We are not exactly known for being a social media friendly country.

Some rightfully call us Blurmany, since our not-so-tech-savvy government forced Google into pixelating Street View images on home owners’ requests.

Also, we usually come a bit late to the Web 2.0 game, while letting Silicon Valley take the lead.

Lately, I noticed a disturbing trend in the timelines of my various social media outlets: More and more German Social Media Experts pop up out of nowhere.

While I strongly believe that given the pretty short history of the Open Social Web, nobody really qualifies to hold an “expert” title just yet, it’s interesting to see how many folks are bluntly trying to jump on the bandwagon.

Sure, there’s money to be made. Companies strive to invest their dollars into seemingly new holy grails. Advisers have been living from riding on trends for decades. Hence the Social Media Expert boom.

Fortunately, there’s one subtle difference this time.

Social Media is largely driven by transparency and the public availability of data. It’s way easier to verify, whether somebody trying to teach you, actually has a track record in the art of social media or just pretends.

In this article, I try to give some by no means expert tips, that hopefully help you to unmask your next Social Media Expert con artist. For the sake of brevity, I call them SMECAs for the remainder of the post.

1. Check out whether your SMECA believes Social Media equals Facebook

Oddly enough, I found many SMECAs confusing social media with just Facebook.

Strictly speaking, Facebook isn’t even a media outlet. It’s the largest social network in the world. It might turn out to be a great source for learning about behavioral targeting. And finding out whether people actually want targeted ads and offers. Early studies show, they might not!

But Facebook is not the only important player in the game.

So, if you find a SMECA talking 99% of his time about just Facebook, ask him about his experience on Twitter, Quora, Foursquare, Buzz, Digg, StumbleUpon, Amplify and others. While you’re doing so, ask for links to his profiles on these services.

If it turns out he’s not present over there, he might be an avid Facebook user, but unfortunately doesn’t have a clue about Social Media.

2. Check out your SMECA’s history

Things on the web move fast.

I’ve seen SMECAs being almost inactive on Facebook and Twitter for years and literally becoming hyper active when they wanted to get into the Social Media Expert business.

Now, you don’t become social overnight.

Social is all about building and maintaining relationships. It’s about long-term commitments and leveraging valuable networks. It takes time.

Unfortunately, Facebook does not provide an overview about a users activity over time. Try this: Visit the profile of your SMECA and switch to her or his Wall. Click on the little link named “Older posts” at the bottom of the News Feed. Click again and again. You’re moving back in time within the News Feed.

If you reach the beginning of his social media lifeline within less than 20 clicks, he’s a newbie. And maybe can learn about Social Media from you. But should never pretend being able to consult. We also don’t trust our businesses to first-graders.

Also, if you recognize that large parts of the older timeline comprise just so called mini-activities but at a certain point in the not so recent history, you see a sudden spike in daily posts – mostly sharing links from Washington Post and the likes – you likely talk to somebody who just got into the game. As he likely missed the impact of Social media for months and years, how good are the odds, he can help you develop a successful strategy?

Thanks got, it’s not easy to pretend a long standing history in Social Media. Even if hiring an expert PR person for the topic, aggressively pushing out messages on ones behalf, Twitter and Facebook timestamp every move. If you haven’t been part of the Social Web for long, this will remain pretty obvious.

3. Check out whether your SMECA actively participates in the Social Web

I’ve said this before: If your SMECA just lives on Facebook, drop him immediately.

Ask for a link to his Twitter profile. Check his followers, not only the total number but also who is following him. Do you find familiar experts like @scobleizer and @chrismessina following back your expert? These folks usually don’t easily follow everybody. Also, check the Twitter lists your SMECA is on.

While the total number of Twitter followers is not a straight indicator for Social Media expertise, in Germany if you’re having less than 1.500 followers, this usually means, you’re watching the game, but not driving it. Simply speaking, the expert voice you’re having doesn’t seem to attract a great enough entourage.

If your SMECA – for whatever weird reason he might give – is not present on Twitter or inactive, drop him immediately. He’s gotta go back to school.

The next thing you might want to check, is her or his blog.

The Social Web is one of the hottest topics in tech these days. Blogs still play a vital role. In fact, they are the most linked-to content sources on Social Networks. Real Social Media Experts usually have a lot to say. And they are eagerly sharing their thoughts. Not just by quoting Washington Post, but by voicing their own ideas.

Thus, almost every Social Media Experts maintains a personal blog.

If your SMECA states, content creation is not his specialty, or hides behind a huge multi-author company blog, invite him for dinner, but don’t ask for advice.

This post got longer than initially planned. I hope the next time, a Social Media Expert approaches you, you’re prepared to ask some key questions.

What’s your experience? Have you seen folks in your network trying to participate from the hype, lately? Do you have anything, I might want to add to this list? Feel free to voice yourself in the comments!

Signing up works pretty much like singing up works these days. You provide your email address, password and authorize with Twitter and Facebook. Next XYDO runs through your social graph and suggest friends to follow, who signed up too.

But wait a minute! There’s a subtle difference here.

This is the screen you see right after signing up or when clicking any of the many “find your friends” links:

Once you press one of the buttons, you get this:

Everybody you select in this dialog will get a tweet on your behalf with an invite to join XYDO. As signing up and next starting to follow friends has become so standard these days, I find it a bit annoying that XYDO sort of tricks me into sending out mass invites through my Twitter account.

While the above dialog indicates that it’s not a list of friends who already joined XYDO, I still believe mixing finding friends and inviting friends to join a service is not a good practice. Moreover, if XYDO keeps the design, I highly recommend to at least put a “FIND AND INVITE FRIENDS” label on the buttons of the first dialog.

Yes, the final dialog is explicit about the invitation aspect. But all of the previous dialogs, links etc. only refer to finding friends. I’m tempted to believe, this is a deliberate design decision! And in general, these two very different things should not be mixed up into one feature.

Maybe I’m too picky with these things. But with new services it’s all about trust. And I don’t trust a service where the first thing it tries to do is using my social graph to get viral without clearly, explicitly and in big letters letting me know.

I recently stumbled across this quote somewhere on the AppleInsider website. I’ve got nothing to add, so here we go:

“Google only wants to give phone makers and providers enough code to allow them to deliver their own customized, distinguished products so that it can continue its core business of selling ads and paid search to mobile users. Those partners actually want to have control over differentiated, compelling features that they can use to sell their Android phones in competition with other Android makers.

So rather than Android being a platform being pushed forward by Google, it will largely be advanced by Motorola, HTC, Sony Ericsson, and other makers who all have a history of making dozens of phones with terrible user interfaces and bizarre bundled apps and hardware features that are poorly implemented.

The commonality between these devices will be that they all run Dalvik bytecode and have an open source kernel, something that few Android users will care anything about.

Essentially, Android isn’t Google’s phone platform, it’s an open alternative for failing hardware makers to use in place of Symbian, Windows Mobile, and Linux to create the same type of convoluted, fractionalized, and poorly integrated products they’re already making. This is also why Symbian, Windows Mobile, Motorola, and Sony Ericsson are all failing commercially.

Google’s primary and most significant contribution won’t be any major innovation in the core Android platform but rather in its own bundled apps, where Google plans to earn its revenues from via, to put it bluntly, adware and spyware. It should not be a surprise to see that Google is motivated to do things that advance the company’s profitability rather than create free value for other companies at monumental expense to itself.

Google has no interest in making Android phones work well with a media app like iTunes because it doesn’t have one; it has no motive to develop hardware integration with home theater or WiFi products because it doesn’t sell them; it has no need to line up major software vendors or games developers for Android because it doesn’t make any money selling hardware, and there’s really very little money involved in creating and maintaining a third party software store.“

Period.

While the internet is a buzz about these breaking news, it’s sad news for me.

A quick glimpse at FriendFeed right after the announcement it appears to me, that the majority of FriendFeeders seem to dislike the idea of being forced to become Facebook users for what FriendFeed delivered to them, as well; some have even started to cancel their accounts.

It’s very likely only a matter of time until Facebook kills FriendFeed as a product, slightly “adjusts” content ownership policies and starts using the FriendFeed history for behavioral analysis and “targeted” ads. We’ve all seen this before.

To me it reemphasizes the need for a community owned, community driven, non-commercial platform. This might sound stupid, but it has worked before with programming and scripting languages, version control solutions and even entire operating systems. There’s no obvious reason why it shouldn’t work for stuff that forms the real-time web.

Having sold my own company, which did enterprise communication solutions, to Alcatel in 2008, I can very much understand the founders motivation to agree to the deal. But this only strengthens my point: At a certain time any founder will be offered enough money, to agree to the deal of his lifetime. And even if they claim not to, we might see Twitter being acquired in the near future, too.

Ultimately the only solution might be, to ask Linus Torvalds to do us one more favor and kick off a real-time web platform, that let’s us build a social network that can stand commercial interests and ask the Gates Foundation to fund it. If Linda and Bill don’t come to our rescue, we might ask users to voluntarily donate in favor of guaranteed privacy.

I’d love to see how that “business model” would work out.

One of the prominent service providers offering OAuth based authentication is… Twitter. As more and more people are using Twitter as a personal and professional communication tool, I’m wondering why many of the additional third party services have not yet implemented OAuth based authentication. I don’t know about you but I’m getting slightly annoyed when an independent (often poorly designed) web site asks me to enter my full Twitter credentials. They all promise to not cache or store my username and password but still, it’s does not feel right. Some don’t even use an SSL encrypted HTTP connection for retrieving my secret user information.

Today I’d like to encourage all third party Twitter services to jump onto the OAuth bandwagon and offer their users with a secure and trusted way to delegate access control.

And here is my list of services that do not currently offer OAuth (and that I’m no longer going to use unless they do):

• Twellow: Asks for username and password. No secure HTTP POST.
• TweetLater: Asks for username and password. No secure HTTP POST.
• MrTweet: Asks for username and password. No secure HTTP POST.
• GroupTweet: Asks for username and password. No secure HTTP POST.
• Twitter Scheduler: Asks for username and password. No secure HTTP POST.

I don’t want to finish this post without giving outstanding, positive examples of doing it right: Check out WeFollow and TwitterCounter.

I’ll update this list accordingly and will add service providers, that don’t do it right and move those that switch to OAuth off from this hall of shame.

Which 3rd party Twitter services are you using? Please submit via the comments!

Update: We have decided to publish the post over at The Next Web. You might want to follow the discussion there, too!

Thank you Laurent and keep up the good work!

As atebits – the maker of both – does not seem to listen nor respond to their two twitter accounts (@atebits and @tweetie), I thought I might start a list of enhancement ideas here. A blog post is also a bit more sticky as compared to the flow of tweets on the @atebits timeline.

I understand that some of these requests might not be ideally suited for the less-than-ideal twitter API but maybe the great folks at atebits find a way to work around it.

Tweetie for the iPhone

• Grey out the “Direct Message” button if the user is not following me. Letting me type in a message and telling me that it cannot be send afterwards is just not the right way of doing it. Maybe it’s been done this way because of the way the twitter API is structured, but it still needs to be fixed.
   
• Add a “Resend on reconnect” option if the user tries to send a message but the iPhone lost the data connect.
   
• Add the typical iPhone “new message badge” to the “Mentions” and “Messages” tabs and maybe also to the Tweetie home screen icon itself. Upcoming Push Notifications might be of great help here and open up a whole new world of possibilities.
   
• Think about introducing the option to auto-add a language hash tag (#en, #de) to tweets and allow client-side filtering by language.
   
• You might even go further: Have the client automagically find out the language of tweets and allow filtering. (For as long, as twitter does not introduce language as a first class citizen to their entity model.)
• Register a custom URL scheme (think tw://…) to allow other iPhone apps to invoke Tweetie and submit tweets. I’d love to see integration in e.g. Byline and other RSS readers that would allow direct tweet of links to articles of interest. 

Tweetie for the Mac

• Integrate the followers/following list into the native interface instead of launching the twitter.com website. If users run multiple twitter accounts, it currently gets confusing. You might have that on your list anyway but wanted to rush with releasing the initial version. That’s ok. Now simply fix it, please.
   
• Add an option to have the dock icon indicating activity and unread tweets (take a look at Adium and simply copy the implementation).

That’s it so far. I’ll keep expanding this list as more ideas will come to my mind. Feel free to add yours to the comments.