And therein lay the small print, the disclosure at the other end of the asterisk. Opting out* is already carrying with it a social stigma, the personal choice to remain behind doors with locks and windows with shutters, to not be One of Us. At the same time, it is the new symbol of American freedom as professed by its right wing, the inalienable right for each of us to exit, to withdraw, to take the door other fools would take: the right to do the wrong thing.

"When users first install one of the new Open Graph apps with auto-publishing capabilities, they're asked for persistent permission to report their activity back to Facebook through a system called frictionless sharing," reads Facebook's official description. "They can set the privacy of their shared content to buckets such as 'public,' or choose a specific friend list to share with. In most cases, though, users simply choose the default of 'friends only.'" Isn't it good to know what the majority of users will do so that you never have to make the wrong choice? If only all voting worked like that.

"From then on, whenever users engage with the app or Facebook-integrated Web site, their activity is published to the home page's Ticker, their profile or profile Timeline, and in some cases the news feed," Facebook continues. "Typically, there is no way to preemptively hide or opt out of sharing a specific activity, such as listening to an embarrassing song or reading a controversial news article. Users must go to their profile and manually delete the post, but by then some friends may have already seen the activity in the real-time Ticker."

Thus far, the discussion about Facebook's accelerated implementation of this feature has centered around whether it is "ruining sharing," as CNET's Molly Wood contends; exploiting sharing, as RWW's Marshall Kirkpatrick believes; or redefining sharing, as RWW's Richard MacManus argues. If I may interject a fourth point of view: Since when have we forfeited the right to define sharing for ourselves without either the status or stigma of "opting out?"

Up to now, I haven't felt the need to "share" with the world what I eat, where I walk, what I listen to or read, on what point of the Earth I stand or sit. It's nothing personal; as a journalist, I just seem to have this inner feeling that you don't actually care. One of the skills that comes with journalism is filtering out unimportant information. If I were to write an article about my music listening habits on a day-to-day basis ("On Monday starting at 11:28 a.m. I listened to Joe Bonamassa, followed by Chris Smither, then Diana Krall...") you would not stick around to read the complete list. You would rightly ask, what kind of conceited maniac shares everything short of his own bowel movements with the general public?

Well, if you would rather I not "share" this information with you in a blog post, then under whose content quota am I obligated to "share" it with you through some social channel? Of course, as Facebook reminds us, "in most cases" other people with more sense than I will share with "friends only." Explain to me how that makes sense, that the outgoing data feed I would filter for my regular readers' benefit should remain unfiltered for my friends'.

Glass houses

We used to speak with one another, but now through the convenience of electronics, we can enable a service to do that for us. Or, in the alternative, we may opt out. The point where "sharing" drifts away from pure communication, and toward Aldous Huxley's searingly prescient vision of thousands of couples simultaneously fornicating in glass houses under spotlights, is what blogger Robert Scoble calls "the Freaky Line." The ability for Facebook to strategically relocate this line, as it is appearing to do once again with "frictionless sharing," is described by Scoble as "Zuckerberg's brilliance." Through the movement of this line, he continues, "the media comes to us."

Once we have ceded the responsibility for maintaining our "Freaky Lines" to an outside entity, so that media and other junk can save us from the inconvenience of having to make choices for ourselves, when can we expect those lines to stop being moved on our behalf? Keep in mind that Facebook is actively experimenting with the Internet of Things protocol (MQTT), with creating an exchange mechanism for everyday devices that may be used by members. On the day that RFID-empowered groceries enable me to walk out of the grocery store and pay for them automatically, do I want the contents of my grocery cart to be published on Facebook? What's my heart rate right now; did you ever wonder? When I try on a pair of jeans, do I want the world to see, "Scott Fulton is trying on a pair of 501s!" When I trip down a public staircase, should my personal feed announce to the world, "ROTF?" When I run out of gas on a highway, should you know the mile marker?

If none of this information coming from me is important to you, then why should the converse be any more valuable? If you would not open your windows and doors to voyeurs hiding in the bushes, why would you illuminate every detail of your life online? When do you decide to opt out, to choose the wrong door, drop out of the club, make the non-preferred choice? When do you exercise the freedom to speak for yourself and not have your life be spoken for you by some bot in the name of targeted advertising? When and where do you start drawing the lines again?

For those who are widely loved, you'll see this as a blessing. For those who are widely loathed, you'll see the full wrath of the internet in colorful cross-platform commentary. Echo further transcends existing commenting systems with the incorporation of HTML, photo and video. This appears to be a truly amazing tool for mash up contests, political debates and global events.

Loux said, "When Robert Scoble saw this his response was, 'blogging is back'." Scoble's own Building 43 project aggregates comments into the Community 43 page from various social media sources using hashtags. However, where Scoble's community dialogue gets buried as new media comes in, Echo produces a live feed that stays visible with the source material. Chris Saad, VP of Product Strategy and Community, said,"We look for links back to the source page inside tweets/FriendFeed etc and bring in the related conversation - in real time."

This evolving stream of truth (good and bad) is about to stare us in the face every time we visit our pages. It will be interesting to see how this will affect blogging as we know it. Do you think bloggers will elevate their game to gain accolades or simply become gratuitously extreme in order to stir conversation? To reserve an Echo subscription, visit the JS-Kit site.

Big Picture

Two of the most striking things we learned by asking (on Twitter, in the middle of the work day, you'll note) were these.

There are now a whole lot of people doing this kind of work. An overwhelming number of people and companies were offered up as examples - we picked the following seven the best we could but there are many other people doing great work in this field that aren't mentioned here.

Second, there may be even more people doing this kind of work internally in large organizations. If we were to count the growing army of people evangelizing for social media use inside companies in an unofficial capacity, then there would be a far larger group still. We'd love to write another post later highlighting some of the people who've been most successful at getting their own co-workers excited about the benefits of using social media tools.

Without further ado, though, here are seven of our favorite examples of people doing public-facing social media work from inside companies today.

Sam Lawrence

On Twitter, but more prominently on his blog Go Big Always, Sam has quickly mastered the art of providing interesting value to the work lives of his readers and drawing in established social media leaders in a dignified way.

He's gently but firmly combative with competitors, sometimes challenges his own PR representatives and calls out Analyst firms the company has subscribed to. Designed by consultant Justin Kistner, Lawrence's blog is striking in appearance and is filled with oversized graphics, charts and videos.

The blog has drawn competitors and potential partners into the company's sphere of engagement through a remarkable number of comments for an enterprise exec's blog. Though Go Big Always is only a handful of months old, Lawrence has used it to rocket to prominence among thought leaders in emerging the social media market.

Daniela Barbosa

Daniela Barbosa is the Business Development Manager, at Synaptica, a division of Dow Jones Client Solutions. Barbosa is one of the most prominent advocates of semantic technology and data portability inside of a legacy institution.

Her personal blog leverages almost every bleeding edge web technology you can think of.

She's a frequent conference speaker, makes regular appearances on blog aggregator Techmeme and is an active participant in the Data Portability Working Group. Talk about Business Development 2.0!

"Daniela is the kind of change agent that is saving big corps whether they like it or not," Chris Saad, chairman of the Data Portability Working Group, told us. "She is leading by example and making waves of change both inside and outside the company. Everyone's very glad she is, too."

Photo by Mario Sundar

Jeremiah Owyang

Owyang publishes blog posts with magnetic titles like "A List of Companies and Services That Provide Live Web Video Streaming," "Many Forms of Widget Monetization" and "Explaining OpenSocial to Your Executives."

Jeremiah is a great example of someone who offers to teach others as a way to draw them in. He's built a reputation as a generous contributor to social media conversations and thus has become a hub for business and tech professionals. That's a good place for an analyst to be.

Linda Skrocki

Skrocki writes a highly engaging Sun blog herself, where for example she recently announced that Sun blogs had just received their reader 100,000th comment. That on 97k blog posts on 4143 blogs. That's pretty remarkable for an enterprise focused community.

Asked about her social media work at Sun, Skorcki described it as follows.

"Along with a colleague, we have sessions that we conduct inside and outside of Sun. The sessions typically cover the benefits of leveraging the venues, do's and don'ts, and how to get started. The sessions are usually small (groups of 25 or so) and conducive to informal discussion while hitting the key points. External organizations that we've shared our experiences with include the United Nations in preparation for their Youth Summit, the DoD, other tech companies, etc. I'll be presenting to a Reuters Women's Group soon -- the group consists of women at various levels in their career and in various sectors."

In addition to being an active Twitter user, Skrocki is also working on putting Twitter to use for Sun events like the forthcoming JavaOne conference.

Disclosure: Sun is a consulting client of mine, though I haven't had the pleasure to work with Linda directly.

Paul Miller

Miller is one of the hosts of the often fascinating Talking With Tails podcast series, he has done one episode of what we hope will be a series of podcasts on the semantic web here at RWW and he recently started covering the semantic web in a ZDNet blog dedicated to the topic.

While this list of social media power users could be described as Scoble 2.0, Miller insisted that he is actually Scoble 3.0 (a joke about how the semantic web is referred to as web 3.0 - Miller is a very humble man).

Miller is part of a whole crew at Talis that uses social media to bring value to the lives of their audiences - including Talking co-host Richard Wallis and Danny Ayers who writes the excellent This Week's Semantic Web series of blog posts.

Kristie Wells

Is there any work being done over there with all this media socializing? There sure is; Joyent provides app hosting for thousands of companies, including some big ones like MLB.com, Oprah's Ambassador program and the LATimes. That history of success made good ammunition when Joyent recently faced criticism for former-customer Twitter's scaling issues. That break-up got talked about on blogs around the web, but social media savvy and the company's own blog came in very handy in response.

Aaron Fulkerson and the MindTouch Team

The company's active developer forums are filled with media that users are able to repurpose for their own evangelism. The company integrates with a substantial number of other developer-level social media technologies.

They also use the sophisticated Viddler video platform so their videos can be tagged and commented on. See the down-home 4 minute example demo video below, the only thing missing is audio quality.

As a result of all this material being made available and the company's high degree of visibility in several social media fora, the marketability of the widely appreciated wiki software is further amplified. Mindtouch says their enterprise wiki software is downloaded 3,000 times every day.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the most successful recent examples of companies employing social media evangelists in order to communicate with existing users and bring new attention to their services. While many, many companies today know they ought to "have a blog," most are still unsure how to use them and are not sure why they would employ a specialist in making putting these new media to use.

This isn't entirely new ground, though. Many companies are finding the ROI of social media engagement to be essential to their momentum. We've highlighted just seven here, though, who are your favorite social media evangelists?