ColemanMedia Report

In an effort to treat his increasingly obvious addiction to broadcasting the mundane details of his life, part time Starbucks barista and full-time social media maven Rodney Pinkleberry checked in to Social Media Rehab through Foursquare Monday afternoon, according to his Foursqure, Gowalla, Facebook and Twitter feeds.  Pinkleberry admitted himself to a Santa Monica, CA facility at his own will, after finally realizing that he has a problem.  ”It didn’t really dawn on me until I ousted PickleD36 as the Mayor of 2nd handicap parking spot at Trader Joe’s in WeHo,” said Pinkleberry.  ”I had my Adventurer badge, my Explorer badge, but I knew things were getting bad when I earned my Overshare badge.  I mean, people stopped responding to my updates.  So I checked in to Rehab.  Where it’s gonna take me forever to oust LindsayL as Mayor.”

Leading social network Facebook successfully sold personably identifiable data, a fitted camouflage Braves hat, and a pair of limited edition Air Force One DJ Clark Kent sneakers belonging to one of their users sometime last week, according to complaints filed with the Douglas County Sheriff’s Department Monday.  The items, previously belonging to 24-year-old Douglasville resident Rodney Boowinkle, were purchased by an unidentified advertiser for $65 under a user targeting agreement facilitated by Facebook’s hotly contested and expertly hidden user privacy policy.  According to paragraph 6,782,423 of the privacy policy, Facebook “may disclose, dispose of, or sell any data, belongings, or immediate family members” of any of its users.  ”This shit is whack,” said Boowinkle.  ”Those were mid-top Air Force One’s in the original colorway.  How am I gonna find me some of them now?”

Fresh off the heels of releasing their Open Graph Platform, which has drawn the ire of lawmakers and privacy advocates, Facebook announced the release of its new OpenPassword feature, which automatically releases password information, social security numbers and complete dating histories of its users to any person, entity or hacker that requests it.  The new feature, announced yesterday and quietly released 6 weeks ago, will allow critical information to travel more freely and efficiently across the Web, according to Facebook founder and privacy adversary Mark Zuckerberg.  ”We live in an openly social world,” said Zuckerberg, “so why not share the information that people really want to know?  I think our users will really like it once they get used to it.  If they don’t, we’ll just sell their bank account numbers to Phil in Lagos, Nigeria.  Or their estranged exes.”

The keynote address for the MOMMA Global conference held last week in San Francisco was nothing but a very thinly-veiled sales pitch for the speaker’s company, according to several witnesses who attended the event.  AntEye Social Chief Marketing Officer Randall Smugfellow’s 45-minute speech reportedly focused on the growing importance of Social Media in the overall marketing mix for approximately 4 minutes before launching into a 41-minute “advertisement” for his company’s services, complete with a 32-slide PowerPoint presentation.  According to witnesses, Randall stressed how critical it was for all brands to speak with him out in the lobby to discuss next steps.  ”This is bullshit, man,” said one attendee.  ”I take a day away from the office to get some insight into my industry, and it’s nothing but another sales meeting.  I wonder when they’re gonna offer the timeshares in Boca Raton.”

Only days after the much ballyhooed and bewildering launch of social media tool Google Buzz, search giant and political lobbyist Google has announced the upcoming launch of “UsToo,” a new platform that will allow the media conglomerate to quickly and underwhelmingly copy virtually any popular social, mobile or web application.  According to the announcement, “UsToo” will give Google the flexibility to release confusing and relatively useless applications that mirror whatever the hottest new future trend may be.  ”We learned a lot from Buzz,” said Google co-founder Sergey Brin.  ”We were late to the game with a social sharing tool that quite simply, even we didn’t understand.  With ‘UsToo’ we’ll no longer be late.  We’ll be nimble enough to release perplexingly forgettable applications almost immediately after a far better version of it becomes popular with the general public.  Because, quite frankly, I’m getting bored of running an immensely profitable search engine.”

According to a report issued Monday by the social media watchdog group Friend Feeder, Facebook users have created more than 16 million new fan pages with the express purpose of generating more fans than every person, public figure, or brand that they dislike, don’t agree with, or simply want to make fun of.  The pages and groups, which started as jokes about pictures of domesticated animals getting more fans than Glenn Beck or Nickelback, have quickly snowballed to collectively waste more than 189 million hours of Facebook user time in the last week alone.  ”We see this as the beginning of the end for Facebook,” said Matthew P. Whipplebottoms, a research analyst at Friend Feeder.  ”It started with lost cows wandering on to people’s walls, where the utility of keeping in touch with friends and acquaintances gave way to the mindless time suck that is ‘Let’s see if this one-eyed mole rat can get more fans than the Verizon Guy’s glasses.’”

Accomplished journalist, television personality and attention whore Anderson Cooper brought himself to tears during a live broadcast of his popular show AC360 Thursday evening while reporting on the recent changes to popular social network Facebook’s privacy policies.  The reporter, who leaped to popularity after crying on air in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, lamented through sobs that the new privacy policy, – which broadcasts his Facebook friends’ status updates as a default – is “one of the greatest crimes against humanity.”  ”I’ve witnessed some pretty terrible things in my life,” weeped Cooper.  ”I’ve seen utter destruction wrought by nature, I’ve cried in Iraq and Afghanistan, but nothing could have prepared me for this.  This is almost as bad as if we subjected our viewers to unfettered coverage of the personal life of Tiger Woods for two weeks.  Oh, wait.”

Co-workers at the Chicago office of Bogelsby, Bertelbahm, & Humperdink staged an impromptu Twittervention early Monday with traffic coordinator Danny McNeil after McNeil reportedly posted his 26th post on the popular micro blog in under an hour.  According to several of McNeil’s coworkers, the frequency and frivolousness of his posts forced them to intervene and urge McNeil to admit that he has a problem.  ”I check Twitter maybe once a week just to follow a few people, and all I get are Danny’s goddamn updates,” said co-worker Jeremy Brighton.  ”Like last week, I logged in to check out the latest from Shitmydadsays, and all I get is a play-by-play of Danny’s 12-hour Battlestar Galactica RPG session.  That show’s been off the air for like a year!”  According to witnesses, the Twittervention did not work as well as planned.  McNeil tweeted about the confrontation 17 minutes after it occurred.  Ed. Note: Senior Twitterverse Correspondent Erin Mikosz contributed to this article.

The blogosphere was abuzz early Tuesday after a recent round of financing by Derivative Capital valued popular micro-blog Twitter at just over 5 billion Retweets, dramatically topping earlier estimates of $250.17.  While the buzz seems to be mostly confusion over what exactly 5 billion Retweets actually means, most bloggers agree that the prognosis is good, despite Twitter’s inability to turn a profit thus far.  ”Technically a Retweet has absolutely no monetary value whatsoever,” said Moishe Malakai, lead blogger at Mashable.com.  ”But Twitter’s not concerned about making money, and they shouldn’t have to be.  Twitter as a business subsists entirely on buzz, popularity, and growth, not a sustainable revenue plan.  And so far they’ve done a bang-up job with that.  Besides, if someone named Derivative Capital places a big bet on you, you have to be doing something right.  Right?”

The Central Intelligence Agency announced late Friday that a new technology contract will allow the agency to instantly track criminals, suspects and ex-girlfriends within popular social networks Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.  The contract, with Seattle-based Visible Technologies, will allow agents to track any and all social networking activity of “persons of interest” secretely – without logging in or revealing their identities.  ”This is a huge leap forward in allowing us to stalk ex-girlfriends,” said CIA Director Leon Panetta.  ”Before we had to log in and send friend requests to find out what they were up to.  Most of the time they would just ignore or deny us.  But now I can track Peggy, Donna, and Gladys Steinberg without them knowing, and find out if they really hooked up with Kevin from senior gym class.”  Financial details of the contract were not released, but Panetta characterized the cost as “totally worth it.”