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Facebook is making a major announcement this morning. By all indications it surrounds e-mail, or more specifically, they are finally revamping the horrible messaging system they have been using. The company recently acquired the fb.com domain name, leading some to think that they will move the 1400 employees to @fb.com e-mail clearing the way for regular users to register @facebook.com e-mail addresses. Yahoo employees use a similar @yahoo-inc.com method to alleviate confusion.

Despite any on going issues I might have about Facebook, this might be enough to pull me back in. While I don’t like the idea of a company with privacy concerns like Facebook having access to my e-mail, I do like the idea of claiming an important part of internet real estate. If I can have an all but dormant Facebook account and have @facebook.com e-mails forward to my gmail account, I might be sold.

The truth is that this could turn into very valuable internet real estate to get your hands on. Just like having your name.com registered or that perfect twitter handle, it could be the key to making sure you are the person turning up at the top of the search results when you’re googled. It could be the key to controlling your image on the internet, something that will only become more important over time.

With 500 million users, the addresses will go fast. I don’t want to be in a position months or years from now regretting that I didn’t nab a good @facebook.com address and be stuck with something less than desirable. Is this going to be the way people get in touch with me initially in the future? Luckily I don’t have a really common name like John Smith, but I do have to battle with people really into their zodiac sign.

Is this going to be enough to get me to return to Facebook? I’m not sure, I’ll have to wait and see what is actually announced.

In the weeks leading up to the release of David Fincher’s latest film, The Social Network, there has been a sudden surge in interest surrounding the origins of Facebook’s founding. I won’t rehash my issues with the service, instead I want to address the burning questions the film (and book) leave us with.

Should I go see it?
Yes, you should absolutely see it. As of this posting, I’ve already seen it twice.

How accurate is this story?
There is a ton of conflicting information out there. Aaron Sorkin who wrote the screen play claims he tried to get as close to the truth as possible. Without writing 1800+ words Inception style on the subject, I’ll say that I believe it to be as close to the truth as we can get. An article from Business Insider lays out the ten most glaring inaccuracies like the following:

The movie starts with a falsehood: that Mark Zuckerberg never rowed for a crew team. Actually he did, back at Exeter, the super elite boarding school he went to.

Some of the inaccuracies are a little bigger, but tonally the inclusion of these wouldn’t change much.

Who is the actress mentioned as a Harvard student?
Natalie Portman, apparently she had dinner with Aaron Sorkin and told him some stories about what it was like to be a student there at the time. The line of dialogue was probably a nod of thanks from Sorkin.

Did Facebook get involved?
The filmmakers approached the company and showed them early versions of the script, but the two company ultimately wanted creative changes made that director David Fincher was unwilling to make. Facebook also refused to allow the film to be advertised on the site.

Is Facebook really worth $25 billion dollars?
According to Forbes it is actually worth $33 Billion and Zuckerberg is the 35th richest person on the planet.

Who is right and who is wrong?
Finally, a serious question.

Aaron Sorkin’s incredible dialogue has Zuckerberg’s character at one point exclaim, “If you were the inventor of Facebook, you would have invented Facebook!” With this one line, Sorkin captures the heart of the issue. He didn’t come up with the idea of a social network, but he went out there and built one. Not only did he build one, he built the best one.

If I were to wake up today and say, “I have an idea to build this new revolutionary product that is the going to be the next big thing,” I don’t have ownership of that product unless I go out and build it. Having an idea and executing an idea are completely different things. Another brilliant Zuckerberg line states (does) “a guy who makes a really good chair owe money to anyone who ever made a chair?”

What about Eduardo Saverin having his stock diluted from 34% to .03%? Another line of dialogue sums up my feelings exactly. “You’re gonna blame me because you were the business head of the company and you made a bad business deal with your own company?” Don’t forget Saverin settled for an estimated $1.1 billion.

He hasn’t made the best decisions, but I’m not sure you can really hold that against him, given the circumstances. History will come down on the side of the person who actually went out there and did it, which in this case is Zuckerberg. Through the good and the bad, he is an incredible, albeit single minded visionary who hasn’t let anything distract him from his dream.

AT&T’s reception has actually gotten a lot better in recent months (at least in Indianapolis). Funny comic nonetheless.

I played a lot of video games growing up. Then I went to college and despite a stint playing World of Warcraft I didn’t really play many games. Post college most of the game playing I’ve done has been on simple iPhone games. All that is about to change. Sometime this morning a delivery man will be showing up to the office with my very own copy of Starcraft II, a game that has been twelve years in the making. The video below is about the game. More than ever the line between movies and games is being blurred.

It’s well known that most people blame AT&T for horrible service with the iPhone. Available today for all iPhone users is a software update to upgrade the operating system of phones to iOS 4.1. The major change? More bars? Maybe. The update changes the height of the bars, making the smaller ones slightly smaller and changes how the bars themselves are measured. Gizmodo has the full story. The end result will probably be less bars, but the ones you do have will be bigger. This won’t actually change the reception issues, but it should give users a slightly better idea of how much reception they actually have.

In a related note it turns out that the iPhone also takes longer to charge on a usb cable plugged into a computer compared to plugged into an outlet. This probably applies to all electronic devices and shouldn’t be all that surprising. MobileCrunch has the full story.

I’ve had a lot of people ask me why I quit Facebook last week. The short answer is that I can no longer be part of what Noam Chomsky calls the bewildered herd. More and more I couldn’t agree with what was going on, so I took a stand. I quit Facebook and I do not plan on going back. Read my reasons and decide for yourself if this is something you can continue to go along with. If you choose to just ignore this and go about your day, that’s fine, but remember what Chomsky would say about you.

Facebook has turned into a total privacy nightmare. What’s worse is that privacy has disappeared as Facebook’s market share has increased. Boing Boing shows a brief timeline of how this has happened. I’ve added the image below.

As Facebook’s power has grown, so has their disregard for privacy. Definitely a disturbing trend. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg had to settle a huge lawsuit surrounding accusations of ripping off the idea from fellow Harvard students he ripped off. I won’t get into the details around the lawsuit, but there is information out there if you are curious.

Recently a college friend of Zuckerberg’s released instant messages to Business Insider. Below are some of the messages, keep in mind this was when he was a poor college student running a web site out of his dorm room. Now his net worth is estimated to be in the neighborhood of five billion dollars.

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How’d you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don’t know why.

Zuck: They “trust me”

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Not the best track record so far, but how about some more specifics about these privacy “changes” as Facebook is calling them. A blogger named Matt McKeon came up with a great animation to show the growing availability of personal information. You can see the progression on his blog, below are images showing the difference between 2005 and 2010.

Facebook today isn’t what I signed up for back in 2005. I understand that you should take precautions putting information online assuming it will be private, but this is ridiculous. My problem is less with the erosion of privacy and more with Facebook’s approach. Instead of making all of this sharing and instant personalization (previous post on this alarming “feature”) features users can opt-in to, they have made it so there are choices buried within the options allowing you to opt-out. That is, if you actually know Facebook has changed the options. With each major update, they routinely attempt to reset user’s options to the defaults. No surprise here, but the defaults involve everything being public.

Just how confusing have these options become? The New York Times has a great interactive feature highlighting the complexity. Some of the interesting highlights include Facebook’s privacy policy being longer than the U.S. Constitution and the tidbit that even if you have made your account totally private, your friends can still share all of your information with others.

Facebook has had a ton of security exploits. Most recently, users were able to witness live chat between other members without their knowledge. Another security issue resulted in private messages being randomly send to different users. What would you say if your e-mail account did this one day? It’s also now in the top ten of most target sites for phishing according to Mashable.

What about Google and all the other companies we are sharing all of our information with? It’s easy. None of those groups are basing entire business plans around making all of your information public. None of those companies have a track record of screwing people over. None of those companies have had privacy violations anywhere close to the scope of those made by Facebook. Google is quickly emerging as the largest rival to Facebook. Google represents the open, transparent web, while Facebook wants a closed system they control.

Think about everything that has been said here so far about Facebook. Here is a quick story about Google for comparison. Google’s company motto is “do no evil.” The Chinese government hacked into gmail to find out information about known political dissidents. Google decided this was the final straw and stopped censoring search results in China even though the popular search engine is now blocked by the great firewall of China as a result. The Google founders decided standing up for what they believed in was more important than becoming a major player in a market worth billions. What would Zuckerberg have done in this situation? It’s ok to share information on the internet, it’s the future of the web, just be careful who you share it with.

The bottom line is that Facebook has gone too far and have done absolutely nothing which would make me believe they are suddenly going to do otherwise. You have a choice, by doing nothing you have made one.

Manage Twitter is a really cool web site that allows you to figure out which of your followers aren’t following you back. It’s really simple, but is probably going to get shut down soon. I recommend checking it out.

Facebook just made some major announcements that not only change the course of the world’s most trafficked web site, but change the course of the internet itself. Unfortunately, these changes also raise serious privacy concerns. The vast majority of Facebook users will not notice, which is sad. This isn’t the first time Facebook has made major changes to their privacy policy, but these changes bigger implications than any changes made in the past.

Remember those Facebook Connect buttons? They are going to start disappearing. In place of those buttons will be innocent looking “like” buttons. Facebook wants you to “like” (recommend / share) an article, a photo or a product. “Liking” something will automatically post it to your feed. You cannot remove these items on your feed from Facebook, instead you must go back to the web site where you hit the like button and click it again to unlike the item. On top of that, these likes do not have privacy settings. They are viewable by every single Facebook user forever.

The other major change concerns applications. It used to be that applications had access to all of your personal data for only 24 hours. Now they have access to it forever. For all those MafiaWars and Farmville players out there, you better hope you are ok with companies having access to your personal data in exchange for playing their games. On top of that, your friends can share your information to applications. Below is a list of all the things friends can share about you.

Most of these changes are not that bad. What makes them really bad is the average user’s ignorance of their existence. Facebook gives you a small notice at the top of your page the next time you login. It’s pretty misleading.

It used to be that you could fairly safely assume you were surfing the internet anonymously. Now Facebook is turning into your digital fingerprint. You might not be aware of all the places you are leaving your fingerprints, but someone certainly is watching, monitoring and recording. Instant Personalization is only available on Yelp, Microsoft Doc.com and Pandora for the time being, but the feature is definitely going to expand to other places.

If you want to disable Instant Personalization, go to Privacy Settings > Applications and Websites and then uncheck the box at the bottom.

The most important thing you can do is take some serious time to look through all of your privacy settings and the information you’ve written in your profile. You can no longer assume only your friends will be looking at your profile.

A more accurate title would actually be “One of the many problems people have when first starting to blog,” but that seemed too long. Last Friday afternoon I was sitting in the office. It was a slow day and most people had already left for the weekend. Our conversation somehow got onto the topic of blogging. The two other guys in the office both said they were interested in starting blogs and wanted help on getting started. I had two initial pieces of advice, neither of which I actually follow, which I admitted up front.

Piece of advice number one: Find a niche and stick to it. If you just get into the habit of posting a bunch of random stuff, you have a limited audience. I find myself breaking this rule all the time. It’s hard to focus on just one thing. I need to find a focus and stick to it.

Piece of advice number two: It’s really difficult to update with original content on a daily basis. I’ll admit I often get into the trap of just posting some funny videos and calling it a day. It’s tough to come up with original stuff all the time. My challenge to my two co-workers was to try to post something original at least five days a week.

That gets into the problem with blogging. To build traffic it takes a lot of work. Finding a niche to fill and putting quality original content out there are two of the most surefire ways to be successful.

Here are the two blogs they started. Check them out, I’m sure they would appreciate some feedback.

Ry’s Blog and Matt’s Blog respectively. We’ve joked that they are having a competition. Which blog do you like better?

I’m going to attempt to try and start following my own advice, we’ll see how that goes.

If you have phenomenal memory, you might remember this post I wrote last year about some upcoming technology trends for 2010. A few weeks after I posted it, at least one of my co-workers told me I was really wrong. We should have made a bet on the spot. Today a different co-worker made me aware of this Time magazine article about technology trends. It looks like someone agrees with me. It will be interesting to see how all of my predictions pan out.