Facebook's tactics are the same as other sites which browser makers mark as malware. Time to mark Facebook as such.

"So it would be easy to think that the Whole Earthers are winning and the Epiphinators are losing. But this isn't a war as much as a trade dispute. Most people never chose a side; they just chose to participate. No one joined Facebook in the hope of destroying the publishing industry."

Good thoughts on Mike Matas moving to Facebook.

Brilliant essay from Paul Ford.

Smart observations on Google+ as it relates to Facebook.

"But in a perfect world you don't want to be dependent on any single one of them. The more social platforms of scale there are, and we have a bunch now, including Twitter, Tumblr, and Foursquare, the better world it will be for developers."

"it is not possible to do journalism in an environment where your writing can be taken down if the company hosting it deems it offensive."

Nick Bilton responds to Bill Keller's editorial on Twitter and Facebook.

Joe Hewitt is leaving Facebook and writes about what is next for him.

"I tend to believe the following about all private companies:

- Information reported by interested parties is unreliable.
- Companies that are still raising money are not profitable."

Inter­est­ing post from Ben Brooks about how Twit­ter and Face­book are attempt­ing to replace email even as both ser­vices rely might­ily upon email to work.

"The best solution is to be yourself. If that makes you uneasy, talk with your shrink. Better yet, blog about it."

Financial Times feature story on Sean Parker.

Zeldman had quite the time migrating from a personal account to a fan page.

"If Mark Zuckerburg hadn’t invented Facebook or Tom Whats-his-name hadn’t invented Myspace, someone would have created them anyway and a very similar product would have resulted because that is the natural progression of the web."

"This will become more obvious over time. It's why we must develop systems that are equal to Twitter and Facebook, but that aren't so easy to block. Permanent link to this item in the archive.

We must make it so that a country, if it wants to turn off Internet-enabled revolution, must turn off the Internet itself."

"We find the publics we wish to join based not merely on gross labels, generalizations, and borders drawn about us—red v. blue, black v. white, nation v. nation—but instead on our ideas, interests, and needs: cancer survivors, libertarians, Deadheads, vegetarians, single moms, geeks, even privacy advocates. We finally tear down the elite of the public few and each become public people in our own right. . . ."

A briefer on why Facebook may not have to go public.

"I know that in 2010 it seems ridiculous to say anything other than “Facebook has won – the war is over” and I know that it feels that way right now. Facebook is so dominant it is astounding. In a complete return to where we all began with AOL – the world is “closed” again as Facebook has become this generation’s walled garden. When you’re on Facebook you’re not on the Internet – you’re on the InterNOT."

"So to the extent you're locked in, that's the extent you are not on the open web. The perfectly open web has zero lock-in. The silos are totally locked-in and therefore not on the open web."

Summary of the Goldman investment in Facebook.

Interesting but off base article about Facebook and the change in culture it has/is creating.

Daniel Bachhuber answers my question on Kommons about how his reading habits have changed since he quit Twitter.

Very cool story about using social media for trying tracking down a missing person.

Daniel reflects on some of the challenges in leaving Twitter and Facebook behind.

"The job of journalism is to collect accurate information on an ongoing basis and ensure that the audience for each story learns about that story. Any way you can deliver that service is fair game. People depend on each other for the news all the time, so journalists better get in those conversations."

Wired Magazine covers "The Social Network."

Dave Winer's review of "The Social Network"

"At 19, Sean Parker helped create Napster. At 24, he was founding president of Facebook. At 30, he’s the hard-partying, press-shy genius of social networking, a budding billionaire, and about to be famous—played by Justin Timberlake in David Fincher’s new film, The Social Network."

Spencer Fry's hesitation with social media gurus.

"Presumably certain groups are more likely to use Facebook check-ins than others, but with Facebook’s scale they can let the users figure this out instead of having to plan it deliberately. That said, history suggests that big companies who rely on this “carpet bombing strategy” are often upended by focused startups who take over one niche at a time."

"A graph consists of a set of nodes connected by edges. The original internet graph is the web itself, where webpages are nodes and links are edges. In social graphs, the nodes are people and the edges friendship."

"History never repeats, but it does rhyme.  We share everything now; we worry that we overshare.  Now it’s time to take our sharing to the next level.  We need a social2.0, something that reflects what we’ve learned in the past half-dozen years."

Steven Levy, author of "Hackers," discusses Zuckerberg's role in the broader history of computing.

"There's nothing wrong with building on top of another platform for a hobby project. You want to build something quickly, you want to take advantage of a large pool of users, and you want make something fun. If you're successful, you'll gain some reputation, make people happy, and have something neat to share. Just don't do it at a business."

There is a distinct difference between the publics you create for yourself and the mass, wide open public of everyone. Facebook needs to recognize this.

"Don't be fooled by the hype of the tech industry, the rules aren't what they say they are. It's much more cut-throat. I give Zuckerberg a lot of credit for putting his plan out there for all to see. That's a lot more than Google or Apple has done."

Mark Cuban argues that the uproar over privacy and Facebook is misplaced.

"Now, it might not be likely that a loose confederation of software companies and engineers can turn Facebook’s core services into shared protocols, nor would it be easy for that loose coupling of various online services to compete with Facebook...But in the internet I’d like to live in, we’d have that option, instead of being left with the choice of letting Facebook use us, or being left out of the conversation altogether."

Interesting new protocol being released for an open and distributed link-sharing system. Already has the likes of Google, Instapaper, and Digg on board.

"What pisses me off the most are the numbers of people who feel trapped. Not because they don’t have another choice. (Technically, they do.) But because they feel like they don’t. They have invested time, energy, resources, into building Facebook what it is. They don’t trust the service, are concerned about it, and are just hoping the problems will go away."

Jason Fried discusses the problems with Diaspora's wealth of money. Sometimes a startup needs to be poor, particularly when it doesn't yet have a product.

"I suspect The Youth are publishing more than ever, but it’s coming in the form of Facebooking and Tumblring instead of maintaining a blog because the proprietary tools, unfortunately, have better readers right now than the open source ones."

Building up the "Facebook is not to be trusted" argument.

Quick comments from Chris Dixon about the tension between Facebook and Zynga.

Notes from Danah Boyd's talk at WWW 2010. A great manifesto for cautiously dealing with Big Data.

There's an opportunity for Facebook, or another startup, to seize the role of the clearinghouse for online identity.

"So in summary: I need to be able to isntall my own Twitter and move my presence to my own server, easily. And I need control over the look and feel of my site."

"Facebook, MySpace and several other social-networking sites have been sending data to advertising companies that could be used to find consumers' names and other personal details, despite promises they don't share such information without consent." – How long before someone sues the hell out of them?

Dave Winer's concerns over the demise of certain coral reefs.

Chris Messina clarifies his views about the initiatives announced by Facebook at F8.

"Social networking is a huge part of the world we live in today. It's far too important to leave in the hands of a near-monopoly, even if that monopoly seems relatively benign today."

Ilse Aigner, the German minister of consumer protection, has fired an opening shot in trying to get Facebook to change some of its policies.

Dave Winer reflects on some of what Facebook announced at F8.

Sometimes stickiness is not the greatest thing for a webapp to have. It can be "like a Starbucks where everyone hangs out for hours but almost never buys anything."