Excellent point, Gillian. I think the biggest thing they can do is to extend the invitation. Reach out to the most passionate bloggers/Twitters who they already engage with and ask one or just a few to come for a visit. The Navy invited Guy Kawasaki last fall on the Stennis and from there, he helped craft the plan to bring more bloggers along for the next trip. Wal-mart did the same with their ElevenMoms.com mommy bloggers, flew them out to HQ and gave them a tour. There's no reason why smaller companies can't do the same. One key thing - you can't do this from scratch. Just like any relationship, it takes time to develop dialog and trust. So my advice is to start now, in small steps, in order to build to a larger platform.

Caterina: Peter Kim just posted the slides up at http://www.slideshare.net/peterkim/why-social-media-fails-questions-slide.

Agreed that the bad language is just horrible. But any type of filter was just going to invite people to do misspellings to get around it, and make it worse. If you take a look at it now, it's settled into more regular norm, where the conversation around Skittles is much more normal, not so much people testing out the service.

It's absolutely the sea change that needs to take place, otherwise companies will find themselves yelling at a wall. When you're ready to share what you're building, I'd love to see it.

The main players are all moving S L O W L Y towards a standard roughly around OpenID, but it only goes so far in terms of the basics. Things like OAuth will help also in terms of giving authorization to tap into identity, contacts, and activity without having to norm the data and give up control.

Dear Awesome Former Direct Report: Mobile IS an essential part of the social graph, but I took out that entire section because of time constraints! I'm particularly interested in the analytical tools that arise from geolocation data, like Sense Networks. I'll have to check into the Microsoft CRM - does it provide linkage into the existing social networks? Sounds interesting if it does. If only they would enable it for Outlook!

You are so totally right! I'll be changing that slide in the future. Thanks for the insight!

All excellent points. The current Facebook TOS discussion is precisely in this area, especially about the rights and ownership of the content created by members. But be careful that you draw the distinction between privacy and permissions. We give permission to the sites to use the content/data in certain ways, and yes, it is a tradeoff, but one that people are in general comfortable making. The greatest check and balance will be people themselves, and interestingly, it will continually evolve as our comfort levels with what is OK/not OK evolves.

That is an EXCELLENT point. I think it's more a poor reflection of the people who do these things than on Skittles. It will continue to happen, continue to fascinate, and generate conversation for Skittles, which is what they want.

Good Q - they will have either stuck with the new strategy or gone back to a more traditional one with navigation to those specific social media pages. I don't think moving social media off the home page will mean "defeat" -- rather, that they didn't find it met their specific internal goals.

I stand corrected - Biz is the co-founder of Twitter.

Randy: Just posted an update to the post with details from the graphic designers. They got it ALL from Twitter via the API.

Yes, it is a minor convenience, but it's interesting to see how it's impacting Google on the edges. BTW, I use Chrome and comments seem to be working fine. I'll double check at different resolutions, etc. Ugh.

Barton: You're absolutely right -- it's Saturday, March 14th when I'll be speaking at SXSW. That's what I get for writing late at night!