links for 2009-02-27

Facebook made one of the most important announcements in the young company's history today. It has proposed a set of foundational documents, including the first official statement of Facebook Principles. The proposal is made to Facebook's users, who will now have 30 days to read, comment and perhaps vote on the documents.

Last week, Facebook reversed some changes it had made to its terms of service after it faced an uprising of unhappy members who weren’t pacified by founder Mark Zuckberg’s initial explanation of why the amendments shouldn’t bother anyone. That was expedient. Today, the company followed up by doing something kind of extraordinary: It’s created drafts of overarching Facebook Principles and specific Facebook Rights and Responsibilities, and is soliciting member feedback on them before they’re finalized. Zuckerberg also says that members will get to vote for or against the revised versions of both documents, although I can’t tell from his post whether those votes will be binding.

Last summer I spent a good deal of time researching and preparing a presentation for Blog World & New Media Expo on putting social media in the newsroom. The point was to show media outlets how some were using web 2.0 and social media technologies to expand their online offerings and engage audiences around their news-gathering products. The focus was directed at executives and media outlets as opposed to individual journalists.

After four JetBlue planes were stuck on the JFK tarmac for 9 hours on February 14, 2004 there was a lot of discussion about a passenger’s bill of rights. On January 22nd 2009, nearly four years later, an AeroMexico flight was stuck on the PDX tarmac for 4 hours. The passengers were not allowed to disembark, and police officers threatened to arrest agitated passengers. Although we are still without a traveler’s bill of rights, what we do have is Twitter.

The Twitalyzer is a unique tool to evaluate the activity of any Twitter user and report on relative influence, signal-to-noise ratio, generosity, velocity, clout, and other useful measures of success in social media.