The Social

Introducing the latest spin on microblogging: Plum Groups, which lets you create your own private stream of bite-size content to share and collaborate with a select group. You can add status messages much like Twitter posts or Facebook status updates, or you can share links, videos, files, or photos. Basically, it puts the ever-popular "stream" slant on the private group niche (you know, like Google Groups).

"Services like Facebook and Twitter are powerful ways to broadcast to large groups of people, but they stop short of keeping real-world groups like families, close friends, schools and co-workers connected in a more private and intimate way," Plum CEO Hans Peter Brondmo said in a release.

"In real life we all belong to many social groups, and what we share and discuss with our family is different than what we share with our friends or co-workers. Plum Groups makes it super simple to share and discuss what matters to you with all the different groups of people in your everyday life."

OK, so I see where he's coming from. It's a more consumer-grade version of the Twitter-for-business genre that was totally hot right before the economy tanked. And I don't think it's surprising at all that online discussion groups will follow the "streaming" trend just like social-network feeds have recently.

But do we really need another microblogging start-up? I could see Plum being useful for students working on a project together, or for limited business collaboration. Something like Dropio's more open-ended sharing stream, which it launched earlier this week, is probably better for more hardcore use. Plum doesn't automatically reload, for example.

Plum Groups, at first glance, looks a lot like would-be Twitter rival Pownce, except structured into private networks. Slight problem: Remember that Pownce, despite the star-power backing of Digg founder Kevin Rose, couldn't sustain the hype and shut down after a bargain-basement sale to Six Apart.

But on the flip side, Plum can make money: it creates custom networks for clients, and had been doing so for some time before launching the consumer-grade Plum Groups. If anything, Plum Groups can serve as free advertising for the company's paid services.

It's rare that you get Chad Hurley, co-founder of the Google-owned YouTube, and Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, on a panel together. But they were on Friday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and we tuned in via Webcast.

Not surprisingly, neither Hurley nor Zuckerberg dropped any bombs. They've been trained in the ways of the Force, after all. But here's what they said in response to the panel's final question for them: where do they see their companies being in five years?

Also not surprisingly, both founders expressed confidence that, yes, their companies would be around. Hurley's answer was basically that YouTube has become so ingrained in digital culture that it's here to stay. "We've seen people expressing their thoughts, sharing their experience," he explained. "We have the Queen (of England) on our site, we have the Pope on our site, we have the White House on our site." YouTube was also acquired for $1.65 billion by Google, so its future is decently stable.

He was more coy when it came to the question of whether he would still be at YouTube in five years. Hurley's answer was simply, "Life is short."

Zuckerberg, meanwhile, put forth the argument that Facebook solidified its survival by two things: staying in touch with what kinds of information people want to share, and being willing to evolve to fit that; and second, launching its third-party developer platform to establish itself as more than just a standalone service.

"Any individual application, yeah, probably will kind of grow and fade over time," Zuckerberg said. "Facebook will always be this hub where we've mapped out who people know, and where people are going to share information." The platform, he said, is open and flexible enough to satisfy the digital world's "constant need for new, more efficient applications."

We admire their optimism--but let's see what the markets have to say about it.

It's sort of cute, really: blogger Robert Scoble went on a nice snowy stroll with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg while the two were in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum. Of course, he wrote about it.

Most of what Scoble wrote about his conversation with the young CEO is either information that was out there already or tidbits like the fact that Zuckerberg was teaming up with former British Prime Minister Tony Blair to work the coat check at the World Economic Forum's annual Women's Dinner (aww!), but there was one fairly interesting part: apparently, Facebook is doing some extensive research into tracking user sentiment, and it has a lot of data on hand but isn't yet sure how it will be used.

"Facebook is, he told me, studying 'sentiment' behavior," Scoble wrote. Keep in mind that he's not actually quoting Zuckerberg, so this may be a bit general. "He said that already, his teams are able to sense when nasty news, like stock prices are headed down, is under way. He also told me that the sentiment engine notices a lot of 'going out' kinds of messages on Friday afternoon and then notices a lot of 'hungover' messages on Saturday morning. He's not sure where that research will lead."

We've had a peek at this already with Facebook Lexicon, the social network's trend-tracking search feature. It also sounds a lot like what some people are suggesting as a signature use for Twitter and may explain Zuckerberg's apparent onetime interest in acquiring the microblogging company.

More importantly, this is basically confirmation (via Scoble, of course) that Facebook has significant amounts of intricate data on hand that it hasn't released yet. It may sound creepy, and privacy advocates may be wringing their hands already, but for Facebook, this could be a quick answer to the profitability question.

NOTE: As it turns out, Zuckerberg was participating on Friday in Davos forum, along with Microsoft's Craig Mundie, YouTube's Chad Hurley, Adobe Systems' Shantanu Narayen, and others. The live Webcast has come and gone, but it looks like an archived version might show up eventually on this World Economic Forum Webcast page.

If you can't visit beautiful Davos this week, there's always the Internet.

(Credit: CC Andy Mettler/World Economic Forum)

In case your invitation to the exclusive World Economic Forum got lost in the mail, you can stop feeling so down about it. The closed-doors event in Davos, Switzerland, has loosened up a bit, thanks to the Web and the whole "transparency" thing that's been trendy for the past few years.

Besides, you can bet a few people will be blogging photos from their iPhones anyway.

This year, the World Economic Forum, which runs Wednesday through Sunday, has chosen to take advantage of just about every kind of social-media app you can imagine.

Broadcasts of many of the forum's panels and discussions are being streamed live on the Web by video start-up Mogulus, with an official Twitter account providing alerts and updates as to which global luminaries are talking at what times.

You can also go to a Flickr photo stream, check out a Netvibes page that aggregates...everything, and chat with other armchair philosophers in a FriendFeed room.

Plus, there are live broadcasts from CNN.com.

Two formally sanctioned "citizen reporters" have been chosen to attend through social networks. One won a MySpace/Wall Street Journal contest, and one won a "Davos Debates" video contest sponsored by YouTube. The MySpace delegate, Rebecca McQuigg of Los Angeles, is blogging at the MySpace Journal site, as well as on a Wall Street Journal blog. YouTube videos from the summit will come from contest winner Pablo Camacho, a Bogota, Colombia-based writer and singer.

Many of the notable attendees are on Twitter, and you can track them with a Twitter search for the hash tag #davos. That'll bring you to a flood of updates, breaking news stories, and general observations on the first Davos gathering since the markets crashed in the fall.

"Here there is a smaller crowd, even more techies than usual, rampant fear and pessimism, and much talk of social responsibility," journalist David Kirkpatrick posted to his Twitter account on Wednesday.

NEW YORK--It's time to stop waxing philosophical about how this thing called "new media" is shaping American elections and time to focus on the real tech issues, like broadband policy.

We talked about bloggers in 2004, we talked about YouTube in 2006, and the 2008 version of the conversation (social media) has already worn out its welcome. Instead, as the sentiment of the Personal Democracy Forum conference here overwhelmingly indicated, it's time to redirect the tech-politics spotlight to what really matters.

We've already learned the basic lessons about the digital campaign trail. Ask nicely for small donations (thanks, Barack Obama). Pay attention to niche communities of political junkies on the Web (thanks, Howard Dean). And whatever you do, don't say anything stupid when there's a camera around, which more or less means don't say anything stupid ever (thanks, George Allen).

But there's much more to the American political system than elections, something that's difficult to augur in a media business that gorges on weekly poll numbers and campaign scandals. "We have this radical, exciting party and activism surrounding this ideal every fourth year and then we crash," free-culture advocate Lawrence Lessig said in a speech Tuesday morning. "We depend too much, we lean too much, we rely too much on this one year, this fourth year. It blinds us to the fact that there's something much more fundamentally missing."

Lessig was talking about the need to keep an eye on government corruption all the time, not just when there's an election around the corner, but his argument stands when it comes to the rest of the conference: Too much of the talk about technology and politics is still focused on how to win an election using Facebook and YouTube. But as the conference indicated, that's going away as the American political system matures into its 21st-century incarnation and more serious topics bubble to the surface.

"It's like forming a new academic field," Harvard law school professor and Personal Democracy Forum speaker Jonathan Zittrain told me. The early years of the relationship between politics and technology were all about defining the medium, he said. "Once the hard work recedes, you're left actually figuring out what you want to do."

Good thing, because there are plenty of issues that need some attention.

I asked Larry Lessig to name the most overlooked tech policy issue facing America, and he said it's the management of the broadband spectrum. And at a cocktail party Monday night for Right Is Wrong, the new book from Huffington Post co-founder and Personal Democracy Forum speaker Arianna Huffington, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark explained in a conversation that while there are more pressing issues facing the country than anything "tech," that access to broadband technology nevertheless demands attention.

That was a big topic of discussion on Tuesday, when the focus of the Personal Democracy Forum was consciously oriented toward ongoing policy rather than elections--an admirable decision on the part of organizers Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry. The conference's big announcement was Internet for Everyone, a new initiative designed to ensure open Internet access as a "basic right" in the U.S.

"We need to bring affordable, truly high-speed broadband connections to everybody regardless of where that is," FCC commissioner Jonathan Adelstein said to an audience at the conference. "The government has to make it a higher priority than it is today." He cited reasons including healthcare cost management, education reform, public safety, and energy policy.

There was a healthy dose of cynicism among audiences over whether anything could actually get done on such a feel-good issue, especially given the kind of telecom dollars flowing into Washington. But there was nevertheless a sense of urgency, given that Europe and Asia continue to leap ahead of the U.S. in terms of broadband speed and affordability.

"The '96 telecom act is a dud. It didn't work, it wasn't enforced, and it didn't take Internet into account in it," Web pioneer Vint Cerf said in a panel Tuesday afternoon about the future of tech policy. "Broadband is important, it's part of the country's future, and we've got to fix it."

But just as difficult as bringing tech issues to the forefront in Washington is bringing them to the millions of Americans who still haven't heard about Net neutrality or the broadband spectrum. It's an issue that just doesn't look quite as good on a cable news ticker as presidential candidates' gaffes caught on YouTube, but it's important--and relevant.

"Use the bully pulpit to be able to explain to some 90 percent or more of Americans that the media that they consume every day is all transforming to a digital platform," Josh Silver, director of Free Press, said in the same panel when asked what he'd do first to change tech policy if he were elected president. "It's all gadgets and terabytes and widgets and they don't' get it. (Explain) how it connects to their lives."

Americans should know that they can only use their iPhone on the AT&T carrier because of "a conscious policy decision that allows Steve Jobs to do that," Silver suggested as an example of a newsworthy item that could clue the public into the importance of broadband and telecom policy.

And it's clear that the message is getting out about the issues that matter, finally. A discussion on Tuesday afternoon debated the ambiguous definition of piracy, whether to nationalize telecommunications, and whether the U.S. should declare Internet access to be a civil right. A panel about the use of live video streaming in campaigns, on the other hand, devolved into a talk about what happens when the births of babies are broadcast on the Web.

Enough said.

NEW YORK--Lawrence Lessig, Stanford University law professor and co-founder of the new Change Congress project, gave the audience at the Personal Democracy Forum conference a brief history lesson on Tuesday morning. His message: government corruption is nothing new.

On a massive display screen, he loaded up a portrait of legendary New England statesman and eventual Secretary of State Daniel Webster, whose professional conflicts of interest would have been enough to make even the most lukewarm of political bloggers cringe.

Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig co-founded the project Change Congress.

(Credit: Lawrence Lessig )

"Bribery wasn't even a crime in our Congress until 1853. The 19th century was a cesspool of this kind of corruption," Lessig explained. "Up to 25 percent of the voters literally sold their votes. I'm not talking about a golden past."

But there are two big differences between that vintage sleaze and the corruption in government today, Lessig insisted. The first is that because of the government's reach and its potential to affect everyday American life, keeping it clean is a more serious priority.

"Even though today the individuals are better than the individuals who populated our government in the past, the problem of this corruption is much worse," Lessig explained. "And it's much worse because government today is much more significant. It's first more critical to core national problems...and second, it's more pervasive. The government's fingers are everywhere."

He brought up a number of examples: Perks from the sugar industry caused the Food Nutrition Board to establish guidelines that determined a "balanced diet" to be 25 percent sugar. When he was vice president of the U.S., Al Gore couldn't have his way with Internet deregulation because Congress was concerned that money from the telecommunications industry would stop flowing, said Lessig, who considered a run for Congress himself. And then there's the big one: global warming, and the "junk science" research put forth at the behest of the oil industry.

"Just putting money on the table removes the conditions of trust," Lessig said. "Money destroys the opportunity for trust. Eighty-eight percent of the people in my district believe they have their votes bought."

But the other big difference between the 19th century's politics and today's is what's making possible Lessig's mission at Change Congress: Daniel Webster's America didn't have Wikipedia, WordPress, or Twitter. (It would've been kind of cool, though: "Wig shopping with @henryclay, then out to eat. WTF is with these tea prices?") The Web's tools have made it possible for far more information to make it into the hands of ordinary citizens, and those citizens in turn can use the Web to band together and work toward democratic action.

Change Congress, which he founded with Joe Trippi, the Web czar for Howard Dean's ultimately unsuccessful but sea-changing presidential campaign, is "a kind of Google mash-up in the context of politics." Pulling together and organizing grassroots anti-corruption and activism efforts from across the Web, the ambitious effort is a "bipartisan reform movement to leverage the reform work of others."

But what's really holding us back, Lessig said, is the notion that we only have to get excited about politics every four years. The political blog phenomenon, for all the press it's gotten, is still a hotbed for small cliques of policy junkies three-fourths of the time. Change Congress, Lessig explained, will be a round-the-clock operation that doesn't only pick up when people are headed to the polls.

He left his role as founder and CEO of copyright reform advocacy group Creative Commons in April to focus on Change Congress.

"Every fourth year we wake up. There's this explosion of democratic energy and then we fall back asleep," he said. "We have this radical exciting party and activism surrounding this ideal every fourth year and then we crash. This is our Thursday night out."

Two decades ago this week--on March 12, 1988--the corny pop song "Never Gonna Give You Up" by Rick Astley hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 charts.

What does this have to do with the Internet? Oh, just about everything.

For those of you who actually have lives and don't pay attention to the latest iteration of goofy Internet phenomena (think "all your base are belong to us," "the Internet is a series of tubes," or lolcats), Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up" is the Web equivalent of the old, "Is your refrigerator running?" prank call.

The gag known as "Rickrolling" consists of sending someone a link that purports to be something good, only to have it direct that person to the cheesy video for the '80s pop song.

If it sounds pointless and stupid, that's because it is. The practice is believed to have started in the 4chan (warning: content may not be safe for work) online forums, the same den of virtual infamy that allegedly brought forth lolcats as well as a good portion of the anti-Scientology hacker activity that went on earlier this year.

On Wednesday, avid members of the Digg community celebrated the song's 20th anniversary of hitting the top spot on Billboard with an extensive comment thread of the song's cringeworthy lyrics.

But there are far simpler ways to celebrate. Just go ahead and trick someone into watching that video. Everyone's pumped about the presence of the Speed Racer and Incredible Hulk trailers on the Web--use that to your advantage!