Today Google’s new privacy policy goes into effect, and some folks are looking askance at the company’s attempt to bundle all of its services together under one information-sharing policy. I love Google, and I love the fact that once you’ve signed in, you can effortlessly glide between google products.

What I don’t love about Google is its tendency to try to market to me based on my online behavior. That means if I use Google to perform a search, Google will tailor my search results based on previous searches and its advertising. In other words, it just shows me what it thinks I want to see (or what its advertisers want me to see), which limits my experience of the Web.

So, while I use Gmail, YouTube, Google Analytics and Google Documents, I don’t use Google for Web searches. I use Microsoft’s Bing instead as my default browser.

When Bing first came out, it was a joke, like most Microsoft products. But it has gotten much better and faster. Is it perfect? No. So I still use Zuula and Ixquick and other meta search engines in addition to Bing. These resources feature Google results, but there’s a layer of anonymity between me and Google when I use a meta search engine that gives me some cover from the Big G.

So I’m OK with Google’s new privacy policy, and I’m pretty sure I’m seeing more of the Web than Google wants me to when I search for stuff, and I’m OK with that, too.

In my ongoing quest to penetrate the mysterious veil of social media measurement, I got interested in Klout a couple of weeks ago. Klout, for the uninitiated, is a score derived by a thorough analysis of all of one’s activities and behaviors in the social media environment as well as the connections one makes and the connections and activities of one’s connections. Following the thorough analysis, one is assigned a Klout Score between 1 and 100.

Once I grokked the basics of Klout, I was rolling along on behalf of the agency, watching as our Klout score inched up from 24 when I first discovered it to a high of 40 last week. Then, when I checked my email today, I had received an update from Klout. Suddenly, overnight our Klout score had dropped to 30 with no explanation other than Klout had just recalibrated everything.

Touting it as a new, more “transparent” and more “accurate” system, Klout explained the change this way:

Today we’re releasing a new scoring model with insights to help you understand changes in your influence. This project represents the biggest step forward in accuracy, transparency and our technology in Klout’s history.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? Klout further explained:

We analyze 2.7 billion pieces of content and connections daily. Reaching this scale, we’ve introduced significant upgrades to our platform, allowing us to handle this explosive growth. Now, we can add more networks and other sources of your influence much, much faster.

Insights help you understand why your Score changed. Each day, you can see which subscore and people in your network caused that change. You can also view insights on your friends’ profiles.

That makes sense, kind of. I mean, if you’re analyzing 2.7 billion piece of content a day, well, that’s a lot. But it still didn’t explain the precipitous drop in NewmanPR’s score. The worst part was this bit:

A majority of users will see their Scores stay the same or go up but some users will see a drop. In fact, some of our Scores here at the Klout HQ will drop — our goal is accuracy above all else. We believe our users will be pleased with the improvements we’ve made. Below is a distribution of the Score changes. You’ll note large decreases in Score are rare.

Apparently, a drop of 10 points, as in our case, is the second-rarest of the rare, the rarest being -15, according to an attractive but meaningless bar chart Klout provided.

I’m reminded of a well-known cruise guidebook writer who was notorious for changing his scoring system every few years, seemingly on a whim. He didn’t revisit the several hundred cruise ships included in his guidebook and assessed their merits all over again, he simply recalculated their scores based on his new system. Usually such a re-scoring was accompanied by press release screed about how the quality of cruising was declining, and now four-star service was being sold as five-star and he wasn’t going to stand by and watch the industry be cheapened, etc.

I think Klout was in a similar situation — too many people’s scores were getting too high too fast as they figured ways to game the system, as humans are wont to do. So Klout recalibrated everybody and those of us who came on later and rose rapidly were treated to a fall.

So, does a Klout score mean anything? Maybe. After all, a company that analyzes 2.7 billion pieces of content daily can’t be all wrong — can they?

I have used several social media platforms to enable me to handle multiple accounts from a single dashboard without logging in and out of Twitter and Facebook repeatedly. I thought HootSuite was the be-all and end-all, but then they started charging for the service and limiting functionality. So I switched to TweetDeck, which I liked even better than HootSuite. But then Twitter bought TweetDeck, and I suspected there would be changes in the product as a result.

I came across an article by Tammy Kahn Fennel on Social Media Today about how Twitter had killed Deck.ly, the application that enabled long-form posts of more than 140 characters on Twitter. She mentioned another product (her own, as it turned out) called MarketMeSuite. So I tried it.

Short story — it’s great.

With tons more bells, whistles and functions than Tweetdeck or HootSuite, MMS has several features that neither of those platforms have. It’s pane display is very similar to both products with the exception of being much more customizable. And it enables something neither of the others do — having an account’s tweets displayed in its own pane. Setup is easy and relatively intuitive.

Although MMS currently only services Twitter and Facebook (LinkedIn is in the works), it has some very nice touches like the auto-suggest when your writing in the tweet box.

One of the coolest things about MMS, though, is its marketing feature. This enables you to expand your Twitter following proactively by “pushing” content out and then responding to the responses selectively to start conversations with others based on keywords. I haven’t tried it yet, but when I do I’ll post about my experience.

If you are looking for a full-featured, robust Twitter and Facebook dashboard, MarketMeSuit (maybe they’ll change that name …) is certainly worth a look.

This is a surprising spin on social networking: A group of scientists has started up a new social network called MyMicrobes, aimed at bringing together people who have similar intestinal flora makeups. Yep — they have gut bugs in common.

The idea is to connect people with similar intestinal bacteria so that they can share their diets and personal anecdotes, helping both the participants and the researchers to better understand which types of gut flora react positively or negatively to which types of foods.

The niche network is likely to remain very niche indeed, considering that it costs $2,100 to have one’s intestinal flora sequenced, which would be prohibitively high for many.

But the interesting thing about this is the use of the social media platform to provide a means of exchanging information on a person-to-person basis to help address health problems. It’s a heart-warming — if not gut-wrenching — development.

The other day a colleague gave me a report to review on a recent Twitter chat she participated in on behalf of one of our clients. It was filled with some very impressive numbers — especially the number of impressions generated by an hourlong Twitter chat. That’s when the red flag appeared.

I asked where the numbers came from, and was told they were provided by the host of the chat. I asked for some background on how the numbers were generated before sending them to the client. The response was, let’s say, testy, but we learned the numbers came from a free online analytics site called Hashtracking.

Here’s how it works: you input a hashtag and the site determines the number of tweets and retweets associated with the tag. Then it calculates the number of impressions by multiplying the number of followers times the number of tweets for each Twitter address that used the tag to determine the number of impressions.

My experiment with a hashtag produced these results: 488 tweets generated 1,780,081 impressions, reaching an audience of 231,997 followers within the past 24 hours. Wow! Big numbers, right?

The logic behind the calculation is tantalizing: if a person tweets using a hashtag, then every one of the person’s followers potentially is exposed to it in their Twitter feed. Makes sense, but to assume that every person reads every tweet in her Twitter feed is just not realistic.

Those kinds of numbers will impress clients who are still susceptible to determining PR values by counting column inches, determining advertising equivalency and multiplying by three. But we assume our clients are more savvy than that and are unlikely to be so easily impressed by inflated impressions. So we removed the numbers from the report and concentrated instead on the quality of the conversation that revolved around the client.

We know, it’s not analytical, but at least it’s meaningful.

I had signed up for the beta version of Storify several months ago when I first read about it. But I never got around to doing anything with it until now, after it’s been broadly released.

I created this story in about 10 minutes:

I admit to being more than a little bored with the whole social media thing, especially Facebook. I’ve got a couple hundred friends, some of whom I actually know. Friend friends are mixed in with work acquaintances and colleagues, journalists I’ve worked with, a couple of politicians, some high-school chums, a few college buddies, former girlfriends and a smattering of miscellaneous somebodies.

But it’s getting harder to make new friends. I get the occasional friend request from out of the blue, usually someone I don’t know but share several dozen friends with. I look through Facebook’s massive list of suggested friends, but find few people I know and ever fewer I’d want to friend in the seemingly endless parade of faces, half faces, avatars and offbeat poses, places or positions that folks like to use to express their innermost self on Facebook.

Which gave me an idea that might spice up my online life. I decided to start doing Facebook theme weeks to add new friends. Here are a few that came to mind:

This, I believe, is a good start and will get me through the next couple of months, at least. For a change, I’m actually looking forward to making new friends on Facebook.

Adam Vincenzini demonstrates how to set up a social media monitoring system on your computer that you can monitor in just a few minutes a day. Oh, and the screenr tool he used to create the demo is way cool, too.

With the rise of Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, it might be tempting to rethink the time, energy and resources you devote to your corporate blog. But according to a new study by eMarketer, you would be making a mistake to do so:

eMarketer estimates that this year more than half of internet users will read blogs at least monthly. By 2014, readership will rise to more than 150 million Americans, or 60% of the internet population in the US. One reason for the rise in readership is that blogs have become an accepted part of the online media landscape.

Since when did blogs enter the mainstream? Since it became clear that alternate forms of communication simply don’t provide the potential depth or breadth available in the blog form. But while more than half of people who are online read blogs, less than 12 percent actually write them, according to eMarketer.

Despite the fact that personal blogging platforms have gotten insanely simple to use, eMarketer says that blog writing will remain a niche activity and is only expected to grow 1.3 percent in the next three years. That said, however, the blog form will continue to be an important online communications platform, as media continue to evolve and printed media recedes.

The interesting point made by eMarketer, however, is that as it becomes more widely used and more familiar, the blog will lose some of its luster as the primary way people express themselves online. Facebook and Twitter already are providing an easier, quicker, though shallower, way to express oneself online.

But remember, 38 percent of blog readers are not blog writers, so the form doesn’t appear to be disappearing any time soon.

To tweet or not to tweet? That is no longer the question at the New York Times. Standards Editor Phil Corbett has issued a fatwa against the colloquialism that has become both noun and verb as a referent to an entry on the micro-blogging site Twitter.

He does have a point about the inherent silliness of the word which could make the Twitter message of even the most august U.S. senator seem trivial.

Here is Corbett’s memo to the paper’s staff:

Some social-media fans may disagree, but outside of ornithological contexts, “tweet” has not yet achieved the status of standard English. And standard English is what we should use in news articles.

Except for special effect, we try to avoid colloquialisms, neologisms and jargon. And “tweet” — as a noun or a verb, referring to messages on Twitter — is all three. Yet it has appeared 18 times in articles in the past month, in a range of sections.

Of course, new technology terms sprout and spread faster than ever. And we don’t want to seem paleolithic. But we favor established usage and ordinary words over the latest jargon or buzzwords.

One test is to ask yourself whether people outside of a target group regularly employ the terms in question. Many people use Twitter, but many don’t; my guess is that few in the latter group routinely refer to “tweets” or “tweeting.” Someday, “tweet” may be as common as “e-mail.” Or another service may elbow Twitter aside next year, and “tweet” may fade into oblivion. (Of course, it doesn’t help that the word itself seems so inherently silly.)

“Tweet” may be acceptable occasionally for special effect. But let’s look for deft, English alternatives: use Twitter, post to or on Twitter, write on Twitter, a Twitter message, a Twitter update. Or, once you’ve established that Twitter is the medium, simply use “say” or “write.”