Okay, there's isn't actually any sex in this story, but it's still pretty tart and juicy. Two leading manufacturers of cranberry products are duking out in court and online, with claims and counter-claims of deceptive advertising and related social media subterfuge. It's pretty ridiculous, kind of funny, and fairly pathetic, but also a great illustration of how companies -- even manufacturers of fairly mundane agricultural goods -- will push ethical boundaries online.

Yesterday I wrote about the need for long-term ROI metrics in social media -- and today, coincidentally, I came across a report by Forrester pointing out that social media success can mean different things, and it doesn't always necessarily boil down to money money money (although that is obviously one of the important ones). Nor can it always be reduced to clicks, downloads, visits, or other purely functional metrics.

I don't think too many people would argue with the statement that social media is both similar to and different from other media. It has reach comparable to broadcast TV and radio, and frequency like print newspapers used to enjoy. On the other hand it is a "lean-forward" activity and obviously differs from traditional media in including a large proportion of user-generated content. And that's just the tip of the iceberg: you could probably spend a couple hours listing areas of similarities and difference. But one of the biggest differences, in my mind, is the time scale over which social …

Unsurprisingly, young adults are more likely to share more information: 27% of males ages 18-29 share their location with friends every day, and 10% check in daily at specific locations (which would allow potential miscreants to construct a fairly reliable schedule). By the same token, women are more likely to express concern about the potential threat posed by geolocation services, with 49% saying they're very worried about a stalker using their information, compared to 32% of men.

Gays and lesbians are heavier users of social networks than the population at large, according to a new national survey from Harris Interactive, which also found they are more likely to read blogs than their heterosexual counterparts. These findings aren't particularly surprising, basically confirming earlier studies showing that -- like young adults and ethnic minorities -- gays and lesbians tend to index higher in social network use. But in the case of gays and lesbians there is an interesting issue of correlation versus causation (at least, I find it interesting).

The British are a lot like Americans, or vice versa I guess, in our shared tendency to become so concerned about sensational threats that we formulate useless safeguards just to say we did something. The threat posed to children by online sex predators is an alarming issue on both sides of the Atlantic, providing news media with plenty of lurid fodder. This has prompted Facebook to offer a new "panic button" to UK users, which I can imagine showing up in the U.S. at some point. The only problem, as noted, is that it completely misses the point.

With all the controversy over questionable marketing ploys and privacy policies, you might get the impression that Facebook is some kind of evil totalitarian conspiracy. But in the big picture, sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are actually a force for good, serving as organizational tools and information channels for dissidents resisting real totalitarian conspiracies. Now a Chinese government think tank has supplied more confirmation of the threat posed by social networking sites to authoritarian regimes.

Men 18-34 are twice as likely as their female counterparts to break up through Facebook (24% men vs. 9% women) as well as via text message (31% men vs. 14% women) -Oxygen Media Insights study, July 2010. What follows is a dramatization.

Although Facebook's growth appears to be slowing in the United States (the site added a mere 320,800 new users in June, down from 7.8 million new users in May), the U.S. is only half the story. Or actually, significantly less than half the story. Indeed, one of the most interesting things about the site's explosive growth over the last few years has been how much of this expansion took place outside the U.S. This is in marked contrast to its predecessor and rival MySpace.

There's no two ways about it: Parents are not cool. Nothing against your parents or against you if you are a parent yourself; but there is no question that in the big Venn diagram of life, "parents" and "cool" exist in two totally separate, mutually exclusive circles. No parents are cool, and nothing which is cool is parental. The same rule holds for locations both real and virtual: if your parents are somewhere, that place cannot be cool.