Remember the old New Yorker cartoon from the early 1990s (you can see it here) that poked fun at the notion that so many people lie or fib about themselves on the Internet? Everyone got a big laugh out of it because it was not only funny but also dead-on accurate. Yes, lots of people DO lie about themselves on the Internet for all sorts of selfish reasons.

Fast-forward that thought to 2009, when Twitter is the rage and just about anyone can sign up and claim that they are just about anyone. Basketball great Shaquille O’Neal found this out the hard way when he tried to sign up for a Twitter account and found out that there were upwards of 30 other Twitter users claiming they were Shaq. He ended up signing up for a Twitter handle as The Real Shaq so he wouldn’t be confused with all those fake Shaqs who were Twittering up a storm.

That pretty much sums up the problem with Twitter and the Internet in general: Users can be totally anonymous, hide out and say whatever they want no matter how inflammatory, libelous or wrong.

I’ve always felt that the anonymous nature of the Internet was one of its great shortcomings, mainly because so many people hide behind the cloak of anonymity and write all sorts of vile things that they would probably never say to a person if they were forced to publicly stand behind them.

Well, leave it to Twitter to take a very small but meaningful step toward greater civility on the Internet. It’s going to “crack down on celebrity impersonators who post messages on the service as if they were the real thing, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, by introducing “a verification system to ensure that famous people are who they say they are.”

“Twitter has long been a playground for people pretending to be Hollywood stars or high-profile political figures,” the Chronicle noted. “It left other users confused about whether they were actually following updates by their favorite artists and athletes or just some 12-year-old with too much time on his hands.”

But Twitter got broadsided when St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony La Russa filed suit against the company last month in San Francisco Superior Court “for allowing an impostor to create an account in his name. (The account was subsequently deleted.)” the Chronicle reports. “Musician Kanye West has also complained. An account in the name of the Dalai Lama was suspended earlier this year.”

Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a blog post “that the company will start testing a verification service this summer for public officials, public agencies, famous artists, athletes and other well-known individuals at risk of impersonation. Their accounts will get a verification seal so users will be able to see that they are legitimate.”

Although this isn’t a big move by Twitter, it’s certainly a step in the right direction and it may be the beginning of reasonable standards that help clamp down on the Wild West nature of the Internet.

Plus—and here’s the workforce management component—it’s critically needed if Twitter is really going to be taken seriously as a recruiting and talent management tool. It is also a step toward eliminating one of the potential legal issues that make the use of Twitter something that can be dangerous if allowed to be used unchecked by workers on the job.

I said this back in February and it is as true now as it was then: No matter how cool the social networking tool, the rapid growth of technology brings along and equally rapid growth of technology-related legal issues. It’s a good idea for all managers to get out in front of them before they have a chance to overrun you.

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I’ve been in the workforce a long time, and one of my basic “rules” is that whenever I hear someone trying to make a case for a merger or deal predicated on all the wonderful “synergies” it will bring, well, that just tells me to run and get as far away from it as quickly as possible.

Sound extreme? Maybe, but in my experience, deals that are predicated on the great synergies they bring are almost always doomed to fail. That’s because the benefits of the synergies are wildly exaggerated and overstated (especially the so-called cost savings) in order to sell the deal, then grossly under-realized later after the dust from the actual merger has settled.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: the just-unwound merger between Time Warner and AOL. Not only was it terrible financially— “valued at $166 billion when the self-styled ‘deal of the century’ between America Online and Time Warner was announced on January 10, 2000, an AOL-containing Time Warner today commands a market capitalization of $28 billion … an 83 percent loss in market value,” according to TheDeal.com—but it was also a horrible cultural fit, bringing together an overhyped and overvalued new-media company with a solid and sober old-media giant.

How did it work out? Well, the overhyped new-media company tried to cram its culture and coolness down the throat of the stodgy old-media giant, and the results were predictably bad.

“Although the partnership between Time Warner and AOL was once pitched as a way to advantageously meld old media with new,” The Washington Post notes, “the deal has been regarded in recent years as one of the largest blunders in corporate history. None of the supposed synergies of the expensive union between the two ever paid off, and in recent years AOL’s flagging fortunes have increasingly cut into its parent company’s profit.”

Time Warner brought a ton of great brands to this deal—Warner Bros. Entertainment (including Warner Bros. Pictures), Turner Broadcasting (which includes CNN, TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies), HBO and magazine publisher Time Inc. (Time, People, Fortune, In Style, and Sports Illustrated magazines).

American Online brought its Internet service provider business that claimed as many as 34 million subscribers at its peak, according to PC World, “but it lacked the infrastructure and management savvy to transition from dial up to broadband, and its ISP business remained stuck in the ’90s. … While AOL remains a major Internet service provider with about 6.3 million subscribers, it has been letting that business waste away for years. … Today it’s [primary] income source is its declining online advertising generated by its eclectic mix of content sites, including the AOL.com portal, gossip site TMZ.com, and MapQuest. There’s a business model there, certainly, but AOL is small potatoes compared to competitors Google, Yahoo and Microsoft—not the Internet behemoth Time Warner wants it to be.”

In fact, the cool new-media company ended up being a gigantic albatross around the neck of Time Warner, pulling down the value of the combined company. And those great synergies that everyone touted when the merger was announced back in January 2000? Well, they ended up being as overhyped as AOL’s pre-merger stock price.

The New York Times points out: “The [Time Warner-AOL] merger was fed by heady ideas that did not quite pan out—that big online audiences would necessarily yield big profits, and that there were profound synergies to be had by owning different media.”

Synergies in business always sound great, but they should simply be regarded as a nice bonus if they actually work out and not the main reason for making the deal in the first place. In other words, the concept of synergy is more myth than anything else. In fact, if you are basing your deal on the synergies you’ll see, well, my guess is that you don’t have much of a deal to begin with. Just ask Time Warner.

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There are a lot of people who would consider Google to be a pretty smart company, but that doesn’t mean it’s immune from doing some pretty dumb things.

Here’s the latest example: “Concerned a brain drain could hurt its long-term ability to compete, Google is tackling the problem with its typical tool: an algorithm,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

“The Internet search giant recently began crunching data from employee reviews and promotion and pay histories in a mathematical formula Google says can identify which of its 20,000 employees are most likely to quit.”

So, what’s wrong with a tech company using its technological know-how to help solve a people management issue? Nothing really, as long as you don’t go overboard with the use of the mathematical formula. And that’s where I take issue with this Google-like notion that technology is always the best way to solve every problem.

As the Journal points out, “The move is one of a series Google has made to prevent its most promising engineers, designers and sales executives from leaving at a time when its once-powerful draws—a startup atmosphere and soaring stock price—have been diluted by its growing size … Google’s algorithm helps the company ‘get inside people’s heads even before they know they might leave,’ said Laszlo Bock, who runs human resources for the company.”

When I read things like that, it makes me wonder: Is Google trying to solve a technical problem or a human resources issue? The notion that you can somehow get “inside people’s heads” before they even know what they are going to do is both frightening and disturbing, and would seem to have more long-term potential to drive people away than to help keep them in the Google fold.

It’s also part of the Google pattern to rely more on technology than people. For instance, when Google News was launched, the company went out of its way to dismiss the value of human editors (full disclosure: I’m one of these guys) in the news selection process.

“Our headlines are selected entirely by computer algorithms,” Google says. “Google News has no human editors selecting stories or deciding which ones deserve top placement. This is very much in the tradition of Google Web Search, which relies on the collective judgment of online publishers to determine which sites offer the most valuable and relevant information. Similarly, Google News relies on the collective judgment of online news organizations to determine which stories are most deserving of prominence on the News homepage.”

Pardon me if I’m bothered by the notion of taking people—and their experience, perspective and judgment—out of the equation, yet that seems to be Google’s response to all too many workplace issues.

And, all the algorithms in the world won’t solve this problem that is also noted by the Journal: “Current and former Googlers said the company is losing talent because some employees feel they can’t make the same impact as the company matures. Several said Google provides little formal career planning, and some found the company’s human resources programs too impersonal. ‘They need to come up with ways to keep people engaged,’ said Valerie Frederickson, a Silicon Valley personnel consultant who has worked with former Google employees. ‘If Google was doing this enough, they wouldn’t be losing all these people.’ ”

Blogger Scott Jagow notes that “Google has surveyed employees in the past and when I Googled, I found why Google employees quit, a collection of testimonials from current and former Googlers. They complained about things people at most big companies complain about—the hiring process, the management, the bureaucracy, the small kitchen.”

Yes, Google has some of the same growing-pain issues with people that so many other organizations like them have had before. The company has gone overboard to try to supply the little things to keep workers happy, but in the long run, good workforce management is about more than cutting-edge benefits and a cool place to work.

It’s about doing meaningful work that matters and that you are appreciated for. It’s about working with and for people who care as much as you do, and feeling like you are a key part of something a lot bigger than yourself.

Somehow, I don’t think this new Google algorithm is going to be able to get at all of that, and it is foolish to think it can. Technology isn’t the answer to every question, no matter what the big brains at Google may think, and sometimes, you need to apply smart people and experience to a problem instead of the notion that higher math and a formulaic approach is all you need to get the job done.

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Anyone who reads this blog knows that I use Twitter, the social networking tool that allows users to communicate with one another in real time in bursts no longer than 140 characters long. I got hooked on Twitter by Workforce Management contributing editor and mega-blogger Kris Dunn, a Gen Xer, social networking hound and early technology adopter if there ever was one.

Twitter was designed to allow users to quickly update friends and colleagues on what they were doing, but it has turned into much more than that.

New York Times technology columnist David Pogue writes that “it’s like a cross between a blog and a chat room,” and that’s a pretty good description, but fails to really capture the wild variety of messages and information that are available there.

Rather than just communicating about the mundane matters of life to your family and friends, Twitter is also a tool to blast out news and information to anyone who has chosen to “follow” you and get the “tweets” that you send out. Although many people use Twitter to chatter and comment on just about anything that tickles their fancy, I use it primarily to alert my 400 or so Twitter “followers” that I have a new column or blog post available here at Workforce.com.

Everyone uses Twitter differently, but clearly, it’s been around long enough (since March 2006) that it has grown from a novel social networking tool into something else. Twitter has now become a potential workforce legal threat and a full-fledged HR issue.

How do I know this? Well, I just got an e-mail newsletter from the California Employer Advisor that discussed the issue of possible “Twitter Trouble” if you have employees who use it while on the job. Some of the potential issues that arise from employee tweets delineated by the advisor are:

• If an employee’s communications run through an employer’s servers, there’s the potential that network security can be compromised.
• Employers have no way of monitoring whether or not employees are disclosing confidential information or trade secrets in their Twitter communications.
• Like all electronic communications, information that is twittered during the course of business may be binding on employers, who often have no way of maintaining records of the communications, which are equally subject to subpoenas as other records.
• As short communications that are often made on the spur of the moment, tweets are vulnerable to misunderstandings, and can result in the exercise of poor judgment since employees may not think before they twitter.
• Like other forms of electronic communication, tweets can be used to make harassing or discriminatory statements for which employers may be held liable.
• When employees are twittering, they’re not working.

I don’t consider Twitter to be a huge workforce issue, but it’s clear from this legal newsletter that somebody does. And that brings up a point for every manager to remember: No matter how cool the social networking tool, the rapid growth of technology brings along an equally rapid growth of technology-related legal issues. It’s a good idea to get out in front of them before they have a chance to overrun you.

Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.

Back in 2006, we published a Workforce Management article that squarely focused on the job-related perils of social networking. “Web sites such as MySpace.com and Facebook can contain details about candidates that make employers think twice about hiring them,” staff writer Ed Frauenheim wrote. “The Web pages people create there sometimes include racy photos and videos, images of drinking or other compromising information.”

I’ve always been worried about having too much personal information online. Although I use LinkedIn—and that’s probably due to my age —I’m not into some of the larger social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook. And as beneficial as I find LinkedIn, I also know I need to be careful about how much detail about myself I want on the Internet for everyone to see.

You may not worry about such things, or you may share my concerns, but either way, a new nationwide survey of employers by CareerBuilder.com should make you think again about the uses of social networking. According to the survey, 22 percent of hiring managers are using social networking sites to research job candidates, up from 11 percent in 2006. In addition, 9 percent of hiring professionals say that although they aren’t currently using social networking sites to screen employees, they plan to start doing so. In other words, almost a third of recruiting and staffing professionals are using or plan to use social networking sites to check up on potential hires.

And, there’s more to the CareerBuilder survey that hiring managers revealed:

• Some 40 percent of candidates posted inappropriate or provocative information about themselves on their social networking site.
• Nearly 30 percent revealed they had poor communication skills.
• Some 28 percent bad-mouthed their previous company or a fellow employee, while 27 percent lied about their qualifications.
• About 20 percent shared confidential information from a previous employer or linked themselves to criminal behavior.

That’s the bad news, but there are some positives that hiring managers reported as well:

• Nearly 50 percent found that a candidate’s background supported their qualifications for the job.
• Forty percent said that the candidate was a good fit for the company’s culture.
• Some 36 percent said that a candidate’s site presented a professional image.
• Twenty-four percent said the candidate’s profile was creative.

This is probably not terribly surprising to anyone, but it does say that the use of social networking sites by recruiting and hiring managers to check out candidates continues to grow and will likely become just as much of a recruiting standard as filling out a job application or checking references (I’ll save for another blog posting my comments on the EEOC lawsuits that are probably brewing out there over the use of social networking).

Yes, there are pluses to social networking, but also some perils for job seekers. And, it goes back to something I used to tell first-time computer users years ago: Always be careful what you write and post online, because no matter what it is, the last person you want to see it is likely to find it at the most inopportune time.