News reports identify the three as Seth Burroughs, Elizabeth Robblee and Ben Byers.

I learned about the story Thursday evening while attending the GeekWire holiday gala in downtown Seattle and agreed to be interviewed by local NBC affiliate KING5.

The reporter wanted to know if I had any idea why the staffers would tweet about the drinking. When I talked to one of my friends at the event, she hypothesized that we were seeing an age-related values disconnect.

I kept thinking: they were drinking Jack Daniels during business hours in the Cannon Office Building? This isn’t a Silicon Valley start-up or an after-5pm drink with the boss. One tweet screenshot, dated December 1, reads:

@TheRockeman1 My D2R team showed up this morning at 9am with shots of Jack. What a glorious and frightening way to kick off the month.

D2R is shorthand for “December to Remember.”

It’s possible that the public conversation on Twitter was a great big hoax. The trio is silent; Twitter accounts disabled. But I don’t think so. If so it was a very elaborate and long-running hoax.

Inexperience isn’t an excuse. Robblee had worked for Larsen since 2007 and was drawing about $60,000 a year. She had worked for Sen. Patty Murray before joining Larsen’s staff. Seth Burroughs, a legislative assistant, had worked for Larsen since 2009. He was making about $45,000 a year. Byers joined the staff in 2009 and was promoted in June 2011; his salary was about $38,000 a year.

Two Sides To This Coin

In my mind, there are two issues at play here. One is the core behavior: drinking at work. The other is the public broadcasting of that behavior.

Think about behavior that society judges to be taboo like date rape, driving drunk, armed robbery. Do folks that commit those acts talk about them publicly (in those terms)? I don’t think so.

For the drinking-at-work to be a topic of even semi-public discussion, it seems like the participants have to believe that it’s not taboo. Did they think that they were living an episode of Mad Men?

As far as those public tweets are concerned, most that are featured in the NW Daily Marker screenshots are @ tweets. That is, these tweets are directed to a person [beginning @twitter-user-name] and thus only show up in a third party’s Twitter stream if she is following both participants (the sender and the receiver). This Twitter behavior may have given the three a feeling that they were in a protected bubble.

Or it may be that these stream-of-consciousness tweets weren’t considered out of bounds because the three didn’t think the behavior out of bounds.

Or a cry for attention. (To look cool?)

This behavior included more than tweeting about drinking. Burroughs also called his boss an idiot. Those writing about this story have assumed he meant Larsen, but he could have meant an intermediary (his real boss).

To me, either set of behaviors is inexplicable.

The reporter asked me if I had advice for listeners. I shared the tried and true: don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t want to see on the front page of the New York Times and don’t tweet anything you wouldn’t want your mother to read.

That may be common sense, but as you can see from the sidebar examples, common sense isn’t necessarily common.

:: Cross-posted at The Moderate Voice
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How Americans Use Text Messaging: Voice Mail v SMS

My cellphone greeting to callers asks for a text rather than a voice mail. It’s an artifact of my life with a Samsung Blackjack that did not reliably or clearly indicate when I’d missed a call. That was before my iPhone, back when I had to wade through a series of keypad prompts to get to messages and then listen to them one-at-a-time.

Periodically, I think about tweaking my greeting, now that I have visual voice mail. But I never seem to get around to it. A new report from Pew will extend my procrastination.

Pew’s research shows that 8-in-10 American adults now own cellphones; three-quarters of those folks use SMS (short message service, aka texting).

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project asked those texters in a survey how they prefer to be contacted on their cell phone and 31% said they preferred texts to talking on the phone, while 53% said they preferred a voice call to a text message.

Almost 1-in-3 people prefer a text message to talking on the phone.  Another 14 percent said the preferred contact method was situational.

I can’t say that I always prefer text to voice — there are times when only real-time voice communication can get the job done. But I certainly prefer text to a voice mail.

• Text messages force the person contacting me to be brief, to the point
• I can read a text message far faster than I can listen to a voice mail, and it’s not just because the text message is right there and the voice mail requires additional fiddling to hear. I can scan a text; I have to listen to a voice mail as it was constructed.

Time-wise, text messages privilege the recipient of the message (it takes less time to read than listen) and voice mail privileges the sender (it takes less time to speak than type).

I’m not a typical cellphone customer, for voice or texts. According to Pew’s work, the median user sends or receives 10 texts every day. Not me. Not even close (my use is “under” the median). I’m even below average for my age group (but close to the median).

You are more likely to be an SMS power user if you are aged 18-29 (87.7 message/month on average), black (70.1 messages/month on average), or have an income of less than $30,000 (58.7 messages/month on average).

Here’s the report: How Americans Use Text Messaging

Thanks to +Laurel Ruma for sharing +Dwight Silverman‘s column in the Houston Chronicle.

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Google Circles

If you’re longing for a digital networking space that lets you easily share information with the different facets of your life, then put Google Plus at the top of your “to explore” list. (Assuming you can wrangle an invitation!)

If you’re longing for a digital networking space that lets you easily videoconference with 10 people while everyone watches (and chats about) the same YouTube clip, then put Google Plus (hangouts) at the top of your “to explore” list.

If you’re longing for a digital networking space that integrates functional email, real cloud-based documents, an attractive photo gallery … and lets you eavesdrop on conversations like Twitter does (no reciprocity required in setting up circles) … then put Google Plus at the top of your “to explore” list.

And if you long for a digital networking space that will allow you to easily and simultaneously communicate with people inside and outside of the space … then you must put Google Plus at the top of your “to explore” list.

In October 2009, Google launched Wave. The current launch, Google’s third foray into “social”, is nothing like Wave, except for the clamor to “let me in!”

It Just Works

With Google+, things work. The interface is clean, light, inviting. Engineers have anticipated how we might use existing shorthand (from Twitter and Facebook), such as replying in a comment thread by putting @ in front of someone’s name. They turn that @ into a + automagically and the name becomes a link to the person’s Google profile page.

Sharing Google Plus Posts : Limited Posts Are Limited

And the iteration — response to feedback — is stellar.

After the Financial Times noted Thursday that restricted posts (posts to a circle, not made “public”) could be shared outside your circle, thus negating the privacy implied in circles, Google engineers tweaked the interface. If an author doesn’t manually restrict the sharing of a post, Google Plus will gently remind anyone sharing that the post wasn’t made public. And next week, no limited post (one shared only with a circle) will have “public share” as an option.

Raise your hand if you’ve ever had a typo in a Facebook status update or comment. No edit option except the hammer that is the delete key. But with Google Plus not only can you fix that typo but you can also style the type (bold, italic)! I call that a #killerfeature.

The Beauty Of Circles

Have you tried putting Facebook friends in lists? If you haven’t, let me simply say that it’s laborious. Painful. With Google Plus, it’s a simple drag-and-drop. Hiring that original Apple Macintosh designer was a stroke of brilliance!

By making it easy to segment our network into circles that mirror the non-computing (analog) world, Google has made it easier for us to customize our messages. But will we be any better at that than network TV? It’s easier to craft a message than anyone can see than it is to craft multiple messages or tell only a few members of our network. Will enough of us embrace the tool to keep the project from turning into Wave? I hope so.

Circles also make it easier for us to filter incoming messages. More people read than create content, so this functionality is a very good thing. And Google+ is so much easier to use than Facebook! (The timeline/stream reminds me of FriendFeed.) When you read something you like, you click the +1 button (Google’s answer to “like”).

It is a generally accepted theorem that the real-time web is here to stay; it is a natural evolution from the early days of the telegraph, a tool that dramatically increased the speed of global communication. More people — probably using phones — will be added to the roster of Internet consumers and creators; this means more content, more noise. So the recommendations of our friends and trusted networks will become more important as we navigate an overflowing information space; what is scarce today is time and attention, not information. As Kirkpatrick writes:

Anything that can increase the percentage of social software users who are actively curating dynamic, topical sources is a net win for the web and for the people who use it.

Sharing is a human thing. It does not have a straightforward put-a-set-of-rules in a virtual box technological solution. Google’s algorithms (rules) have successfully help plumb the depths of computer hard drives. But we want to know what our friends think! Is this third attempt (Buzz was number two) a charm? I think the answer is yes. +1!

Looking Back To Look Forward

On Monday, I shared the classic EPIC2015 with my undergraduate new media class. We discussed which companies had been less or more influential than this 2004 vision and how the vision missed mobile and YouTube. Good background!

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In October 2009, Google launched a not-quite-ready for prime time product. There was a virtual stampede for invitations, which were doled out slowly and in small amounts. Less than a year later, Google would retire Wave.

It’s June 2011. Google launched G+ on Wednesday; early participants could play but not invite anyone. But by late afternoon Thursday, invitations were running wild, although Google did eventually pull the plug. The Google+ interface suggested I could invite 500 people at a time; that’s what Marshall Kirkpatrick (@marshallk, ReadWriteWeb) says that he did:

looks like I may have maxed out my Plus invites at 500 in about 20 mins, sorry! I’ll send out more later if I can!!

This is an economy of abundance, an abundance that seems to have spilled over into an area we think of as constrained (server storage).

It’s also a form of catch-up, due to the value of network effects and the fact that Google is a laggard in the social platform field.

It is a generally accepted theorem that the real-time web is here to stay; it is a natural evolution from the early days of the telegraph, a tool that dramatically increased the speed of global communication. More people — probably using phones — will be added to the roster of Internet consumers and creators; this means more content, more noise. So the recommendations of our friends and trusted networks will become more important as we navigate an overflowing information space; what is scarce today is time and attention, not information. As Kirkpatrick writes:

Anything that can increase the percentage of social software users who are actively curating dynamic, topical sources is a net win for the web and for the people who use it.

Sharing is a human thing. It does not have a straightforward put-a-set-of-rules in a virtual box technological solution. Google’s algorithms (rules) have successfully help plumb the depths of computer hard drives. But we want to know what our friends think! So Google once again enters the fray. Is third time (Buzz was number two) a charm?

First Thoughts On Google Plus (G+)

There is no comparison to the Wave launch. Things work. The interface is clean, light, inviting. Engineers have anticipated how we might use existing shorthand (from Twitter and Facebook), such as replying in a comment thread by putting @ in front of someone’s name. They turn that @ into a + automagically and the name becomes a link to the Google profile page.

By making it easy to segment our network into circles that mirror the non-computing (analog) world, Google has made it easier for us to customize our messages. But will we be any better at that than network TV? It’s easier to craft a message than anyone can see than it is to craft multiple messages or tell only a few members of our network. Will enough of us embrace the tool to keep the project alive?

As with Twitter, you can “follow” (put in a circle) anyone. But no one can see what you’ve named your circles or who you’ve put in circles. All that is public is that you have added someone to your network (circles).

By making it easy to segment our network into circles that mirror the analog world, Google has also made it easier for us to filter incoming messages. More people read than create content, so this functionality is a very good thing. And Google+ is so much easier to use than Facebook! (The timeline/stream reminds me of FriendFeed.)

You can “hang” with members of your network in a video/text space. Watch out Skype.

This is only the first step in a long process (API connection is missing, for example), but it is a very encouraging one if you want there to be competition in this space.

Resources

• Invite your entire Facebook graph into Google Plus
• Introducing the Google Plus project

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Tools For Twitter

Twitter is my primary entry into the real-time web, whether I’m on my laptop, iPad or iPhone. But I don’t use the same tools on each platform.

TweetDeck is my tool of choice on the desktop. Long before Twitter launched lists, I had topic-centered groups (columns) on TweetDeck. I customized the application colors so that it’s dark text on light background, the opposite of the default setting. I use it to schedule tweets. I use it to send tweets from a half-dozen accounts. And I use it to post to Facebook, too.

I was thrilled when I learned Twitter had aquired TweetDeck, because I hope they do what they did with Tweetie, make a good product better. On both the iPhone and iPad, I use the Twitter app. I truly love the iPad app for its display of media (links) and conversation; its functionality has brought me back to Twitter.com (sometimes).

For archiving tweets based on keyword or hashtag, I turn to TwapperKeeper. There is now a limit on the number of archives you can keep for free, and Twitter disabled the download feature, but I still find it very useful. (I have a paid account.)

When I’m trying to get a handle on how someone tweets, I turn to TweetStats.com, a Seattle startup. Damon’s (@dacort) tool shows the percentage of @ replies and RTs, average tweets per day (lifetime or by month). TwitterGrader, Klout and TweetCounter are other useful tools. And Topsy is the place to search and see trends.

To back-up my personal tweets, I believe in redundancy. For a few years, I pushed them to a dedicated WordPress.com blog, and I used the blog as a 3×5 card file, with Google as the divining rod, so to speak. Today I use Backupify as well as TweetScan and Damon’s RowFeeder.

Finally, I use Storify to curate tweets and then integrate them into stories. Storify is the best thing since sliced bread! It’s easy to create a story using media from Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube coupled with traditional web content.

Tools I Share With Students

Screen Captures : For Mac folks, nothing can top Skitch. Nothing! It’s an easy-to-use tool, accessed by keyboard shortcuts, that also makes annotations a snap. For PC folks, I recommend Jing, but it does not facilitate annotartions.

ScreenCasts : If your screencast is reasonably short, then Screenr is your friend. It’s web-based, which means it works anywhere you have a Net connection. Free, of course. Simple integration with YouTube and designed to partner with your Twitter account. Jing, which is dual system, also does scree casts; so does Quicktime (with the mpeg2 upgrade).

File Conversion : Zamzar. Web-based freemium tool that converts almost anything. I learned this quarter that it will not convert propriatary cellphone audio files. See a YouTube clip you’d like to (legally) use offline? Zamzar to the rescue.

File Sharing and Storage : Dropbox. This is a particularly useful tool for students working on lab projects. No need to tote a USB drive back-and-forth (and forget it upon leaving the lab). Use my invite and we’ll both get an additional 250MB storage… for life.

RSS : At the suggestion of Howard Rheingold, I gave NetVibes a second chance. The first weeks of the quarter, I was unconvinced that it was the best tool to monitor student blog posts. At the end of the quarter, I appreciated the dashboard and the ease of reviewing historic posts. It’s a keeper.

Experimenting With The iPad2

I am on the downhill side of a 365 project (photo a day) which has featured iPhone photos almoat exclusively. I’ve migrated to the iPad for cropping and color correction (PhotoGene), creating a thin black border (CameraBag) and uploading to my WordPress account (FTPonTheGo). I create posts using BlogPress (far superior to the WordPress app, plus it’s multi-lingual). I believe the jury is still out on the touchscreen keyboard, but editing photos by interacting with them with my hands? Not going back voluntarily!

I’ve not yet edited audio or video on the iiPad, but I believe the gesture interface will be natural there, too.

Last but not least: This quarter, I read final papers — doc, docx, rtf, pfd — on the iPad, using DropBox. No other application required. No (I hear you thinking), I could not make margin notes. It’s the end of spring quarter, most students don’t want that much detail! I will use this method for my first read because it forces me to read without a (virtual) pen in hand.

PS

Other tools I love on the Mac: TextWrangler (for notes, for writing style sheets and code), Transmission (P2P), DataRescue (the name says it all), OnyX (a simple GUI for command line file maintenance), Rescue Time (when I really want to know how I’m spending my time at the keyboard) and Gist (amazing contact manager that integrates “the web”).

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad (links to come – I’m on vacation and have been up all night – red-eye to the east coast)

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An open letter to Carol Bartz, Yahoo! CEO; Roy Bostock, Yahoo! Board Chairman; Jerry Yang, Yahoo! Co-Founder:

It’s not easy to share a photo posted on Flickr when using popular Twitter applications like TweetDeck (desktop) or Twitter (iPhone or Android) because Flickr is not listed as a “service” that these applications will use to upload my images. I am asking Yahoo! to work with third-party developers to enable easy sharing of Flickr-hosted content on Twitter.

Flickr is the most photographer-friendly photo-sharing website. It allows photographers to easily customize rights using Creative Commons licenses, and it prohibits commercial use of photographs without express approval of a Flickr member. (see Who Really Owns Your Photos in Social Media? and its companion table, http://j.mp/photo-sharing-tos)

No micro-photo-sharing site (those that easily support sharing mobile photos) provides the Creative Commons licensing options that I have on Flickr. But because these sites — like TwitPic, yFrog, Instagram and MobyPicture — integrate seamlessly with Twitter third-party applications, they — not Flickr — are where new photographers are setting up accounts and sharing images.

Mobile is the next stage of growth for the web, both for viewing and creating media. Flickr integration with Twitter would make both Flickr and Yahoo! relevant in the mobile space. It’s where I want to easily share the photos I take on my iPhone — but right now, you don’t make it easy for me. So, like many others, I reluctantly default to another service.

It’s not too late for Flickr to be relevant in mobile sharing, if you act today.

Kathy E Gill, Lynnwood WA

****

Note: I tried my darndest to use Change.org to create this. Well, I created it there (ie, I composed it there) but every time I tried to publish it, the site logged me out then demanded that I create a new account. I thought the problem was Safari, so I tried Chrome. No joy with either one.

Over at PBS MediaShift, read my (timely given Twitter’s roll-out this week) essay, Who Really Owns Your Photos in Social Media? This post has a bit more musing and context.

Twitter recently added @amazon, @AolVideo, @gowalla, @foursquare, @Meetup and @plancast to the Twitter.com “details pane” — which means that links to these sites display media directly on the Twitter.com page. (If you are logged in and not following that Twitter account, you have to click a “display” icon.) This means that site visitors don’t have to leave Twitter.com to see what the tweeted link is all about. Good for Twitter (“sticky”) and good for visitors (easy-peasy nibbles of content).

When Twitter launched the #NewTwitter web design last year, this “social web” integration was central to the user experience. It’s also central to the user experience on Twitter for iPad. Prior to Friday’s announcement, Twitter supported third-party media content from Blip.tv, DailyBooth, Dipdive, Flickr, iTunes, Instagram, Slideshare, Rdio, Ustream, YouTube and TwitPic. (More?)

However, this functionality privileges some content over others, like these two screenshots demonstrate:

Twitter.com does not provide a preview of images shared with the MobyPicture service.

Twitter.com does provide a preview of images shared on Flickr.

MobyPicture is a small(ish) photo-sharing site in Amsterdam. Like Flickr, it has a TOS that clearly favors photographers:

All rights of uploaded content by our users remain the property of our users and those rights can in no means be sold or used in a commercial way by Mobypicture or affiliated third party partners without consent from the user.

And, like Flickr, Moby says it is developing Creative Commons licensing functionality for its photographers.

Take-Away

Repeating my conclusion over on MediaShift: if prohibiting any commercial use of your photographs is important to you, but you want them to be easily viewed on Twitter.com (and Twitter for the iPad), then you should be using Flickr as your image-sharing site.

If commercial use — credit requested but not required — is OK, then use Twitter.com and any extension of Twitter’s photo-sharing service beyond the website. (I imagine that integration with Twitter for the iPhone and the iPad is in the works.)

I can’t recommend using PhotoBucket “naked” (that is, without the protection of Twitter’s TOS). Period.

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If you could mouse over the first set of links, you would see that they look like they are legit, but if you click on them, you discover that they aren’t. (At least not now.)

http://microsoft.windowslive.com/Key=40023.F3kY.C.GJ.h5bhK

http://microsoft.windowslive.com/Key=40023.F3kY.D.GJ.J28b5J

http://microsoft.windowslive.com/Key=40023.F3kY.F.GJ.D3zlX8

And if you are fluent in English, and read like a proofreader, you might catch the grammatical errors and awkward phrasing:

But you should not have to!

Hotmail (as well as Yahoo or Google) would never send out an email asking for customer personal information. Therefore, it seems like a simple filter that counts words like Hotmail (9), account (14) and verify (4) should be sufficient to flag this as probable spam/phishing and divert it to the junk folder.

Heck, a filter that simply looks at the from and subject lines should be enough to send this to the junk folder, since the mail server should be able to determine if the email is a valid administrative account (there should be a limited number of accounts that can send “Hotmail Alerts”) and if the mail truly originated at Hotmail.

Arghhh!

And no, he didn’t fall for it but he did send a copy to Mike, who sent it to me. We so rarely see phishing exploits (gmail) that we can be taken aback at how sophisticated they have become.

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A deal could be announced as early as Tuesday, people familiar with the matter said, though they cautioned that negotiations aren’t yet final and a deal could still fall apart. Including Skype’s long-term debt, the total value of the deal is about $8.5 billion.

Gigaom reported at midnight that the $8 billion cash deal was a wrap.

Here’s the 64-dollar question: now that Microsoft has confirmed that it is buying Skype, will you continue to use the service if Microsoft does buy Skype, would you continue to use the service?

I remember when Skype was young and verboten (that was the rumor, anyway) on university networks because of the P2P nature of the service. This was long before its purchase by eBay in 2005. Four years later, eBay sold Skype to an investment group for “deal valuing the business at $2.75 billion.”

At GeekWire, Todd Bishop thinks the deal “makes sense” because of Microsoft’s enterprise communications reach. He also thinks it’s a natural with Kinect.

I haven’t seen anyone explain how Skype’s value could have tripled in less than two years. And Microsoft’s last big acquisition — $6 billion for aQuantive (now Microsoft Advertising) — was criticized at the time:

I’ve been trying to find a way to illustrate just how screwy Microsoft’s $6 billion bid for aQuantive is, and here it is: For $6 billion in cash, Microsoft could have hired, in a single day, 60,000 engineers and salespeople (plus managers to make sure they earn their pay) – paying each one of them a $100,000 salary.

Of course, if Microsoft did that in one day everyone would think its executives had gone mad. After all, it already employs a modest 71,000 people around the world. Instead, it’s paying out $2.85 million for each of the 2,106 employees who work for aQuantive. Which, no matter how hard as people labor to rationalize this deal, is at the very least slightly more mad than that, if not good old-fashioned American bat-shit insanity.

Is this deal equally as bad?

See a list of Microsoft mergers and acquisitions.

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