Today, I made my first journey to the Googleplex (Google's headquarters in Mountain View, CA). I've read about it as much as the next person who covers tech for a living, but I have to say: It was even more impressive in real life.

Sure, I understand the point of it is to surround employees with as many amenities as possible so they won't ever have to leave (and presumably can work all the time), but something about it is like Disneyland for geeks.

Everywhere you turn: What's that? Oh a dinosaur skeleton. What's that? Oh a spaceship. What's that? Oh a giant solar panel array. Swimming pools. Giant white boards. Volleyball courts. Barber shops. Massage parlors. Free food galore. They had me at free $4 protein shakes.

I'm sure working there can get old just like everywhere else, and perhaps I'm too easily amused, but to me the Googleplex seemed awfully conducive to imaginative thinking. It just had a good atmosphere - especially for a place of work. Actually it reminded me a lot of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. I want to go back.

Tomorrow I'll be at Facebook, where many Googlers are leaving to go to.

First The Wall Street Journal cozied up to Digg, now they're cozying up to Facebook. The newspaper's website has just launched a new feature in conjunction with Loomia that will allow you to easily see what stories are popular with your Facebook friends and networks - all without leaving the story you are reading.

This new 'Popular with My Facebook Friends & Networks' places a section on the right-hand sidebar of every story. You have to opt-in to the service to allow it to access your Facebook data and send information back, but once you do that you will see a list of stories populated based upon how many people you know have read them (and are also using this application).

Certainly there are other applications like this on Facebook, but this one is unique because it is not solely on Facebook and doesn't require that you go to the site at all to use it - Facebook in a sense just works as an information conduit back and forth to The Wall Street Journal.

Interestingly enough I had just written yesterday on VentureBeat about a very similar potential idea Digg could explore with their new membership in the DataPortability group. Seeing as The Wall Street Journal already has 'Digg This' button on everypage, perhaps they will also one day have a ''WSJ Stories Your Friends Dugg' sidebar section.

If you're willing to opt-in and install yet another Facebook Application, this Wall Street Journal one could be pretty useful. I expect to see a whole lot more of these social network elements on more traditional sites in the coming months - especially when OpenSocial hits.


[UPDATE]: Let's also note the connections here. Microsoft has an advertising deal with (and owns a small part of) Facebook, they also have an advertising deal with Digg, and as of yesterday they have an advertising deal with...The Wall Street Journal.

Are the digital media empires starting to form?

Though they haven't officially announced it yet, it looks like Facebook has implemented a new feature to cut down on some of the clutter that is quickly overtaking many profiles as Facebook apps grow in numbers - you can now have an 'extended profile' which really is just a hidden area of your profile only revealed when you click on the 'show more profile boxes' link at the bottom of a person's profile.

The process to select which of these areas you would like to show up in your normal profile and which you'd like in your extended profile is very simple - it's just a check box that lays out all of your current 'boxes' (areas that are movable on your profile). They even try to help you find the best ones to move to the extended area by suggesting which ones you keep at the bottom.

This is a good move by Facebook which was quickly becoming as cluttered in its profile areas as MySpace. Having a lot of apps can be nice for some, but having a way to organize them so as not to overtake your actual meaningful information is nicer.

Most other bloggers have put out their 2008 predictions already, but I wanted to wait until closer to the New Year to get every last drop out of 2007. I know people are probably pretty sick of predictions by now, but if you're interested, here are some of my thoughts as to what we'll see in 2008 - some outlandish, some safe bets:

1) Google Drive aka 'Gdrive' or 'Platypus' will be released
Seems pretty obvious given all the talk and confirmations in the past couple of months, but Garett at Googling Google isn't so confident in Google's ability to get it out the door, and seeing as this was also on my list last year, maybe it's not such a safe bet. Pricing could be a major issue - will the service be free for a certain amount of data? If so how much storage and bandwidth will be free? Will the rest be cheaper than similar services from the likes of Amazon (S3) and AOL (Xdrive)?

2) Microsoft and Google's next big battle will be over who gets the rights to purchase at least part of Yahoo
While many are still waiting for Yahoo to turn around, it seems to be increasingly questionable as to if they can. I don't think they'd want to sell completely but perhaps take an investment injection such as Apple did from Microsoft many years ago and Facebook did recently from Microsoft. If Google were to win this, look for Microsoft to push for more anti-trust hearings. If Microsoft wins, look for Google to buy a half-dozen other companies Microsoft wants but won't sell to MS.

3) Blu-ray will finally defeat HD-DVD thus ending the format wars towards the end of the year
While I am feeling more and more confident that Blu-ray will come out on top, I'm not entirely confident that it will be by the end of 2008. However if Blu-ray is able to woo Warner Brothers to their side exclusively, it will be all but over.

4) The Nintendo Wii will continue its dominance in videogame wars but Sony's PS3 will outsell Microsoft's Xbox 360 for the year
The Wii seems to be an unstoppable train at this point - and just imagine what will happen if they can drop the price below $200 this year (assuming they can finally meet demand). Sony meanwhile finally has a reasonable price and may soon get games that people, you know, actually want to play. Plus if Blu-ray is looking stronger that will really help (see #3).

5) Flickr will launch its video service - but it won't be meant to directly compete with YouTube
While this has been said to be coming for a while, I think the smart move by Flickr would be to make this service less about entertaining videos and stick with what Flickr does best, landscapes, home videos, etc.

6) Google's OpenSocial will fail to capture the excitement that Facebook's Platform did this year
While clearly Google is working to make 2008 a major year in terms of social networking for them, they have a few things up against them - notably how late they are to the game. Google, for whatever reason didn't have much of a social strategy for most of the year and now is stuck being forced to lay a "social-blanket" as it were over existing apps - and soon its OpenSocial partner's apps. This could turn out to be like painting an old brick wall - hard to get all the little spots. While I think Google absolutely needs to do this, it could be rough-going for a while - just as we saw with Google Reader.

7) Social Network Aggregation is going to be huge
As more and more social networks and services gain members, people are going to feel overwhelmed and need a solution to handle it all so as they don't have to go to 25 sites a day to get updates. Look for services like FriendFeed, Lijit, and even Facebook and Google to make major pushes in this arena in '08. Louis Gray has some more thoughts on services out there already working to pull together all your profiles.

8) Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull will be the biggest film of the year
It will edge out the new Narnia, the comic trio (Ironman, The Dark Knight, The Incredible Hulk), Wall-E, James Bond 22, Speed Racer, The Spiderwick Chronicles, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and Angels & Demons. Other hot films will be JJ Abrams' re-launching of Star Trek, Spike Jonze' Where the Wild Things Are, Hancock, Peter Jackson's take on The Lovely Bones, and Steve Carell as Maxwell Smart in Get Smart. A sleeper hit could very well be Doug Liman's Jumper, which has gotten quite a lot of buzz on the Internet. The biggest indie/cult hit should be Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind, which simply has one of the best plots that I've heard in a while. We'll also finally learn what the hell Cloverfield is all about - and it really won't be all that exciting.

9) Apple releases a new kind of mouse with multi-touch capabilities
We already know Apple is working on a ton of new products, many pertaining to mobile computing, but the desktop is still here to stay for a while, and the Mighty Mouse - in my opinion - still sucks. The new Apple desktop keyboards (which I just got) are very slick, they need a mouse to match it.

10) NBC goes back to iTunes
I've been saying this ever since they left, but I really believe that by the end of 2008 we will see NBC shows back on iTunes after both sides give a little. This is assuming the writer's strike is over by then.

11) Microsoft really starts hyping the idea of 'Windows 7' as Apple continues to grow more quickly and Vista continues to be an albatross
Vista usage will obviously continue to grow, but only because it is bundled with new PCs. They'll improve it slightly, but will not be able to shake its association with failure. Instead their tune will turn to the next OS and making it the best one based on "all they've learned" from Vista. Meanwhile people will continue to switch to the Mac platform whether it be via desktop, laptop, sub-laptop, or mobile device (iPhone, iTablet, etc...).

12) Microsoft will enter the mobile phone market
Lest there be a bandwagon they don't jump on.

13) Digg will finally be bought - by a major player
My bet is on either News Corp or Microsoft. And a stake in Revision3 will be part of the deal.

14) Blockbuster will make a last ditch effort to save itself via Movielink
Blockbuster will come out with some outrageous deal trying to save itself from the Netflix/iTunes rental onslaught. It will fail.

15) GPS will be all the rage in consumer goods
Cars, cellphones, cameras. Parents tracking kids. Boyfriends tracking girlfriends. Someone tracking all of us - but we'll call it something more friendly - 'geotagging'. Of course the iPhone will gain GPS as well.

16) Yahoo makes a bid to buy Twitter
Yahoo, needing some kind of good hype/momentum will attempt to buy Twitter.

17) The Beatles will FINALLY be on iTunes
The Long and Winding Road... There will be some kind of special Beatles iPod. Paul McCartney will speak to Steve Jobs via satellite feed to announce it at an Apple event. Ringo won't be invited.

Last year it was 7 predictions, this year 17. We'll see how I did in December 2008...

Facebook today rolled out one of its most significant features yet - 'Friend Lists'. Yes, it is now possible to organize your friends into different groups. This feature is great for easily messaging larger groups in Facebook, sending out invitations, and most significantly: filtering updates to only show to select groups.

Nick O'Neil of allfacebook calls this Facebook's "Killer Feature" - and it very well could be for those potential users - such as business users - who were wary of signing up for a network once dominated by college kids. Inside Facebook notes that this will also greatly help those users such as Mark Cuban who have reached their 5,000 friend limit give some structure to their massive friend lists.

When Facebook first pre-announced this feature in September, I, like most everyone thought it was a great idea for competing with the likes of LinkedIn. However I also assumed they would have set options such as a 'Work Contact', 'School Contacts', etc. The fact that you can completely customize these lists, making as many as you want and still use them to filter who sees what data is even better than I imagined it would be. I see myself being a lot less hesitant to not only update certain things on Facebook, but add certain contacts as well.

I used to be all for keeping my social networks separate by way of one account on Facebook and one on LinkedIn, but with 'Friend Lists' I'm not sure how necessary having both is anymore. It is after all easier to have one de-facto network with which to update and be updated from. If other users feel the same way, LinkedIn could start feeling some heat...

Forget Beacon, the biggest controversy over the past month on Facebook has been the removal/non-removal of 'Is' from the status updates. Well the black cloud that has consumed this world for far too long is finally passing, 'is' is gone from status updates.

There's no huge Zuckerberg Facebook Blog post, there is no fanfare, it is just gone. Or maybe I should say 'there no fanfare, it just gone'.

Facebook today made a huge announcement that they would have their own open application platform - putting it in direct competition with Google's OpenSocial. While there had been some speculation as to whether Facebook would eventually fall in line with seemingly just about everyone else and join OpenSocial, I noted in the beginning of November that an all-out Social Networking War was upon us between Facebook and Google - something which Mathew Ingram backs up today.

Bebo immediately signed on board with Facebook (even though they're already supposedly on board with OpenSocial as well) and Nick O'Neil wonders about the others in a very Magneto in X-Men 3 type way: "Who will you stand with?". Interestingly Yahoo! immediately jumped on to make applications for Bebo with this announcement - take from that what you will.

But I for one still see this as very much a proxy war to the larger Microsoft/Google War. Microsoft of course beat out Google to invest in Facebook in October, and at least part of that was likely due to the events we now see unfolding before us. Facebook had it's own advertising platform it wanted to launch - something which Microsoft was no doubt more receptive to than Google - and they had no intention of falling in line with a Google-run social networking toolkit when they had such a successful one of their own already.

Up until now in the Microsoft/Google war, things had largely gone Google's way as Microsoft continues to fumble its way toward competency in the online realm. This new Social Proxy War could have a much different outcome however with Facebook thus far in the much better position as Google struggles to get OpenSocial out the door.

Yes, Microsoft's stake in Facebook is relatively minor, but it's still a stake and it blocked Google from gaining access to the hottest social network in the world right now. The question may ultimately be: are you a Microsoft Man or a Google Guy?

The candidates have been released for Merriam-Webster's 2007 Word of the Year. On it you'll find such words as 'apathetic', 'charlatan', 'pretentious', 'subpoena', and....'facebook'?

While 'facebook' would seem to not even be a word but a brand name, Merriam-Webster does in fact have an entry for it:

facebook

(verb) : To get on a facebook website.

Did you facebook today?

Uh, do you know anyone who says that? Cause I don't. (To be fair, they also include I facebooked ________, which I have heard more times than I care to admit).

As this is a web vote is there any chance that anything but 'facebook' wins? The only other word I could see people voting for would be 'w00t' (yes, it's there too), but 'cruft' and 'babymoon' - that sounds like an Animal Crossing prize.


[UPDATE]: And in a shocking upset, 'w00t' beats out 'facebook' for 2007 word of the year! Down goes 'facebook', down goes 'facebook'!!

[via Valleywag]

As Louis Gray pointed out a couple of days ago, FriendFeed continues to improve their service. In the past few days they've rolled out, unannounced a better bundling package for feeds. For example if you you've shared 5 things on Google Reader recently, it used to shove them all together in a way that was hard to read beyond the first one - now they have made it simple to unbundle these items and locate individual elements. This is especially handy for a service like Digg where a person can easily digg a few dozen items in a matter of minutes.

As I noted in October, I really like FriendFeed and quite frankly I'm a little surprised that more of the "regulars", those tech users who seem to be on every service, either don't use it or don't talk about it often. Not that it really matters since you can create 'imaginary friends' and recreate them yourself provided you know what user name they use for sites - an ingenious feature I might add.

I also find FriendFeed to be my killer app for Facebook. Rather than having to install a dozen or so apps for all the various services I use, I simply have my FriendFeed app that displays all my updates to a dozen or so services in one window.

It's just a service that is great at what it does and doesn't try to do too much. Yet the service it does provide seems to be an ever more important one going forward as we're continually bombarded by new social networks and the like vying for our attention. I'd be surprised if FriendFeed doesn't catch on in 2008.

Leave me your email in the comments if you need an invite. If you already have the service, you can find my profile here.

Mike Arrington came across a new app on Facebook that has one purpose: to make a mockery of Facebook's Beacon project. The entire point of the app known as Bonfire is to fill in fake information about things you bought, things you like, things you did, at various retailers and companies. This information is than put in your feed and on your profile just as if it were from Beacon.

Right now my feed claims that I 'bought a pink shirt from H & M' (I did not, though I do own a pink shirt and wear it proudly). My second item claims I 'burned hamburgers at Sears Auto Center'. While that seems to make no sense, that is actually quite clear compared to some of the phrases you can make via Bonfire's drop-down menus.

Will this be banned by Facebook's TOS? Who knows, that would be pretty lame but I wouldn't put it past them as the sole purpose of this app is to make a mockery of Facebook's advertising platform and in the process make users wonder what is real and what is fake - it would be much better if they didn't even have the promotional line under your item asking other users to sign up. They also need more objects!

I'm off to go 'rise a hammer at Sbarro'. Viva la revolution!

Valleywag has the scoop (updated below) that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has apparently sold a small part of his very large stake in Facebook in return for $40 million in cold, hard cash. I would consider this the equivalent of a star college athlete buying insurance on their body against the millions of dollars they are going to make upon going pro - Zuckerberg of course stands to make billions of dollars upon Facebook going public (or being bought).

Zuckerberg now has almost $2 million dollars for every year he's been alive (23), a pretty solid deal - likely for both parties involved. Maybe that's is why he took so long to respond to the Beacon backlash - he was counting to 40 million.

[UPDATE]: Okay, looks like Valleywag was completely and utterly wrong. No cash-out, no $40 million, Owen Thomas was simply duped.

Amid all the hoopla yesterday with Mark Zuckerberg apologizing for trying to pull a fast one over 50 or so million people, Facebook apparently left a parting gift: the ability to read full messages and wall postings in your alert emails.

Mike Arrington is absolutely ecstatic ("Dear Facebook: Thank You. Thank You. Thank You.") by this small upgrade because it means you no longer have to take the time to actually log in to Facebook just to see what the message or post says.

Better yet might be if Facebook included a way to directly respond via email and have it go in the Facebook conversation thread or on that person's wall within Facebook (right now hitting reply to a message will allow you to respond directly to their email address only). This might be nice for mobile users without the luxury of using the iPhone's brilliant Facebook app.

At least Zuckerberg didn't include this as a post script on his apology letter. That would have just reeked of "yes, I'm sorry blah blah blah, but check this out - I know you guys wanted this, and I delivered!".

Seeing as the entirety of the blogosphere has chimed in on Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's apology posting on the Faceboook Blog already, let me just say a few thoughts.

First of all, as I noted last week, we've seen an eerily similar situation before from Facebook, though on a smaller scale will the news feeds - Mathew Ingram channels Yogi Berra, "It's like deja vu all over again" - and guess what the end result of that was? Facebook partially rolling back changes, creating new settings for others, and Zuckerberg apologizing. Sound familiar?

Zuckerberg doesn't mention that fiasco in his post, but you can bet he's aware of it - he's now had two fairly major PR screw-ups in about a year's time. Yet, it's smart for him not to mention it, no one wants to have to quote Britney Spears with "Oops, I did it AGAIN". But that's the thing, while many of us in the blogosphere remember that incident, many in the outside world either a) don't remember b) don't care enough to remember or c) never heard of it to begin with. I've hesitated to write a lot about this whole new situation because I know that a few months from now the same three things - no matter how wrong it is - are going to be in play again with the vast majority of Facebook users.

Here's a conversation I can imagine having:
Me: "Did you tell Facebook not to send out any of your 3rd party information?"
Friend: "No. What does that mean?"
Me: "Didn't you hear about how Facebook was tracking your 3rd party actions on Facebook? You should make sure they aren't right now."
Friend: "Hold on, I just want to see who wrote on my wall."

Like Valleywag, I too saw the 'Have you heard of Facebook Beacon' poll the other day in my feed. I of course voted 'Yes' (the only sponsored poll on Facebook I've ever voted in), but the results indicated that nearly 70% voted 'No'. While Valleywag thinks Facebook itself may have sponsored the poll - and I would agree with that - it really doesn't matter who did, it simply goes a long way in showing just how much trouble Facebook was looking at with this screwup. The answer: not too much.

Yes, the blogosphere is in a tizzy, and yes some advertisers are pulling out or debating pulling out of Beacon, but at the end of the day, the users will remain - and guess what, more will keep signing up. This in turn will bring the advertisers back, no matter how "betrayed" they feel - it's always about the bottom line. If the users are on Facebook, the advertisers will be on Facebook.

In the blogosphere I think we often play off each other and get ourselves all worked up about something - and for the record I do think this is something to be worked up about - but while we hastily declare the 'end of Facebook', we forget that many of the other 99.99% of people in the world (to go back to my 3 points) either: a) won't remember about this a few months from now b) won't care enough to remember this a few months from now or c) never heard about this to begin with.

Part of it is the fast-paced, ever-updating world we live in, part of it is that a lot of people, for whatever reason, just don't care about things that maybe they should. We all do it - I write about things all the time that I think are big deals, but then not only will I never talk about them again, I won't even remember them in a few months.

So yes, Facebook's demise was greatly exaggerated. While it would nice, as Om Malik suggests, for Facebook to run new changes by the community before they do them, that simply won't work in all situations. It would turn Facebook into Congress, nothing would ever get done because of a constant back and forth - if you ask people if they have a problem with something, some people are going to find a problem with it.

That's why - as wrong as it may be - I suggested Facebook roll out changes such as these as quietly as possible instead of holding a press conference to announce their bad idea to world with pomp and circumstance. To reiterate:

If you're going to punch someone in the face, you don't call a press conference to announce it beforehand - you do it and hope you knock them senseless so they don't even realize what you just did.

Otherwise you get this situation and you have to spend your valuable time making apologies posts that the majority of your users will never read.

[photo under CC by flickr user flawedartist]

The saying "those who forget the past are destined to repeat it" has just gotten its prime Internet-related example in Facebook. Barely a year after outrage broke out over the displaying of information in their newly launched 'News Feeds', Facebook decided to try its users' tolerance for privacy again and launched its 'Beacon' project aimed at showing your friends (and advertisers) what exactly you were doing and buying on 3rd party sites. Well now once again, after weeks of criticism, Facebook has finally relented and will make changes to 'Beacon' to appease its users - just like it had to do a year ago with the 'News Feed'.

While I was actually a fan of the 'News Feeds' from the beginning (all of that information was already out there, Facebook just was organizing it better), 'Beacon' was something completely different and I immediately recognized it as a bad idea from the get go - as did many others who watch such things.

Just like they didn't scrap the 'News Feeds', but rather made the privacy settings more strict and more clear, they now are basically doing the same thing with the 'Beacon' settings - with one very important difference: making it so you have to opt-in to the program rather than that being the default setting. As to who would want to opt-in to this I'm not really sure, but you can bet that Facebook is betting that some people will.

And thus history has repeated itself - and in barely a year's time. One thing is for certain - for all of Facebook's brilliance and growing power they are absolutely awful at subtle feature launches and seemingly gauging the temperature of their own community. As I said at the beginning of the month:

What I really don't understand is what is with all the pomp and circumstance for such an announcement? I would think Facebook would want to roll out something like this quietly so as not to piss off users...

...which of course is exactly what they did. If you're going to punch someone in the face, you don't call a press conference to announce it beforehand - you do it and hope you knock them senseless so they don't even realize what you just did.

TechCrunch has techcrunched some good data on social sites for October 2007 compared with October 2006. The biggest news? At its current rate of growth, Facebook would surpass MySpace in total unique visitors a month within 2 years. Now it's probably unlikely that Facebook will keep growing at 118% a year, but its growth still destroys MySpace's at only 28%.

LinkedIn's growth is even better (though the site is much smaller) at 257%. This is surpassed only by Digg (280%), AIM Pages (320%), and IMEEM (720%). While Windows Live Spaces looks pretty sad at only 4% growth for the year, it's much better than Yahoo's Geocities which went down 11% and Classmates which lost 1% (which is likely why they're rushing forward with that IPO).

You may notice that AOL and Yahoo! dominate the social sites losing viewers, yet the two also have two of the best performing properties in Flickr for Yahoo and AIM Pages for AOL. This brings me back to the reminder I like to give Yahoo! at least once a month now: you own Flickr.

Yahoo! has been pumping out new social site after new social site trying to catch the wave after their failed attempt to buy Facebook last year. Yahoo! 360 folded, I haven't seen any activity on my Mash profile in weeks, and I don't even remember the names of some of their other efforts.

According to this data Flickr - which Yahoo owns - is a solid #3 on this list behind only MySpace and Facebook in terms of unique visitors a month. In the past year they've shot past Windows Live Spaces, Anglefire, 3 AOL groups including Hometown, Classmates, their own Yahoo! Groups, and they're getting close to their own Geocities. Yahoo appears to have a very robust social network, they just don't realize it.

The importance of Google's OpenSocial could finally be starting to reveal itself - and no, I'm not talking about widgets. The company Pluck has announced a plan to link up over 50 million users of the various properties they support (The Washington Post, Reuters, Fox News, and USAToday, just to name a few) and pipe that data through its SiteLife suite back to all the social networks using both Google's OpenSocial APIs and Facebook's platform.

This means that if you leave a comment on a story on USAToday, you can choose to have that data fed back into your MySpace profile. Or if you want to share a story from Reuters, this can easily show up on your Facebook profile.

I can't even begin to tell you how many different sites' networks I now belong to (I certainly can't remember them all). While it's nice to have some of them separate some of the time, more often then not it's a nuisance and leads me to stop using many of them simply because I don't have 40 hours in my day to update all of them.

While some might not like the idea of all of this data collecting in singular places (and obviously you'll be able to opt out), to me this is what efforts like OpenSocial should be about. Social Networking has a keyword: networking. Not networking within walled environments of select social sites, but over the entire Internet.

If you ever need proof that one company greatly fears another, just look at how much they copy that company. Today's perfect example: MySpace. Reuters is reporting that MySpace will add a Facebook-style news feed sometime in the next 30 to 45 days. No less than Fox Interactive Media's (MySpace's parent) President said this himself.

It's doesn't surprise me that I feel the need to remind myself and others all the time that MySpace is still much bigger than Facebook in terms of users and traffic, but recently it seems like MySpace needs to do the same thing to itself. First we had MySpace promising a platform after they realized how successful Facebook was - AllFacebook rightly notes this has still yet to come to fruition despite such an emphasis being placed on it, and no, OpenSocial doesn't count. Now we have an emphasis being placed on pumping out a News Feeds feature, which I don't think there is anyway MySpace can deny is directly lifted from their smaller rival. And of course don't forget the rumor that MySpace will soon undergo a complete redesign to look more like Facebook.

Perhaps most interesting is this little tidbit from the story:

He [Fox Interactive Media Presiden Peter Levinsohn] said his company also plans to let users express different versions of themselves by creating more than one profile, for example one for family, one for friends and another for work.

Which again sounds similar to a feature that has been rumored to be coming to Facebook for a while now.

MySpace, you're the biggest social network in the world, try to act like it. Come up with your own ideas, force Facebook to copy you. At the very least, buy LinkedIn already to make it seem like your only comeback tactic isn't "I know you are but what am I?".

People in college drink. People on Facebook post pictures. A contest in which Molson gives away a trip to Cancun for students posting their best pictures of themselves drinking Molson beer seems like a natural fit for a promotion right? That was likely the discussion had before launching such a campaign.

Unfortunately it seems no one within Molson bothered to realize what such a contest might look like to those on the outside - that they were unintentionally promoting binge drinking, which as we've all heard - or experienced - is a major problem on college campuses. The complaints started rolling in and Molson was forced to end the contest early - though they will still pick a winner.

Despite Molson's lack of foresight in seeing a potential problem with this particular contest, I actually think the idea behind the contest is a really smart one: using a social network's community to do your advertising for you. We'll be seeing a lot more of this going forward.

TechCrunch UK has an interesting rumor on this slow news day for Thanksgiving here in the U.S.: News Corp is looking into buying the business social networking site LinkedIn. News Corp of course already own the biggest social networking site, MySpace, but has no doubt heard all the hype about Facebook this past year and needs something to try and stop its momentum.

A purchase of LinkedIn would give News Corp an entirely new dynamic in its social networking schema. While RapLeaf's data from a few weeks ago showed that almost all of the social networks are dominated by women at nearly a 2 out of 3 margin, LinkedIn has a demographic that is just about the exact opposite, about 2/3rds male. LinkedIn users being mostly mature and professionals (read: wealthier), also would bring a different advertising niche to the table.

All of that being said, if News Corp is planning on buying LinkedIn with the intention of merging it with MySpace what would be a truly awful idea. While I bitch a lot that MySpace is basically a cesspool of fake profile, advertisements, and hideous design, in reality I know that there is little they can do to corral all of that at this point, MySpace is simply too big - and still growing. Bringing LinkedIn into the MySpace fold wouldn't clean up MySpace either, it would simply overwhelm LinkedIn users with the crud - 'Hey is this my boss John McDonald's profile or is this the profile for McDonald's new $3 Cheeseburger?'.

There's been a lot of talk that Facebook's new target in the social sphere is the LinkedIn (professional) market. They recently updated their 'Looking for' area to include the more business-appropriate 'Networking' rather than 'Random play' for those users who sign up with clear business networking intentions (those not in college). I'm not sure Facebook can pull this off either until they implement their rumored segmenting different networking into different groups feature.

With Facebook making a move for that market, New Corp would probably be smart to buy LinkedIn - just please keep it separate from MySpace.

[photo under CC by flickr user simplifica]

In other, more legitimate Facebook news, the site has unveiled its voting system for feed items. On the right hand side now of each item in your feed you will see both a 'thumbs up' and an 'X'. Obviously the idea is to click on the 'thumbs up' if you like news of that nature being in your feed and the 'X' if you do not. Facebook will then analyze this data (hopefully electronically) and create a news feed that is better tailored to the information you care about.

While this is pretty standard stuff, I can't help but be reminded of Digg here. Would Facebook ever implement a Digg-like voting system for stories/news items people share and then showcase that data on a 'Popular Page'? If you think that is off base, remember that MySpace has already started doing something similar with MySpace News (users rate stories from 1 - 5). Something like voting on publicly shared items could be very useful in a major social network - which is no doubt why Digg started making the moves a couple months to become more social.