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Illinois employers will not be able to ask employees or prospective employees for social networking user names and passwords under a new law signed by Gov. Pat Quinn Tuesday.

"Employers certainly aren't allowed to ask for the keys to an employee's home to nose around there, and I believe that same expectation of personal privacy and personal space should be extended to a social networking account," said Senate Minority Leader Christine Radogno (R-Lemont), who sponsored the legislation in the state senate.

House Bill 3782 makes it unlawful for an employer to demand access to an employee or prospective employee's social networking accounts. The law does, however, allow employers to monitor activity on work computers and allows employers to use information shared publicly on social networking sites.

It also specifically excludes email in its definition of social networking websites.

"Members of the workforce should not be punished for information their employers don't legally have the right to have,"Quinn said in a release. "As use of social media continues to expand, this new law will protect workers and their right to personal privacy."

The law is set to take effect Jan. 1.

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Law Puts Employers on "Limited Profile"

At a tense time for the newly public company, three top executives announce they are departing from the social-networking giant, all in one day.

It was a three-in-one blow today for Facebook execs announcing their departure from the company.

All Things Digital reports that Director of Platform Partnerships Ethan Beard first said he was planning to leave the company; then, Platform Marketing Director Katie Mitic said she had plans to leave too. And finally, Facebook's Mobile Platform Marketing Manager Jonathan Matus also announced his departure.

All three employees made the announcements on their Facebook timelines and said that they've had good experiences working at the social network. Beard wrote, "I've had the pleasure of helping build an ecosystem of incredible developers from innovative startups and established companies."

Ethan Beard

With four years under his belt at the company, Beard was in charge of developing partnerships with many of the app makers that work with Facebook, according to AllThingsD. Mitic and Matus were also on the marketing side of the platform.

AllThingsD points out that investors have worried that Facebook would face a brain drain when it went public and if this is indeed the beginning, it could lead to "what all growing companies dread -- a stall in company innovation and proper leadership."

None of the three execs announced successors to their posts or specified what exactly they plan to do once they leave the social network.

CNET contacted Facebook for comment. We'll update the story when we get more information.

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Three Facebook execs bow out of the social network

Social media and social networking for internal collaboration and knowledge sharing can raise the productivity of some employees by up to 25 per cent according to a McKinsey report released last month.

However, internal deployment of social technologies by businesses often involves a spike in engagement followed by a drop-off in participation as the novelty wears off, according to McKinsey. This can be a product of failing to integrate social technologies into work processes and a lack of attention to changing workforce culture to maintain internal social networking adoption rates.

To promote the kind of knowledge sharing that will actually increase productivity requires developing users as ongoing participants, not merely passive consumers. Its tackling this problem that led to the development of Barter: A social networking platform created at MITs Media Lab.

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All social media services, especially knowledge-related platforms that rely on users' participation, sharing, and contribution all face the challenge of building incentives for users, says Dawei Shen, the MIT PhD candidate who developed the platform.

One problem faced by organisations with a fixed employee incentive for contributing knowledge, for example $100 per article, is it leads to an oversupply of garbage information, and undersupply of really valuable information, Shen says. A market is a term that's the opposite let the market decide how to allocate resources and what knowledge should be built, and how it should be priced.

Using Barter, people buy and sell ideas, documents, questions and answers using virtual points, and virtual currency in a decentralised way. But building a knowledge market has its own set of problems owing to the nature of knowledge products, Shen says. Knowledge products are peculiar non-rivalrous, non-excludable, and repetition cost is zero. Information asymmetry is severe, and knowledge has spillover effects that are not captured by transactions. My research is to devise mechanism that addresses these problems.

We are applying innovative market mechanisms and established economic theories and practice to the domain of social collaboration/knowledge management software, especially trying to optimise incentive design, he says.

In short, we are building a knowledge economy with currency, market dynamics, and sophisticated economic tools optimising both social and material incentives, instead of simply building another social media website.

The platform consists of three components: Knowledge currency, knowledge markets, and economic policies, which consist of monetary policies and fiscal policies.

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What's your idea worth? Building a social knowledge market with Barter

GoMad with networking

Dhanusha Gokulan / 1 August 2012

DUBAI - For the techno-savvy who are constantly online and addicted to tweets, multiple accounts on social networking websites is not unusual. Gen Y keeps one account for friends and family and the others for professional contacts.

Soon theres the hassle of having multiple browsers, separate profiles and tighter security settings to manage the 5,000-odd friends list.

Adding to the burgeoning list of upcoming social networking websites, GoMadinc.com promises to be a one-stop shop for both your professional and personal networking needs. Founder and CEO of GoMad Ideas Shabbir Adamji launched the spunky new social/ professional networking web portal amidst tight competition and failing IPO of social networking giant Facebook in Dubai on August 1. Adamji and his team of 30 employees including nine webpage designers developed the website in their office in Jumeirah Beach Residence.

The planning for the website began in February. Most of the designing and coding was done from March, said Adamji. Why not Dubai, asked Adamji, I love the city. It has close to 190 nationalities living together amicably, he added. Understanding that social networking works best through word of mouth, Indian-born Adamji, who has been in the UAE for the last ten years, predicts that the website will do well.

We have an achievable target of 10 million users in one year, said Adamji. It started with the need to do something about changing the way people use the Internet. We have a population of seven billion people of which two billion are active users. Yet people are not able to benefit from the Internet despite them spending a lot of time on social media, he said.

People havent been able to exploit the power of the Internet. Adding value to the time spent online and seeing a direct benefit has not happened, added Adamji. What makes GoMad different? Its a one of its kind multifunctional portal.

Primarily being a social media platform, GoMad incorporates standard functions of current social media applications.

Yes, you can chat, update your status and upload albums. Yet, contacts on your professional network will not know what you are telling your peers on the social platform. Set in a black background, which according to the website developers is soothing to the eyes, the portal lets you upload separate content for both your social and professional avatars. People can have multiple avatars on the same account which makes things much easier. GoMad becomes a one stop for all your networking needs, Adamji said.

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GoMad with networking

HUNTSVILLE, AL (WAFF) -

It's a part of Facebook, a listing that shows your marital status. Imagine seeing someone's status as sex offender. One state is about to put that law into effect. Louisiana will require sex offenders to document their status on social networking sites starting August 1st.

The state of Louisiana is trying to build on their existing sex offender registration laws by taking a new law to the World Wide Web. The law requires sex offenders and child predators to put their criminal status on their Facebook or other social networking page. Abuse survivor Allison Black Cornelius said that's information that children and parents need to know.

"I could absolutely see a benefit to it having to be mentioned on a Facebook page or any type of social media. I could see where that would make sense," Cornelius said. "I would want that on a social media site because social media is a requirement tool, but it seems to me that bad guys are so good at marketing and they are so good at reaching our kids, the good guys need to get that good. Instead of us figuring out how to shut them down, why don't the good guys start figuring out how to do as good a job?"

So, what would it take for a law like that to come to Alabama? According to the Alabama Department of Public Safety's web site, there are more than 11 thousand sex offenders in their registry. State house representative Dan Williams says if a bill like that were to be drawn up, it would probably pass.

"I do think it's probably a good idea to keep the child molesters and the people who have been convicted of those types of crimes from using the social networks," Williams said. "I think a lot of people we found out are using those particularly for that; pornography and child pornography. I would be all for something like that."

Athens Police Chief Floyd Johnson said knowing your new friend's criminal past could help them keep track of offenders.

"I think it's important that parents watch what their children are doing online and if the parents are able to see they are communicating with a sex offender, I think it would be to the benefit of the parent and the child and they could tell law enforcement," Johnson said.

Louisiana's law states that sex offenders and child predators "shall include in his profile for the networking web site an indication that he is a sex offender or child predator and shall include notice of the crime for which he was convicted, the jurisdiction of the conviction, a description of his physical characteristics and his residential address."

Alabama lawmakers said a similar bill could find its way to our states legislature in no time.

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Social networking sex offenders