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I listen to people constantly lament about all the awful things that the Internet has wrought, from cyberbullying to identity theft to arcane new scams that only a rocket scientist could untangle. But I think those are actually small stories. To me, the big story is how much opnness, transparency, and plain do-gooder activity is being rewarded online, in a place I call the Untangled Web. I believe that the Internet is a force for good behavior, and becomes more so with each passing year. And nowhere is that more apparent than in how it changes company behavior, expecially in marketing.

Some businesses have existed only by fooling people. Enron fooled everybody. customers, suppliers, investors, and even their own employees. Although it's an extreme case, it shows that it's possible, at least in the short term, to make lots of money by fooling everybody all of the time. The sad thing is that many of the employees of Enron were the biggest victims even while they were unwittingly victimizing others just by showing up and doing their jobs--they lost their jobs and many lost their life savings tied up in Enron stock.

But most businesses aren't corrupt through and through like Enron. Do you work for a bank? Do you think that anyone knows how much they pay for the credit card you offer? Or understand how much trouble they can get into wi/> [...]

Sat Jul 03, 2010 18:40 pm

Jive Software has acquired Filtrbox, a Boulder-based startup that monitors the social Web to help clients understand and better participate in online conversations.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Jive sought a social media monitoring company to bring into its Social Business Software (SBS) platform. The goal is to extend the social footprint of the Jive platform. Jive sees the market becoming far more oriented around conversations on social networks such as Twitter and Facebook. These conversations affect everything from product development to sales strategies. Monitoring is critical to following and capitalizing on the conversation flow.

Sponsor

Jive looked at several companies in the space before deciding to approach Filtrbox. The choice came down to the Filtrbox user experience; its collaboration features; the scalable architecture and the social intelligence baked into the product.

The Filtrbox architecture may be the greatest value to Jive. Filtrbox Founder Ari Newman said its architecture is a hybrid that leverages the cloud. He would not say much more about it though its business model reflects a cloud based approach.

[...]

Thu Jan 07, 2010 07:00 am

Facebook has revealed a little bit of information about how it looks at spam. The company says it wants to be more transparent about how it handles it.

Along with this transparency is a new message explaining why content might be blocked. It looks something like this:

"With billions of pieces of content being shared on Facebook every month and bad actors constantly targeting the people who use Facebook, preventing spam isn't easy," says Caroline Ghiossi, an associate on Facebook's user operations team. "Just as a community relies on its citizens to report crime, we rely on you to let us know when you encounter spam, which can be anything from a friend request sent by someone you don't know to a message that includes a link to a malicious website."

"Using information from your reports and what we know about how the average person uses Facebook, we've identified certain common patterns of unacceptable behavior," adds Ghiossi. "For example, we've learned that if someone sends the same message to 50 people not on his or her friend list in the span of an hour, it's usually spam. Similarly, if 75 percent of the friend requests a person sends are ignored, it's very likely that that person is annoying others he or she doesn't actually know."

The company notes that it can't be too transparent in how its spam detection system works. This is obviously because spammers would simply take advantage of it. However, more details can be found in this post from Ghiossi.