Apple’s decision to sign on to Fair Labor is potentially of enormous significance both for the U.S. tech sector – it is hard to see anyone not following suit – and for the Chinese labor force. Having established a lean, highly responsive, and quality-assured supply chain, now is indeed the time to address fundamental issues of social responsibility – which will otherwise return to haunt the company, not least given the demographics of its users.

I discuss this at more length in my latest column for the U.S. Chamber BCLC website.

Apple admits it has a human rights problem – Asia – World – The Independent.

The tweetstream has been flowing today with quite  a variety of responses to the announcement on Twitter’s blog that they now have the capacity to take down tweets within individual countries while leaving them accessible to everyone else. That seems to be the key statement.

Some have welcomed this is a reasonable response to legal strictures (they give the fact that several European nations prohibit pro-Nazi sympathies in law as a relatively benign example) that limits the censorship damage while respecting national rules. Others have seen it as the development of a dictator-friendly app which opens the door to lock-downs when governments dislike protester use of the medium. Quite apart from Arab and other anti-freedom governments, the London riots provoked a big outcry against social media use with demands that Twitter be shut down or censored.

An emerging issue is that with Twitter’s success, staff are being located in various parts of the world. So governments have leverage they did not have before.

Quick responses, assuming I have understood what’s afoot:

1. The rollout was incompetent, especially if the Twitter spin (extreme cases, one by one, after the event – no machine exclusion of keywords, for example) is honest. Both in respect of concerns tweeps have ventilated, but to my mind much more important the signal being sent to governments.

2. We may not doubt that it has already been seen as a come-on in the chancellories of repressive regimes everywhere and also of rather freer but touchy jurisdictions like the UK. Overweening “superinjunctions” issued by the UK High Court to protect celebrity anonymity have been outed on Twitter. Perhaps no more.

3. Twitter’s insistence that their country kill switch is, as it were, a sniper’s rifle, needs to be put to the test. if the High Command is to retain our confidence. Here’s my proposal: Let them issue a fuller, more formal statement with examples, and let them appoint an independent panel who will take responsibility for approving the sniper’s targets in line with those principles.

4. I suspect this country-specific technology will weaken Twitter’s claim to be offering a conduit to the opinions, good and and bad, of tweeps, and move it further toward taking a curation role in the dissemination process. This will weaken its defenses in law as well as public perception. Indeed, perhaps it already has.

Do we agree?

http://t.co/OnhmJwHB

Part of the perennial problem with our assessing both individual digital tools like email and the huge digital brands that have rapidly developed is our being schooled in a way of thinking in which Situation A is replaced, traumatically but clearly, by Situation B. The idea that Situation B is one in which there is no Situation B, but in which rapid evolutionary developments spin off every which way, constantly coalescing and then shape-shifting, is beyond the ken of mere mortals except when we are in the zone to have that particular convo. Am I not right?

Seems to me that is what Brits, of whom I used to be one, call a statement of the bleedin’ obvious – or, to be more elegant, it is close to being self-evident. Yet ignoring it has led to everything from ridiculous IPO over-valuations to cringingly embarrassing repudiations of Twitter by media executives to the depressing fact that political leaders see the future entirely in terms of the past.

So, to email: no question, the idea that we type our letters and send them electronically instead of by fax (some of us are old enough to remember how hot that was!) or postal service is starting to wither. Not because there is another way to send mail than the e-way, but because letters are now being innovated. That’s what’s really interesting here, and I am not sure if I have seen anyone point it is out in quite these terms. Fax and then email became successive vehicles for the old-style business letter (and its personal equivalents, though never so comfortably in that department). Now the “letter” and the office memo and the phone call – the three-legged stool of business communication – are slipping and sliding around into our new forms from texts to Facebook to Twitter (I’m waiting for DM to to get more functional, in which case it could go BIG) and the gazillion other options. We have begun to re-think the need for one-size-fits-all set-piece documents (that is, “letters”); and the innovation of the letter is what we are now discussing.

Email, seen as a cheap and easy fax machine, is a transitional form. Into what? There will not be any one standard successor. Since even the most informal communications tend to be recorded, for better and often for worse, a text or DM will serve as well once we are prepared to recognize that.

Craig is certainly right that there will be no “new” Facebook. My sense is that Facebook (and probably Google) will soon be seen as the last of the behemoth brands in areas that are rapidly becoming utilities and in which interoperability and generic alternatives will very soon destroy the possibility of economic profit (sorry, IPOland). We shall have a thousand ways into “the social network,” paths will all cross, and in ways we have yet to get our heads around communication will actually get simpler and ever more intuitive. This will happen in a lot less than than many expect.

Is email going out with 2011? | craigconnects.