March 2010

Blending behind-the-scenes nuggets with a defense of President Barack Obama's record, White House and administration officials increasingly are communicating through Twitter.

The popular social network is operating as a Web-based clearinghouse for public statements on weighty subjects (the federal budget) and the mundane (personal grocery lists). It's similar to a bulletin board where anyone can post short notes and users cull the pieces they see by choosing to "follow" individuals' account. Forget press releases. Gibbs and his deputy, Bill Burton, are now sharing news in Twitter messages. So far 33,000 people have signed up to follow Gibbs and more than 6,000 are tracking Burton. Those two officials have a ways to go to catch actor Ashton Kutcher and his 4.6 million followers. With a news cycle now measured in seconds rather than days, administration officials recognize they must embrace this rapid pace and use the same tactics as the critics who assail them and the reporters who cover them. Gibbs, who is Obama's chief defender, has signaled that the White House won't cede any ground online. Since then, it has proved to be a powerful tool for mobilizing causes and protest movements by allowing people to use common phrases to link subjects by theme. In Washington, that translates into hashtags - key words preceded by the symbol for a pound sign - such as (pound sign)whitehouse or (pound sign)gop that users key in to find connected nuggets.

Panelists from the Federal Communications Commission, Capitol Hill, public interest groups and the private sector addressed issues of FCC reform and regulatory responsibility at "An FCC for the Internet Age: Reform and Standard-Setting," a half-day conference sponsored by Public Knowledge, Silicon Flatirons and the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

Dale Hatfield from Silicon Flatirons opened up the conference by enforcing the need for an open, transparent process to encourage investment. He said regulatory risk is no good but it is critical to our fundamental belief in government. He added that while it's important to protect investors, we run the danger of too much or too little regulation with bad effects on both ends. "We need the right tool to stay closer to the optimum," he said.

Tom Evslin, Vermont's Chief Technology Officer, is working to bring broadband to the small, northeastern state. That effort -- not to mention his deep industry experience -- has put him at the center of numerous efforts to help seed and speed that broadband deployment, including applying for funding via the federal broadband stimulus program, for similar federal funding in the area of smart grids, and even making an application to Google's closely-watched Fiber for Communities project.

Facebook now has more than 400 million active users, up from only 50 million as recently as 2007.

If social networking still resembled a young, hip downtown nightclub scene -- one day a site is hot, the next it's not -- we might expect the crowds to decamp soon. Facebook would become another Friendster, still around but ghostly, forgotten by most. Facebook, however, isn't likely to have such a fate. For one thing, it has attracted many "olds," and they tend to stay put. (Consider AOL.) More than 50 percent of Facebook's members in the United States are 35 or older, and only 26.8 percent are 24 or under, according to an analysis of December visitors by comScore Media Metrix. More than demographic stability favors Facebook. The site has shrewdly emulated the "network effects" strategy used by another brand that has long held a dominant position in the computer industry: Microsoft Windows.