Flickr photo by Steve Rhodes

The Pentagon is gearing up for a looming social media war–battles the military envisions will be won by being one step ahead of Twitter- and Facebook-powered insurgencies.

For the Pentagon that means developing social media tools that combine the code-breaking know-how of its intelligence services with the propaganda skills and manipulation techniques of its Pys-Ops group. On top of all that, the Pentagon hopes it can revolutionize the analysis of social media trends and conversations.

It’s all part of the Defense Department’s new Social Media in Strategic Communication program, which the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) first announced a few weeks ago.

DARPA, the Pentagon’s secretive research agency, is offering a $42 million contract to the company that can go where no social media tracker has gone before. DARPA posted a request for proposals in July that basically says don’t bother applying if your idea is nothing more than the next step in social media analytics. In other words, it means creating social media analytics light-years ahead of anything on the market or even on the drawing board. Following the trending topics on Twitter ain’t going to cut it. Obviously, the use of Twitter and Facebook to organize the populist Arab Spring uprisings this year got the Pentagon’s attention. If anything, the speed with which events took place in the Middle East caught U.S. military analysts off guard. From the DARPA request for proposals:

Flickr photo by Stuck in Customs

If you follow the major online influencers (yeah, I’m talking about you, Scoble, Brogan, Kawasaki, Rowse et al) you’ve noticed that all of them are gaga over Google+. For sure, G+ is a fascinating platform with tremendous potential. Google took some of the best features of Facebook and Twitter and rolled them into an easy to use (if difficult to fully understand) social media network.

But despite its upside, G+ is far from perfect. And while those smart guys in Menlo Park will surely be adding features and improving things in the coming days, weeks and months, here are the Top 10 reasons Google+ will fail:

10. Here come the spammers

9. Two words: Google Wave

8. Privacy? What privacy?

7. No search. No hashtags.

6. You’re in my “Friends” circle. I’m in your “Asshats” circle.

5. Keeping your circles organized is a lot like trying to keep your sock drawer organized, but only if you have 1,000 pairs of socks in 100 different drawers.

4. Search, e-mail, chat, maps, YouTube: Do you really want Google to have this much control over your life?

3. Cat gifs

2. It’s Google’s way or the highway.

1. I’ve got to use Picassa. Really?

It was a very short list. For one, most Members of Congress leave the tweeting to their staff. The other thing is that their Twitter feeds are often one-way conversations. They’re social only in the sense that they want you to hear what they have to say–but who knows if they’re listening to you. When Twitter is used effectively, it’s as a tool to not only inform and entertain but to engage.

Anthony Weiner was one of the exceptions. Before his awful implosion, his Twitter feed was humorous, insightful, engaging. It represented an unprecedented milestone–our democracy entering an age where the American public for the first time could have instant, unfiltered access to a Member of Congress. Unfortunately, it also answered the question of whether there’s such a thing as too much transparency.

What will be the fallout of Weinergate? Will it be a setback for government transparency via social media?

In the short term, we know that the amount of tweeting by members of Congress dropped almost 30 percent in the days following the scandal.

But ultimately, I think the whole Weiner episode is inconsequential. It’s not going to have much impact on whether Members of Congress or agencies in the executive branch use social media. The federal government’s move toward Gov2.0 has much bigger challenges than the awful judgement of a single Member of Congress.

Not that there’s any stopping the social media train. Two of the three branches of government have belatedly embraced social media. All of the major agencies have some sort of presence on either Twitter or Facebook, or both. Some agencies, such as NASA are leading the way. NASA has more than 200 social media accounts across the agency. Its main twitter feed has more than a million followers. An astronaut unlocked a Foresquare badge from outerspace.You can’t get much more social media savvy than that.

Similarly, most Members of Congress have Facebook and YouTube pages. And according to TweetCongress there are 387 Members of Congress on Twitter. That includes all but 15 senators.

The biggest obstacle is that government by its very nature is the opposite of almost everything social media values. Government often struggles with innovation. It’s about tradition and protocol. Government doesn’t encourage its employees to be free spirits and individuals. It encourages conformity. Government is a tangle of dense regulations and convoluted codes.

Your company or organization might have a set of guidelines or best practices about your use of social media. But government has reams and reams of documentation. There have been congressional hearings with hours and hours of testimony. There is guidance from the General Services Administration, the Office of Management and Budget, the National Archives and Records Administration, the Department of Justice and the Federal Election Commission, to name a few.

Is it any wonder that faced with this mountain of bureaucracy, your typical government employee might be overly cautious when using social media? Is it any wonder why some staffers might be a confused about what they can and can’t do on Twitter or Facebook?

Consider that Congress failed last year and will likely fail this year to pass a law that creates rules for agencies on the preservation of email. If Congress can’t figure out what to do with email, forget about tackling questions like whether direct messages on Twitter or Facebook are subject to the Freedom of Information Act.

Unfortunately, all this bureaucracy has a stifling affect on the use of social media.

For me, the ones who “get” it use Twitter and Facebook to give the public insight into why they support or oppose a certain issue. They use it to create a dialogue on any topic. The important part is that the sharing of thoughts and ideas flows in both directions. Framed another way, social media when used as a free-flowing, unfiltered forum can give us a sense of a person’s values.

Ultimately, I’m a glass-is-half-full kind of guy when it comes to government and social media. Social media has tremendous potential to increase transparency. It already is helping people feel more connected to their elected officials and federal agencies.

Unfortunately, the immediate hurdles are significant. Many federal agencies are still struggling to overcome a culture of secrecy. The federal budget for the important E-government initiative has been severely cut.

Critical transparency legislation often falls victim to partisan fights on Capitol Hill. The Electronic Message Preservation Act, which passed the House last year, failed to make it out of the Senate. This year that measure has been absorbed into a broad transparency bill. However, the prospects of that bill moving forward aren’t good.

We need Congress to put aside these partisan fights, so that we can update our FOIA and records management laws to account for the new ways that people communicate. Right now, federal officials are having to make interpretations based on laws that never envisioned the rise of social media.

Ironically, social media might help us get past these hurdles. The power of the people to organize and put pressure on our government has never been greater.

Originally appeared on POGO’s blog.

Photo by Joe Newman

I took this photo during a January snow storm in D.C. It’s dark and moody and the snow is whipping around in what looks like 10 different directions. If I was a better photographer, I might be able to tell you how I thoughtfully set my exposure and aperture before waiting for just the exact moment to fire off several frames. Except, I only snapped one picture and it was with an iPhone. Before I left that corner, I had processed the photo with one of the 13 filters on the Instagram app and uploaded it simultaneously to my Facebook, Flickr and Twitter accounts (and it would have gone to Foursquare, too, if I hadn’t entered the wrong password).

If you’re one of the 2 million iPhone users who have discovered Instagram since it launched in October, then you know how addictive it can be. Instagram and its competitors Hipstamatic, PicPlz and Path are battling it out for their piece of the mobile photo-sharing market (Okay, maybe not Path. Does anyone out there even use that?)

The one thing that sets these apps apart from their online photo-sharing forebears i.e. Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket etc, is that they have been designed specifically for the mobile phone, rather than the Web.

And before you write them off as just a gimick, consider that a New York Times photographer took third place in the prestigious Pictures of the Year International for photos taken with a mobile phone and the Hipstamatic app.

You can expect mobile photo-sharing services to zoom to even greater heights this year, as a wave of developers start producing new apps that tie into Instagram, Hipstamatic et al.

The New York Times Bits blog recently wrote about Instagram’s new API, which follows a $7 million infusion of capital earlier this month. (Incidently, PicPlz launched its API hours before Instagram.)

Instagram’s blog has some examples of how the API will allow other apps such as Foodspotting and Memento to integrate Instagram’s photos into their services.

For the past several months, JC Penney was inexplicably at the top of the Google search results for everything from dresses to area rugs. Let that percolate for a bit. JC Penney? Really?

Well, it turns out that JC Penney either knowingly or unknowingly through a third party, gamed the Google search engine to the tune of tens of millions of extra hits a month for the past three to four months. There’s no telling how many of those hits translated into online sales. But you’ve got to figure the retailer got a major boost during the holiday shopping season from its undeserved search engine rankings. The New York Times’ David Segal dishes the dirt on JC Penney’s foray into black hat SEO in “The Dirty Little Secrets of Search.”

The company bested millions of sites — and not just in searches for dresses, bedding and area rugs. For months, it was consistently at or near the top in searches for “skinny jeans,” “home decor,” “comforter sets,” “furniture” and dozens of other words and phrases, from the blandly generic (“tablecloths”) to the strangely specific (“grommet top curtains”).

This striking performance lasted for months, most crucially through the holiday season, when there is a huge spike in online shopping. J. C. Penney even beat out the sites of manufacturers in searches for the products of those manufacturers. Type in “Samsonite carry on luggage,” for instance, and Penney for months was first on the list, ahead of Samsonite.com.

JC Penney is apparently paying the price. Google’s punitive action includes pushing the brand deep down into the nether regions of its search results.

The link farming tactics revealed by the NYT have been going on for years. What’s perhaps more disturbing is that it took the NYT to blow the whistle on JC Penney. Where were Google’s safeguards? We’re talking large-scale manipulation of search rankings.

Did Google turn a blind eye? Or is its internal security system so lax that it could let such a massive black hat operation go on for months?