The Washington Post released a story chronicling the rise in the number of people who have felt “overexposed” by the sudden upswing in popularity of social networking sites and are reinventing themselves online. The story leads off with Luke Mitchell, who tells the story of how he amassed a large number of friends online in under two years on sites like MySpace but deleted the over-saturated profile because his employers were able to log on and see pictures of him in his private life that were not work appropriate.

From the article:

“All of the sudden I felt completely exposed,” said Mitchell, a 22-year-old financial analyst in the District. “It was fine when I was in school, but I just started my first job. I can’t be out there like that.”

This is a trend we are seeing a lot here at Reputation.com. People will come to us with tales of social networking gone wrong, like the students who lost internship opportunities because of their online profiles.  We have nothing against social networks; we promote them and believe they are a vital and valuable tool for people on the Internet. Given the increased visibility of social profiles, it is important to monitor the content you post and who has access to it in the digital age.
Reputation.com encourages social networkers to educate themselves about privacy controls and use them to keep strangers away from their personal online space.

Together with the rest of the Reputation.com team, I am very excited to announce the launch of Reputation.com’s new MyEdge service.

MyEdge is the world’s first Personal PR service. Own your Google results. Establish yourself on the Internet. Make sure that your online “resume” looks the way it should.

We have worked hard to bring this offering from concept to private beta (check out these testimonials from real customers–my own favorite is the first one) and now to public beta.

This product will generate and publish profiles and bios for you around the Internet in such a way as to maximize their visibility and staying power on search engine results.

Our technology, product, business development, marketing, and customer service teams have worked hard to get this MyEdge product ready for you. We are proud to invite you to come on in and order it now!

PC World is reporting that social networking powerhouse Facebook has enacted an online safety agreement with the attorneys general of 49 states, as well as the District of Columbia to better protect children online.

As part of the agreement, Facebook is pledging to implement new safety measures and refine existing ones, as well as affirming its participation on the Internet Safety Task Force that MySpace launched in January with the attorneys general.

The Palo Alto based company will also work to better protect private data placed on its site:

Facebook is also pledging to be aggressive in responding to requests to remove inappropriate content and groups, immediate removal of links to pornographic sites and prominent display of privacy information and safety tips.

Reputation.com applauds this important development and supports the stated goals of the Internet Safety Task Force. Facebook and MySpace have taken positive first steps to better protect children and privacy online, but users still should be aware of the potential dangers associated with social networking. As regular readers of this blog know, divulging personal information online can have harmful effects in the real and digital world. In order for the increased security and privacy measures adopted by the social networking giants to be effective, Facebook and MySpace users must be aware of the potential pitfalls of posting personal information in very public places.

Reputation.com looks forward to even more comprehensive privacy controls to better protect children online.

Reputation.com was pleased to attend the Cool Product Expo at Stanford last month. We met and mingled with innovators and entrepreneurs from a variety of fields and were happy to spread the word about Online Reputation Management from Reputation.com.

Here’s a little video we threw together documenting all the exciting products and people we came across this year. Hope you enjoy it!

We recently picked up this story from CNN that relates the story of a political activist who harnessed the power of the social networking site Twitter to get himself released from an Egyptian prison.

James Karl Buck was attending an anti-government protest in Mahalla, Egypt to research the impact of blogging on that country’s political establishment when he and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested. The University of California-Berkeley graduate student had been introduced to Twitter the week prior by friends, and within seconds of being picked up by Egyptian authorities he sent a simple one word message from his cell phone to the site: “arrested.” This was instantly picked up by his colleagues and propagated across numerous blogs and websites.

In a deviation from their normal practices, Egyptian authorities did not confiscate Buck’s cell phone even after he was brought to the police station. This allowed him to be able to update friends on Twitter as to changes in his condition, telling them that he had spoken to a prosecutor but had not been formally charged with a crime. Less than 24 hours later Buck was released, and he repeated the same action he had performed upon his arrest, this time updating his friends with another one word message: “free.”