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I was serving on a grant proposal committee, and I watched as a fellow judge asked his Twitter followers if a certain project had been tried before. In 15 seconds, his followers replied with Web links to the information he needed. No e-mail message, phone call or Web site could have achieved the same effect.

Twitter, in other words, is precisely what you want it to be. It can be a business tool, a teenage time-killer, a research assistant, a news source — whatever. There are no rules, or at least none that apply equally well to everyone.

The masses also came up with conventions

SPONSORED BY: placeAd2(commercialNode,'88x31|5',false,''); Google’s Orwell Moment On the Web, privacy has its price. &nbsp; TECHNOLOGY How Well Do You Know Google? Can you pass this trivia test—without looking up the answers on you-know-what? &nbsp; By Daniel Lyons | NEWSWEEK Published Feb&nbsp;17, 2010 From the magazine issue dated Mar 1, 2010 Share: Facebook Digg (5) Tweet LinkedIn newsweek:http://www.newsweek.com/id/233773Buzz up!&nbsp;(8) Tools: 19 Post Your Comment Print Email NWK.widget.EmailArticle.init(); SPONSORED BY placeAd2('printthis','88x31',false,''); &nbsp; Email To A Friend Please fill in the following information and we'll email this link. Your Email Address Recipient's Email Address Separate multiple addresses with commas SPONSORED BY &nbsp; Google recently introduced a new service that adds social-networking features to its popular Gmail system. The service is called Buzz, and within hours of its release, people were howling about privacy issues—because, in its original form, Buzz showed everyone the list of people you e-mail most frequently. Even people who weren't cheating on their spouses or secretly applying for new jobs found this a little unnerving. SUBSCRIBE <script languag

The genius of Google, Facebook, and others is that they've created services that are so useful or entertaining that people will give up some privacy in order to use them. Now the trick is to get people to give up more—in effect, to keep raising the price of the service.

These companies will never stop trying to chip away at our information. Their entire business model is based on the notion of "monetizing" our privacy. To succeed they must slowly change the notion of privacy itself—the "social norm," as Facebook puts it—so that what we're giving up doesn't seem so valuable.

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