Large social media vessels are picking up speed, displacing water in such volumes that even those in the shallow periphery (indifferent to Twitter, Foursquare and the like) will be sucked by the wake into the middle of the lake.

It seems the social graph is now being mapped by all the big players, including Google, Microsoft, Facebook and LinkedIn.

For Google, borrowing a bit too plenty from the hive of Gmail to launch Buzz was not the half of it. With social search now on the ubiquitous Google search page, core search functionality will become ever more personal and relevant. (And, whether or not Google intends this, advertising will become ever more superfluous and irritating.)

Microsoft, too, would appear to be ready to turbocharge its flagship office productivity product for another generation of relevance: note this company post from last month that the heretofore sacrosanct Outlook (imperfect, but admittedly the de facto professional CRM for many of us) will embrace and enable what looks like the social graph. (To date, in my experiments at least, Gist and the LinkedIn Outlook plug-in have performed like grafts that the main body won't quite accept.)

When it’s understood that office productivity is an extension of social networking, everyone will be doing it. It may be one of those things society adopts virtually overnight.

In the back and forth drama over privacy, keep the following in mind: sometimes people use "privacy" as code for compartmentalization, or selective disclosure. We all use walls, to greater or lesser degrees, to protect ourselves from what we perceive to be the ill effects of information transparency. But as with most adaptive or adopted behaviors that are based on fear, we will end up happier when we let it go.

Why do I say "what we used to call Twitter," presupposing that Twitter will not survive? Alas, from published reports, it would seem that Twitter means to chase advertising dollars, and that will inevitably mean that Twitter will become an upscale Facebook. The true social graph is inimical to advertising. (To adapt an example from the Google social search explanatory video, when you are able to search the experiences of those in your social network who have recently traveled to Zürich, you won't want to hear what an airline or hotel chain have paid someone to say about it.)

With a logic and a purpose that defies antiquated 20th Century business models (and sometimes even management intention to perpetuate the past!), software engineers at companies small and big are taking us to a world free from advertising.

It's too early to find a pattern, but in Episode 2 of Entrepreneur's Prior Lives, Michael Cann treats us with the same candor Joe Harb showed in the rollout episode a week ago. 

Mike is the CEO of (>CLT) TapDynamics, Inc., a San Francisco-based company and the leading provider of draft beer monitoring solutions for multi-unit bar and restaurant operators. (Did you know that "20 to 30 percent of all draft beer poured at a restaurant is never paid for?" See this article.)

But before Mike brought data capture and analytics to draft beer flow meters, he was an investment banker, working for Banc of America Securities. For a time, Mike also worked in a San Francisco office for Seattle-based Cascadia Capital. 

Here's what Mike tells us in the podcast, about investment banking and about himself:

• he gave up early on pursuing a career in sports broadcasting
• he turned a temp job into a Vice Presidency at Banc of America Securities
• an investment banker will never have the passion of any CEO he or she works for
• the current controversy over Wall Street pay is misguided
• divorce and single-fatherhood have focused his entrepreneurial energy

Entrepreneurs’ Prior Lives is produced and edited by John Solit. Burgess Carleton wrote and recorded the theme for the series. The Mike Cann episode was recorded in Seattle last Thursday.

Pictured: Michael Cann and EPL producer John Solit.

Disclosure, and a solicitation: Joe Harb's and Mike Cann's companies, Quu and TapDynamics, respectively, are clients of mine. I'd like the series to also include entrepreneurs for whom I do not work as a lawyer. Please send me any suggestions . . . or volunteer yourself!

Okay, this post is totally for language geeks who love the visual play of text on a page or screen. (If I didn't just describe you, you're excused, and I'll see you next post!)

Here are the rules of the redlining practice I follow and espouse:

1. Redline only language that is actively in play. If language proposed in the other party's redline works for you, "mark" that fact "negatively" by removing the redlining (in the parlance of Word, this is the practice of "accepting changes").

2. View all language in play, suggested deletions as well as proposed additions, in the middle of the field. Relegating deletions to the sidelines gives too much deference to proposed additions. Deletions are just as important to view in context.

(Confession: I will not review a redline with deletions relegated to the margins. It makes my brain hurt to do so, and I no longer try.)

3. Don't trust Word for redlining. Use DeltaView or another industrial strength comparison app. Unlike Word, DeltaView won't clutter the page with formatting changes and will (ironically, given the name of the ubiquitous Microsoft word processing program) draw your attention only to the words. Formatting changes are best reviewed on a clean page, and need not be redlined.

DeltaView also has the brilliance to mark, in a third color, language that has not been changed from another draft, but has been moved to another place in the document. (Choose green to pick up on the metaphor of recycling.)

4. When encountering the deviant redlining practices of others, take the path of least resistance and generate, for circulation, redlines in the formats they prefer. This may sound counter to the other rules, but isn't; you will yet generate and use the true blue redline for your own review.

While the art of the redline is the sport of an introvert, deployment of redlines is a trade. Say the other party prefers to see all changes from all drafts marked cumulatively until negotiation is done. Fine; Word generates that kind of mess easily enough, doesn't choke on it like it did in the past. Nothing says you must yourself rely on the deviant redlines you circulate.

In my last post, I fantasized about what the Citizens United case might have portended, were Justice Clarence Thomas to have written the majority opinion.

Well, the K&L Gates law firm has already written a memo to help corporations do what they can to realize Justice Thomas's vision.

Here's the bit I like the best: 

"Just because a corporation may make an independent direct advocacy expenditure doesn't mean that it should. Since the entity or entities financing independent expenditures must be disclosed, a corporation leading the way against a particular candidate risks alienating a significant block of its potential customer or shareholder base. . . .

"Therefore, most corporations will probably proceed cautiously. If such independent expenditures are made, groups of corporations within an industry may form coalitions or use existing trade associations to support candidates favorable to policy positions that affect the group as a whole. While corporations that contribute to these expenditures might still be disclosed, this indirect approach can provide sufficient cover such that no single contributing entity receives the bulk of public scrutiny."

A kind of "anonymity of the crowd," you might say. Huddled corporate masses, yearning to be heard and not seen.

One more thing: the memo sadly brings home the reality that there will be lawyers on both sides. I had them wearing the white hats in my last post, on the side of shareholders.

In explicating the holding of the majority in the Supreme Court's recent Citizens United case, Stanley Fish shows how the majority actually pulls its principled punch and engages in the kind of "consequentialist" thinking that animates the incredulous Justice Stevens in his dissenting opinion. The principled conservative Justice, Fish reasons, would strike down, not only limits on corporate spending in political campaigns, but also the statutory disclosure requirements that the majority upheld. Only Justice Clarence Thomas, who filed a separate opinion explaining how speech may be chilled or speakers may self-censor if they know they may later face retribution for their speech, eschewed "consequentialist" thinking and played out the principle that the other conservative justices followed only halfway.

I'm in a "consequentialist" frame of mind myself this morning, imagining, how would anonymous corporate speech impact corporate governance?

Let's suppose Justice Thomas' views were ascendant. It would be unconstitutional, then, for the SEC to require public companies to disclose their political activities. Goldman Sachs, GE, Google, you name them, might soon come to have "black box" budget aggregations, analogous to secret budget allocations the federal government uses for intelligence and counter-terrorism activities.  

If a public-company shareholder wanted to know what political candidates or political referenda her or his corporation was supporting, the board of directors might say to that shareholder, "We are protecting you from the ridicule that would fall on your head if anyone actually knew. But don't worry. We've got it under control, and as always we have your best interest at heart." (It's tempting to joke that shareholders would then know as little about corporate campaign expenditures as they now know about executive compensation!)

What about private companies, not subject to the disclosure regimes of the 1934 Act? Might not pesky shareholders wield state corporate codes and the common law to inquire about what their company might be "speaking?" (The argument before the state judge could go like this: "We hear what's being said, your Honor. We'd just like to know whether or not we are the ones who are saying it.") Here again, though, federal constitutional law might have precedence. State corporate codes typically require that shareholders be given access to financial statements; but any expansion of such statutes to reach more directly into campaign expenditures might have to be overturned as unconstitutional.

Lawyers would adapt. What the Supreme Court taketh away by limiting governmental power, we would replace utilizing the power of contract. New protective covenants would become a part of private financings. Political expenditures might be prohibited, except upon approval of the shareholders. It could be a kind of private, Fifth Amendment: "the shareholders of this corporation hereby instruct it to be silent!"

I don't know how you feel about the recent, controversial Supreme Court decision, Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, but it struck me this morning that we lawyers talk all the time as if corporations have points of view.

I was doing it just five minutes ago (that's what prompted this post): I was drafting an affidavit for a lawsuit (not something I do every day!), and found myself explaining the "motivations" of a corporate entity involved in a transaction.

And the corporation doesn't have to be humongous to throw its weight around. Startuppers believe this, and behave accordingly. For instance, founders, key hires and contractors will all, to a person, assign products of their intellectual labor to the venture, which, in turn, will own it, develop it, commercialize it, maybe eventually sell it, etc. And in these situations we are not buying into a partnership model, or a community property paradigm. No, we understand that, if the founders split or there is a " divorce," the company we created will keep right on going. Sometimes whether we like it or not!

Well, I know the Supreme Court is engaged in a different, somewhat rarefied discourse (Stanley Fish calls the opinions in the case "a virtual anthology of the limited repertoire of moves the saga [of First Amendment jurisprudence] affords"). But we live with our metaphors at all levels, don't we? Give them the force of law, and they sometimes even work their way into our culture and our everyday behavior.