, and the way people work. But it won’t change everything. Nor should it; it doesn’t need to. Quite a bit better or even a little bit easier is certainly enough.

5. Don’t think that your biggest challenge is to get your chief executive to write a blog
   Eager social software organizers often feel that if they can only get the CEO to blog regularly, then everything else will fall into place. Top-level validation and executive buy-in certainly can help, but if a senior executive needs to be convinced to blog, he or she probably won’t be very good at it. With a great deal of work, it is possible to learn to blog effectively, but it’s difficult to get your boss’s boss’s boss to do this. It’s usually better to get someone lower in the organization who is attracted to blogging and more likely to be good at it.
6. If you leave me a voice mail, tell me what you want.
   I know I will be having a bad day when I receive a voice mail that says something like “Hi. This is Mphrlwysiz Affmrrhl. Can you call me back when you get a chance?”

   I am pretty sure that their name is not actually Mphrlwysiz Affmrrhl, but something phonetically similar. Now I have to figure out how to get back to them, and what they want. Since I am often calling while juggling luggage on the way to the airport, it could take several calls back and forth before this interaction gets completed.

   I live my professional life by email. It is great at conveying information, and handling the request right away. With mobile email, I can do this on the fly as well. I understand, however, that some people prefer to talk to other people, to make contact, explain the context. Fine. Just tell me what you want though, so that we don’t have to bounce back and forth too long.

7. “Lose” and “loose” are different words with different meanings. Do not mix them up.
   Look them up if you have to: Lose    and    Loose
8. Don’t leave obvious, essential features out of your product.
   With my Blackberry, I had to choose between wifi and a camera. The iPad ships without a camera, on a device which is perfect for video conferencing. The rims for my snow tires don’t come with hub caps, so the salt corrodes them. Every device needs its own specific power cord and connector, and they never include extras.

   These features are all so obviously desirable, why leave them out? I know what you will say “To get us to buy expensive ‘accessories’ and the next version when it comes out.” But it ticks me off. Please stop it.

9. Stop saying that something New is no different from something Old.
   I have heard it before. Email is not that different from a fax. Mainframes had email and instant messaging decades ago. You could buy stuff to be delivered from a catalog long before you could do so from an e-commerce Web site. A wiki isn’t that different from a Word document with revision tracking on.

   Sometimes these observations are correct. But who cares? The truth is that e-commerce is creating millions of new businesses, and changing the way that people buy, no matter who did it first. Email shapes the way we work to an extent that faxes or telexes never came close to achieving. Tracing the roots of a supposedly “new” development can be interesting. Unexpected similarities can expose different ways of looking at new developments. But if the goal is to squash the new thing back into a corner where it can be safely ignored, please don’t.

10. No one should “Reply all” to more than ten people.
    Yeah, that would be nice. I live in hope.

I guess I must be grumpy this year, since I made it back to 10 anti-resolutions. Last year, I only could think of seven. Grumpy is no way to start out the new year, however. I certainly don’t feel that way as I start into 2011. I think it’s going to be a great year, although it could always be a bit better.

Happy New Year, everyone!

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Category: anti-resolutions blogging humor microblogging Personal predictions social media social software     Tags: anti-resolutions, blogging, happy new year, humor, ipad, microblogging, twitter

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The Wikileaks organization has been in the news a great deal the past couple weeks with its large scale disclosure of internal communications from the US State Department, and promises to release reportedly explosive internal discussions from banks at a later date. I have held off commenting for awhile to see how the issue played out a bit, and what the potential effects on how enteprises use social software might be.

Last week’s announcement that Mark Zuckerberg is Time magazine’s “person of the year” for 2010 put the issue in perspective. Many were aghast at this perceived slight of Wikileaks’s Julian Assange, but I tend to agree with it.

Too many years ago, I did a customized undergraduate college degree in the Philosophy of Journalism, so I probably should have some deeper opinions about the issues Wikileaks raises. When I was thinking about journalism in the early ‘80s, I was mostly considering differences between the Soviet model of journalism and how it compared to Western ideas. Like so many projects studying anything having to do with the Soviet Union, all that work has since become utterly obsolete and almost completely irrelevant.

Now I spend more time thinking about how enterprises use social software, an endeavour which might remain relevant for a bit longer. The Wikileaks affair actually does not have much to do with social media, or at least it shouldn’t. Despite its name, Wikileaks does not have much to do with technologies like social networking, discussion boards, or even wikis. The organization uses fancy security and anonymization techniques to keep their web sites up and protect contributors, but there isn’t much social about what they do in the way that Wikipedia or Yelp are social.

The rise of internet-mediated social interactions has had a profound influence on how we work, play, and interact as humans. Without downplaying the effect that Wikileaks will have on politics, journalism, and potentially business (if Assange’s threat/promise to release controversial banking documents comes to pass), the influence of social software goes much further. While not the only driver, Facebook is the public face of this influence.

So for once, I agree with Time. It doesn’t happen often.

I fear that an unavoidable, but unfortunate result of the furor around the Wikileaks disclosures will be an increased desire to lock down conversations and restrict communication at both commercial and government organizations. It will be used as a reason to block access to social media sites, stop sharing information, and treat many who want to collaborate widely with suspicion. After a period where sharing and access were generally encouraged, I fear that the pendulum will swing too far back the other way. This inevitable reaction is unfortunate from a social media perspective because encouraging participation is one of the biggest challenges I find organizations facing. As social software gains in maturity, usage grows beyond the pioneers who are naturally attracted to the technologies and interacting that way. After the pioneers, the settlers need encouragement. Clamping down amid an atmosphere of fear is not conducive to encouraging participation.

This would not be the first time that a desire for one thing triggered the opposite. When deciding on steps to take post-Wikileaks, I really hope that the familiar relationship between babies and bath water does not get forgotten.

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Category: compliance Facebook privacy security social media social software     Tags: Facebook, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, person of the year, TIME, wikileaks

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Symposium is usually an intense experience, and this year was no different. This year 3300 attended the event, a 21% increase over last year. It was the biggest EMEA Symposium in the last ten years. Close to 100 analysts did 200 presentations, almost 2200 1on1 meetings, and about 40 user roundtables. Personally, I did 26 1on1 meetings and seven sessions over 3 1/2 days. All those contacts provide a lot of information from customers about what they are doing, what they are struggling with, and what is confusing or perplexing them about the developing world of collaboration. I will be mining these insights over the next couple months in research notes.

These were some of the top questions people were asking about.

• Promoting Social Software in Conservative Organizations.
  The initial issue many organizations faced with social software was how to get control of the mavericks and pioneers who were dragging in innovative solutions from wherever they could find them. As adoption deepens, more organizations are finding that their internal or industry culture is stronger than the impulses of these dynamic individuals. In conservative organizations, people feel that using wacky new software like wikis or microblogging would be seen as a bad thing, even if there is no official statement or prohibition. These organizations are looking for ways to encourage innovation and responsible adoption.
• Developing a Collaboration Strategy
  A bit of an evergreen, but definitely still a hot topic. There are lots of initiatives, some benefits, and lots of attention. How do we channel that energy into a viable strategy?
• Involving Customers in Social Software Efforts
  The first several iterations of social software concentrated on collaboration among colleagues. After that, the marketing or customer service organization started Social CRM efforts. Now, it’s time to develop a long term view of how to involve customers in the developing conversations.

This year is different for me because it is most likely the last time I will serve as chair for the event as well as attending as an analyst. This was my third year organizing the agenda, which is personally stimulating as well as a pleasant challenge. I became familiar with areas of our research that I otherwise would not have seen. I loved the chance to think about how we present our ideas as well as what the ideas themselves should be. I have loved working with the events team, leading to a much greater appreciation of the professionalism, work, and skills needed behind the scenes to pull off an event like this one. If Symposium is a success, it is mostly due to the events people making it seem (mostly) seamless. I will miss that part of the event, when I go back to just worrying about finishing the slides for my own presentations.

To everyone who made Symposium possible: Events staff, analysts, consultants, management, sales people, and (most of all) clients and sponsors: An enormous thank you. 

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Category: being an analyst collaboration consumerization europe Events social media social software Strategic Planning symposium     Tags: conservative organizations, EMEA, social software, symposium. #gartnersym, Type C

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Today’s announcement that the Telegraaf Media Groep has acquired the company behind the Hyves social networking site is another troubling sign for locally-oriented media sites. Hyves has achieved quite good penetration in the Dutch market, with almost 11 million Dutch users, over half the total population. Despite its efforts, it hasn’t succeeded much in growing beyond the borders of The Netherlands, however. Other European social media sites have shown the same pattern. StudieVZ.net has captured many German students, Netlog has a reasonable French following and Bebo achieved some UK penetration before fizzling out.

The Hyves announcement does not mention it, but Facebook is the elephant in the room for all of these locally-oriented sites. I have seen it with many of my Dutch friends, who started out on Hyves, but gradually moved over to Facebook as they developed more contacts with people beyond the Dutch borders. Bizarrely, when Google translates the original Dutch page from the Telegraaf into English, most of the references to Hyves get changed to Myspace. Just as many Myspace users have moved to Facebook, so goes it with Hyves.

Today’s acquisition by the Telegraaf reinforces the local character of Hyves. Terms were not disclosed, but I think it is fair to assume that there will be no movies made with Justin Timberlake about Hyves. The consumer social networking market is one where the big get bigger; the dominant site either loses touch with its audience which switches en masse to something else (e.g. Friendster to Myspace to Facebook) or gets more dominant, as Facebook has so far been able to do.

I believe that there is a future for local sites, but not a huge one, particularly in Europe. Certainly, there is an audience which wants local content and values the tight cultural connections that a locally-oriented site can offer. This audience will be most viable in markets which are reasonably isolated by culture or language. Local sites are emerging or even thriving in China, Japan, Korea, Russia, and Arabic-speaking countries. Friendster, one of the original social networking sites, was bought last year by a company in Malaysia.

Holland is definitely not isolated, neither culturally or linguistically. While few foreigners speak Dutch, language skills in Holland are so good that if you have any kind of an accent, it can be hard to find someone to speak Dutch with. The Dutch go everywhere on holiday, to live and to work. As cross-border interactions and relations become the norm, the same goes to some extent for most European countries.

Local  focus can be a way to differentiate a social networking site. It usually won’t be enough to compete with a behemoth like Facebook, however, especially in Europe.

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Category: consumerization europe Facebook Hyves social media social software     Tags: consumer social networks, europe, Facebook, Holland, Hyves, Netherlands, social media, Telegraaf, TMG

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In an announcement from San Francisco today, Microsoft provided more details about next year’s planned revamp of its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) cloud-based collaboration suite. Gartner’s official take on this announcement can be found here, but here are some of my thoughts.

The new brand name is the most striking part of this announcement. BPOS never really tripped off the tongue and always kind of felt like a code name. Office 365 as a major Microsoft brand will be a surprise to a certain UK office supply company, but will quickly become associated with Microsoft’s cloud collaboration suite. I actually was surprised at how Microsoft was able to keep this new brand name a pretty good secret until the unveiling. I was also surprised that the web site was not scheduled to be available until 3 1/2 hours after the launch event, leading to avoidable snarky Twitter comments.

Inevitably, there will be fun poked at the new moniker. Do I really want to be in the Office 365 days per year? What happens in leap years (Microsoft gives you a day off once every four years). I honestly don’t think that it would be possible to come up with anything that would not have some kind of downside, and it certainly is better than BPOS or some other anodyne acronym.

The second big news is that in addition to Exchange, SharePoint and Lync (OCS), Office 365 will also include Microsoft Office applications, delivered either in the browser or running from the desktop. While Microsoft naturally emphasizes the productivity benefits integration with the rest of the products will bring, many corporate buyers will be hunched over their calculators figuring out how the new possibilities will affect what they pay for Microsoft Office products. With prices ranging from $2 to $27 per user per month, it won’t be simple to do the maths.

The most important indication from this announcement would be if Microsoft’s design focus is really shifting to the Cloud. Yes, this has been the stated direction for some time, but it has been hard to defend when new functionality that was available in on premise products a year ago won’t make it to the cloud products until sometime next year. If Microsoft starts introducing new functionality first in its cloud products, that will be a major step towards proving that Microsoft is “all in” for the cloud, as Steve Ballmer keeps saying.

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Category: Cloud collaboration Google Microsoft social software     Tags: BPOS, Cloud, Microsoft, Office 365, SaaS

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Last week, I had the chance to do a quick tour around Europe with Ed Thompson talking to over 300 people about social media in London, Utrecht, Zurich, Milan, and Frankfurt. I talked about developing strategy, and Ed covered social CRM.

While five cities in five days is a quick pace, it’s not out of the ordinary. I really enjoy these tours. As well as eating some great food, seeing (briefly) some nice places (the train trip from Zurich to Milan is stunning), I get a chance to talk to lots of people about what they are doing. It is always a great source of research, as I hear about the questions people are asking.

Here are the top three questions that I heard on this trip:

• How do we introduce social software into a skeptical organization?
  Although social media is hot, it ain’t hot everywhere.Some organizations are more conservative, or have been around for a very long time and aren’t too eager to adopt new technologies. In these cases, people won’t use it because it is cool or because Gartner says they should.
• Should we start our own customer community or build onto one that already exists?
  After hearing all the reasons why customer communities are good for you, this issue comes from those who have not yet really started. They face the dilemma of going where their customers already are (like on Facebook or a more specialized site), or trying to draw them to a site associated directly with their own brand.
• How do we handle privacy? Our users and customers find this stuff creepy.
  This is a huge issue in Germany, where attitudes towards personal and professional privacy are very highly developed, but was a hot issue across Europe this tour. Importantly, the questions were not about legal restrictions and requirements on privacy, but about how social media makes people feel. Many are not comfortable with sharing too much in their professional lives, and social techniques make them uneasy.

I’ve got some ideas about how to answer these questions, and will work them out in formal research notes in the coming weeks. I also will be talking about some of these (especially the first one) at Gartner Symposium in Cannes. Carol Rozwell will cover this in Orlando. There are also sessions on privacy in Europe, and social CRM.

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Category: collaboration compliance europe Facebook privacy social media social software Strategic Planning symposium     Tags: communities, Frankfurt, London, Milan, privacy, social media, social software, symposium, Utrecht, Zurich

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My last post got several interesting comments, which got got me thinking about what is creepy, and what to do about it. The uncomfortable feelings that some social software implementations create can be a major inhibitor of adoption, so understanding what

My colleague Nick Jones offered a potential algorithm for determining levels of creepiness, but what really makes things creepy? In his comment, he proposed surprise, uncertainty and intrusiveness, but is that all?

Everyone knows what makes them feel creepy, but what are the attributes that are more likely to make someone feel that way? Here are some I have thought of:

• Vulnerability: Actions involving people who are in some way vulnerable are much more likely to attract creepiness. Anything that deals with children, the elderly, victims of any kind or even just people in a lower position of authority are far more likely to tend towards the creepy side.
• Context: Where and how interactions happen can have a tremendous influence on how people perceive them. Teasing or jokey comments which would be appropriate on an informal discussion board could easily turn creepy if used in a more formal venue, like a performance evaluation or project appraisal.
• Tone: How something is said is more important than what is said. Tone can be wrong for the particular context (see above) or just plain wrong. The easiest example is vulgar, obscene or hate-filled language.
• Sneakiness:  No one likes it if they feel that something has been snuck past them, collecting information or making connections that they don’t expect or couldn’t anticipate. Most users of free social media sites have gotten used to ad targeting based on information provided on the site. But when different sites share their information or pool it, then it can feel unpleasantly intrusive.

  If someone emails a friend from Gmail about a holiday in Brussels, it would be no surprise to see an an advertisement for Belgian hotels on the Gmail home page. It would feel creepy if those ads started appearing on newspaper sites. It would be alarming if after joining a Facebook group about World War I history, ads or spam for tours of Belgian battle sites started appearing. That would feel creepy.

• Specificity: The more specific the information or actions come to me, the more likely I am to get creeped out. If the spam for WWI battle site tours seemed to know the dates of the planned holiday, that would be very unsettling.

Some of these overlap or are covered by Nick’s three-part criteria, but I felt they were worth elaborating on, I would be interested to hear about the attributes of what you find creepy. Please add thoughts and descriptions in the comments. I am not asking for individual incidents or anecdotes, but the common threads of what companies or software products have done to make you feel that they have crossed the line.

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Category: compliance social media social software Uncategorized     Tags: creepiness, creepy, social media, social software

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I’ve been thinking about “creepiness” over the last couple weeks. I’ve been finding the concept come up more and more as I speak with end users and vendors about social software, because it is becoming a real barrier to adoption as end users react with sometimes unexpected revulsion at what seems normal or trivial to others. It is hard to pin down what constitutes creepiness and what to do about it, which makes it such a difficult concept. For example, some people always think of clown pictures as creepy.

But usually, creepiness is all about perception and how a policy, feature, or incident makes people feel. There is no ISO standard for degrees of creepiness that everyone can agree on. That makes it hard  for many technology suppliers to get their heads around. They are accustomed to making powerful tools that can do amazing things. Something as squishy as “how people feel” doesn’t fit into their engineering plans.

That feeling is not rational, but triggered by deep, unexplainable ur-reactions. I saw that myself when a supermarket I visit started using big monitors that display every item I bought as I went through checkout. Intellectually, I know that anyone can look over my shoulder and see what is on the rolling band. Still, it felt super-creepy to see all my purchases displayed on a big screen for all to see. I must not have been the only one; that experiment didn’t last long.

This problem has come up a couple times when talking to vendors promoting social network analysis (SNA). A tool to map the real communication lines and understand who collaborates with whom is undeniably a powerful tool, one that many companies can profit from. However, describe SNA as “our system will snuffle around in your email, read all the documents you create, and analyze everything you post on the intranet and Internet so that we know more about how the organization works” and you can feel the anti-creepiness hackles rise. Explaining that only automated algorithms will read the email (no people) and that subjects can preview and edit the analyses generated can help, but not really. The feeling of creepiness persists.

Different situations and places also bring different attitudes. Instant messaging and presence are good bellwethers. It is part of the standard infrastructure and work process in may organizations, while in others, employees rebel at the thought that their bosses can monitor when they are at their desk from a distance. What is a useful and even necessary communications tool to most is as bad as hanging surveillance cameras in the bathroom would be to others. Anecdotally, Germans seem to be especially sensitive to these issues. Hundreds of thousands of people in Germany reportedly find seeing their house on Google Streetview too creepy to bear.

Creepiness is also impossible to defend against. The second a company or a person starts to explain why what they have done is not creepy, it already ipso facto becomes creepy.

Google recently made the news with a creepy story of a Google employee who was fired after he used his position as an engineer to read the email, chat logs and other private information of some kids he had met IRL. While creepiness is often hard to define, everything about this incident was creepy. The facts of the breach itself, the pictures of the offending employee, the fact that children were involved, and the realization that quite a few Google employees can apparently dip into our private communications — all of this adds up to a huge bout of creepiness.

There is not much that Google could do in this instance, except fire the creepy guy and hope that the incident blows over. It looks like that will happen, but I expect the overall issue of creepiness will not go away so easily.

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Category: compliance email Google privacy social media social software technology     Tags: creepiness, creepy, gcreep, Google, privacy, SNA, social network analysis, social networking

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