Jurors and defendants are not meant to be friends — even if it’s just Facebook friends.
Four charges of contempt of court probably drilled this point home for 22-year-old Jonathan Hudson of Arlington, Texas. While on jury duty, Hudson sent a Facebook friend request to the female defendant in the case.
He was dismissed from the proceedings following the friend request, as well as for posting case information on his profile. Afterwards, he contacted the defendant through a Facebook message to apologize.
“I pretty much just said I was selected to be on a jury,” The Star-Telegram reports his Facebook message to the defendant read. “I’m pretty upset over this and I’m sure you guys are too. I guess you know what it feels like to be prosecuted too. Good luck with everything.”
His lawyer told the paper the mistake was “a reflection of the times.”
But we’d like to help in a more direct way, too. Mashable‘s job boards are a place for socially savvy companies to find people like you. This week and every week, Mashable features its coveted job board listings for a variety of positions in the web, social media space and beyond. Have a look at what’s good and new on our job boards:
Mashable‘s Job Board has a variety of web 2.0, application development, business development and social networking job opportunities available. Check them out here.
Got a job posting to share with our readers? Post a job to Mashable today ($99 for a 30 day listing) and get it highlighted every week on Mashable.com (in addition to exposure all day every day in the Mashable marketplace).
Already using Google+? Follow Mashable’s Pete Cashmore for the latest about the platform’s new features, tips and tricks as well as social media and technology updates.
The time users spend on Google+ and the traffic to the site appear to have plateaued after a peak in mid-July, according to research from Experian Hitwise.
The researcher found that users spent 5 minutes and 50 seconds on the site the week of July 16; by late August, the average weekly time was 5 minutes and 47 seconds.
Meanwhile, U.S. visits to Google+ fell 5.5% to 1.16 million for the the week ended Aug. 27. Traffic had risen 283% the week of July 16. Reps from Experian Hitwise could not be reached for comment.
Hitwise’s last report on Google+ was similarly downbeat. In late July, the company found traffic and time on the site had been on the decline. However, the average time since that report — 5 minutes, 15 seconds — is up. Total visits, however, are down, from 1.79 million. Of course, Google+ is still in a limited trial and the Hitwise numbers don’t take into account visitors from mobile apps or visitors who access the site via Google’s navigation bar.
A report on Google+’s August traffic from Hitwise rival measurement firm comScore will not be made public until next week, a rep says. ComScore’s report on July traffic had contrasted with Hitwise’s findings, showing an increase in time spent and traffic for the month.
The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles — it delivers smart mobility services. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.
Social media monitoring and analytics can help city, state and national government agencies make faster and more informed decisions. Some of the decisions can be predictive, such as gauging public sentiment during the planning of a major public event like a parade, sporting event or even a royal wedding. With the right process and tools in place, some decisions can be made on the fly, such as during a natural disaster where responsive action is needed — think earthquakes, tornadoes, shootings or bombings.
Public safety is a major area where agencies, particularly law enforcement, are looking at the value of social media participation and monitoring despite complex issues like privacy intrusion and real-time effectiveness during an unfolding crisis. Publicly available data from social networks is being retrieved and applied by agencies to improve how they provide services to their citizens. In some cases, effective use of social media could mean cost savings and better resource deployment.
As demonstrated in countries like Egypt and Syria, governments worldwide are monitoring — and in some cases, shutting down — social media channels in attempts to control gain control of unfolding events. More recently, the unrest in the U.K. highlights the complexity of monitoring social media conversations and putting the information gathered in real-time to use.
Social Media and Control
Looking at the larger picture, are governments and law enforcement agencies violating individual rights by monitoring social media? According to Washington D.C. social media lawyer Bradley Shear, any user of social media should realize that everything he posts publicly online has the potential to be reviewed by others who may not be the intended readers — that includes governments and police departments.
“If you post something on a public Facebook Page, public Twitter account, public Google+ profile, you generally give up your right to privacy regarding the content that you have posted,” says Shear. “When I tweet or blog, I do so with the knowledge that my content may be viewed by anyone at any time who has access to the Internet.”
Some protection for individual privacy, at least in the United States, occurs when government wants to monitor or access a private social media account. In theory, the government must go through the proper legal channels to obtain access.
Shear explains that in the U.S., the fourth amendment of the Constitution guards against unreasonable searches and seizures.
“The legal test in the U.S. is: ‘Do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy?’ I believe a strong argument may be made that one has a reasonable expectation of privacy on social media pages that are not accessible by the general public,” says Shear.
What about a government going beyond just monitoring and deciding to shut down access to social media channels, either to avert a crisis or ostensibly to manage one? In the U.K., law enforcement agencies and government ministers are exploring these options.
Says Shear, “In the United States, a government that shuts down access to an electronic communications platform may be violating the First Amendment.” Barring access, he points out, could also have unintended consequences that jeopardize public safety.
Monitoring Strategically
Mike Alderson, a former U.K. police officer and director of Open Eye Communications Ltd. consults some of the U.K. police agencies that work with the social media monitoring provider Radian6, a Salesforce company. He says law enforcement organizations and agencies should look at their social media deployment from four main areas: Strategic, Operational/Tactical, Intel and Media.
As an example of Strategic use, Alderson explains that agencies can monitor to see if the services they’re providing are what people actually want.
“People are surveyed to death. Social media monitoring helps agencies to strategically understand what services are required,” he says.
Operationally or tactically, police units can aggregate, filter and analyze a social media stream in a given policing area and look for conversations ahead of planned events such as demonstrations. Analyzing what people are talking about can guide the effective deployment of services.
For intel, a police unit could identify key influencers to both glean and disseminate credible information. They could monitor the streams during the day of an event to make on-the-spot decisions and better manage resources on the ground. Then after an event, they could learn from the operation and assess the public’s feelings about what took place.
Without deeper analysis of recent events in the U.K., it’s not clear how much Twitter and Facebook played in anticipating civil unrest. On the surface, it appears that law enforcement was using it in the moment to reassure the public, provide them with information and help identify offenders, says Alderson. The platforms were also used by concerned citizens to get and provide help, via tags like #riotcleanup.
Social media can also reveal to law enforcement what information needs to be disseminated and when. Conversely, the police can incorporate updates from the media or citizen journalists to get a clearer picture of what is happening in places where they don’t yet have officers on the ground.
However, as the situation in the U.K. demonstrated, false information can also be disseminated rapidly through social networks, causing misdirection of police resources.
“A lot of police effort went into correcting that misdirection,” says Alderson. “One of the great advantages of forces using Twitter actively is that police do work to correct the misinformation. Some U.K. forces are more advanced in their social media monitoring and use than others.”
During the riots, all police forces saw an uptick of their Twitter followings. For example, in Nottinghamshire, their following rose from about 2,200 to more than 16,500, a 625% increase. In Debfordshire, they saw a 538% increase, and London’s Metropolitan Police saw a 674% increase.
Alderson’s firm assisted with the monitoring of the March 26 “March for the Alternative” In London, the fifth largest event of its kind in British history. As people were gearing up to protest austerity measures, law enforcement was able to monitor conversations on Twitter and other networks to take the temperature of public emotions to understand how best to meet the needs of the public in terms of safety. In the case of the March 26 protests, one police agency alone was dealing with 55,000 separate social media conversations.
“That’s a lot of data value, just on the day of a particular event,” says Alderson. “One of the big things is making sure your social media monitoring structure behind the platform is in place. How you triage conversations, how you identify ones that are significant. Do pre-planning if you can,” he adds. “Otherwise, you’re just watching noise go by.”
Monitoring for Public Safety
Queensland Police Service (QPS) began using Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and social media monitoring tools on a trial basis in mid-2010 in the wake of international events such as the Mumbai terrorist attacks of 2008. Analysis of the Mumbai attacks revealed to law enforcement worldwide that despite increased use of social and mobile communications by the public, most authorities lacked a presence, much less a system, to discern what posted information was credible.
When a series of floods affected 200,000 Queenslanders and three-quarters of the state declared a disaster area in mid-December 2010, QPS had systems in place to integrate social media usage and monitoring into their communications efforts.
“QPS recognized the need to establish an online presence before potential disaster struck, and be known as a credible source of information,” says James Kliemt, senior digital media officer of the media and public affairs branch at Queensland Police Service. “In an emergency, people go to the familiar, which is why QPS employed social media platforms and why it was so effective during the Queensland crises.”
Their case study, “Disaster Management and Social Media,” outlines how the QPS used both traditional and social media communications tools to deliver public safety information to both the media and the public.
The growth of the QPS social media followings was significant. Before the floods, their Facebook fans had grown to 8,000 in six months. Two weeks later, during the disaster, they had 18,000. Three days after that, they had 160,000. Their Twitter followers also grew by a factor of 10 over the same time period.
“Information was kept bite-sized and simple for the audience to understand during a crisis,” Kliemt explains. “Summaries of the major points from media conferences were made available immediately for those unable to watch the livestream.”
The QPS Facebook and Twitter accounts were also used to initiate the #mythbuster hashtag on posts crafted to debunk misinformation being disseminated in online and offline conversations. Actively addressing rumors as soon as they appeared to greatly reduced panic within the community.
A large user base was already established on Facebook and Twitter before the floods, says Kliemt, so it made sense to establish a QPS presence where citizens were present. Both sites offered robust platforms to not only distribute high volumes of potentially life-saving information, but to provide ongoing access to that information. While many government websites were crashing under the sheer weight of user traffic as citizens desperately sought updates and help, QPS could continue their communications without any technical downtime using social media.
After the floods, QPS anticipated a steep decline in followers, but the numbers and interactions have continued to grow to significantly broaden QPS’s reach — their Facebook following is now more than 215,000. The agency continues to use social media to help investigating officers source information on outstanding cases including missing persons, homicide investigations and child abduction alerts.
“Don’t wait for an emergency situation before implementing your social media profiles,” says Kliemt. “Give your agency and staff enough time to become familiar with your chosen platforms, and they will embrace these technologies as part of their regular duties.”
In terms of monitoring technology, surprisingly QPS doesn’t use robust analytics technology.
“We basically do everything manually. We have just started using Hyperalerts to give us daily digests of page activity,” says Kliemt, adding that “all our media staff are expected to monitor and participate in our social media channels as part of their normal duties.”
Series Supported by BMW i
The Global Innovation Series is supported by BMW i, a new concept dedicated to providing mobility solutions for the urban environment. It delivers more than purpose-built electric vehicles; it delivers smart mobility services within and beyond the car. Visit bmw-i.com or follow @BMWi on Twitter.
Are you an innovative entrepreneur? Submit your pitch to BMW i Ventures, a mobility and tech venture capital company.
Flickr has introduced a new privacy feature called geofences that allows users to create geographic privacy settings for photos’ location data.
With the new feature, Flickr users can draw a circle on a map to designate a geofence and then choose a geographic privacy setting for that area. Users can create up to 10 geofences, and previously uploaded photos are also updated with the new geo-privacy settings.
“You might want to create a geofence around the your ‘home’ or ‘school’ that only allows ‘Friends and Family’ to see the location of the photos you geotag in that area by default,” Flickr said in a blog post on the update. “So the next time you upload a photo with a geotag in the radius of a geofence, it will follow the geo privacy setting you’ve designated for that hotspot.”
Flickr, a Yahoo property, has been characterized as slow to innovate, especially amid the mobile photo-sharing boom. The geofences feature, however, addresses one of the primary concerns associated with geotagged images — Flickr claims to have more than 300 million geotagged photos and videos on its site — and should receive a welcome reception from the service’s users.
We talked with MTV last week about its social strategy for the VMAs, which included a highly refined second-screen experience focused on keeping people talking online and watching on TV. It looks like the strategy paid off. According to @MTVPress, the 2011 VMAs scored the biggest television audience in MTV’s history with 12.4 million total viewers. That’s a breakthrough and a record for the 30-year-old network.
The VMAs are famous for creating buzzed-about moments — from Madonna in a wedding dress to Lady Gaga in a meat dress — but since 2009, the award show has had a particularly influential run on Twitter.
MTV provided us with a few additional stats from the show:
Best VMA day ever on MTV.com with 1.9 million visitors on Sunday.
More than 1.2 million live streams were served across MTV.com and on iOS and Android.
Social media traffic was up 76% from 2010. Twitter referral traffic to MTV.com was at its highest level ever.
Frankly, we’re still a bit shocked that Beyonce’s announcement — simply confirming something what was long-rumored — is the most tweeted about moment of all time.
If communication barriers on Google+ got you down, never fear. Google has released a tool to ensure that updates from its international user base can be easily translated.
Google Translate for Google+, released Monday, is a simple browser extension for Chrome that translates posts and comments into more than 50 languages.
“We’ve heard from a lot of Google+ users wanting an easier way to understand posts written in other languages. I’m an engineer on Google Translate and thought we could do something about that,” writes Google Translate front-end and mobile development lead Josh Estelle in an update on Google+. “Once you’ve installed the extension, refresh Google+ and you’ll see Translate links next to posts and comments. Click the links to instantly see translations.”
The addition won’t prevent all Google+ updates from getting lost in translation, but it will certainly make it easier for users to chat with others who speak different languages.
New York City launched a crowdsourced project Sunday that allows residents to plot damage caused by Tropical Storm Irene on a Google map.
Though the storm’s toll was less severe than expected, more than 150 people have used NYC Severe Weather Crowdmap to report incidents like fallen trees, downed cable lines and flooded basements.
The site makes it clear that it is not a replacement for 311.
“The purpose of the NYC Site is for you to let the City and fellow New Yorkers know about weather conditions and weather-related service disruptions in your neighborhood,” it reads. “Insofar as any posts made concern weather conditions and weather-related service disruptions, the City will not take action.”
If the site looks familiar to New York City residents, it might be because it looks and functions much like a site that was launched after a blizzard covered the city in more than 20 inches of snow in December 2010.
That crowdsourced map was launched independently of city efforts and focused not just on damage, but on cleanup efforts. Neighbors could list when they had a snowblower or shovel available or if they were hosting a “cleanup party.” It also mapped snowball fights and sledding hills.
The city’s severe weather map has more targeted goals.
“This is an information sharing site,” it states on its homepage.
The approaching storm gave our weekend coverage a countdown drama feel to it, where readers stayed put with their eyes glued to the TV, tweeting all the while. There was hardly anything else to even think about, but we did anyway.
While the Eastern seaboard shuddered at every howl of the wind, the rest of the world watched and waited along with them, but that was not all. There were quirky gadgets to play with, panoramas to peruse and laptops to lust after — and that’s just what we did.
Want to relive the weekend’s drama? You’ve come to the right place, because we’ve gathered the whole shooting match together for you all in one place:
Already using Google+? Follow Mashable’s Pete Cashmore for the latest about the platform’s new features, tips and tricks as well as social media and technology updates.
Google+ was meant to be an identity service, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said this weekend, shedding some light on Google’s reasoning behind Google+’s controversial real-name policy.
Google’s requirement that members of its social layer, Google+, use only their real names has been a point of contention for several weeks — especially for people with uncommon names and people who prefer to use pseudonyms. Schmidt’s comments at the Edinburgh International TV Festival reveal a new perspective on Google+.
NPR’s Andy Carvin asked Schmidt how Google justifies its names policy when it could put people at risk.
“He replied by saying that G+ was build primarily as an identity service, so fundamentally, it depends on people using their real names if they’re going to build future products that leverage that information,” Carvin wrote in a Google+ post. “Regarding people who are concerned about their safety, he said G+ is completely optional. No one is forcing you to use it. It’s obvious for people at risk if they use their real names, they shouldn’t use G+.”
Paraphrasing Schmidt’s comments, Carvin wrote that the Google exec also said the Internet “would be better if we knew you were a real person rather than a dog or a fake person. Some people are just evil and we should be able to ID them and rank them downward.”
Because Schmidt’s comments were made during a Q&A session, Carvin said he wasn’t able to ask any follow-up questions.
On Sunday, venture capitalist Fred Wilson followed up with his own thoughts on Schmidt’s “identity service” comments and the products that Google might build based on users’ information.
“It begs the question of whom Google built this service for? You or them,” Wilson wrote in a blog post. “And the answer to why you need to use your real name in the service is because they need you to.”
How could Google leverage users’ identity information for new products? Perhaps through more targeted advertising or personalized search, or maybe something completely different.
Wilson seems to imply that just knowing Google’s intentions is useful. “Well at least we got that out there and can deal with it,” he concluded.
The time users spend on 
Social media monitoring and analytics can help city, state and national government agencies make faster and more informed decisions. Some of the decisions can be predictive, such as gauging public sentiment during the planning of a major public event like a parade, sporting event or even a 
