Something to keep an eye on:

Lawmakers voted Tuesday to establish rules for candidates using Facebook, Twitter and other social networking websites, making Maryland one of the first states in the nation to regulate the increasingly popular means of campaigning.

Starting two weeks from now, candidates must begin including an authority line — a declaration of approval that lists their campaign treasurer — on the social networking sites run by their campaigns.

The more than 700 people who have filed to run for statewide office, as well as hundreds of candidates for local posts, will soon receive information in the mail explaining the new social media policies, elections officials said.

Idealware has just released a nonprofit social media decision guide, which includes

# What social media is, and why it might be useful for you
# How your goals, audiences, and metrics should drive the decision making process
# Specific information on the tangible value nonprofits have seen in using Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Photo Sharing Sites, Video Sharing Sites, and more.
# Choosing an effective social media mix
# Integrating all your communications
# A workbook that helps you walk through all of this for your own needs

I haven’t had a chance to look through it in detail, but it seems like a useful resource.

The full guide can be downloaded here (PDF).

On Twitter you may have seen people writing tweets that include either ‘RT’ or ‘MT.’ But the site doesn’t offer any  explanation of what either of these abbreviations stands for.

Many people are familiar with RT, which stands for ReTweet. If you want to forward a tweet that someone else sent, simply copy the tweet, click the reply button, paste the tweet after the person’s name and add an ‘RT’ at the beginning. This lets your followers know that you are ReTweeting someone else’s Tweet.

If you are like me, you’ve been seeing a lot of tweets in recent weeks that include ‘MT.’ MT stands for modified Tweet. You can use this the same way as a ReTweet if you’d like to forward someone else’s tweet with a modification.

Are there other abbreviations you’ve seen lately on Twitter? Let us know in the comments.

If Twitter wants businesses and nonprofits to rely on it as a communications medium, it is going to have to seriously minimize downtime.

A sneak peek at the next generation of Twitter tools.

Twitter now allows users to tag tweets with a specific geographical location. I’ll be curious to see how nonprofits hosting local or distributed events are able to take advantage of this.

What else is going on?

Good to keep in mind:

The AP Stylebook has released its new social media guidelines, including the official change from “Web site” to “website” (a move first reported back in April) and 41 other definitions, use cases and rules that journalists should follow.

Among the more interesting changes –- at least from a grammar and style standpoint –- are separating out “smart phone” as two words, hyphenating “e-reader,” and allowing fan, friend and follow to be used both as nouns and verbs.

The full stylebook is available on AP’s website.

This is a very smart move on Facebook’s part, given all of the recent complaints about privacy concerns:

Since then, you have sent us lots of feedback. We’ve listened carefully in order to figure out the best next steps. We recognize that we made a lot of changes, so we really wanted to take the time to understand your feedback and make sure we address your concerns.

The number one thing we’ve heard is that there just needs to be a simpler way to control your information. We’ve always offered a lot of controls, but if you find them too hard to use then you won’t feel like you have control. Unless you feel in control, then you won’t be comfortable sharing and our service will be less useful for you. We agree we need to improve this.

Today we’re starting to roll out some changes that will make all of these controls a lot simpler. We’ve focused on three things: a single control for your content, more powerful controls for your basic information and an easy control to turn off all applications.

Interesting:

E-mail marketing giant Constant Contact has acquired NutshellMail, a service that lets businesses track and post updates to social media sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn via e-mail.

The deal moves Constant Contact –- which went public back in 2007 — into the world of social media marketing. The company has 350,000 business customers for its e-mail marketing service, so the idea is to now become their provider of social media tools as well.

In a statement, Constant Contact’s CEO Gail Goodman said: “Small businesses clearly have the interest and desire to make the most of social media marketing. We want to make sure we provide the tools and the know-how for them to easily add social media to their marketing efforts.”

I’ll be looking forward to seeing how they integrate the services.

This is something to keep an eye on:

Facebook, the ever-expanding social networking site, delights millions of users with its innovative ways to stay in touch. At the same time, the six-year-old online phenomenon continually tests their tolerance for sacrificing privacy. Now it has provoked a new skirmish—this time with members of the U.S. Congress. On May 12 aides to Senator Charles Schumer (D—N.Y.) met in Washington with Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s public relations and policy chief, to discuss concerns about the company’s privacy policies. Schumer has had talks with colleagues about holding congressional hearings, according to a person familiar with the proceedings.

Senator Mark Begich (D—Alaska) says he’s worried about new data-gathering capabilities Facebook has introduced and what he sees as the Web company’s arrogance in brushing off questions about its practices. The site has launched a feature that builds restaurant guides and music playlists derived from personal information supplied by users and their Facebook friends. Begich, Schumer, and two colleagues—Al Franken (D—Minn.), and Michael Bennet (D—Colo.)—wrote a letter dated Apr. 27 to Facebook founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg taking him to task over how this commercially valuable information is being shared with other Web sites and marketers, sometimes without users’ consent. In early May, the Alaska lawmaker sent aides to meet with Facebook in D.C. So far, Begich says, nothing has changed. Facebook’s inaction, he says, “tells me that we need to elevate this so they understand how important it is.”

This is an exciting development:

Here at Twitter Media, we want to experiment in exactly the same way we’re encouraging you to experiment. We want to implement the things we’re recommending that you implement. And we want to share tools that we develop—even when they’re quite simple.

So, we decided to take the janky script we’ve been using to generate static HTML tweets for posts (like the one you see here), polish it up a bit, and make it public. And if tweets really are the new quotes, this should come in handy: Blackbird Pie.

The origin of the script is both self- and user-centered. Mostly, we just think it’s a pain to take screen grabs of tweets. But of course we also think it’s a much better user experience to have @-mentions, hashtags and the account itself all linked and clickable.

We’ve only used this on Twitter Media, so we’d love to hear how it works—or doesn’t—on other platforms, and in the context of other designs. Try it out; bookmark it. And of course, hit us up at @twittermedia if you have any suggestions or run into any bugs.

More and more media outlets have begun pulling quotes from Twitter. This new functionality is likely to accelerate that trend.

It should be interesting to see how this plays out:

Competition begins this week in the House Republican Caucus’ “New Media Challenge,” a six-week contest modeled after the NCAA’s March Madness basketball tournament.Led by Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-Wash.), vice chair of the group, the competition calls on select members to expand their presence on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube ahead of this year’s tough 2010 midterm elections.

Of particular interest, the piece notes that House Republicans as a caucus have drastically increased their new media presence in the past year:

The congresswoman’s staff stressed that 79 percent of its members are already on Facebook, 89 percent of them are currently using YouTube and 64 percent have taken to Twitter. Those numbers are notably up from January 2009, they said, when just 37 percent of House GOP members were on Facebook, slightly more than half were on YouTube and just over one-quarter were on Twitter.