We still don't have this anywhere near to being sorted. A recent post by Malkuth Damkar about the way in which Twitter makes celebrities of us all makes the point that people who would otherwise escape notice are often judged and gossiped about on Twitter in a way that's disproportionate; as though by conversing publically, we've abandoned our right to privacy and respect. Not to mention the recent furore concering hapless British Twitterer Paul Chambers who jokingly threatened to blow up an airport ,then found himself jobless and facing criminal charges, which clearly demonstrates how serious the consequences can be.

Media and marketing website Mumbrella recently covered an exchange on Twitter between a journalist and the personal account of someone working in PR, as evidence of a sometimes tricky relationship between the two disciplines. While naturally journalists often choose to ignore context and nuance for the sake of a good headline, this seemed a particularly unfair conflation of public domain and public interest. The journalist has a relatively large public profile and is employed by a media organisation, arguably making her tweets our business; the other person is not - and public or no, her personal Twitter account exists independently of her employer.

It served as an excellent example of this rather messy grey area. I've personally hired people because of their significant digital presence - people who came to my attention because of the way in which they communicated online and their degree of influence. And I've been more than happy for these people to use their talents for the good of the company, for example by sharing content to their personal networks, using data gathered from their accounts etc. By creating a social media usage policy that, reasonably enough, prohibited any mention of confidential or sensitive information, I could, as a boss, be reasonably sure my team were clear about what would be appropriate to share via both the corporate and personal accounts and allowed common sense to guide their behaviour in the grey areas on an ad-hoc basis.

But I think with hindsight I have sometimes got it wrong. On one occasion I effectively muzzled a team member who had a long standing online stoush with another public figure, arguing that as he linked to the company website from his Twitter bio, this feud would reflect poorly on the company. I now think that I should have suggested he remove the link, and made clear he was operating under his own auspices and his views were not shared by his employer. Non-celebrities with large Twitter followings and extensive personal networks have generally developed them through communicating interesting content in an expressive manner, with a distinct voice and point of view.

Crucially, this influence is built up over time, not on the company dime. By allowing employees to use their personal influence to share content, engage communities and achieve corporate objectives while simultaneously restricting the individual's right to express a contentious view or enter into critical discourse, the company is attempting to have its cake and eat it. Not only is this problematic from an ethical standpoint, but it's also ultimately illogical: a toothless tiger can only maintain its edge for so long before the social network begins to sense inauthenticity and drift away. I for one choose not to follow people I feel to be little more than an RSS yes-machine.

Drawing the line is essential. My suggestion - and this is a work in progress, subject to review and evolution - is that professional and personal accounts need to be separate. If you refer to your employer in your bio, your account is going to be inextricably linked to their profile, at least in public perception. So don't risk it. Unless there's a scenario in which your boss will compensate you for allowing the company to bask in your reflected glory - which could mean attributing a dollar value to influence, or specifically stating in your contract that your network is an asset the company will be able to use during the life of your contract with them - then be very wary of using your own account as another channel for sharing corporate content - whether on Twitter, Facebook or anywhere else. A profile that's specifically you @your company might be one way of resolving this, or by using shared corporate accounts.

Because nobody wants to end up like Tennessee Ernie...

You load sixteen tons, and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt. Saint Peter, don't you call me, 'cause I can't go; I owe my soul to the company store...

FourSquare

The team claim that they "wanted to build something that not only helps you keep up with your friends, but exposes you to new things in and challenges you to explore cities in different ways."

It's a geosocial site (and application) which enables you to 'check in' at places and share details about your activity. More importantly - and this is what sets it apart from BrightKite et al - it syncs info about local businesses to enable you to share your favourite places, give people tips about the things and places you love and create a to a to-do list based on the recommendations of friends and neighbours.

The opportunity for business is enormous, allowing brands to reward consumers who are advocates, to monitor, engage with and respond to users and to further cement consumer loyalty, e.g. offering you a free coffee if you check in at your local cafe four days in a row.

The B2C commercial imperative is obvious - can businesses afford not to have a presence on FourSquare?

The reason it's so addictive - and will, I predict, become massive in Australia - is that it's framed as a competition, with just enough hipster credibility not to feel contrived.

You become the Mayor of a certain location by checking in there more frequently than anyone else, are given badges for particular activity (adding new places, spiked activity at night etc.) and user statistics are updated weekly on each city's leaderboard (currently Likeomg, Warlach and I are amongst Sydney's biggest hitters) - thus appealing directly to the ego and plugging in to our desire to be seen as influential, in the know, hyperconnected digital thought leaders....

Rewarding users by offering them ultimately meaningless and arbitrary trophies demonstrates an extremely sophisticated understanding of the psyche of the early adopter/ digital native on the part of the creators.

It's been hit by so much activity in Australia since its launch (in Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne) on Friday that the servers needed to be upgraded, and I am still finding much of the functionality within the website is limited and buggy. It works like a charm on iPhone though, which is after all where the heaviest use will occur.

Scoble says FourSquare is the next big thing, suggesting it's as significant as the Twitter API release:

"It enhances your experience in each location. Check in at the Half Moon Bay Ritz and you’ll see tons of “tips” that people have left for you. Francine Hardaway, for instance, tells you where the best dog beachis. I tell you how to save $40 on smores. Other people tell you that Tres Amigos is the best Mexican place nearby"

This certainly looks like the first site developed for internet on the move that's actually going to make it to the mainstream - the execution isn't quite there yet but it seems to be well thought through at a strategic level, cleverly rationalised and with the key component -monetisation - built in from the beginnning.

FourSquare: pressing the "go viral" button any day now....

Helpful and entertaining presentations by Brett Morgan and Pamela Fox certainly deepened my knowledge and understanding but it’s clear that this is a tool very much at the development stage.

My initial impressions haven’t altered substantially three weeks in: in short, it often feels as though one is drowning not waving.

I’ve seen a number of people make the comment that Wave feels very much like IRC: the format is such that it can be inchoate, messy and confusing. The ability to comment on replies, edit existing messages and delete posts at any point in the timeline means that without repeatedly re-playing the wave, it’s nigh on impossible to fathom what’s going on. However, to dwell on this is to miss the actual purpose of Wave, which is – as Daniel Tenner suggests in his excellent review - for working, not shirking.

The real strength of Wave is all about collaboration in real time. Watching a document or piece of content come to life through a cooperative effort enables you to see the rationale behind changes as they’re made in an intuitive fashion, make notes, discuss alterations and agree on a final cut. Even for people who aren’t working together in the same time zone, playing back the wave gives a truer understanding and deeper insight into the process and decisions made to date.

Rather than the stilted to-ing and fro-ing of email - potentially dropping people and files along the way - or even the clever but structurally rigid Basecamp from 37 Signals, Wave gives users a fluid conversational tool that keeps everyone, from stakeholder to implementer, involved, clued-up and empowered. Being able to drag and drop files into a conversation feels smooth and logical.

The true hallmark of great design or innovation is when something feels so seamless and obvious that you can’t imagine why it didn’t already exist, and Wave has this in spades. It won’t be long before we’ll be amazed we ever managed to work before Wave.

Main drawbacks

Of course Wave is buggy – it’s in a private test environment being battered around and monkey-tested by nerds for this reason. However, there are a few massive holes that will need to be addressed by the developers at the Googleplex fairly promptly. Firstly, there are currently huge confidentiality and privacy issues: while you can branch off from a group into a private conversation, there’s no ability for users to approve or vet who is added to a Wave. Any user can invite anyone else. That’s great for transparency and accountability, but human nature being what it is, this could be the source of some of the most awkward office gaffes and breaches of commercial confidence ever to exist.

Those awkward accidental ‘reply all’ emails pale into insignificance in comparison. Without some radical re-thinking and added security settings, @ replying a DM on Twitter will come to seem like as quaint an act of indecorousness as using the wrong fork at a dinner party is to Gen KFC, when set against the risks of inappropriate Wave sharing.

Further massive usability failures include the monumental amount of RAM eaten by Wave, the fact the iPhone app is slow and creaky and Chrome is the preferred Wave browser as FireFox “doesn't like waves with more than 100 blips in them...” more than a little irksome for Mac users.

Version control is also tricky: in order to find the original version, one has to replay the wave, pause when you reach the virgin document and paste it into a new Wave, meanwhile hoping someone else doesn’t alter it subsequently. Perhaps a ‘freeze edit’ function may assist here.

An invaluable – and presumably simple tool that I very much hope is in the pipeline is a desktop app to notify you of updates, new Wave invites and contacts. It would assist in streamlining the process and avoiding situations like the one I found myself in recently: IM-ing my team mate to ask why I still hadn’t received his email containing an urgently needed document, then discovering it had been sitting neglected in Wave for several hours.

I’d estimate that we’re easily a year away from the release of a robust consumer-friendly version of Wave. That said, it’s a pleasure and a privilege to be one of the lucky few getting to play in the sandpit and even at this stage the enormous potential of the tool is evident.

Catch you in the tubes....cathie.mcginn@googlewave.com

Seeing ill-advised tweets, oversharing via Facebook updates and emotive personal posts, I’m reminded of the giddy immediacy of my teenage years, in which I existed in a state of selfish isolation, immersed in the frenzy of the Now. Nothing was more important than my feelings that very second; I had no sense of, or interest in a broader context or that my actions could have consequences of any significance. And this seems to be the case for many people online; the fact one feels this way at this moment is justification enough for broadcasting that information to the planet.

I feel, therefore I post.

Hal Niedzviecki refers to this phenomenon as “Peep Culture," suggesting that we're witnessing the tabloidization of everyday life. Perhaps the logical progression of our paparazzi-fuelled, celebrity-obsessed culture is to have us believing that revelations of a wincingly personal nature are everyone’s business. There again, we’re not taking out one page ads in the Times or employing a town crier to announce our break-ups or our bad days at work. This behaviour is only occurring online.

I’d argue that it’s due to a combination of factors:

1) the false sense that these online spaces aren’t 'serious' and don’t have real life impact: the value of communication online is somehow seen as less than offline interaction

2) the ease, speed and accessibility with which one can post anything from anywhere. An emotion that probably would have dissipated by the time you’d put pen to paper and started looking for a stamp is shared, out there and un-retractable in three seconds flat.

3) an erroneous belief that these spaces are somehow lawless, frontier territory where all bets are off, crimes go unpunished and an outlaw-esque anonymity can be preserved A post on the Social Media Law Student blog makes the point that

People will express themselves, albeit to their own detriment, through numerous mediums whether by electronic communication, acts of aggression, verbal comments, physical actions, written letters, and more. Social media networks such as Facebook and MySpace are not to blame for sheer stupidity...

...but they do make stupid actions harder to retract and easier to prove. Our actions have implications, consequences; the spaces may be virtual, but this is very real. Thirty-five percent of employers reported finding content on social networking sites that caused them not to hire the candidate; Facebook evidence was used to convict gang members in Britain who posted photos of themselves posing with guns; Australian courts allow legal documents to be served via Facebook; lawyers have begun to use social profiles in divorce cases. Four Awkward Moments on Facebook is hilarious, unless you're one of the people involved: I can only imagine the lacerating sense of shame and hurt they must have experienced.

Imagining the future

I’m confident that the next generation will view our bumbling online interactions with humour and, I hope, some pity, much in the way that I view photographs of my parents in their heyday; fondly and with affectionate mockery. I can’t predict what these new models of behaviour will look like but I wonder whether our notions of public and private space will be fundamentally redefined; will a new set of boundaries be created or will these constructs simply have drifted into irrelevance?

Will the citizens of the future live in digital glass houses?

When everything is on display and there’s no separation between your inside voice and outside voice, will people’s personal (increasingly public lives) cease to have any interest or relevance - is the sense of intimacy we use to build social cohesion in part derived from the sense one is holding privileged information?

In this landscape, our perceptions of each other would be based on new criteria and new values not related to how much we earn or who we're screwing. Although I find this a faintly terrifying prospect, I can’t help but feel this re-imagining of our future is the most exciting, the most radical (and the least likely to occur). Alternatively, will this new generation, kids who’ll take in the digital space with their mother’s milk become the New New Puritans? There is surely a possibility they will enact a backlash against the over-availability and over-sharing of information, images and personal data.

With public figures as influential as Obama warning schoolkids to think about the long term consequences of the stuff they share on Facebook, will we see a generation of locked down profiles, gated social spaces and private Twitter streams. Will we become paranoiac data-hoarders, carefully considering every piece of information dispersed through the web? Or - returning to Planet Reality - will we just have to grow up, embrace the new and reign in some of the worst excesses of overly disclosive behaviour in favour of a more reasoned approach?

Being a teenager is fun, but we can't remain in a virtual NeverNeverland forever.

It may be more staid and a little less compelling than the ambulance-chasing, Schadenfreudian thrill of watching someone crash and burn online, but perhaps fewer hearts and reputations damaged beyond repair is worth losing out on a little second-hand salaciousness for....