Facebook's announcement of an email-like service this week has generated quite a bit of hype and not all that much substance. There is really nothing technically interesting here, an all ecompassing messaging system fits well with how users currently use the site and also with Facebook's longer term vision of being the primary web destination.

Despite this, the move is actually a subtle one, and quite a significant data point in terms of how we will use the internet in five years.

First, some context. Everyone understands that the history of computers has been one of constant progression towards ease of use. This history can be broadly grouped into three stages thus far:

The first stage consisted of computers governed by esoteric punch cards and command lines, and were useable only by a highly trained few. The second stage consisted of the graphical interface and the web browser, making the computer more useful to normal people. The third and current stage is defined by social media and continues the gradual progression of making computers behave more like humans.

In an excellent article over at allfacebook, Facebook watcher Nick O'Neill argues that this Facebook messaging platform is a small step in a larger play for dominance in establishing online authority.

Online authority is basically what it sounds like. It is the answer to the question "How do I find useful information online, and how can I trust it?" Right now Google is the undisputed arbiter of online authority. If you show up at the top of the search results, you are the most authoritative source on that search, at least according to Google.

The problem is that Google's Pagerank system is firmly entrenched in the second stage of computing as I outlined them above. It is a technical, algorithimic solution to a messy, decidedly unalgorithmic question.

This is where it all gets interesting. While it isn't obvious to most people, Google is very slowly losing ground as The Sole Online Arbiter of Authority to its rival and recent upstart Facebook.

It's not hard to see why. Try doing a Google search for a washing machine. Or a TV, or a sandwich, anything really, and tell me that what you find is useful. It can be, but it is obvious what you're seeing is a product of a computer algorithm that doesn't truly understand what you want, and is ultimately all about selling something.

Now think about how the real world works. If I want a restaurant recommendation, I ask a friend whose palette I trust. If I'm looking for new music, I turn to my friends who are musicians and audiophiles, not to Google's tin ear. Facebook is the online equivalent of these friends. I'm much more likely to check out an album that I see my friends and peers raving about on Facebook or Twitter than one that gets 5 star reviews on 25 pages of search results.

Facebook is betting that access to the messages of millions of its users will augment its already impressive online behavioral database and ultimately help it unseat Google as the primary destination for information on purchasing decisions, tastes, trends, and everything else interesting on the web. Thanks to the ubiquitous "Like" button, Social Graph, and the personal information its 500+ million users willingly provide, it is already well on its way.

Facebook email is neither a surprise nor an innovation. In this context though, it is a glimpse of how we will interact online in the next few years as the social media stage continues to unfold.

Pretend, for a brief moment, that you are the dictator of a third-world backwater. Picture this secenario:

A profitable company has set up shop discretely in a little corner of your desert country to take advantage of, say… the local sand. Millions of dollars have been invested in the company, yet It pays no taxes and you have no ownership stake in the company whatsoever. They're just squatting there, hoping no one will notice.

Its product, say... artsy glass panes, is entirely dependent on a particular type of sand only found in your country, no other kind will do. As a dictator, you have complete authority over any economic activity in the country, and in general you require a little extra off the top as the price of doing business. What are you going to do when you find out about this company?

Actually, this isn't really a thought experiment. The company involved is not an artsy glass company however, but one of Silicon Valley's hottest startups. It's not squatting in the middle of the country's desert, it has taken up residence on its online turf.

The country is Libya, and the company is bit.ly, the online world's most popular internet link shortener. Here's the catch: '.ly' is the country code domain of Libya, which has become the trendy new place to register new startup domains.

You heard that right. Some of the smartest venture capital people in the world invested $10 million last week into a startup that only exists because the eccentric dictator who runs the country probably doesn't know its there. It's not just bit.ly, there's a host of venture backed companies registered there. Think they won't shut any of them down? The day before bit.ly's funding was announced, Libya shut down a similar link shortening service that specialized in adult links. No warning, they just pulled the plug.

This is guaranteed to have a roomful of investors somewhere sweating bullets.

Bonus: The Guardian is reporting that some of the investors didn't even know that the domain was registered in Libya.

Bonus Bonus: The dictator in question tried to sleep in a Bedouin-style tent on Donald Trump's property when he visited the US in 2009. Oh yeah, and he was also behind a little debacle called the Lockerbie Bombing.

A recent conversation with a friend brought to mind a something I witnessed as an entry-level employee. It was an episode that taught me the importance of the chief executives truly understanding their role within the company. I remember watching in stunned silence as the CEO spent 30 minutes dismantling months of hard work done by his marketing  department. The marketing team had come a long way in implementing industry standard metrical analysis into their email marketing campaigns under conservative, technology un-savvy management.

The business was in trouble, and months of missed revenue projections and poor execution of strategic initiatives had resulted in a management shakeup. The CEO decided that the problem lay in our marketing efforts, and that by parachuting in and stirring up some "creative chaos," he could permanently solve the revenue problem and go back to pretending the messy business of selling his product online didn't exist.

It was a case study in the misapplication of scales in leadership. By using the strategic role of the CEO to dictate day-to-day (tactical) activities, he created a situation where both he and his marketing team had to function outside of their respective realms of expertise. The CEO's job is to set strategic vision for the company, hire competent personnel, and keep money in the bank, not to dictate the word length of email campaigns.

The irony was that his message was backward looking: we don’t care about metrics, we don’t care about best practices, we don’t care about expanding our audience. We’re going to target the same people we always have, in the same way.This is the very definition of lunacy. After all, doing just that for 10 years was the very reason he found it necessary to have that conversation in the first place.

Many bloggers have their rig setup to autopost, shorthand for automatically spraying their latest posts all over the social media universe. Autopost succeeds in getting a message out quickly, but it comes at the expense of actionable analytics data on your content.

Google Analytics will tell you how each individual post does in terms of traffic, but it won't easily tell you, say, how various categories of posts perform over time for each social media channel.

Let’s say you have a blog hooked up to GA in which you write about your personal life, vent about your job, and review jazz records. Perhaps also your personal life has slowly become boring (and your personal posts less popular) as you’ve spent all your free time writing about your obscure music collection. GA, good friend that it is, will point this out to you, if you let it. Here's how it works.

From GA's perspective, all traffic you get from Twitter looks more or less the same, regardless of whether it came from your tweet or someone else’s:

You don’t know if those visits came from your autopost, some else's tweet, or a social share widget. If you're getting traffic from Twitter, you know that someone out there, somewhere is listening. But they’re not necessarily listening to you, and you may very well be shouting into an echo chamber without even knowing it. This is one of the prime dangers of social media in general, and one of the blind spots that caused blogger Spencer Fry to cry  "Down with Social!"  

Fortunately, there is an easy way tell whether people are listening. It's called the UTM code and, it's appended to a url before posting through a social channel or getting shortened by bitl.y, su.pr, or your twitter client. It looks scarier than it really is, and the only parts you need to worry about are bolded

?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=official&utm_campaign=music

and you would shorten the following link before posting:

blog.you.com/most-awesome-record-ever?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=official&utm_campaign=music

Easy enough right?

Let's go back to the GA dashboard. That code creates an "official" traffic bucket that contains all the traffic resulting from clicks on that link. In other words, it discriminates between traffic from your tweet and one that gets sent out by a share widget:

In this test case, we have a official / referral ratio of around 2:1, which means that most twitter visits come from original postings. This is great information. It means that we have an active and engaged twitter following that is probably passing along our content.

This works for any channel. To post to Facebook, just change "twitter" to "facebook" and post:

blog.you.com/most-awesome-record-ever?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=official&utm_campaign=music

And if you're writing about how no one ever calls you to to go out anymore, change "music" to "ineedalife," or whatever.

That’s it, you’ve mastered UTM codes. Next time we’ll look at campaign types (music, etc.) and how to set up a GA custom report to quickly analyze that data over time.

Most successful tech concepts follow a similar life cycle. First everyone laughs at it, then a few successfuly implement it, and suddenly it’s the best thing ever.

I first noticed this trend 5 or 6 years ago, when the term “innovation” was becoming mainstream shorthand for large companies trying to act like small ones. BusinessWeek even launched an entire section on its website dedicated to “Innovation” (note the big ‘I’). Naturally, by the time BW picked up on the trend, there wasn’t much Innovating left to do.

I think we have hit a analogous point with social media. It now seems that every company is “going social,” and most are doing a terrible job at it. Why?

It’s very simple, social media was never supposed to be an end in and of itself. It is a natural step in the progression of making technology more human, and was designed to make the internet more naturally compatible with how humans act in real life. That process of humanizing technology did not begin with social, and it certainly does not end there.

However once it became fashionable, we saw a rash of companies jumping on the Facebook and Twitter bandwagon.  In most cases this leap was not a natural fit with the culture or existing branding of the company, it was simply added to the marketing department like an extra nose.

What’s more is that companies that are not “social” in any meaningful sense, from pizza joints to dry cleaners, all have Facebook and Twitter accounts that are used the same way that they use TV commercials and junk mail.

Its not about social anymore. Social is a means to an end, and companies both in and out of the tech sphere need to stop pretending everything social is new or innovative. It’s not.

The only truly innovative stuff in social is happening beneath the radar in areas like curation, which tries to aggregate interesting content in a useable form (Tip of the hat here to Austin’s own Keepstream).

But then I could be wrong. BusinessWeek still hasn’t created a “Social Media” section, so maybe there’s still some life left in this horse.

What happens when the amount of available information doubles, triples, or even begins increasing exponentially? What happens to our ability to process all of that?

As recently as 20 years ago, the amount of information available to the average person was very limited by today’s standards. A handful of media conglomerates acted as the gatekeepers to the vast majority of information. They were the filters that decided what was important and what wasn’t. If it didn’t show up in a paper, get broadcasted over radio or TV, or get published in a book, you likely didn’t know about it. 

This situation had two tangible effects:

1) There were very few sources of information. You could get your news from the Chronicle or the Inquirer, but in the end you still had only two or three choices at best. Same with radio and TV stations.

2) The products were highly packaged, made for passive consumption by the masses. Only verified details deemed relevant were provided, and the creative process was entirely hidden.

The mere handful of sources in existence made it imperative that these sources be as accurate and trustworthy as possible in the eyes of their audience, and sources went to great lengths to create and preserve credibility. The entire craft of journalism, for example, was developed in response to this problem.

Starting with CNN, the first 24 hour news channel, speed became more important than accuracy. Since then, there are no longer discrete intervals between news cycles that allow the  traditional journalistic process to take place. The news cycle is continuous, everything is “breaking” news.

Interestingly, this has resulted in an environment where the credibility of a source is often much less important than its timeliness. This is the way we digest almost all information today.

While news is a perfect example, the phenomenon is not contained to it. We now digest much more information than ever, and all in real time. The modern problem is no longer determining the credibility of the source, but filtering out the massive amounts of noise and garbage to get to what interests us. This is only getting more difficult.

The trend is toward increasing volume and complexity of data streams. Between RSS feeds, email, aggregators, blogs and social media, we are exposed to far more information than we can process. All the data in the world does not translate into knowledge if we are unable to make sense of it. The challenge of the next 5-10 years is how to organize information, curate it, and somehow create coherence from the chaos.

Facebook's privacy uproar has more or less died down. There are no more empty threats of a mass exodus, and no more friendly odds on the next Facebook killer.

Facebook has weathered the crisis but its reputation has taken a hit. It may not seem like such a big deal now, but it I think it will in the future.

Privacy and trust are valuable commodities in any social environment, even more so in one that contains more personal information in one virtual location than nearly anywhere else.

Facebook and its constantly evolving privacy policies have come to resemble the proverbial pot of slowly boiling water. It is a safe bet that the site would have withered and died early on had it been founded with its present privacy rules, and it has become very good at pushing the privacy envelope in a way that does not overwhelm its users all at once.

But as the company has matured, it has become increasingly clear that the site does not have its users' best interests at heart. True, Facebook is a business, and the only way it is going to make money is by capitalizing on the data provided by its users.

However, everything the company has done has come across as underhanded and sneaky. Mark Zuckerberg's immature leadership and thinly veiled condescension for privacy and Facebook's users in general have seeped into the DNA of the company. The change has been gradual, but the goal all along has been to get users to share as much of their information as possible.

And This was to be expected. But the opaque and deliberately obfuscatory manner in which it has been accomplished is what I object to. I don't care to read, digest, and stay on top of Facebook's privacy policies and corporate practices any more than I care to read the income tax code. Facebook doesn't provide enough value to me to justify the effort, and I like to think I have more important things to do with my time anyway.

This is where trust is crucial, and I just don't trust Facebook not to do something shady behind my back. This is why I will never succumb to the temptation to click a "Like" button beneath an article I article I, well, like. Never will I log into interesting websites via my Facebook login, or leave comments on a friends blog under my Facebook ID.

I don't know what any of those actions authorizes Facebook to do with my information, and I just don't care enough to find out. It's not worth the hassle.

To its credit, Facebook has even realized we are no longer friends. When I declined to hand over curation of my musical and literary interests to its one-size-fits-all "Fan Pages," it promptly retaliated by deleting all information from my profile.

The sad thing? I wasn't surprised in the least.

I have written before on how the news business model is in dire need of an update. Here and here, I've argued that what we casually refer to as news is actually a conflation of the two processes that go into making the news product. The first is journalism, or the actual gathering of news, the second is the process of distributing that product to consumers.