I was reading reports that General Motors is planning to offer Twitter capability for drivers who use the company’s OnStar security, communications, navigation and diagnostics system.

GM offers OnStar as a subscription service in the US and Canada for vehicles it sells in those markets that have the factory-installed OnStar equipment. The service currently has more than five million subscribers in North America (see the  Wikipedia entry if you want detailed information about OnStar).

According to a GearLive post yesterday – this story is an exclusive, they say – Twitter integration is coming to OnStar which you would use in the same way as you use OnStar to make or receive a cellular phone call – hands free and voice activated.

While in your vehicle, you can use OnStar to submit and retrieve tweets (messages) via your Twitter account. Using OnStar’s Voice-Activated Hands-Free Calling system, and having your voice converted into text, you can provide updates which would appear in the “What are you doing?” section of your Twitter homepage. It is also possible to listen to a tweet that was sent to you by someone else after it has been converted into voice. You can send and receive tweets without having to type or read anything.

You’ve been able to do something similar for quite a while now with TwitterFone – call in your tweets from your mobile phone and the service converts your voice recording into text and then tweets your message. Your voice recording is also available.

I’ve used that service and it’s pretty neat.

It’s amazing the imagination at work from so many people with so many products and services that work with Twitter.

The OnStar deal, if it is real, is another indicator of how mainstream Twitter has now become.

Is it an April Fool’s Day joke or the real deal? GearLive says it’s the real deal.

If Twitter and OnStar isn’t, I’d say it’s only a matter of time before someone offers something like this, somewhere.

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I’m sure you’re just now recovering from the shock, so I hate to have to do this to you again, but: there are still perverts on Facebook. Yes, nearly six weeks after we first brought this to the general public’s attention, Facebook hasn’t done anything to the nasty people using their network for nefarious purposes.

Okay, okay, </tongue in cheek>. That was my initial reaction when I saw the headlines today: New York Attorney General Investigating Perverts on Facebook, etc. But looking deeper, this story shouldn’t be dismissed as overcautious fuddy-duddyism.

The New York Attorney General isn’t just randomly accusing Facebook of hosting perverts; they’ve done an “undercover” (I don’t think it counts if you’re online, does it?) investigation of Facebook and its safety and privacy measures. They set up profiles for young teens and waited for the illicit material to pour in.

And pour it did. To my recollection, I’ve never seen this type of message on Facebook, and certainly haven’t received any, but the fake profiles in this investigation received graphic solicitations (which are illegal, at least in New York).

But worse, when the users complained to Facebook about the lewd messages, there was no response:

When undercover OAG investigators lodged complaints with Facebook regarding the inappropriate – and illegal – solicitation of the underage users, Facebook in many instances ignored the complaints and took no action against the reported sexual predators. The OAG made these complaints to Facebook posing both as underage users as well as parents of underage users.

OAG investigators also lodged several complaints with Facebook about inappropriate content or communications on the website. In response, Facebook took down many inappropriate images within a week of receiving our complaints. On the other hand, other complaints reporting user groups that hosted hardcore pornography were ignored by Facebook, and the content remains available to all users – including underage users – to this day.

Perhaps most alarmingly, Facebook ignored several – and repeated – complaints from our undercover investigators concerning persons who made inappropriate sexual advances to underage users. For instance, on August 30, an OAG investigator created a profile for a fourteen-year-old female high school student from New York. Approximately a week later, she received a Facebook message from a 24 year old man, asking “do you have any nude pics?” The investigator lodged a complaint with Facebook as the student’s mother complaining that her daughter was being solicited by older men. The next day, Facebook sent a response saying that Facebook “will review the reported material and remove anything that violates our Terms of Use.” To date, however, Facebook has taken no further action, and the 24-year old’s profile is still available on the Facebook site.

The New York Attorney General has now subpoenaed Facebook for records of similar complaints (presumably not made by 30-somethings posing as teenagers).

Obviously, privacy is a serious, key issue to Facebook. The ability to control who has access to your personal information has long been part of its appeal (even if users can be indiscriminate in giving strangers that information). But are they really taking it seriously enough?

Lately, Facebook has seemed to roll back some of its privacy measures. At the beginning of the month, they announced that personal profiles would appear in search engine results (unless you opted out). After Lisa Barone started seeing information from her Facebook profile in Bloglines yesterday, Danny Sullivan took a closer look at how private Facebook’s notification feeds really are.

Privacy was Facebook’s USP. Perhaps as they’ve become more involved in their platform, other concerns have become more salient. But if the Attorney General’s prosecution is unsuccessful, hopefully there will be one positive outcome: we’ll have lost our false sense of security on Facebook.

(via)

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The NYT just went free and likely the WSJ will follow. Once something goes free it is hard to start charging for it again – just ask Prince.

Getting Real Information From Google

A few years ago some Google human review documents were leaked stating things they considered spammy at that time. Google usually gives webmasters misinfomation about organic search results, but their advice on AdWords ads is typically clearer in how they want to shape the web. The Inside AdWords blog just classified ebook sites as being similar to other types of sites that are likely to get hit by quality score issues.

Google will push selling ebooks that are published by a publisher they have a deal with, but if you are selling information outside of a large Google partner and Google is not hosting your content (and getting a cut of the action) they don’t want you to be selling ebooks on their web. To be fair, for every satisfied ebook purchaser there are likely many people who paid to buy an ad formatted and sold as information, as marketers have abused the ebook format.

General Web Publishing Trends

• each day the web collectively improves how page elements are used (example: using tabs better)
• relevancy algorithms and ad networks make the most useful or most profitable business models easier to find while less sophisticated or lower value formats / models / businesses die
• a near endless sea of information becomes freely available, as information gets commodified by open competitors
• technology decreases the cost of creating interactive experiences (you can embed Google presentations in your web pages and hold live real-time chats)

Profitable Longterm Sales Growth

Given those trends I think the 4 big things we will see in selling information are

• demise of one time sales based business models – they are nowhere near as profitable as subscription based models, and they expose the merchant to lower end customers that are less likely to invest enough to succeed or invest in recurring charge based models
• the rise free and ad supported – if information is generic in nature and not time sensitive then it is going to get harder and harder to charge for it, especially if little value is shared before the sales pitch and Google is trying to clean these types of sites out of the advertisement slots as well
• people paying to distribute valuable information for free – I recently saw an AdWords ad for OpenCourseWare from the Sloan Business School. They are not only giving their courses away, but now they are paying to give it away. This means that if you go to MIT you are paying for the interaction, format, certificate, and atmosphere. You are not paying for learning or information. In a couple years, in many industries, better free information will exist than what you currently pay to access.
• subscription for interactive stuff with various formats – Google just launched their Gadget ads. As ads get richer and can show more I think the keys to selling will be to use a variety of formats to convey your messages, give people more than they want and let them consume the parts that are most interesting to them, and come up with formats that feel personalized and interactive. Publishing will become less about investing in a variety of projects until you find a hit and more about the art of investing in relationships.

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GM were pioneers when FastLane launched in January 2005, setting a standard for the measurable benefits of executive blogging and directly engaging with customers.

Indeed, GM became the early poster child for corporate blogging.

GM in the US continues to embrace social media, deepening its reach with additional blogs such as the FYI Blog, a channel for “the many voices of GM’s employees and friends and attempts to put a human face on our diverse activities,” as the blog describes its goal.

One thing GM hasn’t done is extend its public social media reach into the heart of traditional communication such as online resources for reporters and others interested in GM and its business which are designed for direct social engagement.

GM Europe, though, has done exactly that with the launch last week of the GM Europe Social Media Newsroom.

This new online resource for journalists and PRs from GM’s European subsidiaries offers a library of press releases and other media information about GM’s brands in Europe – Cadillac, Corvette, Saab, Hummer, Opel, Vauxhall and Chevrolet – on a website that’s designed for engagement and for sharing.

Every release or article is comment- and trackback-enabled so, just as with a blog, you can tell GM Europe your opinion about any of the content on the site, either directly on the site or linked from your own blog or website.

The site has RSS feeds so you can easily subscribe to the content and comments. You can save or post any press release or news article to any one of over 30 popular social bookmarking and sharing sites including Digg, del.icio.us, Facebook, Newsvine and StumbleUpon.

And there are links to GM photos – the company’s and well as those taken by GM customers and fans – on Flickr and to GM videos on YouTube.

Quite a comprehensive social offering for the media, not to mention PRs and interested bloggers.

About the only thing needed to make this resource really compelling is offering press releases as social media releases. Maybe that’s to come.

It’s quite interesting to also note that the site provides all content under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license, meaning you can use, adapt and share any of the content under the terms of that license.

And unlike the US-focused GM Media Center, the GM Europe Social Media Newsroom requires no registration – it’s openly available on the internet.

I do like the site’s strapline:

Product news and downloads for the online reporter

I’d say that description extends well beyond traditional mainstream media reporters. Wouldn’t you?

A great move by GM Europe, one that I would find valuable if I were an automotive journalist, PR or blogger (and I do find it valuable as an interested communicator). As far as I can tell, no other major car manufacturer offers anything similar.

Could be another pioneering step from a company that continues to innovate in social communication.

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Unified Communications Bring Network Traffic

Forty percent of companies polled said they use integrated voice, video and Web conferencing, and close to 70 percent have used VoIP, but only 12 percent cite voice communication as responsible for additional network traffic. Around 80 percent of respondents believe the network traffic from all their communications applications will increase over the next 12 months.

"With the growth of unified communications and additional new applications, IT departments are finding that their environments are becoming increasingly complex, as each new service often comes with unique management tools," said James Messer, Director of Technical Marketing at Network General.

Close to 40 percent of companies have dealt with application performance problems because of the convergence of communication applications on their IP network, and almost twenty percent were not sure if their performance problems were related to the convergence of communications.

"The increasing mobility of the workplace is driving unified communications to a new usage level," says James Messer. "Additionally, it is through implementing unified communications – and streamlining business processes to support those communications – that IT managers will be able to help their companies communicate more effectively."

That’s the way Tudou phrases it in an official press release.  The release goes on to describe the company as “China’s largest Internet Video Web site,” and states, “According to AC Nielsen, 40 million Chinese Internet users are currently watching more than 1.2 billion videos each month off of the Tudou platform and according to iResearch, Tudou now accounts for over half of all valid visiting of online video sharing in China. Tudou’s users also spend the most time per visit of any major video site at approximately 40 minutes per session.”

Those are very good numbers, and are only likely to rise; this display of dominance prompts Search Engine Watch’s Frank Watson to call Tudou “the Chinese equivalent to YouTube.”  Unfortunately, when trying to visit Tudou, I got a “problem loading page” message – perhaps that $19 million can iron out some technical issues.

In any event, “Tudou has continually made the right decisions to maintain its leadership position in China’s online video market and dictate the actions of its competition,” says David Orfao of General Catalyst Partners.  That competition includes the giant Sina, and Danwei’s Jeremy Goldkorn lists a number of other businesses, as well.