Zuckerberg Changes Recruiting

Derek Dooley's unfortunate mispost on Facebook with a recruit comes to light today in the Knoxville Sentinel. Costly error as he put a comment on the wall rather than a personal message. It is understandable -- anyone using the Facebook app on iPhone knows those buttons are right next to each other -- but UT does the right thing, self-reports and it is coming to light now I suspect in a semi-annual FOI sweep by the local newspaper.

Key passage in the newspaper's on-line report:

According to the report, which was filed Aug. 11 and drafted by associate athletic director for compliance Brad Bertani, Dooley had been “permissibly communicating” with O’Leary through the e-mail function on Facebook. When he received an e-mail from O’Leary on June 3, Dooley, using a Motorola Droid, mistakenly sent his message to O’Leary’s wall, which, depending on how O’Leary configured his privacy settings, could be viewed by all 500 million Facebook members.

Let me reach back to something I saw last month and forgot until future NCAA Convention panel chair Ronnie Ramos shared a message with me today.

Mark Zuckerberg is about to change the NCAA's rules on recruiting.

Facebook Messages is rolling out over the next few weeks/months, and when it is done, the ability for the NCAA to say that a coach sent an impermissible text message to a recruit when they could have/should have sent an email disappears. Why? Because The Social Network is going to bring three separate bit buckets into one Message stew.

To quote from our Blue Overlord's website, Message provides:

Integrated communication: No matter what you’re using to communicate (Facebook, mobile or email), your conversation streams quickly and seamlessly into one place.


Let me put a little compliance nightmare into this:

Getting and responding to messages from your phone:
Once you turn on text messaging, friends can check the "Send to Phone" option when they send you messages. If a friend checks this box, you’ll receive a text that contains the message. Simply reply to the text from your phone, and your friend will receive your reply as a Facebook message. It will also be logged in the ongoing conversation with your friend, which you can view from your Messages home page.


So a coach sends a PM that becomes a text, and it was because the end user turned it into a text.

Now, the NCAA staff is on top of this shift, and a great post about it a couple of weeks ago by John Infante on the organization's own Bylaw Blog makes it clear they understand. Kudos here for the NCAA as they are often dinged for "not getting" the on-line world or making rules that become unenforceable. John gets it, and his key passage reinforces my own thought:

It may seem like tortured logic to say that Twitter direct messages were like email, and thus permissible to prospects who had started their junior year. It might make you scratch your head further to learn that if the prospect received updates of those messages via text messaging, they suddenly became impermissible.

Even if it was a fiction, that fiction was still hanging on. Until Facebook created a system that might turn a text message into an email. Or turn an email into an instant message. Or where an email might trigger a “push notification,” a potential intrusion into a prospect’s life that the rules don’t even consider. All in a system that might change the nature of a message not just based on a preference selected by a user, but even by whether the user is logged into a website or not.

When texts were ruled out, the two motivating reasons were mounting cell phone bills for recruits (and, let's be honest, coaches too) getting texts from would-be suitors AND the passionate plea of the then head of the NCAA's Student-Athlete Advisory Committee that these texts were a serious annoyance into the daily life of prospects. Toss in a couple of anecdotal horror stories of recruits getting a text in the middle of a test on a school day, and the ban is on.

For those outside the college world, pretty elaborate systems are in place to track and monitor coaches' phone calls and text messages for these reasons. Not to bore, but only so many calls at certain times a year and no texting. Email, however, is unlimited (well, sort of again), and private messaging to Facebook and other areas was considered email (unless, like Coach Dooley, it accidentally went Wall rather than PM).

I'm guessing that we'll see this as a top at the NCAA Convention in January, or a staff interpretation shortly after once Message gets a wider adoption.

If you want to read more from Facebook on the concept, the FAQ is here.