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Why Facebook Birthdays Feel So Weird

Login and make a Facebook birthday wish! Receive a multitude of classic happy birthdays. Celebrate your existence on Earth in a truly virtual style.

The oddest aspect of Facebook birthdays is the re-emergence of dormant social connections. Facebook makes it oh-so-easy to reconnect with people you may have forgotten you were even "friends" with. And then all of a sudden they're up on your wall, sending you birthday shoutouts like the good ol' days.

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"One of those things that distinguishes Facebook, is there is no obvious decay mechanism for friendships," says Dr. Sam Gosling, a professor of psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. "We meet many people everyday. Some of the people we meet become close friends, others we never see again, others acquaintances. In normal life, if you don't maintain a friendship it goes away. Facebook leaves a concrete link to that person."

Facebook is an online social space, akin to a public cafe. It does not provide the one-to-one intimacy of email, texts or IMs. Then there's the non-asymmetrical Facebook friend feature. Both Facebppl parties must agree to the friendship. It ends when one or both of the people decide to cut it, and cannot be restarted unless both of those parties agree. This is very different from Twitter or Google+, where connections are fully asymmetrical. Just because someone follows you does not mean you have to follow them back. Not so on Facebook.

Depending on the number of Facebook friends you have, you might see a birthday every day, a few times a week, or a few times a month. That strange little box in the upper right-hand corner of the screen quietly reminds you that you have friends with birthdays today. Congratulating them on their virtual existence is entirely your choice.

On the old Facebook, birthday posts could easily become overwhelming and out of control. So, in the Timeline era, Facebook has indeed attempted to help users keep track of all these emotive wishes through topic-focused categorizing. Facebook means well.

The odd thing now is that this seemingly simple Facebook Timeline birthday solution actually makes it harder to individually reply. And if you don't respond, you're not actually making any attempt to connect. You just passively watch posts fly by. Facebook has gone the opposite route, making the Facebook birthday increasingly impersonal, with an opportunity for users to post one big "thank you" to all their friends.

If the purpose of Facebook is truly to connect and share with the people in your life, why just watch the posts fly by?

Two days after my birthday, I jumped onto Facebook, busily liking and/or commenting on each post. Those simple actions inspired a few interesting conversations, one with a classmate from college, another with a local artist and a few friends from the past.

As Movies Debut on Facebook, the Era of Social Cinema Begins

If anybody could pull it off, it would be Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim. The comedy duo and stars of the often demented Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job! have a rabid and loyal enough fan base that releasing their new movie in an experimental new way just might work.

Tomorrow night, Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie will debut on Facebook, a full two weeks before it arrives in theaters. For $10, fans will be able watch the movie and chat with its stars in real time. The model represents a new sort of social cinema that, while not widespread, appears poised to become a potentially major trend.

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Magnolia Pictures, who is releasing the film, is no stranger to the concept of making movies available before they hit theaters. The distributor is accustomed to releasing films via Video on Demand prior to their theatrical release, but this is the first time they've experimented with putting something out on Facebook first. Tim and Eric, they figure, would make an ideal test case.

"Everything that we've done with them has just been huge," said Magnolia's Vice President of Interactive Marketing. We did a Reddit chat, which was the biggest Reddit has had. All of their viral videos have been huge hits."

To make it happen, Magnolia partnered with a company called Milyoni, which specializes in live entertainment events on Facebook. Using its Social Live product, the company sets up streaming content that lives directly within Facebook, as well as deep social integration to encourage fan interaction. By setting everything up on Facebook and streaming the movie at a set time, the opportunity becomes ripe for genuine, real-time social buzz, which can spread across social connections as people see their friends participating and sharing content related to the movie.

Facebook Movie Debuts: A Small, But Emerging Trend

This won't be the first time Milyoni has hosted a social cinema event of this kind. Indeed, it was the company's reputation as a leader in this emerging space that got Magnolia's attention and led to the partnership. Milyoni's technology was used to stream the award-winning independent movie Archie's Final Project on Facebook, as well as a few other live social entertainment events. The Tim and Eric movie, which contains cameo appearances by several well-known comedy stars, has the potential to be the biggest film that's gotten this kind of social treatment.

Milyoni CEO John Corpus is banking on the notion that this approach to releasing movies will become more common in the future.

"I do think it's going to be a trend over time," Corpus said. "It's great, especially for many of the independent movies that can't get a huge distribution the opportunity to do it on Facebook."

Technically, the movie is not being shown for the first time ever on Facebook. After debuting at the Sundance Film Festival, it was made available via Video on Demand on January 27. Thus, many of the fans who are most eager to watch the film have had the option to do so for a few weeks. Still, the Facebook screening presents a new social dynamic and creates the possibility for increased exposure. In the past, Milyoni has seen several thousand participants in their live online movie events.

As for whether these online screenings run the risk of cannibalizing box office ticket sales, Milyoni and Magnolia aren't worried. Instead, they look at the Facebook screening as a marketing opportunity that will help generate interest in the movie.

It's unclear whether making the content available on demand via social networks will have a demonstrable effect on piracy. In theory, offering fans the option to pay to stream it should lessen the temptation to download it illegally, but there will always be a contingent of users who instinctively turn to Bit Torrent and other file-sharing platforms for free content.

The concept of having users jointly consume media content via its social network is something Facebook has begun dabbling in itself, especially with its music streaming service integrations. There's talk of integrating with Netflix in the same way, but obscure legal challenges have prevented that from happening so far.

Saturday's showing of the Tim and Eric movie will only be available directly on Facebook.com. Users with browser-equipped set top boxes like the Boxee Box will probably have no trouble viewing it on their TV sets, but the experience hasn't necessarily been optimized for such a use case. In time, distributors like Magnolia hope to offer this kind of thing in a way that's native to set top boxes like Apple TV, Google TV, Roku and Boxee. Once that happens, they hope, we may start to see this trend really pick up steam.

Ex-Pixar Geeks Building Siri-Style Line of Toys

Teddy Ruxpin, meet Siri.

Imagine a children's toy designed by the people behind the Toy Story and Finding Nemo movies but connected to the web and chock full of artificial intelligence. Then add in visual tracking, speech recognition and massive network scalability. It appears that's what San Francisco startup ToyTalk is building, based on conversations and information available online.

The company is putting together a powerful team of technologists and creatives from Pixar and SRI (makers of Siri) and is being relatively open about what it's up to. But it has received no press coverage anywhere as far as I can tell. That's going to change once word gets out about who they are and what they're doing. The possibilities in both entertainment and education are amazing.

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ToyTalk CEO Oren Jacob, photo by Chuck Foxen.

Neilsen announced new numbers yesterday, showing that tablet computers are increasingly being used by children. 70% of US households with both tablets and children under 12 now report that their children use the family tablet computer, up 9% over Q3 of last year.

Imagine the youngest of children using Web-connected toys carrying character-driven chatterbot artificial intelligence programs. If done well, the possibilities for child development, education, language learning and more are awe inspiring to consider. What are the problems that need to be solved? Lovability, connectivity and sufficiently intelligent interactivity. It's that last one that seems the hardest, the least solved. Perhaps if ToyTalk can pull it off, the company can resolve one of the world's most damaging resource shortages, the shortage of engaging time and energy for childhood development.

The Brains

ToyTalk CEO Oren Jacob worked at Pixar for 20 years, where he served as Chief Technology Officer. Then he was the Entreprenuer-in-Residence at August Capital. Now he's assembling a company that includes other ex-Pixar people, a heavy-duty engineer from Internet mega-pipe Akamai and a computer scientist from SRI, the research firm that created the now Apple-owned mobile personal assistant Siri. (Jacob once made a documentary film about competitive grocery bagging; more on him here.)

ToyTalk's Creative Director Bobby Podesta worked on Pixar movies like A Bug's Life, Toy Story 2, Monsters Inc., Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and was a Directing Animator on Cars. Podesta is hiring a mobile UI developer and a creative writer who can build out charecter dialogue.

Martin Reddy, the ToyTalk CTO, is a Computer Science PhD with more than 40 published papers and 5 years of experience building geospatial visualization technology at the Artificial Intelligence Center at SRI International, the organization that built Siri.

Now imagine massive data input and output from these toys. James Chalfant, ToyTalk's Director of Scalability, helped build Akamai, a massive Content Delivery Network that serves up 30% of all the web-based content consumed in the world.

Michael Chann built Pixar's animation technology and is now a visual tracking software specialist at ToyTalk. Brian Langner is a Carnegie Mellon PhD and now ToyTalk's "Senior Speech Scientist" specializing in human computer spoken word interaction. Byrne Reese was the Product Manager for Movable Type, one of the world's first major blogging platforms and is now Head of Customer Development at ToyTalk. Renee Adams, head of operations at ToyTalk, spent years working on logistics and retail operations at Apple.

Got that? We're talking about children's toys built by an AI scientist from where Siri was born, that tracks human movement, can interact with spoken words, is connected to the web and mobile by an engineer with a world-beating scalability background, promoted by an early advocate of blog publishing software that changed the world and designed by people behind the most popular children's movies in history.

That sounds incredible. And maybe a little bit frightening.

Could these be the toys that teach your children multiple languages, that help provide some interactivity to neglected children, that save the next generation from passive consumption of non-interactive broadcast media?

Or will they fall into the Uncanny Valley, seem creepy to adults but desensitize children to the true humanity of living people, ushering in a generation of humans so comfortable with robots that the robots proliferate and ultimately... Well, you can imagine. Perhaps it's post-humanity that will feel like Elvis's swinging hips for our generation, so wrong to us but a much-loved part of the future for our children.

Those are the questions I'll be asking when more information comes out about ToyTalk. The company hasn't yet responded to my request for an interview. I hope they will soon.

OpenStack Sandbox and API Reference Site Launched

Developers working with OpenStack now have a Sandbox and a separate one-stop shop for the OpenStack APIs. The API site is "inspired by" sites like Twitter's API resource page, and includes the OpenStack Identity 2.0, Compute 1.1 and Image 1.0 APIs. The OpenStack Sandbox provides a test environment for developers to try their code against.

Anne Gentle announced the OpenStack API reference yesterday to the OpenStack mailing list. It's not 100% complete yet, Gentle says that Object Storage hasn't been added yet. The site also doesn't reflect non-standard extensions that may be used on some deployments, but is similar to the installation on the OpenStack Sandbox.

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Jay Pipes announced the Sandbox yesterday on the OpenStack blog. Developers register for the service by joining the Facebook Group, and then receive a username, password and "Stack Dollars" for the sandbox. Says Pipes, "When you perform certain actions in TryStack – launching instances, creating volumes, etc – you consume Stack Dollars. Likewise, instances consume Stack Dollars as long as they are running. When you run out of Stack Dollars, you won't be able to use TryStack services until your Stack Dollars are replenished."

The refresh rate for Stack Dollars hasn't been established yet, but the FAQ says "you should find you have ample credits available for almost any testing scenario. One tip: If the size of the server instances you launch doesn't matter too much to your tests and experimentation, you'll get more life out of your account by launching smaller instances. "

Developers also need to be aware that instances will only remain alive for up to 24 hours. (This is to keep the sandbox from being used "for evil" and to make sure everyone has an ample shot at sandbox time.)

The current Sandbox is based on OpenStack Diablo and lacks a Swift deployment. Another availability zone, using Essex, is planned for the OpenStack Sandbox "in the next three to six months." This will be hosted in Las Vegas on HP hardware. Pipes also says that an installation of Swift object store is on the horizon, either as a separate availability zone or as part of the upcoming Essex deployment.

If you're a Facebook-hater, a non-Facebook registration process is in the offing as well.

Given that Amazon has made available a free tier of AWS for some time, it's probably a smart move on the Stacker's part to have a free sandbox for developers to test against. Anybody signed up for this one yet? Let us know how the experience goes.

Coffee & Power's Dream of the 2020s Is Alive in Portland

Coffee & Power's third workclub is set to open in Portland, Ore. at Urban Grind, a favored ReadWriteWeb remote workplace. The San Francisco-based "meta-company" opened its first workclub in its home city and a second one opened under its own power (and coffee) in Santa Monica, Calif. in December.

Portland will now be the third front in Coffee & Power's campaign to provide an economic backbone for the new normal: remote, independent, project-based work. Whether you're a Web developer, a costume designer or a little bit of both, Coffee & Power provides a network for job listings, discovery, trust and payment. The workclubs provide coffee, power and space for everyone's work and collaboration.

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Coffee & Power's mission speaks to me. How can any remote worker not be excited by the prospect? It was co-founded by Philip Rosedale, creator of Second Life, no stranger to experimental, online economic models. After a brief run with its own virtual currency, Coffee & Power has now switched to dollars and focused on ways to be the new office for independent workers working for each other.

"We're working on how to give Coffee & Power workers health insurance," Rosedale tells me, "and we think it's solvable, too."

Coffee & Power is an online job board for people to post work they can do and work they want done. It processes the payments and maintains the reputations. It also operates in physical co-working spaces, called "workclubs," as hubs for this activity.

While Coffee & Power itself works on raising funds, hiring developers and building out its network, co-working spaces are lining up to put its signs in their windows. It's a great way to attract creative, coffee-hungry workers to your establishment, and it's an almost-no-cost expansion of Coffee & Power's mission.

Portland is a place full of freelancers, contractors, artists and artisans, and we need a support system like this. After covering Coffee & Power for a few months, I introduced its leaders to Dian Crawford at Urban Grind in the hopes of opening a workclub here. I'm thrilled that this worked out, and I'll be working from Urban Grind even more often now.

Today I visited Urban Grind and talked to Dian about the partnership:

(I'm sorry that this video is so small. I shot it in portrait mode like a fool.)

The new Portland workclub at Urban Grind launches on March 14 at 6:30 p.m. The event will feature Scott Kveton, CEO and co-founder of the Portland-based mobile platform service provider, Urban Airship. I am so bummed that I can't make it, because I'll be on a plane back from SXSWi. But in case you need more evidence that Portland's tech future is bright, you should stop by.

Photos by Tovah King

Umbraco CMS' Latest Reinvention Finally Complete

One other way to think of a "content management system" is as a database engineered to present data in a rich and navigable format. As such, a CMS doesn't have to be "the company blog;" and a business' communications - especially the kind that used to be logged on the intranet - don't have to look like WordPress.

A few months later than originally planned, the "RTM" code for version 5 of the open source Umbraco CMS has made its way to CodePlex, Microsoft's open source distribution channel. Now the hard part begins: updating, and in many cases replacing, existing documentation that goes back to version 3.

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The various elements of Umbraco's CMS database are referred to as document types. You define how a document type functions and operates by way of macros (not how it looks; that's done with CSS). From version 3 of Umbraco, which was only a few years ago, up until now, there have been unofficially three, and actually four somewhat different methodologies for producing macros. Version 3 relied on XSLT, a W3C standard since the late 1990s. XSLT effectively leverages XML to embed server-side instructions into an HTML page, that translates data from an outside source into content and HTML markup. The client never sees the code, or, to use W3C's term for it, the stylesheet, even though it wasn't being used for style in this context.

XSLT seemed to be the right choice at first, because it was inarguably a world standard, nobody owned it, and it was well documented. It was terribly cumbersome, however. Here's an excerpt from a CMS I created for Umbraco v3 two years ago. It's a code segment that projects the three newest headlines from a blog with my name.

It looks far more confusing than it actually is. The easiest part is spotting the pure HTML, such as the UL block where the results are rendered. You can spot certain global variables, or parameters, by the $ prefix, as in $currentPage. Then the whole bit about ancestor-or-self::root and all that is part of another W3C standard called XPath, which is used here to navigate through the database tree. To make sure the articles are sorted by the date of publication as opposed to the date of creation, I invoked the DisplayDate variable as the sort parameter sent to the xsl:sort instruction. (Every single XSLT instruction has an xsl: prefix. I sometimes spent hours wondering why some macros were stuck, only to find I had written "xslt:" as the prefix.)

But the layers of abstraction between the variable name and the XSLT instruction were three-fold, and this was the case all the time. select="data [@alias = 'DisplayDate']" used single quotes to denote the variable separate from the attribution, which was always preceded by @alias (JavaScript devs, imagine always having to write "the name of the variable is" before every variable), which is demarcated by [square brackets] that separate the attribution from the data market ("the following data is data"), which is then set off from the property name using double-quotes. The result looked like the cat had danced on the keyboard, and few XSLT veterans would claim it as legitimate.

With version 4, the Umbraco developers began taking controversial, but necessary, steps to move toward a more sensible approach. As Microsoft began its major push for an architecture called MVC (Model / View / Controller) for ASP.NET, it only made sense that Umbraco adopt it somehow. It fit perfectly with Umbraco's original philosophy of separating the data from the rendering of the data, and separating that from the device that controls it.

But the easiest route to embracing MVC appeared to be the direct one, which with respect to a Microsoft technology meant embracing a Microsoft language: C#. After Microsoft made available a broader array of development tools such as WebMatrix that didn't tie devs down to using the commercial Visual Studio, the skepticism winded down.

Now using Umbraco's third iteration of Microsoft's Razor - its scripting language based on C# - it is entirely feasible for the above monstrosity of an excerpt to be boiled down to a single instruction.

With thanks to long-time Umbraco contributor Warren Buckley, here's a complete example of the change in legibility from XSLT to Umbraco v5 Razor. The following two excerpts do the exact same thing. Here's the Umbraco v3 version:








version="1.0"
xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/1999/XSL/Transform"
xmlns:msxml="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:xslt"
xmlns:umbraco.library="urn:umbraco.library" {0}
exclude-result-prefixes="msxml umbraco.library {1}">








• 


• 




• 



Here is the Umbraco v5 version:





@inherits PartialViewMacroPage
@using Umbraco.Cms.Web
@using Umbraco.Cms.Web.Macros
@using Umbraco.Framework

@{
//Get the macro parameter and check it has a value otherwise set to empty hive Id
var startNodeID = String.IsNullOrEmpty(Model.MacroParameters.startNode) ? HiveId.Empty.ToString() : Model.MacroParameters.startNode;

//Check that we have a HiveId to work with
if (startNodeID != HiveId.Empty.ToString())
{
var startNode = Umbraco.GetDynamicContentById(startNodeID);

//Check that startNode has child pages
if (startNode.Children.Any())
{


• 
@foreach (var page in startNode.Children)
{

• @page.Name
• 
}



}
}
else
{


HiveId is empty


}
}


How You Could Get Sued For Using Pinterest

The Boston Business Journal stopped using Pinterest one day after setting up its account after realizing it could be sued for images it uploaded to the site.

Web editor Galen Moore started playing around with the rapidly-growing social network on Thursday as a possible way to share the visual images that the Boston Business Journal uses in its coverage of real estate development: things like blueprints, artists conceptions and photos. But by Friday afternoon he had pulled the content after taking a careful read of Pinterest's user agreement and finding out the company reserves the right to sell images users upload.

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"Exceptions for publishers of user-generated content protect Pinterest, but they don't protect you," Moore wrote with a link back to an earlier ReadWriteWeb article. "Unless you know you have a 'worldwide, irrevocable,' perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, royalty-free license,' you'd better tread carefully."

In other words, if you upload an image that doesn't belong to you and Pinterest sells it, you could be sued for copyright infringement.

Like Moore, we've asked Pinterest for comment. We'll update if we hear back from them.

It's unlikely real estate developers, who are notoriously hungry for publicity of their projects, would quibble with the business weekly for publishing their plans in the paper and on Pinterest. And Moore acknowledges in most cases, permission to do so would be just a phone call away. But not everyone is going to be that lucky, and for now, Moore and his colleagues are going to sit out the Pinterest craze.

"I hope we'll find another way to use Pinterest safely. The service shows fascinating potential," Moore wrote. "But if you operate a business, or have any net worth to speak of, I recommend a careful read of the fine print."

Applicasa Tries to Differentiate Itself in the Mobile "Backend-as-a-Service" Sector

The "backend-as-a-service" segment of the mobile development community is evolving. Several startups got into the game early and helped define the market, such as StackMob, Parse and Kinvey. Others have followed suit and attempt to give developers similar options while integrating other value added services. Israel-based Applicasa is one of those.

Applicasa released a program this week it calls "Start-App." The program is designed to give developers all the cloud functionality and content management system services for free until an app has 100,000 downloads. Applicasa claims to be the "one stop shop" for all mobile developer needs.

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Applicasa's Differentiator

Applicasa got in touch with me after the news that Appcelerator had acquired Cocoafish. The goal for Appcelerator in buying Cocoafish was to add cloud service functionality to its existing set of tools. Applicasa's CEO, Lior Malenboim, sees itself in the same realm as both a tools and service provider.

Applicasa provides database creation, custom queries and a CMS to manage updates, deployment and push notifications. It provides a customized SDK to set up cloud functionality that Malenboim promises is fast and simple to use.

Fundamentally though, Applicasa is not different from Kinvey, Parse or StackMob. Each of those companies also helps developers with many of their problems. StackMob wants to be "your complete technology stack for mobile development." Kinvey is very active in helping the developers on its platform with any solutions they may need.

"I think at Applicasa we have a little bit of a different approach from the others. We don't only do the database, we consider ourselves the one-stop shop. We want to help the developer with anything that he needs," Malenboim said. "You can use backend service to send versions (updates) to different clients, use our CMS. I think our CMS is quite a different approach from the other providers. We actually give you a complete solution so you don't have to build a CMS, you don't have to build a complete system for your clients (users). You can actually invite clients to use the system with the developers."

The with "Start-App" program, Applicasa's service is free to 100,000 downloads. Packages then start from $199. The program is designed specifically for startups as Applicasa has three different pricing tiers for brands ranging from $49 (10,000 users) to $199 (300,000 users).

"We at Applicasa decided that the best way we can support innovation and budding developers is to give our service away for free," Malenboim said. "As the competition for the heart of developers accelerates, companies will try to do their best to keep up with the new technology and trends. I think all the service providers have so far done a great job developing their product by trying to help developers to deliver the best app possible in the shortest amount of time. Let's all hope that this so called 'war' for the developers will be seen as beneficial to the development community as a whole creating the best tools for the job."

Google Releases "Dartium" Browser for Developers

Google is trying to get developers interested in Dart with a technology preview of the Dart VM in Chromium, better known as Dartium. The plan is ultimately to include the Dart VM in Chrome itself, but no timeline has been given yet for that.

Google has been pushing pretty hard to move Dart forward. The company released a Rosetta Stone for JavaScript programmers called Dart Synonym at the beginning of February. However, developers have had to compile Dartium from source or find unofficial builds to test the code.

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Now it's much easier to get ahold of a browser with the Dart VM. If you're using Linux or Mac OS X, you can download Dartium today. Windows builds are not available yet, but should be available "soon."

Google does warn that Dartium "should not be used for day-to-day browsing" but says that the Dart VM integration will come to Chrome "after more testing and developer feedback."

If you're interested in trying out Dart and Dartium, be sure to read over the intro and language basics pages. The language basics page also has an embedded app to run Dart code directly in the browser. You can also grab the Dart Editor for Linux Windows or Mac OS X.

Note that Google says that the Dartium binary "will expire after a few days" so you'll be needing to grab a new copy from time to time. Working with Dart? What do you think of the language and tools so far? Should developers be focusing on Dart or sticking with JavaScript?

3 Useful Facebook Media Apps

Like its users, Facebook's media apps are fickle.

Yesterday Facebook launched 12 media apps: for Buzzfeed, CBS Local (Los Angeles and New York), The Daily Show, MTV News, TODAY Show, MSNBC.com, photo-sharing site Pixable, entertainment social network GetGlue, CMT (Country Music Television), SportingNews (coming in March) and The Huffington Post.

After trying all of them, only three actually worked. At some point, all of the apps will work. But in the meantime, why should Facebook users to read via social apps? What extra value do they provide, if any?

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CBS Local New York: Install this social app, and it sends you to the news organization's website instead of keeping you on Facebook like the Washington Post Social Reader does. When you turn the app on, every story you read will be added to your Facebook Timeline. Specify your audience for the social reader in your Facebook Activity Log. Otherwise, prepare to broadcast everything you read to all of your Facebook friends. Don't say we didn't warn you.

Visit MSNBC.com's media app, and it will send you straight to the news organization's website. This app is essentially just a compliment to the Facebook social plugin, which MSNBC is already using. You can see what your other Facebook friends have read and when. There is a pretty clear way to stop sharing, too, which is a nice touch coming from a monster-huge news organization.

Pixable is a useful way to view curated visual content from your Facebook friends. It provides an excellent way to scroll through Facebook friends' photos, viewing the most popular and most recent. It also looks a lot like Pinterest pinboards.

Interestingly, Pixable does not give you an opportunity to comment directly on Facebook photos. You can only view comments from friends, like the photos or tweet the photos out to your Twitter followers.

Pixable actually brings additional value to your Facebook visual content, displaying images as if they're are your very own glossy magazine.

Speaking of Apps, Here are 8 That Don't Work & One That Isn't Available Yet

The following return some variation of fail messages: CMT and The Daily Show both show up as "your session has timed out." The BuzzFeed app appears blank. The Today Show brings up a "Page Not Found" error message. The CMT.com app sent me to this page, which displays nothing at all. The GetGlue app brings up an "error, sorry the application you were using is misconfigured" message. The TODAY Show app brings up a "page you requested was not found." And even though SportingNews is listed as one of the 12 apps that Facebook launched yesterday, it's not launching until March 2012.

Have you tried out any of the new Facebook media apps? Tell us about it in the comments.

It's Dueling Cybersecurity Bills as McCain Threatens Countermeasures

In a move to pigeon-hole his mostly-Democratic opponents as high-spending bureaucrats, perhaps with an axe to grind against the Defense Dept., former Presidential candidate Sen. John McCain (R - Ariz) announced yesterday the formation of competing cybersecurity legislation. Sen. McCain's move pits him squarely against the former Democrat who endorsed him for President in 2008 and who once was considered a shoe-in for his running mate, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I - Conn.).

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A hearing was held yesterday in the Senate Homeland Security Committee that Sen. Lieberman chairs. From the makeup of the witness panels, one could suppose it was originally intended to be something more like a graduation ceremony for a bill Lieberman and his colleague, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D - Nev.), would like to characterize as one step from the President's signature. As it turned out, McCain's announcement gave an opening for one panelist, former DHS Secretary Tom Ridge (under Pres. George W. Bush) to give what sounded like a pitch for the McCain bill.

"If the legislation before us today were enacted into law, unelected bureaucrats at the DHS could promulgate prescriptive regulations on American businesses, which own roughly 90% of critical cyber infrastructure," stated McCain in his opening remarks yesterday. "The regulations that would be created under this new authority would stymie job-creation, blur the definition of private property rights and divert resources from actual cybersecurity to compliance with government mandates. A super-regulator, like DHS under this bill, would impact free market forces which currently allow our brightest minds to develop the most effective network security solutions."

DHS or DoD?

The major point of contention for McCain is that new language in the Lieberman/Collins bill would effectively make the Homeland Security Dept. the nerve center for cyber-emergency initiatives, and the point of contact for private security experts to help develop federal cybersecurity policy. McCain - who serves as ranking member on the Armed Services Committee - perceives the Defense Dept. as already having led the way in that category. He cites a September 2010 memorandum of understanding (MOA) between DHS and DoD (PDF available here), establishing a joint cybercommand center where DHS employees effectively report to the NSA - an agency of the DoD.

"DoD and DHS agree to collaborate to improve the synchronization and mutual support of their respective efforts in support of U.S. cybersecurity," the memorandum reads. McCain's assertion is that Lieberman/Collins would bypass that MOA, creating a new regulatory agency in place of the existing set of tactical response authorities, and replacing a general with a bureaucrat. McCain quoted this general - Keith Alexander, who heads U.S. Cybercommand - as saying, "In order to stop a cyber attack you have to see it in real time, and you have to have those authorities."

In her testimony before the committee yesterday, current DHS secretary Janet Napolitano acknowledged the MOA, but asserted that instead of replacing it, the Lieberman/Collins bill could potentially strengthen it. But the way to do that, she said, would be "to allow DHS to expand and enhance these efforts with critical infrastructure" - in other words, to give DHS the authority to act when both public and private resources housing government data are threatened.

"While the Administration has taken significant steps to protect against evolving cyber threats, we must acknowledge that the current threat outpaces our current authorities," stated Napolitano. "DHS must execute its portion of the cybersecurity mission under an amalgam of existing statutory and executive authorities that fail to keep up with the responsibilities with which we are charged. Our cybersecurity efforts have made clear that our nation cannot improve its ability to defend against cyber threats unless certain laws that govern cybersecurity activities are updated."

The Complaint About "Compliant"

Arguing against that line of reasoning, and effectively on McCain's behalf, was the first DHS secretary, Tom Ridge - himself a former senior advisor to McCain's 2008 campaign. Presently, Gov. Ridge serves as chair of the National Security Task Force for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He argued that a new regulatory agency would create a kind of regime that makes enterprises that do business with the government shift their focus from "secure" to "compliant," potentially lowering the bar with respect to proactive measures against cyber attacks.

"Contrary to some news headlines, the private sector routinely thwarts cyber attacks against its networks because it is fast and nimble in its response and recovery efforts," Ridge stated. "The Chamber is deeply concerned that a new regulatory regime would box in our critical infrastructures, hampering the freedom, agility, and innovation needed to deflect or defeat adversaries who are often quite amply resourced."

Calling out the apparent disharmony between the two agencies' approaches, Microsoft Corporate Vice President for Trustworthy Computing Scott Charney noted that a multitude of government agencies - DoD and DHS included - have instituted their own cybersecurity initiatives. Perhaps all of them are commendable; the problem is, they're separate. And the Lieberman/Collins bill might add one more silo to the list.

"While each initiative has value, their long-term effectiveness would be improved by an articulation of common goals and operational alignment to maximize their impact," stated Charney. "It is clear that cyberspace demands a different type of policymaking; agencies cannot develop and implement policies in silos. Nor can national governments act alone. The Internet is truly global and the U.S. Government must be cognizant that American cybersecurity efforts reverberate beyond our borders. In some instances, foreign governments will act in alignment with American interests and may even emulate its policies. In other instances, however, there may be disparate national approaches. Countries may have philosophical differences, of course, but sometimes technical requirements - even if promoted in the name of national security - are really attempts to create trade barriers. Policymakers must be mindful of the global import of their actions and ensure that competing interests are balanced appropriately."

Sen. McCain said his competing legislation will be introduced following the President's Day holiday, which could mean as soon as next week. Lieberman/Collins does have a modicum of bipartisan support, by virtue of Sen. Susan Collins' (R - Maine) co-sponsorship, and could conceivably pass the Senate even over McCain's objection. But any legislation started in the Senate must then either pass the House, or be reconciled with similar legislation introduced in the House. That body is still under Republican control, so if McCain pulls the right strings, he may be able to stall Lieberman/Collins - thus adding it to the one of the largest stockpiles of unpassed bills from any Congress in history.

Give Google Some Credit

Google's having a down moment in the press. It can't catch a break. Every public, top-level decision it's made recently is either the end of "Don't Be Evil" or impossibly optimistic. After all, "Giant Company Falls From Grace" is the kind of headline industry reporters dream of writing, so we pounce on any scrap of evidence.

But lord knows tech news is an echo chamber. A successful meme like "Google sucks" tends to amplify. It's easy to laugh at blustery executive statements and paint a whole picture of Google's decline. But, surprise surprise, things are more complicated than what you read on the blogs.

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It's Complicated

Yes, unambiguous failures of Google products have come to light recently. There's no excuse for Google's mobile payments to be insecure. Score one against Google. It has also come to light in the last day or so that Google does sneaky things with Apple's mobile Safari browser to track users' browsing habits. Does that mean Google is evil, period? Or is there perhaps more to the story? What about every other technology company involved here?

Online privacy is a generally sad state of affairs. Is Google all-the-way evil for exploiting mobile Safari like this, even though its users can delete their browsing histories? Can Facebook users delete their tracking history, which Bing uses for social search? (No.)

Search, plus Your World

Other Google products have changed recently, and our reactions are matters of opinion. I'm just glad I vented my Google+ spleen when its integration into the rest of Google was still mostly hypothetical, because what eventually shipped was not that bad. You might even like it if you try it for a few months before you blog about it.

Google iterates constantly in response to huge, statistically significant amounts of data from its millions of users. That's why, for example, it hasn't settled on a top nav bar yet. It might be temporarily annoying to users and provide temporary blog fodder, but Google's public beta testing gives it statistical confidence about its product decisions. The opinions of bloggers aside, the behavior of millions of users doesn't lie.

Search, plus Your World is no different. It may be propelled by business imperatives, but as Google Search lead designer Jon Wiley told me yesterday, the design team's motto is "don't break search." If SPYW breaks search for its users, Google will change it. I don't much like it myself yet, so I just turn it off. "We're at the very beginning," Wiley told me, "and how that experience is going to grow and change is kind of an unknown, because it really is dependent upon how people use it."

As I said on Twitter at the time:

When a large-scale Web service puts an opt-out switch on a new feature, it's because they know users will like the feature.

— Jon Mitchell (@JonMwords) January 10, 2012

When I talked to Wiley yesterday (more from him later today), I asked him if "people have chilled out" about Search, plus Your World since it launched. But even as I asked it, I realized the question was smeared with blog-juice. "That implies that they were not chill to begin with," Wiley pointed out, and that's true. I was biased by the blogosphere into thinking that people hate this thing.

If the numbers didn't support it, even if Wiley hadn't been straight with me about it, I would have heard it in his voice. But "Search, plus Your World is working as intended," he said. That sounds opaque. But Google's intention is to enable hundreds of millions of users to find what they're looking for. If that wasn't working as intended, this product would change.

Google Is People, Not Just Data

But more can be said for Google products right now than that the data support the decisions. Some of Google's current projects are completely irrational, and yet they're wonderful. Have you tried a Google+ Hangout? You should. Lots of Web products in 2011 liked to call themselves "social." How many of them really were? Lots of people in 2011 liked to say that Google doesn't "get" social. Is that true?

No, Google+ will not replace Facebook. Is Facebook your standard for what "social" means now? "Like" buttons and virtual farms? Google+ has those, too, and that's a bummer. But Google+ also lets you hang out, face to face, with anyone with a computer or smartphone. Even people with dumbphones can join in by voice. Which is more social: being the Foursquare mayor of your neighborhood Starbucks or talking to people?

Yep. It's ironic that I'm praising hangouts. I've had three straight hangouts go horribly wrong due to technical glitches. The conversations themselves were fantastic, but Google lost them afterwards. Google+ has given +ReadWriteWeb Hangouts On Air capability, and no, it hasn't worked very well so far.

You know what else Google has given me, just another of its users, other than the ability to broadcast high-quality, 10-way video conversations to everyone in the world for free? Tech support for Hangouts On Air in the middle of the night. In-person training on how to use it. Why the hell are they doing this? Isn't this ridiculously expensive in both human and machine terms? What does Google get out of making a product like this?

You know, other than a hangout with the President of the United States?

That's a pretty good question. Maybe Googlers just think it's amazing.

Just So We're Clear

You might notice I haven't mentioned Android. It is my opinion that that product isn't serving its users well, which is why I am not one of them. But I haven't mentioned Chrome either, and I think that's the best browser in the world. The point is, Google is a big company. It's working on lots of things.

Some are bad. Some are dumb. Some are wrong. Some are the best tools on the entire Web. Some are insane, totally irrational, like free face-to-face hangouts for everyone. We should never fail to hold Google accountable, but don't fault it for trying, either.

Think Wall Street Executives Make Too Much Money? Check Out Facebook

Where did Facebook's profits go last year?

Fortune is pointing out that, according to the company's initial public offering, 8% went to its top five executives. That's more than most Wall Street firms, including JP Morgan Chase, which only shelled out $79 million to its top five executives.

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That is even more remarkable when you consider that the investment bank has 239,831 employees, compared to Facebook's 3,200.

Facebook isn't commenting as it waits out a quiet period ahead of its shares hitting the market. But the scrutiny is something the company should get used to: excessive executive compensation is a surefire way to tick off shareholders and would-be shareholders.

As Fortune senior editor Stephen Gandel points out:

"You can make the case that start-ups have to pay out a higher ratio of their bottom line in pay than a big bank would because they don't make a lot of money. But Facebook isn't your typical start-up. It's bottom line is already $1 billion. What's more, in the year before Google (GOOG) went public back in 2004, the search firm top executives collectively received just $2.2 million in pay. Of course, those guys were set to get a huge payday from IPO, but so is Zuckerberg and Co."

The chart above was compile by Fortune shows Facebook's executive compensation as a percentage of profits when compared with similarly-sized companies.

Photo courtesy of ShutterStock.

The Spectrum Dance: Sprint Twice to the Altar, Twice Burned

The mating dance of the contemporary mobile carrier in the United States is a fickle and awkward ritual. The carrier has certain ... needs ... that must be met and finding a suitable partner becomes challenging. One only needs to look towards Sprint, the mawkish third child in the U.S. operator ecosystem and its recent history of suitors. Twice Sprint has found itself engaged and headed to the altar, only twice to be burned.

For years, Sprint has been looking to expand its spectrum footprint in the U.S. Bandwidth scarcity has never really been a problem for Sprint because it has a smaller user base than AT&T and Verizon. But, if Sprint plans on growing to join Ma Bell and Big Red in the top tier, it will face the same challenges. To expand its footprint, Sprint has tied itself to one troubled company in Clearwire and then to another with LightSquared. Truly, Sprint is cursed when picking dance partners.

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The Estranged Wife: WiMax & Clearwire

Sprint has stated that it plans on rolling out a 4G LTE network to upgrade over its previous "4G" WiMax network. While WiMax has decent potential as a wireless standard, LTE is a more robust network based on the GSM standard. Like Verizon, Sprint needs to upgrade its aging CDMA network and WiMax was its first choice. The original "killer" Android smartphone, the HTV Evo, ran on WiMax.

This is where Sprint got in bed with Clearwire, the primary holders of WiMax spectrum in the U.S. The problem for Sprint is that Clearwire did not have the infrastructure to scale WiMax across the country as it had hoped. A series of bad decisions (such as spending more than $50 million for mall kiosks and stores) proved to be ill conceived. The idea for the Clearwire stores were to provide WiMax broadband to the home. The green and white stores were flashy ... and empty. In talking to one sales representative a year or so ago, he told me that people wandered in more out of curiosity as to what Clearwire was trying to sell than any intent to buy. Frankly, he told me, he had no idea what the store was doing there in the first place.

The future of WiMax is destined to be local wireless broadband. It probably will not be facilitated by Clearwire, which had a deficit of $1.62 billion in debt at the end of 2011 and announced today that it will need a cash influx to survive the year. WiMax, as a "pre-4G" (or advanced 3G, whichever semantic term you prefer) technology is better suited to infrastructure than on mobile smart devices.

Sprint is the largest shareholder in Clearwire. That could prove problematic if (when) Clearwire files for bankruptcy. Clearwire holds 100 MHz of spectrum in many major American cities, an extremely valuable asset that may be worth more on the open market than the actual valuation of Clearwire.

Clearwire is moving towards deploying a LTE network, but it does not have enough cash on hand to fully develop it. All the eggs were in the WiMax basket. Sprint has started to deploy its own LTE services outside of Clearwire and has remained noncommittal on how much it will rely on Clearwire in the future.

The Budding Bride With the Major Flaw: LightSquared

When it appeared that WiMax and Clearwire were not going to work out for Sprint, it turned to the darling (or albatross) of the wireless industry, LightSquared. The Virginia-based startup planned on becoming a bandwidth wholesaler (like Clearwire) by turning satellite spectrum into a ground-based LTE network. This week, the FCC revoked LightSquared's waiver based on the recommendation of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and concerns over GPS interference. See our "Requiem for LightSquared" for more detail.

Sprint jumped in bed with another wholesaler with a dangerous business plan. For the second time, Sprint has been burned. The LightSquared deal would have rapidly accelerated the carrier's LTE rollout but without the FCC waiver, LightSquared does not have a viable future. The battle is not over for LightSquared but there will be no movement on its regulatory troubles in the near future.

So, Sprint is now back to square one: upgrading its existing CDMA infrastructure to LTE on its own without minimal to no help from its proposed dance partners.

The Awkward Spectrum Dance

Three of the four major U.S. carriers have had very public and controversial relationships when trying to acquire more spectrum and upgrade to 4G technology. Sprint's case is laid out above. T-Mobile and its parent company Deutsche Telekom have no plans for an LTE network. Left on its own, T-Mobile will build out its HSPA+ network to be as robust as possible. AT&T figured that it would acquire spectrum by subsuming T-Mobile. The FCC put the kibosh on that and AT&T has been having a tantrum ever since. Verizon has actually stayed clear of many of these troubles. It recognized early on that its CDMA network needed to be upgraded and that most of its capacity would need to be funneled to LTE. It has bought spectrum where and when it can, such as from the cable operators, and continued to build. When it comes to the awkward dance, Verizon is like the older brother standing in the corner smoking cigarettes and grinning while watching everybody fumble over themselves.

Sprint needs to be creative to be competitive. That is why it is the only U.S. carrier that does not cap data usage or throttle it past a certain point. In the long run, that strategy may be untenable. There are no more dance partners on the horizon.

Top and satellite images courtesy of Shutterstock

Big Question (Answered): "Should Apple Build Its Own Social Network?"

In the wake of several companies admitting to uploading iPhone address book data without permission, Dan Frommer wonders if Apple should consider another go at social. While Ping wasn't the success Apple hoped, Frommer suggests Apple may still be smart to return to the drawing board and create full featured social network for iOS users.

Should Apple build its own social network? Does it make more sense to merely continue supporting other social networks instead?

We asked and culled your responses from Facebook, Google+ and Twitter and presented them back to you with Storify. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

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