ark Zuckerberg, Facebook's chief executive, introduced the site's new features on Thursday. Photo: NYT

It seems you are either connected or disconnected in today’s world. The more connected you are – the more important you are socially. You have to brand yourself. Your popularity is measured by views, friends, posts to your wall, or how many times you were poked by someone you don’t even know.

We are being sold social media as though it is a great addition to our culture, one that furthers democracy and freedom of expression. But is this true? Could it be that we are just being exploited by the companies that advertise on these sites?  And Facebook is just furthering this – by connecting us even tighter to companies that want to sell us more junk?

The NYT story that follows is an example of exactly what I mean. NYT- Facebook, the Web’s biggest social network, is where you go to see what your friends are up to. Now it wants to be a force that shapes what you watch, hear, read and buy.

Facebook is not becoming a purveyor of media products, like Apple or Amazon.com. Rather, it is teaming up with companies that distribute music, movies, information and games in positioning itself to become the conduit where news and entertainment is found and consumed. Its new partners include Netflix and Hulu for video, Spotify for music, The Washington Post and Yahoo for news, Ticketmaster for concert tickets and a host of food, travel and consumer brands.

http://nyti.ms/nYrZnG

Kenji Kasahara, the chief executive of Mixi, one of Japan's most popular social networking sites.

NYT – Mr. Zuckerberg, the 26-year-oldFacebook chief executive and co-founder, may be the man of the moment in the United States and much of the rest of the online world. But here in Japan, one of the globe’s most wired nations, few people have heard of him.

And relatively few Japanese use Facebook, the global social-networking phenomenon based in Palo Alto, Calif., that recently added its 583 millionth member worldwide.

Facebook users in Japan number fewer than two million, or less than 2 percent of the country’s online population. That is in sharp contrast to the United States, where 60 percent of Internet users are on Facebook, according to the analytics site Socialbakers.

Japanese, until now, have flocked to various well-entrenched social networking sites and game portals — like Mixi, Gree and Mobage-town. Each has more than 20 million users, and each offers its own approach to connecting people online.

One trait those sites have in common is crucial to Japan’s fiercely private Internet users. The Japanese sites let members mask their identities, in distinct contrast to the real-name, oversharing hypothetical user on which Facebook’s business model is based.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/technology/10facebook.html

Google is not alone among Internet and telecommunications companies in feeling inundated with requests for information. Verizon told Congress in 2007 that it received some 90,000 such requests each year. AndFacebook told Newsweek in 2009 that subpoenas and other orders were arriving at the company at a rate of 10 to 20 a day.

As Internet services — allowing people to store e-mails, photographs, spreadsheets and an untold number of private documents — have surged in popularity, they have become tempting targets for law enforcement. That phenomenon became apparent over the weekend when it surfaced that the Justice Department had sought the Twitter account activity of several people linked to WikiLeaks, the antisecrecy group.

Many Internet companies and consumer advocates say the main law governing communication privacy — enacted in 1986, before cellphone and e-mail use was widespread, and before social networking was even conceived — is outdated, affording more protection to letters in a file cabinet than e-mail on a server.

The demand for social media jobs has exploded, even as overall unemployment hovers around 10%. A recent study published by SocialMediaInfluence.com showed that 59 of the Fortune 100 companies have at least one employee who works full time in social media, and that job postings directly related to social media have soared 600% in the last five years.

The Social Media Influence report, which collaborated with the career site Indeed.com to research online job listings, found more than 21,000 social media-related job postings — up from only a few thousand in 2005.

That may be a glimmer of good news for the country’s vast pool of young and underemployed college graduates. But in a fledgling field surrounded by hype, some industry insiders are saying it may be too good to last.

As social media hiring has picked up, the pool of qualified talent has failed to keep pace. The resulting imbalance of supply and demand, says Curtis Hougland, founder of the New York-based marketing and social media firm Attention, is the surest sign of hiring inflation.

Demand for social media skills in the corporate world has outstripped the supply of candidates with training in communications and the analytical skills to track the effectiveness of a media campaign. The void, Houghland says, has been filled by a burgeoning workforce of self-proclaimed social media experts — qualified and not so qualified.

To explain the situation, Hougland turns to an analogy that has become ominously common when describing social media — the dot-com bubble.

“What happened [in the 1990s] is just that the market became impatient,” Hougland says. “That’s the only danger with social media. We might already be there.”

Hiring for social media jobs started picking up steam in about 2005, though it still constitutes only a small percentage of overall post-college job placements, says New York University’s Trudy Steinfeld, director of the university’s office of career services. Steinfeld estimated that only a few students — ballpark 1 to 2% — take jobs in social media specifically, but that those numbers have been increasing.

More often, companies eager for social media authenticity aim even younger, tasking student interns with charting their new media course. “They’re using interns to test it out more and more,” Steinfeld says.

http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2010/12/21/are-social-media-jobs-here-to-stay/

The digital-marketing research firm says U.S. spending on online ads will hit $25.8 billion, surpassing the $22.8 billion spent on print ads in newspapers.

The eclipse has been on the horizon for years as consumers have migrated en masse to the Internet, where there are many more options for news, and where newspaper publishers can’t charge nearly as much for ads as they can in print. So even while the total audience for many newspapers has grown, they have been unable to stem revenue declines.

“It’s something we’ve seen coming for a long time, but this is a tipping point,” says Geoff Ramsey, the chief executive of eMarketer.

It isn’t just that newspapers are facing fiercer competition from the Web. Recently released findings by Forrester Research show that U.S. consumers, on average, now spend as much time online as they do watching television. But they aren’t spending less time in front of their TVs. What they are doing less of is listening to the radio and reading newspapers and magazines offline, Forrester says.

While total ad spending in the U.S. is expected to rise 3% this year to $168.5 billion, eMarketer estimates spending on print ads in newspapers will decline 8.2% in 2010, to be followed by a 6% decline in 2011.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704443704576026073503437388.html?KEYWORDS=online&mg=com-wsj

WSJ – In a reversal of the federal government’s hands-off approach to Internet privacy regulation over the past decade, the Obama administration said Americans should have a “privacy bill of rights” to help regulate the commercial collection of consumer data online.

he administration also proposed the creation of a Privacy Policy Office that would coordinate online privacy issues in the U.S. and abroad.

The proposals, contained in an 88-page report released by the Commerce Department Thursday, reflect a rapid re-evaluation of online privacy in recent months as an area ripe for potential abuse with the emergence of an industry of data-gatherers who collect and sell personal details about people for marketing purposes.

Among the suggestions in the report: Companies should ask people for permission to use their data for a purpose other than for which it was collected, and submit

The proposals mark a turning point for federal Internet policy. Until now, Congress and executive branch agencies have largely left the commercial Internet to regulate itself, out of a concern that a heavy government hand would stifle innovation in a booming area of the economy.

But growing concerns about the practice are prompting a re-evaluation in Washington of the government’s role. Earlier this month, the Federal Trade Commission issued a report calling for the development of a “do not track” system that would enable people to avoid having their actions monitored online.

The use of personal information has increased so much that privacy laws may now be needed to restore consumer trust in the medium, the Commerce report says. The U.S. has no comprehensive federal privacy law; current law covers the use of certain types of data but not others.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703395204576023521659672058.html#ixzz18O6TzqYh

Twitter said Wednesday it raised a round of funding that valued it at $3.7 billion, becoming the latest young Web company in which private investors put a multibillion-dollar worth on the operation.

The rich valuation comes despite the fact Twitter is still working on ways to translate its more than 175 million registered users into a profitable business.

The popularity of Twitter has fueled expectations that marketers could use the service to target relevant ads to consumers interested in real-time information about breaking events and organizations they care about.

Since launching its ad services in April, Twitter has signed on more than 80 name brands, including Coca-Cola Co. and Verizon Wireless, to buy promoted tweets for as much as $100,000.

Read more: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704828104576021954210929460.html#ixzz18O5t0ZOq

“Over time, Myspace got very broad and lost focus of what its members where using it for,” Michael Jones, the president of Myspace, a unit of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, said in an interview.

Mr. Jones said that the more than 120 million Myspace members were primarily using the site to listen to music and share opinions and information about that music, as well as about movies and television shows. The new site will emphasize that content with a simplified service that removes much of the clutter that Myspace was known for, Mr. Jones said.

And Mr. Jones said that Myspace would no longer seek to compete with Facebook, but rather to complement it. “Our focus is social entertainment,” he said. “Niche players have long staying power.”

Analysts say that burnishing Myspace’s tarnished brand, even with a more narrow focus, will not be easy. While Myspace, founded in 2003, still has a large audience, its fortunes have steadily eroded in the last few years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/technology/27myspace.html