Business Insider's Nick Carlson has just published a number of long posts, which are the result of a "long investigation into the origins of Facebook" and don't appear to reflect too well on founder Mark Zuckerberg: the word 'hacked' comes up more than once. (more...)

So remember the big hubbub over Facebook’s ever-changing Terms of Service (TOS) last year? Remember how Zuckerberg & co tried to say that they didn’t “own” your data…they just licensed it? And remember how most of us in the blogosphere made the point that regardless if they “owned” it they still had an all-encompassing, perpetual license to do whatever the hell they wanted with it (including sub-license it and store copies of it on their servers)? Well, Facebook would like to send a friendly reminder that at the end of the day, they’ve still got your data by the proverbial balls. (more...)

According to the Constitution you have to be 35 years old to be elected President. There is obviously no such regulation for social media moguls -- despite the ever increasing power they wield over our daily lives -- though judging from some recent comments from Facebook head Mark Zuckerberg maybe there should be. Speaking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco this weekend 25-year-old Zuckerberg told the crowd that privacy should no longer be considered a "social norm." (more...)

When looking ahead at the next year, pundits turn into prognosticators. Bloggers covering all sorts of topics and industries are now giving their predictions for what's to come in 2010. Conventional wisdom says to go the conservative route with these choices in order to avoid looking foolish when none of your projections pan out. At the same time, there's a key difference between picking things that are realistically possible and those that are already on the road to happening. I've assembled my favorite predictions covering a variety of fields and what's supposedly in store for the near future: (more...)

The year 2009 had many media bright spots, break-out stars, dominating networks and game-changing technologies.  The Mediaite 50 collects the finest, most exemplary innovators and influencers of the year, defining a media moment in time and setting the agenda as we move forward. (more...)

Despite the fact it looks like Facebook has shored up many of its new privacy setting issues which drew red flags when they were unveiled last week -- notwithstanding your friends list, which is still considered obligatory public information -- the public fallout continues. Seems that those easily overlooked 350,000 people who actually took the time to figure out the privacy settings and apply them are none to happy with the arbitrary nature with which their control over their personal information was suddenly removed. Also, a lot of them work in media. Wall St. Journal personal technology columnist Julia Angwin has explored the new settings, which she attributes to a thus far one-sided distribution deal with Google and Bing, and is considering giving up her Facebook account altogether.

But those who want a private experience on Facebook will have to work harder at it: if you inadvertently post a comment on a friends profile page that has been opened to the public, your comment will be public too. Just as Facebook turned friends a commodity, it has likewise gathered our personal data – our updates, our baby photos, our endless chirping birthday notes— and readied it to be bundled and sold. So I give up. Rather than fighting to keep my Facebook profile private, I plan to open it up to the public – removing the fiction of intimacy and friendship.

Over at Big Money, meanwhile, Paul Smalera appears to be taking it all in stride and putting it all in rather severe perspective: Suck it up, people.

The outcry against the publicizing of friend lists boils down to two main arguments, which I’ll deal with individually. First, the idea that your friend list is “your data” and Facebook is a mere vessel for you to store it on and thus should not have any say-so in how that data is presented or used: For Facebook users who feel this way, may I suggest using an address book or Excel spreadsheet rather than a public Web site? If your interpersonal connections truly belong solely to you, there’s no reason they should need to be “connected” via some fancy Web site a Harvard dropout created, except to leverage them into a source of occasional amusement and competition. Facebook is a private, for-profit company that uses user data to serve advertising and earn revenue.

Snap! Though yes, all true. And yes, you can cancel your account. Meanwhile, over at Gawker Ryan Tate has created a guide to the new, sometimes confusing, privacy setting: "what can't be attributed to Facebook's greed can be chalked up to ineptitude. " So there you have it. Keep those drunk pictures to your excel spreadsheet self.

At this point, who hasn't written a song for the holiday season with some sort of Jew-related punchline? The latest in the canon comes courtesy of Max Weinberg from the Tonight Show, singing a response to Orrin Hatch's "Eight Days of Hannukah" — a song by a Mormon for the Jews. Weinberg and the Tonight Show decided to return the favor with a song by a Jew for the Mormons. (more...)

the aughts This new decade has snuck up on us. It's mid-December and only just now has the media world seemed to have awoken to the fact that, wow, we're about to enter a new decade. I myself had not even realized it until I got an email from Newsweek inviting me to participate in their end-of-decade package. What a difference from ten years ago, when a millennium was drawing to a close and we lived in fear of the havoc to be wrought by Y2K even while we were partying like it was 1999. (I was dreaming when I wrote that.) By contrast, this year has been so crazy that just chronicling the madness of 2009 has seemed like more than enough work, let alone reflect on the past decade. But part of the import of a passing decade being so overlooked lies to in how un-unified it seemed. The 90s were a big deal because they were so different from the 80s and so different from the 70s. And when we left the 90s behind, we left them for...what? (more...)

Scary And now playing the role of Big Brother: Facebook. With a lot of help from you. On the off chance you may have missed the news in the last few days, Facebook has rolled out new, controversial privacy settings that appear to be aimed at getting users to make as much information about themselves available to as many people possible. Why is Facebook so keen on getting you to share all your favorite TV shows, and drunken party pics, and your entire list of friends and interests? Advertising baby. Facebook is a goldmine of data and the more they can provide the more they can charge. (more...)

Ken Auletta seems unable to spell the names of some of the tech world's biggest stars. Has the famed media critic perhaps not heard of a little research tool called Google? (more...)

If you are one of Facebook's more than 350 million users and have logged in since last night, you were greeted by an open letter from Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg outlining a sweeping set of changes to the site. Regional networks are officially dead and gone (though Mashable called their demise a while ago). And privacy settings are getting a major shakeup. The comments on Zuckerberg's note tend towards favorable, but one, somewhat unrelated question keeps popping up: where's the dislike button? (more...)

Today's Gawker Media redesign unveils a new feature that attempts to optimize the loyalty of the network's already robust fan base. Gawker Open Forums now exists on all of the group's nine blogs, integrating social networking, crowdsourcing and standard discussion forums, leaving each blog as not only a conversation starter, but a channel where news can be broken, shared and commented on by readers, all in one place. (more...)

It's no secret that we're obsessed with competition and we get our kicks from big movement on the Power Grid. Recently sickness has been responsible for much of the movement in the rankings, as Dr. Sanjay Gupta -- who recently announced he had swine flu -- jumped from #12 to #4 in the rankings among TV pundits, with his Google buzz peaking at #1. The third search result? "I went to Afghanistan and all I got was H1N1." (more...)

What would happen if a bunch of fancy-free media-types put their heads together and ranked the most influential movers and shakers in the media industry by relevance? (more...)

Just like the swallows return to Capistrano every year, the world's top media moguls come to Sun Valley. And while there might be less bird poop  at the Allen and Co. Media Mogul Conference, there is as much ruffling of feathers (zing!) Early headlines from the event have focused on the rise of social media (have you heard of Twitter?) as well as paid content. In other words, if you can't make money off of Twitter or Facebook, how much should one pay for it? (more...)