It's not that amazing. As CenterNetwork's Allen Stern first pointed out, each time a new user signs up for FriendFeed, the site suggests the new user becomes friends with "Popular FriendFeeders." On the list: Bret Taylor, Fred Wilson, Scott Beale, Michael Arrington, Loic Le Meur, Jason Calacanis, Dave Winer and Leo Laporte — despite, as Stern notes, the fact that many of these "popular" users don't actually use FriendFeed very often. Why? We haven't asked anybody at FriendFeed because the answer is obvious: So that the whole bunch of easily ego-fluffed blog blowhards will blog about how amazing FriendFeed is, without bothering to figure out why, exactly, it seems to be growing so much faster for them than everybody else.

A group of supporters are lobbying the Democratic senator to change his position on the bill on his campaign social network, MyBO. The question is, will Obama actually take serious policy suggestions from supporters using the same website he's already using to mobilize volunteers and, more importantly, raise more cash than any presidential candidate in history? The Magic 8-Ball says "very doubtful." (Photo by AP/Jae C. Hong)

No real working girl is going to use the world's hardest-working zombie generator as a place to advertise for new clients. Still, Harvey is humiliated, and has called for Facebook to tighten up — to respond faster to user complaints about fraudulent profiles, and if they can't? To shut down, displacing users who want to hurl those most reliable of playground insults, "whore" and (don't feel left out, guys) "fag" to the rest of the Internet. (Photo via Daily Mail)

• In "Fears Over Facebook Beach Party," SkyNews reported today that

  As thousands of Facebook party-goers prepare to descend on a seaside town for a "Night Of Mayhem", local police are determined to stop it going ahead.

• In "Woman branded prostitute in Facebook scam," Britain's Telegraph reported in February that
  

  A woman claimed her life has been destroyed by strangers who stole her identity and set up a Facebook profile describing her as a prostitute.

• In "Facebook Tube party that ended in drunken riot was organised by City banker," the UK's MailOnline reports:
  

  One of the organisers of the London Underground protest that descended into drunken chaos at the weekend is a City banker who fears losing his job as a result, it emerged yesterday.

• In "Fledgling Rebellion on Facebook Is Struck Down by Force in Egypt," the Washington Post reports:
  

  Since late March, 74,000 people had registered on a Facebook page created and run by Maher and a few other young Egyptians, most of them newcomers to activism. Maher would end up among what rights groups said were 500 Egyptians arrested during two months of political activism in Egypt — and find himself stripped and beaten in a Cairo police station, he said.

• In "Facebook 'dipping' craze irks pool owners" the UK's Telegraph reports:
  

  Teenagers are using internet satellite images to spot outdoor swimming pools before meeting for late-night dips.Once a venue is found, the youngsters use social networking sites including Facebook and Bebo to meet for impromptu swims and pool parties.

• In "Tycoon's son wanted over Facebook murder," Australia's News.com.au reports:
  

  An Arab billionaire's son listed as a Facebook friend of a murdered socialite has been named by police as a prime suspect in the blonde's death.

• In "Husband 'murdered wife before killing himself' after she confessed on Facebook she was leaving him," the UK's MailOnline reports:
  

  A husband is believed to have murdered his wife before killing himself after she told friends on Facebook they were splitting up, it emerged yesterday. Less than a fortnight ago Mrs Grinhaff, 42, updated her profile on the social networking site, Facebook, telling friends she was "currently splitting" from her husband.

• In "Facebook mob trashes £4.4m Spanish villa," the Register reports:
  

  A Brit-owned £4.4m Spanish villa has been laid waste by 400 rampaging teenagers after the owners' 16-year-old daughter posted invites to the mother of all wrecking parties on Bebo and Facebook.

• In "Internet' party turns into riot," This Is Cheshire reports:
  

  A girl's 18th birthday party turned into a major "riot" after an invitation was posted on social internet networking site Facebook. Gangs of teenagers tried to gatecrash the fancy dress bash after a friend of the unnamed youngster put a message about it on the internet.

  
  
  
  
  (Photo of the Facebook Tube Party by Annie Mole)

An enormous, highly visible brand may not want to risk seeing its ad wind up on a page such as that run by the actual Facebook group "I've Had Sex with Someone on Facebook," which at press time had 59,353 members. Or consider the MySpace profile (turned up after about two minutes on the site) of 18-year-old "Nikki AKA Death Angel!," which is adorned with the motto "Don't fuckin fuck with ninjette bitch we'll cut ur fuckin head off an give it to ur momma."

When spending the majority of their time browsing content like this (or, more likely, content like this slightly more relevant to their friends), what are users thinking about? Checking out an ex's profile, we're more likely to remember the photos of the new sweetie, and not the "Last Minute Cabo Deals!" enticement next to it. If anything, that's salt in the wound. This new argument goes, if advertisers could sell based on users' messy passions, we users will stop playing Scrabulous — or dreaming of getting back together — and pay up. Sex does still sell.

HotWired FAQ

What Is HotWired?
HotWired is new thinking for a new medium. We call it a cyberstation, a suite of vertical content streams about the Digital Revolution and the Second Renaissance with an integrated community space. While HotWired is currently bound by technological limitations that restrict bandwidth, it represents the genetic blueprint that will evolve into the overarching media environment of the next century.

At the core of HotWired's editorial is point of view. We are not in the content business, we are in the context business. People today don't have the time or inclination to make sense of the data flood. HotWired is Wired's answer to the need for professionalism in a new medium that has been filled until now with something that resembles public access television programming.

HotWired is live, twitching, the real-time nervous system of the planet.

What Does HotWired Look Like?
HotWired is a stunning reinterpretation of the World Wide Web. Developed by Creative Director Barbara Kuhr of the award-winning design firm Plunkett + Kuhr, HotWired's look is clean and bright, filled with playful logos by Dutch designer Max Kisman and bursting with world-beat colors.

HotWired can be accessed on the Internet via the World Wide Web and a client application such as Mosaic or NetScape (though be warned, NCSA Mosaic for Windows has a bug which makes it unusable).

How Is HotWired Different?
HotWired doesn't look like any online service out there - it zigs where all the others zag. (HotWired's unofficial design watchword was "war on bevelled edges.") Its content and perspective are as innovative as those of its mothership, Wired magazine, while at the same time being utterly different. Its community space is technologically unrivalled - the first graphical conferencing system for the World Wide Web.

Isn't Advertising Anathema on the Net? The Net community does indeed react negatively to invasive advertising - the kind of spamming conducted recently by the Arizona lawyers Canter and Siegel, which elicited a massive rejection by the Net's immune system. The advertising on HotWired is the opposite of invasive.

Each advertiser is accessible only through a single discreet banner at the head of a content section. Most advertising is 90 percent persuasion and 10 percent information; advertising on HotWired reverses this ratio. And the privacy of members is guaranteed by HotWired's unqualified commitment to never divulge a member's personal information to advertisers.

Why HotWired, Why Now?
Because while Big Media and the telecom behemoths have been busy forming "strategic alliances" to build the "information superhighway" and sending out press releases about the tests they're launching any day now, thousands of companies and millions of people have quietly built a new interactive medium called the Internet.

This medium is not magazines with buttons, any more than television was radio with pictures. It's a new medium with a new aesthetic, a new commercial dynamic.

Many media companies shovel their leftovers into the online world and call it content. HotWired is not one of them.

Where Wired is a clear signpost to the next level, HotWired is operating from that next level. HotWired is a constantly evolving experiment in virtual community. It's Way New Journalism. It's Rational Geographic.

Today is like 1948; a new medium has reached critical mass. We're trying to help define the future of that medium before it ends up like television.

So if you're looking for the soul of our new medium in wild metamorphosis, our advice is simple. Get HotWired.

What Does HotWired Cost?
HotWired is free to members. HotWired's revenue model is similar to broadcast media - content supported by sponsors. HotWired's sponsors are some of the bluest chip advertisers in America, including IBM, AT&T, Volvo, Sprint, MCI, Zima (Coors), Internet Shopping Network (Home Shopping Network), Club Med, etc.

What Hotwired Is Not HotWired is not Wired magazine with another name (Wired works perfectly well in print, thank you). It's not a so-called online magazine (print content reduced to ASCII and shoveled into another medium, narrowband interactive). It's not video-on-demand (a pie-in-the-sky marketing concept created by out-of-touch old-media executives to justify their headlong rush into a new medium they don't understand, broadband interactive). It's not an online service like Prodigy or AOL (now rendered obsolete by the explosion of interest in the Internet and the development of the Web and graphical browsers).

And like Wired before it, HotWired is not a cold, marketing concept, but the heartfelt expression of the passion of its creators.

Previously, Facebook went with a three-column format, but now there’s only two. That means that the right-most column that was previously filled with new app messages and notifications is gone. Which means that profiles are lot cleaner — and a lot more difficult to get your custom app featured on. Those apps that used to line the right column now live within the ‘Boxes’ tab (first I’ve ever heard that term used on Facebook). When clicked, that tab expands to reveal all your installed applications, but also keeps them out of plain sight. Again, nice and tidy for users, but troublesome for marketers.

Truth is, Facebook's anticlutter efforts are doing these marketers a favor. During the Facebook platform's first year, users installed apps with abandon — and then abandoned them. But since oft-installed apps remained on user profiles, they were still considered a success. No longer. Now apps will need to be used — and need to be useful — to be considered a success. And it'll be that much harder for brands to create applications that Facebook users appreciate — but that much easier to get value out of the ones they actually use.

Smith told the crowd that the big spends agencies like to make for the clients on TV actually go too far on social media. With $100 million, Smiths said, he could purchase and track 1,500 TV ad spots for a client. Spend a tenth of that much on a social media site, and suddenly, "There's a huge wave of data we're not prepared to deal with." That overflow of information is one reason advertising on social media requires "more resources" from agencies.

More work to spend less of the client's money? That doesn't appeal to agencies. Besides, social media advertising — which is all about engaging consumers on a deeper level — is not always worth it for packaged-goods advertisers, which just want to move product off shelves. Smith said it best: "No one wants a relationship with their mustard." (Photo by Marshall Astor)

A ban on drinking in London's subway system — the Tube, they call it — began on Sunday. On Saturday night, London's best drinkers gathered for a Circle Line Cocktail Party, also known as the Last Round on the Underground. Thousands attended, 17 were arrested, two police officers were assaulted and Mark Zuckerberg made it all happen. Reports say word of the the citywide cocktail party spread only after 26-year old London banker Alexandre Graham created a Facebook group called "Circle line party - last day of drinking on the Tube." Soon after, several other Facebook groups formed with plans to party as well. "The point of it was just to make fun of how ridiculous the ban is," Graham told the Evening Standard. "I hope I don’t get sacked," he added. (That's British for "fired.") Below, ten YouTube videos of "the Last Round On The Underground." Graham's employers at the Royal Bank of Scotland, will want to examine them closely before determining his fate.

Circle Line Tube Cocktail Party 31-05-08 Final Night

Circle Line Streaker - 31 May 2008 Tube Party

Underground circle line tube party 31st May 2008

Circle Line Tube Party - Liverpool Street - 31/05/08 - 3/4

The last drinking party in the London Underground ever.

"Boris is a wanker" chant

Party-goers play Twister on the tube.

Last tube party; guy getting arrested fight police

Guy Getting Arrested on the Last Round of the Underground

Cicle Line Party + Police With Attack Dogs

Somebody said that we were allowed to wreck the house because the birthday girl's parents were getting divorced and there were kids behaving like gangsters from a rap video, throwing stuff around and smashing things. There were chairs, tables, even a TV in the pool.

Six Apart, the previous owner of LiveJournal before selling it to Russian Internet startup Sup, looks wiser by the day for abdicating the company's iron-fisted rule over what sounds to a non-LiveJournal user like the democratic turmoil in some post-Soviet Central Asian country. Except with more homoerotic Harry Potter fan fiction.

Founder Brad Fitzpatrick, who returned to the advisory board in December after leaving the company in the wake of another user-generated fracas last year, has to be regretting the decision. Not to leave the company, that is, but to agree to rejoin it on the advisory board, which was recently proved toothless by a ham-handed change to LiveJournal's account types. (Users, unbelievably, complained about the elimination of an option for completely advertising-free, unpaid accounts; only in the bizarro financial world of LiveJournal users does this option make economic sense.)

While the affair amounts to bad publicity for LiveJournal — even the developer who wrote the poll code managing the election has called into question voting practices — it's got to be great for pageviews.

Which makes us wonder: Why just let one LiveJournal user onto the advisory board? Sup execs should just turn the asylum over to the inmates, sign an ad-network contract, and step away. Far, far away. Moscow has never been so conveniently distant.

We understand that only a minority of older users are sex offenders, but you must understand that we cannot tell which.

It's all in response to a pending British law, mandating that social network check users against a government issued list of sex offenders' email addresses. Such lists would be generated by the sex offenders themselves, like the fellow who drove 100 miles to have "everything but" sex with a teenager he met off the site. As Faceparty doesn't maintain email records for its users, the Olds-deletion policy is just their way of keeping the Internet safe for teens to continue to "log [their] asses on."

The unauthorized-access law has never been cited in a social-networking case, having previously been used by the Justice Department to go after hackers, according to U.S. Attorney Thomas O'Brien. Most importantly, for all the scare reports in the media of MySpace aiding and abetting crime and other moral backsliding, the Justice Department and the FBI sent a clear message that the company is not liable for the behavior of its users outside the site's stated restrictions. (Photo AP/Tom Gannam)

No, the problem for Facebook is the appearance of a well-funded competitor in a market Facebook has yet to crack. Entering the China market is a key reason why Facebook took money from Hong Kong telecom mogul Li Ka-Shing. (Ironically, Accel Partners, an early backer of Facebook, also invested in Oak Pacific.)

It would be foolish for Facebook to go out and raise more money simply to match Xiaonei's bankroll; equally foolish to entertain thoughts of buying the company at such a high valuation. No, Facebook's only reasonable choice here is to redouble its efforts to expand into the Chinese market. Engineers who speak Mandarin but have been rebuffed on previous attempts to get into Facebook might find its recruiters more hospitable now.

Inadmissable Advertising Pop-ups and Pop-unders Ads with non-functioning drop-down menus, radio buttons, and text boxes Ads that contain fraudulent, deceptive or misleading statements or illustrations. Attacks of personal nature Advertisements that are overly competitive or that refer abusively to the goods or services of others. Offensive to Good Taste - Indecent, vulgar, suggestive or other advertising that, in the opinion of LinkedIn, may be offensive to good taste. Discrimination Advertisements that fail to comply with the express requirements of federal and state laws. Investments Advertisements that do not comply with applicable federal, state and local laws and regulations. Political advertisements that do not identify the paid sponsor in every frame of the ad will not be accepted. Tobacco Advertisements for cigarettes and other tobacco products. Occult Pursuits Advertisements for fortune telling, dream interpretations and individual horoscopes except when the emphasis is on amusement rather than serious interpretation. Endangered Species Advertisements offering furs or products made from the furs or hides of animals included on government endangered species lists. Online Gaming Advertisements promoting online gaming or wagering sites. Advertisements that, in our opinion, simulate LinkedIn.com web pages and/or other LinkedIn products or that may be confused with our web pages are unacceptable.

[W]ith help from the Egyptian bloggers who received the message and alerted his university and the U.S. Embassy, Buck walked out of the police station a free man. His translator Mohammad was left behind.

The incident largely ocurred within the confines of a forum specifically set up by Uloop to enable employees scattered across American college campuses to communicate with other. When on payday a number of employees found their checks were short, a thread was started to discuss the matter with each other — since management hadn't formally or informally alerted anyone to the pay cut, according to Garrido and Doolittle.

Garrido says management fired the pair within twenty minutes after bringing up the prospect of unionizing. He also reported that management began to call every employee who had left a message in the thread — shortly before deleting it entirely. Which sounds a lot like typical offline actions long deemed illegal by the NLRB: Intimidating employees in order to deter them from organizing, and removing employee-posted, pro-union materials from designated areas of the workplace.

When I asked Garrido and Doolittle if they had contacted, or been contacted by, any existing unions or support, they pointed out that they no longer had access to fellow Uloop employees, having been fired and banned from the message board. And while an ad-hoc group could possibly be assembled on Facebook, it offers no safe-harbor — management can moderate "networks," including deleting messages, and can monitor employee-created groups simply by joining.

In other words, until the NLRB has ruled one way or the other, if you're going to try to organize employees online, which in the case of Uloop's disparate workforce is really the only way, it's best to copy what contact information you can from employee directories and set up as secret and private a system as you can manage on your own. As poet and activist Audre Lord once pointed out, "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house."

Keys to using Facebook Pages: Showcase the human element of your business. Update frequently. Choose applications for your business. A restaurant may add an app for reservations. Promote your Page through Facebook Ads based on age, gender, geography, educational status, relationship status, and precise interests or keywords. Add links to your Facebook Page on other websites and blogs. Search engines index your Page. One way Facebook knows which stories are most interesting to a given user is the number of that user's friends involved in a story. Stories about Events include all the users who have RSVP'ed. Notes is Facebook's blogging feature. Record, upload, and edit videos. Delete any Wall post. Send updates to all your fans. View data on your fans. Export this. Integrate outside websites with the Facebook API and Beacon to users' friends about something they did on your site.

They're working on a desktop application that will use the awesome superpowers of social networks to make sure that your search results never turn up anything that your clique wouldn't approve of. These dashing gentlemen will save you from not knowing exactly what movies to see and clothes to buy and papers to read so you never have to fear the awkward, anxious feeling of not being completely conformed to the manners and mores of your peers.

Ning does have people in the Valley, as Fast Company claims, "buzzing," but not because of the "viral expansion loops" which Andreessen talks up in the piece. Penenberg's thesis: Andreessen has fused viral marketing with social networks, and therefore Ning's current fast expansion rate will continue ad infinitum, or at least ad acquisition.

This is a fashionable delusion fostered by people with something to sell. Supporting Andreessen's argument are Union Square Ventures' Fred Wilson and Sequoia Capital's Roelof Botha, both of whom make the argument for compound growth. Wilson is an investor in Twitter; Botha backed YouTube. Both profit from the notion that a site's current growth rate will continue unchecked.

The reality? Growth always slows. Facebook used to crow about how its user numbers grew 3 percent a week. By the time Microsoft sank $240 million into the company, that figure had already dropped; it may now be around 1 or 2 percent. Still impressive, and still fast-growing — but any projections based on 3 percent weekly growth are now dead wrong.

With absurdities about compound growth and viral expansion stripped out, Penenberg has little to offer in Ning's defense. According to figures in the piece, Ning is making roughly $1.7 million a year in the $20-a-month subscriptions some social-network creators pay. The rest of the money they make comes from Google's AdSense ads, the familiar fallback of hopeless startups. Bianchini admits as much in a blog post. And yet she and Andreessen commanded a $214 million valuation for their creation.

What Penenberg doesn't explore: The laughable reputation of Ning's software within the Valley. The piece quotes exactly one Ning user. Had Penenberg asked around, he'd have heard from scores of disgusted social-network creators who walked away from the service after trying it out. Pointing that out would get in the way of discussing the appearance of Ning's creators. Really, Adam, I thought that was our job.

(Photo by Fast Company/Art Streiber)