In the latest development to the Facebook terms of service debacle, Mark Zuckerberg has put out a call for user feedback to the proposed changes to what is now separated out into two separate documents termed the Principles and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.

Kara Swisher at All Things Digital liveblogged the conference call in which Zuckerberg discussed the changes. Staci D. Kramer at paidContent comments on the outcome of the episode, saying:

“Facebook, which has had several major missteps when it comes to implementing new products and rules, appears to have learned one thing: the chance to comment before changes are implemented can make a big difference when it comes to acceptance.”

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb thinks the episode proves Facebook’s management is delusional about its relationship with its users:

“Facebook appears to forget that it’s just one of many ways people use the internet. It’s wildly popular today, but just as people have used other social networks in the past – they have other options for social networks to use in the future.

[...]

Let’s keep everyone’s place in this situation straight – Facebook is fortunate enough to have won millions of users, but its for the connection with each other and self expression that they come and stay – not because of any loyalty to Facebook.”

Elsewhere on the web:
Steve Rubel points to a short video from Intel’s social media strategist Michael Brito who’s roped in his daughters to explain social media in sixty seconds.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb thinks the social media experiment of tracking sleep patters at Yawnlog could yield fascinating results and is proof that you can socialise anything online.

Ryan Tate at Valleywag waxes ironic about Harper Collins’ decision to pay Gawker compatriot Nick Douglas to compile a book of his Twitter favourites.

There’s a lot of talk floating around about Google and Twitter at the moment; John Battelle explains why Twitter is the YouTube of realtime search and states the case for why Google should acquire the company:

“It’s an asset Google cannot afford to not own, and also, one they most likely do not have the ability (or brand permission) to build on their own. (Remember, Google tried to build its own YouTube – Google Video – and it failed to get traction. A service like Twitter is community driven, and Google has never been really great at that part of the media business).”

Staci Kramer at paidContent thinks Battelle has a point:

“Given that I’ve made as many searches on Twitter in the last 24 hours as on Google, in my own echo chamber he makes a lot of sense. I think mobile search is ahead in terms of importance though—and that the real breakthrough will be a true meshing of the two.”

Chris O’Brien writing for Silicon Valley’s Mercury News says it’s absurd to imagine that Twitter has Google freaked (though Google itself has now launched an official Twitter account), but adds:

“But the fact that Twitter’s potential to disrupt the search market is being seriously discussed shows just how quickly the sands can shift under the feet of even a colossus like Google.
Very quietly, one of Twitter’s most powerful applications has become its ability to allow people to conduct real-time searches.

The emergence of real-time search also certainly says a lot about us, and how our increasingly wired society is becoming ever more hyperkinetic. In this world, compared with Twitter, Google suddenly begins to feel old and plodding. Its search results might be minutes, hours, or even days old. Yawn!

Typically, when such goliaths are slain, it’s because they failed to recognize the threat and make the necessary changes until it was too late. So, it’ll be interesting to see how Google — or even if Google — feels the need to throw some kind of counterpunch. In theory, Google has created a culture to keep it flexible and innovative. On the other hand, its track record of new products has been a bit lackluster.”

Elsewhere on the web:

Dan Zarella, creator of the TweetSuite Twitter plugins for WordPress, has an interesting take on the classis, with a post on what the Homeric poems and oral tradition can teach us about social marketing.

Shiv Singh at Razorfish loves how inherently social Recovery.gov – a US government site detailing how money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is being spent.

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb deconstructs the word-of-mouth phenomenon that has driven international growth for US crafts ecommerce site Etsy.

Sarah Lacy guestblogging at TechCrunch posts a thoughtful response, concluding:

“I’m hopeful that the direction social networking is headed in is the answer to this, not the problem. As more of our social graphs move online, via Twitter or Facebook, the more the same social pressures of the real world come to bear. Compare anonymous YouTube comments with Twitter comments. Generally, Twitter is more kind and substantive, especially among users who Twitter under their real names. Now compare that to comments on Facebook. Almost all of the comments on someone’s photo, video, status are supportive and empathetic, because the site has mimicked real world relationships and with that real world pressures.”

Stephen Waddington at Rainier PR is less understanding of Lady Greenfield’s hypothesis, as reported by the Daily Mail:

“This is not neuroscience as we know it as Chris Edwards said. Students wouldn’t be allowed to get away with this level of conjecture in a school essay. It’s lazy journalism. And even lazier science. Will Sturgeon has dissected the story paragraph-by-paragraph and gives further insight into how these types of stories reach the front page of a tabloid newspaper.“

Elsewhere on the web:

YouTube has opened its social API – which allows users to import their YouTube activities into social networks like Friendfeed and Facebook – to developers. Adam Ostrow at Mashable discusses the implications.

Nick Booth highlights the Social Action WordPress plugin, which makes it easier for readers to actively participate in social change through social media, drawing comparisons with Paul Bradshaw’s model for 21st century journalism, leveraging the same concept in context of newspapers.

Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb reviews MicroPlaza, a personalised memetracker for Twitter which, assuming you follow a lot of people, looks like it will be a killer tool for picking out coherent conversations from the babble.

AOL’s $850 million social network Bebo entered the lifestreaming space yesterday with the launch of a raft of new features focused on pulling in all aspects of users’ friends’ activity online even if they aren’t on Bebo, through Socialthing, the social aggregator which AOL snapped up last summer.

Adam Ostrow at Mashable puts the launch into context:

“At launch, Bebo is offering support for Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and Delicious. That’s a smaller number of services than the competitors, but the company is hoping that with its unique ability to pull in activities from your disparate friends automatically, it can make up ground. Another way the company hopes to do that is by getting celebrities into lifestreaming – they tout the fact that a number of prominent artists like Miley Cyrus and All-American Rejects are already using the features.It will be interesting to see how this plays out. Socialthing hadn’t even left private beta when it was purchased by AOL, but it did seem to make social aggregation a lot easier to get excited about, since it leveraged your existing social networks and didn’t entail having to find a whole bunch of new people to follow, ala FriendFeed. There’s also AIM integration coming, wherein AIM profiles become Bebo profiles, which could lure millions of new people into the site.

AOL and Bebo have a huge audience and in many ways a better, more mainstream take on an idea that has proven successful so far with early adopters. Will it be enough to get the masses into social aggregation and prove that AOL didn’t massively overpay for Bebo? Probably only if tens of millions of people cling to it, versus the hundreds of thousands that use existing social aggregators.”

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has more detail on Bebo’s new services:

“It is also introducing a visual timeline called a “Lifestory” that puts uploaded photos, events, and (soon) videos into a scrollable, chronological series of postage stamp icons at the top of members’ profile pages. Eventually, people will be able to subscribe to other Lifestories, including those from brands and bands, and embed them in their own profile pages or elsewhere. The timeline will also become the centerpiece of a Bebo iPhone app coming out soon.

The new features should all help to reinvigorate a site that has been in the doldrums lately. But Bebo’s biggest boost will come later this week when AOL migrates all of its AIM Profiles members over to Bebo on Wednesday and Thursday. This single move will more than double Bebo’s presence in the U.S., where AIM Profiles is even bigger than Bebo. According to comScore, Bebo’s unique U.S. visitors have been in decline the past few months to 5 million in January, whereas AIM Profiles has seen an upswing to 8.5 million. (See chart below). Worldwide, Bebo has 22.6 million monthly visitors.”

Elsewhere on the web:

Kevin Marks, Google’s developer advocate for OpenSocial, authors a social web Q&A on OpenSocial in a guest post on TechCrunchIT.

Jeremiah Owyang reviews TechCrunch’s 2008 Year in Review report.

Olivia Mitchell presents an excellent guide on how to present while people are Twittering.

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch stirred up a hornet’s nest over the weekend with a post suggesting that Last.fm had handed over user listener data to the RIAA – an allegation that prompted Last.fm founder Richard Jones to come out with guns blazing in the story comments, saying:

“I’m rather pissed off this article was published, except to say that this is utter nonsense and totally untrue. As far as I can tell, the author of this article got a ‘tip’ from one person and decided to make a story out of it. TechCrunch is full of shit, film at 11.”

Robert Andrews at paidContent reports on the other refutations issued by a CBS spokesman and Last.fm staff, saying:

“If true, the instance would be a PR disaster for Last.fm and, despite the denials, the episode already appears to have hurt the site over the weekend. Another London developer,  Jonty Wareing posted on TechCrunch: “What annoys me is that people are deleting accounts and losing their entire scrobbling history based on shoddy journalism. This hurts those people who have spent years carefully collecting their data far more than last.fm as a whole. We have now stopped the job that removes users marked for deletion, so if you did delete your account in haste and want your scrobbles back, please contact our support team.” If true, staff would have revolted, too: Wareing posted on Last.fm’s forum: “You could also expect most of the Last.fm staff to walk out of the office door and never return.”“

Commenting on Last.fm’s response, Paul Carr voiced what no doubt many in the industry are thinking:

“I know they’re doing lots individually, but lack of a a firm public statement from CBS or anything on the Last blog is ridiculous“

Elsewhere on the web:

Jeremiah Owyang conducted a straw poll to see how many people have deleted their Facebook accounts after last week’s TOS issues. Read the comments and linked Facebook break-up stories to check the temperature of social network users actively concerned with digital rights.

Tameka Kee at paidContent muses on the potential backlash for Twitter now that Second Life’s hype has fizzled.

Abigail Corfan points to an interesting low-tech exercise in audience engagement which demonstrates that technology needn’t be the linchpin of social media in the arts.

Just a week after Google launched its Social Bar, Facebook has launched a social widget for Facebook Connect, called the Comments Box. Ray C. He announced the launch on the Facebook blog, saying:

“The Comments Box is a great way for any website, blog or photo gallery to add social comments to their page in just a minute with a few lines of code. We want to help bring you social widgets that make it easier for users to communicate and share across your site and with their friends on Facebook.

With the Comments Box, Facebook users on your site can comment on your content, post those comments to their profiles, and share them with their friends on Facebook. The Comments Box allows non-Facebook users to make comments on your site as well. And via our APIs, you can access related comments made on Facebook as well to bring the conversation together.”

While this is undoubtedly a cool new feature, Frederic Lardinois at ReadWriteWeb picks up on the significance behind the move:

“What is most important about this announcement, though, is that Facebook continues to open up its platform to third parties. Earlier this month, third-party developers got access to users’ status updates, notes, and links. Now, Facebook is allowing bloggers and publishers to implement some of Facebook’s core features outside of Facebook’s own site. Facebook use to be a closed off silo, but this is changing rapidly right now and it will be interesting to see how Facebook’s users will react to this.”

Eric Eldon at VentureBeat questions the need for Comments Box, saying:

“From VentureBeat’s perspective, we use Disqus, which comes with its own set of features, like threading comments, spam filtering — and Facebook Connect integration. So I’m not sure why we’d use this new widget.”

Meanwhile Jason Kincaid at TechCrunch wonders what Comments Box might mean for the future development of the social web:

“But in the end all of this content is going to be going to Facebook, which established blog owners and publishers are not going to like. It’s also bringing Facebook one step closer to becoming the universal standard for social content across the web – an idea that may alarm advocates for open standards like OpenID.”

Elsewhere on the web:
will.i.am and Kevin Spacey both made appearances at Mobile World Congress, to get the lowdown on the future for entertainment content on mobile devices. TechCrunch UK interviews MySpace’s Travis Katz.

YouTube has expanded its Annotations feature to make it more social, allowing users to invite friends to use text boxes, labels, and interactive buttons to enhance their videos.

ReadWriteWeb has an interesting look at how Japanese newspapers are innovating to try to save themselves.

Biz Stone has blogged about Twitter’s plans to integrate real-time search into the central Twitter service, saying that a small random subset of people will see Search and Trends in their signed-in home pages, looking something like this:

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch says:

“By making search more central, Twitter will capture even more of those what’s-happening-right-now searches. I wonder how many Twitter users right now even realize that you can search it. The search feature is not easy to find (it is a link at the bottom of the page). This is an obvious move. It will open up new ways to explore Twitter for users and train them how to do real-time searches on a regular basis.”

Adam Ostrow at Mashable says the power of the feature is clear:

“It’s not only a real-time sentiment index and chat room-like feature for different topics, but also an amazing way to address one of new user’s big problems – finding people to follow, beyond the “suggested users” that was recently added. Once search goes live to everyone, the value of Twitter should become immediately more obvious, and could also help keep the company on its incredible growth trajectory.”

Elsewhere on the web:

Beth Kanter has a lengthy post based on a conversation with Twestival founder Amanda Rose about what non-profit ventures can learn from Twestival 09.

Robin Goad at Hitwise blogs about the most searched-for personalities in the UK towards the end of 2008; quite unsurprisingly, Martin Lewis of MoneySavingExpert.com is #1.

Shiv Singh at Razorfish blogs his thoughts on the worrisome aspects of social media for brand managers and marketers.

In the face of the widespread backlash over its new terms of service, Facebook has reverted to the old TOS while they work out a new new version, which users can contribute to by joining the Facebook Bill of Rights and Responsibilities group. As Eric Eldon at VentureBeat says: “Well, that was pretty fast.”

Mark Zuckerberg announced the change on the official Facebook blog; Kara Swisher at All Things Digital was lightning fast in her screamingly funny interpretation and analysis of the post.

Taking a look at a Facebook user poll on the matter, Adam Ostrow at Mashable comes back to the issue of the social network’s endlessly ironic communication problems:

“As with Facebook’s past transgressions, the problem seems to be less about the net result than the poor communication on the company’s part. While they blogged about changes to their terms of service back on February 4th, the changes to the part everyone is now furious about was omitted from that post. And once again, the company’s increasingly well-known CEO is hung out to dry, defending unpopular changes, as opposed to promoting all the exciting things going on at Facebook.”

Meanwhile Jessi Hempel at CNN Money takes a closer look at how Facebook is taking over our lives, with a view to whether the social network can ultimately turn a profit.

Elsewhere on the web:

Patrick at 10e20 provides the ultimate how-to on social media buttons, tools and badges – a must-read for anyone working in social media marketing.

Joshua Benton at Nieman Journalism Labs posts an interesting analysis of monetising content online, using 4chan’s recent coverage in the Washington Post as an example.

Jennifer van Grove at Mashable gets excited about Tumblr’s new features, including audio posts and saving drafts.

Facebook just can’t seem to get the knack of handling service announcements in a way that doesn’t leave their users in a tizz. Chris Wallis at The Consumerist was the first to take a closer look at Facebook’s new terms of service, alerting readers to changes that allow the social network to archive in perpetuity any content users upload in public (i.e. without any privacy settings enabled), even if they later delete their accounts. As Wallis summed up:

“Make sure you never upload anything you don’t feel comfortable giving away forever, because it’s Facebook’s now.”

Thousands of Facebook users have themselves mobilised to express their dismay, forming several groups to express their concern, prompting Mark Zuckerberg’s response explaining the Facebook philosophy around data rights and retention:

“Our philosophy is that people own their information and control who they share it with. When a person shares information on Facebook, they first need to grant Facebook a license to use that information so that we can show it to the other people they’ve asked us to share it with. Without this license, we couldn’t help people share that information.

One of the questions about our new terms of use is whether Facebook can use this information forever. When a person shares something like a message with a friend, two copies of that information are created—one in the person’s sent messages box and the other in their friend’s inbox. Even if the person deactivates their account, their friend still has a copy of that message. We think this is the right way for Facebook to work, and it is consistent with how other services like email work. One of the reasons we updated our terms was to make this more clear.

[...]

Still, the interesting thing about this change in our terms is that it highlights the importance of these issues and their complexity. People want full ownership and control of their information so they can turn off access to it at any time. At the same time, people also want to be able to bring the information others have shared with them—like email addresses, phone numbers, photos and so on—to other services and grant those services access to those people’s information. These two positions are at odds with each other. There is no system today that enables me to share my email address with you and then simultaneously lets me control who you share it with and also lets you control what services you share it with.”

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch comments on Zuckerberg’s explanation:

“Zuckerberg is saying, ‘Trust us.’ But it is difficult to trust a company that is stripping users of rights they’ve become accustomed to, even if hardly any of them ever actually asserted those rights in practice. And the principle that you should be able to delete your data from the Facebook service is one that many would argue trumps the good that is done by letting Facebook keep it. If I upload a picture which I later regret uploading, why shouldn’t I be able to erase it from Facebook forever, even if some of my friends have already seen it? And should there be different rules for different media? Most people consider the messages in their inbox to be theirs, even if the sender wishes they’d never sent it? And as this data is shared beyond Facebook across the Web, who controls what becomes even harder to determine.Like Zuckerberg says, it’s complicated.”

Chris O’Brien at Silicon Beat couldn’t understand the fuss, while Kara Swisher at All Things Digital expressed the view that for social networks, this is all par for the course:

” … once you send something to others, it is out there in cyberspace forever, never ever to return.And that goes double on social networking sites, where–let’s be honest–people egregiously overshare and then get all righteous when it is explained to them that sharing means, um, sharing.”

Louis Gray started a Friendfeed conversation around the subject, where a prevailing view is matter-of-fact – if something truly is private, don’t put it online.

Update: For added context, Amanda L. French compares Facebook’s TOS with those of MySpace, Flickr, Picasa, YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Elsewhere on the web:

Steve Rubel points out five digital trends he’ll be watching out for in 2009.

Rob Brown sums up a fast and free-flowing debate about PR and SEO by many of the UK’s leading lights of the industry, facilitated largely through Twitter.

Lance Armstrong has turned to Twitter to try to track down the thieves who made off with his one-of-a-kind bike. Have you seen it, perchance?

It’s not as if Twitter was looking, but who wouldn’t answer when opportunity knocks carrying $35m? Though Mark Hendrickson at TechCrunch has confirmation that the actual sum raised is in excess of $35m. Announcing the funding on the official Twitter blog, Biz Stone says the shot in the arm will mean recruitment and (at last) revenue generation, based on the service’s recent stats:

“Twitter is growing at a phenomenal rate. Active users have increased 900% in a year and even though our web traffic is amazing, we see twice that traffic to the APIs. Interacting with Twitter over SMS is also getting more popular every day. Our relatively small team of 29 employees has accomplished quite a bit lately but it’s obvious that we have the world ahead of us.”

Tameka Kee at paidContent puts the news into context:

“Twitter’s popularity has surged, despite its lack of a business model, and has garnered plenty of media attention since mid-2008: President Obama planned to use Twitter to announce his running mate at the start of the election, CNN covered how breaking news spread through the service, and VCs have even invested in Twitter-related startups like TweetDeck and StockTwits. Meanwhile, Twitter has been the subject of acquisition rumors (including a botched deal with Facebook)—and all this for a company that only recently hired its first business development exec.”

Jeremiah Owyang is impressed but not surprised after Twitter’s support crew helped him out in no time flat after spammer(s) spoofed his account and linked to a ‘get rich quick’ scam. His advice?

“Twitter needs to keep the network clean, why? Brands are very interested in this community, I’ve been getting more and more requests from clients to discuss twitter, and whether or not they should engage and how. Just today, Forbes captured my thoughts on how I believe Twitter can monetize from corporate services, read why and how.”

Erick Schonfeld at TechCrunch has another theory about how Twitter will evolve from here; the service creates a real-time database of thoughts and opinions about pretty much anything under the sun — bringing the possibility of mining the thought stream within reach.

“What makes Google and other search engines so valuable is that they capture people’s intent—what they are looking for, what they desire, what they want to learn about. But they don’t do a great job at capturing what people are doing or what they are thinking about. For thoughts and events that are happening right now, searching Twitter increasingly brings up better results than searching Google.

[...]

Twitter may just be a collection of inane thoughts, but in aggregate that is a valuable thing. In aggregate, what you get is a direct view into consumer sentiment, political sentiment, any kind of sentiment. For companies trying to figure out what people are thinking about their brands, searching Twitter is a good place to start.”

Elsewhere on the web:

Lidija Davis at ReadWriteWeb has a fascinating report from the SMX Conference, where Vint Cerf shared his thoughts on the future of the internet, IPTV and advertising, bit rot and the mechanics of ‘the intercloud’.

The Guardian reports that Friends Reunited is up on the block.

Mike Butcher at TechCrunch UK reports that Fav.or.it will be pushing into corporate blog tracking.