"Amity Island had everything. Clear skies. Gentle surf. Warm water. People flocked there every summer. It was the perfect feeding ground."

As we all know. MySpace, Bebo and Facebook draw predators of their own.

"The police chief of Amity Island tries to protect beachgoers from a great white shark by closing the beach. Tourism is the town's major source of income. The town council must decide whether it is better to protect the livelihoods of their townsfolk. Or the actual lives of a very small percentage of those visiting tourists. The decision to close the beach is overruled. "

Tired of waiting for the social networks to do anything to protect users that might compromise their business, New York state Attorney General Andrew Cuomo's bill Electronic Security and Targeting of Online Predators Act (e-STOP) was introduced in February 2008.

"As the attacks continued, the police chief enlists the help of a marine biologist and a professional shark hunter."

Bebo has been keen to push its credentials in online safety, including the high-profile appointment of Rachel O'Connell, a forensic psychologist, and her work on a number of industry and government councils.

Perverted-Justice volunteers put profiles on social networking sites as decoys order to collect incriminating evidence against the predators.

"We're going to need a bigger boat"

The sheer scale and complexity of social networks makes it impossible for policing activity to have much of an impact on the problem overall.

The dramas of Amity Island and Social networks both pivot on a conflict of interest. Amity Island and social networks depend on public confidence to ensure profitability. In the absence of any real solutions to defend against predators, their businesses depends on their ability to play down the risks. Policing initiatives and warnings to be careful will never solve the actual problem. But they can help lull users into a sense of security that is good for the business. The real effect of policing initiatives and warnings is to confuse the issue of who is responsible when trouble arises. To cut through the confusion again we only have to ask. Is the individual to blame for attracting the predator? When predators are known to be active, is it okay to promote destinations such as Amity Island or Facebook as safe? By the way, Jaws, the movie and book was inspired by this true story of the Jersey Shore attacks of 1916:

via Ina.

From here:

The problem that I'm seeing with most of the current social networks is that 90% of the time spent on those social networks is work that is done in order to maintain currency, keep content fresh, and continue building a sprawling network of friends and raise popularity. So, what does that mean? What it boils down to is this: If you are working for your social network instead of your social network working for you, you my friend, are standing on top of a classic MMO-style treadmill grind. I have bobbed in and out of various social networks and there is something that every single one of them had in common: for me to gain any value from that network, I had to go out of my way to perform repetitive, out-of-band tasks just to gain any value from the network. Having been the victim of many a MMO treadmill grind, I recognize an infinite loop of horse poo when I see it, so I bailed. I have yet to find a measurable value in Facebook or any of a dozen other social networks I've played with. At some point, someone is going to get it "right", and there will be a social network that gives us tremendous value without us having to sacrifice for the cause, and all of the apologists using MySpace, Facebook, and the others who don't know they're apologists will flee to the new network in droves.

If you've been talking to me at all you probably heard me say stuff like this. Connecting 'people 2 info' is trumped by connecting 'people 2 people'. Google is great at connecting people to information. But a better way to create new knowledge is to connect people to people. When you connect to people they discover and create new knowledge. And people find this activity deeply rewarding and highly addictive. As the guys discoverio say '..discovery is the new cocaine'. The company that manages this will be bigger than Google To give people what they want. To really connect people online. We have to create the same sense of privacy, reputation, identity and trust online that we take for granted in the real world. I came across this today. An article riffing on a comment made by a leading VC...

Search is dead...[In the near future, people will] find what they want by using their social network rather than a search algorithm. After all, the people in your online social network should know you better than a mathematical equation, right?

Social discovery pivots on identity

...this focus on online identity is what could turn search upside down... it’s conceivable that the information could attempt to find us—the old concept of push media, but in a far more refined way. As new content enters the Web, it could tumble through the various filters that you set up around your identity...

The unholy mess of privacy and security issues show us where the pivotal opportunity lies

...[currently] nobody owns this space the way Google “owns� search. And as it evolves, there will be an unholy mess of privacy and security issues to work out.

This kind of talk was the ever-constant ever-recurring theme at the Web2.0 expo this last week in San Francisco. And this has made me even more excited about RelevantM than ever. If that were even possible.

O'REILLY CAPTURES IT IN A NUTSHELL Conference blurbs usually drop me into a coma with their schmarketing speek. But not from O'Reilly Media for the Web2.0 conference.

Web 2.0 technologies are empowering us in ways we could only have imagined even just a few years ago. We're able to... connect more, have more fun,...and do it all faster. But as the pace...accelerates, separating signal from noise, useful from annoying...becomes increasingly challenging.

How can we provide a more meaningful experience ... have a positive impact on the world we live in?...deliver relevant information...increase conversation and collaboration?

Right on the money. And a word perfect context for explaining... What MAKES RELEVANT MEDIA UNIQUE in the Web2.0 ecosystem. In a nutshell: Relevant Media works 'with reality'. Rather than working with 'models of reality'. All existing social tools begin by capturing something of real life into a model of some sort. Social networks, for example, try to create an online model of your real world social network. Recommendations engines create a model of what to recommend based on the expression of your tastes by you and your friends. The problem with models: The problems with models is that by definition they only capture aspects of the real thing And this in turn leads to instances where the model and the reality clash. For an example you can take any problem peculiar to online social networks. And I include all those problems related to breakdowns of privacy, reputation, identity and trust. All result from incidents where there have been unanticipated breakdowns or clashes between the model and the reality. Reality bites: What is needed are tools and platforms that support, merge and coevolve with the dynamics of social reality Relevant Media's tools and platforms couple and coevolve with the emergent and dynamic characteristics of real life social interaction as opposed to trying to capture reality and shoehorn it into a model of the real thing. This is what gives us a unique ability to better answer all those questions raised by O'Reilly for the upcoming Web2.0 expo. If you are there, make sure to look me up here on Crowdvine and come over for a chat.