Says Doc Searls: "Tracking and “personalizing”—the current frontier of online advertising—probe the limits of tolerance. While harvesting mountains of data about individuals and signaling nothing obvious about their methods, tracking and personalizing together ditch one of the few noble virtues to which advertising at its best aspires: respect for the prospect’s privacy and integrity, which has long included a default assumption of anonymity."

Bad news for Facebook: General Motors decided to dial down advertising on Facebook after finding it has little impact on consumers' car purchases. If Facebook's customers don't trust in the platform's effectiveness, this could put quite a damper on the IPO due this Friday.

Facebook is extending to new platforms, namely TVs and cars. These announcements around CES is an indicator of ever-increasing overlap of some so-far largely separated spheres. Publishers and broadcasters have long been looking into getting their products ready for Social Primetime. More recently, the automotive industry has realized that the cars they build should be made a platform - CarOS, so to speak. Getting a slimmed-down version of Facebook on your Mercedes Benz is one early step into that direction.

An interesting glimpse into what _seem_ to be Facebook's revenues. Let's just say: Facebook is definitely turning a solid profit, but failing the high expectations. Read the full article for some more concrete meat.

Molly Wood shares this quite lovely rant on how Facebook tries to change the act of sharing information online, and ruins it. Great read.

"The promise of the open web looks increasingly uncertain": an excellent, in-depth essay about the meaning & necessity of the open web, and insisting on controlling our own infrastructure.

Mark Jensen analyzes the new Facebook interface, the new Timeline feature as well as Facebook's goals with its (so-called, but not really open) "Open Graph".

Heise.de implemented sharing functionalities that would comply with European privacy laws: An extra click would be needed to load Facebook's Like button. Facebook isn't amused and threatens to pull the plug on Heise.

some useful links for Facebook background (data, media, engineering, safety etc):

We are losing touch with the old verities that underlie the 20th Century's bourgeois middle-class dreamtime, a way of life that involves consumerism, unconcern for the world as a whole, and a willingness to live in the small, through the nuclear family an

Top 5 Reasons Building on the Facebook Platform is Foolish

I've been thinking a lot about the social graph for awhile now: aggregating the graph, decentralization, social network portability, etc.

It's called the internet and it's more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007. Eventually, someone will come along and turn Facebook inside-out, so that instead of custom applications running on a platform in a walled garden, applications ru

If you are on Facebook, and an increasing percentage of you are, chance are likely that you get asked to link with someone as a friend all the time. But what do you do when someone you do not know asks to be your friend?

Jeremiah Owyang's take on Facebook: "If you’re responsible for the direction of your online strategies for your company or organization, you’ve probably been asked by your colleagues to take a look at a social network. If you’re new to the Facebook

With a little savvy, anyone can create a page that hosts all of the essential stuff one would find on a Facebook profile that can be set up with the same plug-and-play ease. You'll have to store all of your photos, videos, and contacts elsewhere, but at l

Excerpt: Over the last six months, I've noticed an increasing number of press articles about how high school teens are leaving MySpace for Facebook. That's only partially true. There is indeed a change taking place, but it's not a shift so much as a fragm