The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today published its updated rules governing the publication of endorsements and testimonials by “consumers, experts, organizations, and celebrities” (in other words, everybody). The updated rules governing online testimonials and endorsements arguably now cover bloggers, Internet marketers, affiliates, and others who promote (including through endorsing or testimonial) products or services on the Internet.

And the bottom line is, if you talk about a product or service, and if you put it out on or via the Internet, and if you stand to gain on it, you’d better disclose that relationship.

In addition, the revised rules, referred to as “Guides” or “The Guides” by the FTC, and which were last updated nearly 30 years ago, in 1980, now require that “advertisements that feature a consumer and convey his or her experience with a product or service as typical when that is not the case will be required to clearly disclose the results that consumers can generally expect.”

In other words, you must make very clear what the actual, typical results that the average person can expect are likely to be.

Previously you could get away with simply saying that the results were “not typical.”

However, by far, the changes that most directly affect the majority of people who publish anything on the Internet, be it a blog, other type of website, newsletter, or other mailing, are those requiring full disclosure of a material relationship between the publisher and an advertiser. And by “advertiser” we mean anyone who may provide anything to the publisher in exchange for – or with the expectation of – a positive recommendation (and by “recommendation” we mean endorsement, suggestion, hint, implication, or even hoped-for inference).

The bottom line is that if you put anything out on the Internet which may lead someone to purchase a product or service, and if you in any way stand to gain from that transaction, you need to disclose it up front.

Continue Reading…

Google Wave is about to open to new users. Starting today, Google will send 100,000 invites to some of those who were eager to use an early version of the service. Google’s blog lists three categories of users that will receive invites: Google Wave Sandbox users, those who signed up and offered to give feedback on Google Wave and some Google Apps users. When you receive an invitation to Google Wave, you’ll be able to invite other people so you can use Google Wave together.

“Google received more than 1 million requests to participate in the preview, said Lars Rasmussen, engineering manager for Google Wave, and while it won’t be able to accommodate all those requests on Wednesday it is at least ready to begin the next phase of the project,” writes CNet.

Like Gmail’s early version released in April 2004, Google Wave lacks many basic features: you can’t remove someone from a wave, you can’t configure permissions or write drafts. The interface is not very polished and some of the options are difficult to find, but it’s important to keep in mind that Google Wave is just one of the ways to implement an open protocol. Gmail revolutionized email with an interface inspired by discussion boards: messages are grouped in conversations and it’s easy to handle a large amount of messages. Google Wave wants to revolutionize real-time communication by extending a protocol mostly used for instant messaging, XMPP.

Combining email, instant messaging and wikis seems like a recipe for confusion, but Google Wave pioneers a new generation of web applications, where everything is instantaneous. As Google explains, each wave is a hosted conversation and users can edit the conversation in real-time.

Source : Googlesystem.blogspot.com